Although it is not used for programming, the wiki is an excellent method of collaborative editing. Take a look at the wikipedia. There are lots of other wikis around on the web. The great thing is that you don't need any special software, just a browser.
Full list of conservative changes has now been leaked.
1. "man" pages are now called "person" pages.
2. Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime."
3. To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped."
4. To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored.
5. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command.
6. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers.
7. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather".
8. The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command.
9. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX".
1. SHELL COMMANDS To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanise."
2. The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones.
3. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory."
4. "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced.
5. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."
1. TERMINOLOGY From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text".
2. The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides."
3. There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable.
4. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.
5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS).
6. No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users.
7. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System.
8. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged.
I agree. For example, the author wants free software developers to "Drop... your 15 minutes of fame on freshmeat when making the announcement". Does he realize that if it weren't for the fun/ego-satisfaction of the 15 minutes of fame, there would be far fewer free software developers in the first place?
What about all the proprietary software that doesn't work perfectly (you know what I'm talking about). It hasn't prevented a certain software company from dominating the desktop market.
The point the author makes is that free software developers are a scarce resource; being much smaller in number than proprietary software authors, we must channel our resources efficiently in order to compete. However, "none working perfectly" is BS.
If software worked perfectly, programmers would be unemployed.
You recommend that software should deliberately be incomplete? That's bad: users would much rather like one piece of software that works well than several that don't.
However, the example in the article (text editors) is stupid. vi and emacs are both outstanding editors. If you are looking for something joe sixpack can use, gedit/kwrite are quite good enough for the job.
The author wants these projects to be removed because they waste developer resources. Note the logical fallacy: if nobody is working on them they _can't_ waste developer resources.
And it's the wrong way to go about doing it: if you want to promote decrease of diversity (which I agree might be a good thing), then companies should pay developers of the highly active projects, not by penalizing less active ones. Free software is developed by _volunteers_, for _fun_, and you recommend treating them like cheap labor??
As someone pointed out on freshmeat, mature projects will probably have very little activity, but can still be widely used. Should they be thrown out?
There is an underlying philosophical issue here: free software can never me made to work by forcing things on developers, but instead by giving them incentives to do what you want them to do.
The article is a TROLL. And it was completely shredded in teh comments on freshmeat.
For instance: someone pointed out that the author is a gnome contributor. No wonder he wants to do away with Qt. Yes, you read that right: author wants free software developers to abandon Qt. Claims that "Qt still has licensing problems, being non-Free for commercial applications" - the fact is that Qt is licensed under the GPL. So it is perfectly fine for commercial applications. However, if you want to build proprietary application on top of it, you have to pay TrollTech.
My favorite is this:
Sourceforge should start removing projects with less than 1% activity for the last six months
This is just incredibly stupid. It is the perfect way to kill people's enthusiasm for free software. And to show you how little thought the author has put into it: if you remove the bottom 1% (1% == 1 percentile), then the next 1% will become the bottom 1%, which will be removed next and so on.
Go read the comments on freshmeat for more reasons why the article sucks.
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
PNG can not replace jpeg. png is a lossless compression algorithm. Therefore, for encoding images like photographs, using png will lead to a huge increase in file size. That said, I've noticed that people tend to use jpeg for many things for which png would be better: screenshots for instance. Not only is a screenshot usually smaller in size when encoded using png, it also leaves the text clear while jpeg blurs it.
This article goes one step ahead of slashdotters clamoring "Digital restrictions are bad. IP is untenable" and actually gives a revenue model which sounds workable to me. The important parts are:
But how will artists and their agents and lawyers get paid? This time we can turn for answers not to coal distribution, but to an industry much closer to musicians' homes: the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP licenses, collects and redistributes music royalties from music performance venues (like radio stations, concert halls and so on) to the artists. It determines who gets paid what by polling these venues to see whose music gets played and how often.
To determine reimbursement in an MP3 player world, a small sample of users could be invited periodically to voluntarily, and anonymously share their listening history stored in the player. Then, just as in the ASCAP model, payments collected from the music player distributors (Kia, the BSO and the like) would be split among the copyright owners. No fuss, no complexity and no secret CD police.
