The Findlaw editorial makes an interesting case. Given Judge Patel's obvious leaning toward the industry, I'm not at all sure we'll see the idea tried in the Napster case, but someone will raise the issue sometime. If the industry is smart, they'll offer something similar just to avoid having the market yanked out from under them, but then they've not shown themselves to be smart so far... --
It's still personal politics, you still use the @ as a status symbol to say who's "approved" and who's not, to put down those you don't personally approve of or who don't fit into your little circle.
Bullshit. With exactly one exception, every regular on the channel whose nick is registered gets opped. That one exception is the person to whom I was referring when I mentioned old disagreements. As to other channels on the net, I don't care even a little bit, since the only reason I go there is to try to raise another admin when things are going wrong.
I do, however, find it interesting to see how many folks from there are showing up here to put me down, yet don't have the courage to stand up and identify themselves as I have. --
What you say may be true of DALnet or Undernet or the other large networks. It is not, however, true of the network I inhabit; while it has channel and nick protection, the people there are completely indifferent to who has ops and who doesn't. There are old disagreements, true, but those are related to other issues.
The problem is not channel and nick protection. The problem is the people involved. Get a rational, mature bunch of people, and you don't have any of that. --
Indeed not. That's the problem: EFnet doesn't recognize that people do want to maintain an identity. It's ingrained. Would you want some faceless bureaucrat telling you that you had to change your name because someone else started using the one you'd had all those years?
IRC IS a bunch of friends getting together to chat. Those friends have identities they've built up over years. Telling them that someone else can swoop in and whisk it away in the blink of a modem light ignores all of that. That's why many folks - definitely including myself - consider an IRC network without services simply unusable. --
Why does that make not having them wrong? It doesnt.
I submit that that statement merely emphasizes that you don't understand the social aspects of it. IRC users are voting with their feet, and leaving EFnet behind...and the folks who are doing the attacking are merely another symptom. --
A simple question, Ryan: How many nets are there that run some sort of services to protect ncks and channels, and how many are there that don't? AFAIK, there's one major network that doesn't: EFnet. I'd say that the answer to that question shows who's right about the social aspects. (Yes, the net I'm on now has a services machine.) --
I was on DALnet. I left a long time ago, having bounced through a few networks, and now run a server on a small network with just some friends on it. In reply to another poster...I left in large part because of what you're complaining about: it appeared that the net admins no longer cared about the users, unlike at the very beginning.
You lost your channel? So what, go make a new one.
You lost your nick? So what use a deviation.
These two lines, all by themselves, show why EFnet's been going downhill for years. Simply put, they ignore the social aspects of IRC. People don't want to change their name, or their street address, just because some script kiddie managed to kick them off and steal theirs.
I got off EFnet when DALnet first came up with a real solution to these problems (I held founder status on #watertower when it was the biggest channel on DALnet, way back when), and never looked back. I'm not surprised that EFnet has been in a long slow decline ever since. --
Looking at it with the color highlighted, it looks like it's to the southeast a little bit of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (There's an entry there in the database.) This would put it in far northwest Iowa.
Anyone wanna schedule a meeting for Sioux Falls? It's actually not hard to get to... --
Where are the North American and European centers, anyway? I can only guess from looking at the map that the North American center is somewhere in northeastern South Dakota or southwestern Minnesota, and can't guess at the European one at all. --
It's not censorship, it's protecting your property
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I run my own mailserver. I see no reason at all that I should not be allowed to filter access to it by whatever means I believe are appropriate, just as I guard any other access to my personal property.
MAPS and the various ORB* systems are not censoring my email. I am doing so myself, on a conscious decision that those who send or facilitate spam are not welcome to send to me. Nobody else has the right to question my decision in the matter.
I believe that ISPs have the right to determine who can use their property. They should disclose fully what filters, if any, they use to their customers, so that those customers may make an informed choice, but the decision of what to filter is theirs alone, influenced only by market pressures. --
Re:anti-bsd posts up 75% on slashdot!!!!!