Makes a lot of sense to me. To get this off the ground, it only takes one company to tie up with some mp3 player makers. If it succeeds, others will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and the RIAA will be left wondering what hit them.
What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?
Well if you are the average geek, killing all those bacteria clinging to you should lead to a considerable weight loss;^)
Re:This antiseptic obsession
on
Clothes That Kill
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Ah, but this clothing isn't chemically antibiotic, it's physically antibiotic.
Well, in a limited sense. You realize, of course, that the dagger stuff is just by way of analogy.
(From the article):
The "blade" is a carbon chain up to 16 atoms long, populated only by hydrogen atoms. It has a strong affinity for fatty surfaces.
That sure sounds like chemical action to me.
However, the reaction is not specific to some compound in the microbe:
When bacterial or fungal spores approach the fabric, their negatively charged fatty membranes are attracted to positive charges on the nitrogen-rich rings and to the fat-seeking blades.
So since it is not selective, you're right: there is no chance of creating resistant germs. There's no way the critters can stop having fatty membranes altogether.
He deemed the Sun Microsystems Inc.-backed OpenOffice.org suite "almost usable" and predicted that as such software becomes more robust, Linux will begin making inroads into the desktop market in price-sensitive regions such as China and India.
Openoffice.org somehow got changed to staroffice in the slashdot blurb. Of course, openoffice is the greater threat to MS. Just as they could kill netscape, but not mozilla.
First, in an economy where there is no real fear of legal action for illegal copying
Used to be. It's changing rapidly. Today it would be rare to find businesses running unlicensed software. The IP thugs (the Indian arm of the BSA, I guess) have really stepped up their activity. It's helping. My guess is that running illegal software in government is almost out of the question. (Although home desktop users are probably not going to care for a few more years.)
Second, in an economy where corruption is endemic down to the lowest clerical levels,
Absolutely.
Free software may be at a disadvantage here, because there is not always a for-profit entity to ``encourage'' a product's adoption.
This is what the article said. Gates' bribes do have an effect. However, note that the more decentralized the decision making, the more difficult it becomes to give "encouragement".
Indeed, in contrast with (for example) East and Central Europe, Latin America, or East Asia, South Asia doesn't seem to be making any major contributions to Free software, despite having large numbers of trained programmers.
You're missing a lot of things here, at least with respect to India.
First, all the reports you hear about huge numbers of Indian programmers actually pertain to growth rates. The indian software segment is growing very fast, but the actual number of programmers is quite small, due to the miserably low level of penetration of computer use in India.
Second, the Indian software economy is mostly service oriented. A large number companies offer services on top of non-M$ platforms. They're not making "major contributions to free software", but nor are they making major contributions to properietary software either. The question to ask is if a sizeable fraction of the Indian software industry says no to Microsoft, and the answer is yes, it does.
People are going to hack on say gnome or the kernel only if they have lots of free time or if they are paid by some company to do so. The latter has not happened (though sun is showing some interest recently) and the former will probably never happen, at least as long as people's primary concern is to earn enough to stay alive.
Summary: you are using the wrong metric.
Back to the issue of government, I think the main reason they are interested in free software is because of their strong desire for self-reliance. You see, they're pretty pissed off by the US imposing sanctions when they tested nukes and telling them what to do every now and then. That's why you always find both "open source" and "in-house" mentioned together. That's why they developed supercomputing technology. They want to have the option of giving the US the finger.
We are very excited about the new engine since it moves us closer to our goal of a reliable and economical vehicle for space tourism as well as educational and commercial uses.
I'm particularly fascinated by the educational uses. How long until high school teachers fire real rockets to demonstrate Newton's third law? That'd be the day! No more boredom in school:)
"If time doesn't become 'fuzzy' beneath a Planck interval, this discovery will present problems to several astrophysical and cosmological models, including the Big Bang model of the universe," Lieu says.
I can already hear the "I told you so"s from the creationists.
This the fourth time! Obviously, Taco's been doing this on purpose! All the people who flamed him in the previous story are going to look like suckers!!