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· Score: 1
I know I'll get modded down for saying this, but some Linux supporters have an attitude that reminds me of things said in the Communist Manifesto. (shrug)
Damn right you'll get modded down. I'm not commenting on this thread because the last time I got involved in a thread posting my honest opinions, I got modded down by the Slashdot rank and file for "trolling" (which I wasn't...see the Jargon File entry for the correct definition) to the point that I was actually censored: my account was disabled.
I've given up on Slashdot as a place for honest discussion. If you dare to post opinions counter to the Slashdot orthodoxy, you're slammed and censored. --
...the last time I jumped into a discussion on the GPV, I got moderated down so many times for daring to disagree with the Slashdot orthodoxy that I was actually censored: my account got disabled. I had to ask that it be reinstated; by the time that happened, the discussion was over.
To moderators: "Trolling" does not equal "posting controversial opinions". Check the Jargon File entry for the true meaning.
I argue against the GPV not because I wish to disrupt discussion, or to provoke reactions. I argue against it because I honestly believe that it's a Bad Thing.
This will be my only posting on this subject, in order not to get my account suspended again. The moderation system here has succeeded in censoring me. --
The GPL is ultimately valuable for its' darwinistic aspects, in addition to all the aforementioned virtues. It creates the MOST dog-eat-dog software development model that I'm personally aware of.
Code well, and your code (think DNA) survives and evolves. Code badly, and your code (DNA) dwindles and dies.
This is true of any open source software package, not just those licensed with the GPV.
We can thusly conclude that all that oppose the GPL are weenies that don't 'trust' natural evolutionary forces, and demand protection from them.
This is true of those who oppose open source software; it is nto true of those, like me, who oppose the GPV but support the larger concept of open source.
What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.
Not even a little bit. There's nothing to prevent a M$ from implementing their own version of a program and using that as the basis for an e&e tactic. The most commonly cited example of this, Kerberos, isn't even an example: not only could M$ have done so if their other choice was to use a GPVed implementation, but the premise is a fallacy...since the field they used to implement their extension was put in the Kerberos spec SPECIFICALLY for that purpose! --
Not in my plans. Neither is getting sued by the FSF, should it ever decide that they need to actually sue someone instead of just blustering.
Misquote and misunderstand RMS, and sttempting to drag his name through mud. Fuck you.
I do not believe I'm either misquoting or misunderstanding him; I'm merely taking his ideas to their conclusion, and raising what I believe to be legitimate objections to that conclusion.
Further, RMS has made himself a public figure, and having his name dragged through the mud (though I do not agree that that's what I'm doing) comes with the territory. This objection is typically raised by cultists about the leader of their cult; is that the image you really wish to portray? --
So why on earth is it that your photograph on your home page shows that you use so much GPL'ed software, then? If you feel moral compunctions about free software sharing, then step up to the plate and stop using it. Well, let's see...Of the systems currently in the machine room (I should update that picture), there are:
Three Linux full-time systems: one firewall, one net server, one Hercules development box.
One Windows NT machine.
One Windows 2000 machine.
One AS/400.
One SGI Irix system.
One NetBSD box.
One Alpha running Tru64 Unix.
One AIX box, with a P/390 coprocessor running various IBM OSes.
One laptop that runs either Windows 2000 or Linux, depending on the disk I've got in the machine.
Each system runs what it does to meet a specific requirement. In some cases, it's because it's the only OS that hardware will run; in others, it's because it's needed to perform a specific function (the Hercules development system is a case in point). In a couple of cases, the OS could be replaced; both of those cases are Linux boxes. I haven't done so mainly because I haven't wanted to subject those who use my systems to the extended service outage doing so would require. (And no, that's not just me.)
Finally, I don't see any inherent hypocrisy here...because I don't do significant development on GPVed software. The folks who put GPVed software out there do so in the expectation that others will use it, and I see nothing wrong with that. It's the idea that I can only work on it on their terms that I have a problem with. --
Hercules runs on Windows or Linux. To compile it, you must use egcs.
Actually, this is largely due to the fact that Hercules was originally written on Linux, and the original developer didn't worry too much about other OSes. One of my ongoing tasks is to make Hercules pure ANSI C to remove the dependency on egcs; this is not so much for philosophical reasons as it is for portability reasons. Hercules doesn't run only on Linux or Windows, BTW; it's in the FreeBSD and NetBSD packages collections, and has been reported to run on AIX with minor modifications.
Hercules is distributed under the QPL, which appears to me to be only marginally less restrictive than the GPL (and more like the LGPL), including some language that looks very much like a 'coercive form of sharing' (with the "maintainer", at least).
The QPL is the license that most closely matches the original author's desires on licensing while still being an OSD-compliant license. The original author is even more hard over than I am about the GPV, BTW. (Bet you didn't know that was possible...) When I write code by myself to share with others, I do use a BSDish license.
I don't think Chip disagrees, either.
I do...else why would he say " it would be tempting for those of us who don't identify with ``Free Software'' to use as our primary reply that ``Open Source is more than the GPL.'' That would be a mistake."?
You arguments against the GPL have much in common with Microsoft's; including that they are mostly FUD. This helps Microsoft, not Open Source.
"There is no idea so good that you will not find a fool who supports it." -- Larry Niven
Not even Microsoft is wrong 100% of the time. As for FUD, if raisiing real issues with something is FUD, then it's a lot more prevalent than you would otherwise think. --
I came to the attention of my current employer, Global MAINTECH Corporation, because of my work on the open-source Hercules mainframe emulator. It's been a good match for both of us.
One thing I asked for, and got, was an exemption in the standard "all your work are belong to us" employment agreement for work on open-source projects that isn't strictly related to GMI's business. A similar clause should be added to every employment agreement, IMAO, and doing that for these hires would make your company a lot more attractive to an open-source developer, because it removes any doubt that they could have legal problems later from continuing to work on the things that brought them to your attention in the first place. --
And like anything else about the North Slope, raises hard-to-answer questions about the preservation of nature vs. human comfort.
"Preservation of nature"??!! Render unto me a ****ing break!
A datacenter isn't even on the same order of magnitude as other, probably more vital, things we're doing in Alaska. On the grand scale of things, it's hardly even a blip. Only the most rabid, anti-development environmentalist would even consider the idea that it might be a problem. $DEITY save us from rabid environmentalists. --
It's not a matter of a fixed number of spinlocks. It's a matter of the whole kernel being *designed* to be run on more than one CPU, and only locking those resources that are absolutely needed to be locked and only for the minimum amount of time for which they need to be locked. One Big Kernel Lock fits neither condition. It's a kludge, designed to let marketroids (and yes, free OSes have them, too, even if they don't get paid for it) claim "SMP support" when in fact it's a poor imitation at best. --
Have you ever seen linux actually running with 32 Processors?
I can't claim 32, but I do have more than a little experience in the 4 to 8 range...and the 2.2 Linux kernels don't use more than 4 processors all that well. Testing real-world stuff that does more than just crunch cycles didn't show a lot of improvement when going from 4 to 8 processors in the same box (a Compaq ProLiant 8500 with 8 GB RAM, only 2 GB of which was used in testing).
Even so, the lack of SMP support in the BSDs (and no, One Big Kernel Lock is *not* SMP support) has been a real drawback, so I'm happy to see this happen. --
You don't need z/Series hardware. Hercules will do the job on your Linux (or, with some restrictions, WinNT ot Win2K) box. I agree that, until recently, there was no need for IBM to provide a hobbyist license; Hercules has removed that barrier. Check it out...I think you'll be impressed. --
Slashdot Mirror
The Findlaw editorial makes an interesting case. Given Judge Patel's obvious leaning toward the industry, I'm not at all sure we'll see the idea tried in the Napster case, but someone will raise the issue sometime. If the industry is smart, they'll offer something similar just to avoid having the market yanked out from under them, but then they've not shown themselves to be smart so far...
--
Your dumb little IRC net wouldnt need the services on it if it werent for you and your channel.
Then why did it have them long before my channel came to the net? Perhaps it's because others there share my opinion about their necessity?
--
Bullshit. With exactly one exception, every regular on the channel whose nick is registered gets opped. That one exception is the person to whom I was referring when I mentioned old disagreements. As to other channels on the net, I don't care even a little bit, since the only reason I go there is to try to raise another admin when things are going wrong.