Taco, this is a really sweet one you pulled off! I guess even until the third time nobody caught on , given your dupe posting reputation. Congrats. Let's hope though, that dupes frequency goes down after this.
Is anyone else getting pretty pissed that:
1) There haven't been any real articles today so far
2) All the jokes so far aren't even remotely believable
I remember the fun we had last year with some well-crafted stories. (In particular I remember a lot of flames generated over Linus quitting kernel development). The fraction of hoaxes was more than it should have been, but not as bad as this.
Anyway, about the article in question, note that
backfire security doesn't exist, nor does Archie Mendoza.
Slashdot Mirror
Faith is belief in something which you know to be false -- Arthur Clarke.
Not at all. No data is lost in a wiki during concurrent editing.
Although it is not used for programming, the wiki is an excellent method of collaborative editing. Take a look at the wikipedia. There are lots of other wikis around on the web. The great thing is that you don't need any special software, just a browser.
Full list of conservative changes has now been leaked.
l - Policitally correct UNIX
1. "man" pages are now called "person" pages.
2. Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime."
3. To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped."
4. To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored.
5. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command.
6. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers.
7. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather".
8. The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command.
9. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX".
1. SHELL COMMANDS To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanise."
2. The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones.
3. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory."
4. "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced.
5. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."
1. TERMINOLOGY From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text".
2. The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides."
3. There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable.
4. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.
5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS).
6. No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users.
7. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System.
8. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged.
Source: http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/computing/newunix.htm
I agree. For example, the author wants free software developers to "Drop ... your 15 minutes of fame on freshmeat when making the announcement". Does he realize that if it weren't for the fun/ego-satisfaction of the 15 minutes of fame, there would be far fewer free software developers in the first place?
The point the author makes is that free software developers are a scarce resource; being much smaller in number than proprietary software authors, we must channel our resources efficiently in order to compete. However, "none working perfectly" is BS.
True. Note that this already happening. Redhat and Sun fund a lot of gnome development; IBM and RH employ kernel hackers etc.
This is ESR's philosophy: market forces are enough to make free software better.
Sorry to nitpick, but the program will compile without the include. In C, functions that aren't declared will be assumed to return int.
You recommend that software should deliberately be incomplete? That's bad: users would much rather like one piece of software that works well than several that don't.
However, the example in the article (text editors) is stupid. vi and emacs are both outstanding editors. If you are looking for something joe sixpack can use, gedit/kwrite are quite good enough for the job.
The author wants these projects to be removed because they waste developer resources. Note the logical fallacy: if nobody is working on them they _can't_ waste developer resources.
And it's the wrong way to go about doing it: if you want to promote decrease of diversity (which I agree might be a good thing), then companies should pay developers of the highly active projects, not by penalizing less active ones. Free software is developed by _volunteers_, for _fun_, and you recommend treating them like cheap labor??
As someone pointed out on freshmeat, mature projects will probably have very little activity, but can still be widely used. Should they be thrown out?
There is an underlying philosophical issue here: free software can never me made to work by forcing things on developers, but instead by giving them incentives to do what you want them to do.
The article is a TROLL. And it was completely shredded in teh comments on freshmeat.
For instance: someone pointed out that the author is a gnome contributor. No wonder he wants to do away with Qt. Yes, you read that right: author wants free software developers to abandon Qt. Claims that "Qt still has licensing problems, being non-Free for commercial applications" - the fact is that Qt is licensed under the GPL. So it is perfectly fine for commercial applications. However, if you want to build proprietary application on top of it, you have to pay TrollTech.
My favorite is this:
Sourceforge should start removing projects with less than 1% activity for the last six months
This is just incredibly stupid. It is the perfect way to kill people's enthusiasm for free software. And to show you how little thought the author has put into it: if you remove the bottom 1% (1% == 1 percentile), then the next 1% will become the bottom 1%, which will be removed next and so on.
Go read the comments on freshmeat for more reasons why the article sucks.
PNG can not replace jpeg. png is a lossless compression algorithm. Therefore, for encoding images like photographs, using png will lead to a huge increase in file size. That said, I've noticed that people tend to use jpeg for many things for which png would be better: screenshots for instance. Not only is a screenshot usually smaller in size when encoded using png, it also leaves the text clear while jpeg blurs it.
But how will artists and their agents and lawyers get paid? This time we can turn for answers not to coal distribution, but to an industry much closer to musicians' homes: the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP licenses, collects and redistributes music royalties from music performance venues (like radio stations, concert halls and so on) to the artists. It determines who gets paid what by polling these venues to see whose music gets played and how often.
To determine reimbursement in an MP3 player world, a small sample of users could be invited periodically to voluntarily, and anonymously share their listening history stored in the player. Then, just as in the ASCAP model, payments collected from the music player distributors (Kia, the BSO and the like) would be split among the copyright owners. No fuss, no complexity and no secret CD police.
Makes a lot of sense to me. To get this off the ground, it only takes one company to tie up with some mp3 player makers. If it succeeds, others will be quick to jump on the bandwagon and the RIAA will be left wondering what hit them.
What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?
Well if you are the average geek, killing all those bacteria clinging to you should lead to a considerable weight loss ;^)
Well, in a limited sense. You realize, of course, that the dagger stuff is just by way of analogy.
(From the article):
The "blade" is a carbon chain up to 16 atoms long, populated only by hydrogen atoms. It has a strong affinity for fatty surfaces.
That sure sounds like chemical action to me.
However, the reaction is not specific to some compound in the microbe:
When bacterial or fungal spores approach the fabric, their negatively charged fatty membranes are attracted to positive charges on the nitrogen-rich rings and to the fat-seeking blades.
So since it is not selective, you're right: there is no chance of creating resistant germs. There's no way the critters can stop having fatty membranes altogether.
Takes 30 seconds to start up on my machine. Does that count?
Openoffice.org somehow got changed to staroffice in the slashdot blurb. Of course, openoffice is the greater threat to MS. Just as they could kill netscape, but not mozilla.
If Indian CS student is Ok, read on.
First, in an economy where there is no real fear of legal action for illegal copying
Used to be. It's changing rapidly. Today it would be rare to find businesses running unlicensed software. The IP thugs (the Indian arm of the BSA, I guess) have really stepped up their activity. It's helping. My guess is that running illegal software in government is almost out of the question. (Although home desktop users are probably not going to care for a few more years.)
Second, in an economy where corruption is endemic down to the lowest clerical levels,
Absolutely.
Free software may be at a disadvantage here, because there is not always a for-profit entity to ``encourage'' a product's adoption.
This is what the article said. Gates' bribes do have an effect. However, note that the more decentralized the decision making, the more difficult it becomes to give "encouragement".
Indeed, in contrast with (for example) East and Central Europe, Latin America, or East Asia, South Asia doesn't seem to be making any major contributions to Free software, despite having large numbers of trained programmers.
You're missing a lot of things here, at least with respect to India.
Back to the issue of government, I think the main reason they are interested in free software is because of their strong desire for self-reliance. You see, they're pretty pissed off by the US imposing sanctions when they tested nukes and telling them what to do every now and then. That's why you always find both "open source" and "in-house" mentioned together. That's why they developed supercomputing technology. They want to have the option of giving the US the finger.
I'm particularly fascinated by the educational uses. How long until high school teachers fire real rockets to demonstrate Newton's third law? That'd be the day! No more boredom in school :)
I can already hear the "I told you so"s from the creationists.
You are either with us or against us.
Taco, this is a really sweet one you pulled off! I guess even until the third time nobody caught on , given your dupe posting reputation. Congrats. Let's hope though, that dupes frequency goes down after this.
However, the link to the tarball being a 404 is a dead giveaway :(
1) There haven't been any real articles today so far
2) All the jokes so far aren't even remotely believable
I remember the fun we had last year with some well-crafted stories. (In particular I remember a lot of flames generated over Linus quitting kernel development). The fraction of hoaxes was more than it should have been, but not as bad as this.
Anyway, about the article in question, note that backfire security doesn't exist, nor does Archie Mendoza.