I do, however, find it interesting to see how many folks from there are showing up here to put me down, yet don't have the courage to stand up and identify themselves as I have.
--
The problem is not channel and nick protection. The problem is the people involved. Get a rational, mature bunch of people, and you don't have any of that.
--
Indeed not. That's the problem: EFnet doesn't recognize that people do want to maintain an identity. It's ingrained. Would you want some faceless bureaucrat telling you that you had to change your name because someone else started using the one you'd had all those years?
IRC IS a bunch of friends getting together to chat. Those friends have identities they've built up over years. Telling them that someone else can swoop in and whisk it away in the blink of a modem light ignores all of that. That's why many folks - definitely including myself - consider an IRC network without services simply unusable.
--
Why does that make not having them wrong? It doesnt.
I submit that that statement merely emphasizes that you don't understand the social aspects of it. IRC users are voting with their feet, and leaving EFnet behind...and the folks who are doing the attacking are merely another symptom.
--
A simple question, Ryan: How many nets are there that run some sort of services to protect ncks and channels, and how many are there that don't? AFAIK, there's one major network that doesn't: EFnet. I'd say that the answer to that question shows who's right about the social aspects. (Yes, the net I'm on now has a services machine.)
--
--
You lost your nick? So what use a deviation.
These two lines, all by themselves, show why EFnet's been going downhill for years. Simply put, they ignore the social aspects of IRC. People don't want to change their name, or their street address, just because some script kiddie managed to kick them off and steal theirs.
I got off EFnet when DALnet first came up with a real solution to these problems (I held founder status on #watertower when it was the biggest channel on DALnet, way back when), and never looked back. I'm not surprised that EFnet has been in a long slow decline ever since.
--
Anyone wanna schedule a meeting for Sioux Falls? It's actually not hard to get to...
--
Yes, that's what I had in mind, but having the color different does help for the European one...
--
Where are the North American and European centers, anyway? I can only guess from looking at the map that the North American center is somewhere in northeastern South Dakota or southwestern Minnesota, and can't guess at the European one at all.
--
MAPS and the various ORB* systems are not censoring my email. I am doing so myself, on a conscious decision that those who send or facilitate spam are not welcome to send to me. Nobody else has the right to question my decision in the matter.
I believe that ISPs have the right to determine who can use their property. They should disclose fully what filters, if any, they use to their customers, so that those customers may make an informed choice, but the decision of what to filter is theirs alone, influenced only by market pressures.
--
Damn right you'll get modded down. I'm not commenting on this thread because the last time I got involved in a thread posting my honest opinions, I got modded down by the Slashdot rank and file for "trolling" (which I wasn't...see the Jargon File entry for the correct definition) to the point that I was actually censored: my account was disabled.
I've given up on Slashdot as a place for honest discussion. If you dare to post opinions counter to the Slashdot orthodoxy, you're slammed and censored.
--
To moderators: "Trolling" does not equal "posting controversial opinions". Check the Jargon File entry for the true meaning.
I argue against the GPV not because I wish to disrupt discussion, or to provoke reactions. I argue against it because I honestly believe that it's a Bad Thing.
This will be my only posting on this subject, in order not to get my account suspended again. The moderation system here has succeeded in censoring me.
--
Code well, and your code (think DNA) survives and evolves. Code badly, and your code (DNA) dwindles and dies.
This is true of any open source software package, not just those licensed with the GPV.
We can thusly conclude that all that oppose the GPL are weenies that don't 'trust' natural evolutionary forces, and demand protection from them.
This is true of those who oppose open source software; it is nto true of those, like me, who oppose the GPV but support the larger concept of open source.
--
What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.
Not even a little bit. There's nothing to prevent a M$ from implementing their own version of a program and using that as the basis for an e&e tactic. The most commonly cited example of this, Kerberos, isn't even an example: not only could M$ have done so if their other choice was to use a GPVed implementation, but the premise is a fallacy...since the field they used to implement their extension was put in the Kerberos spec SPECIFICALLY for that purpose!
--
Not in my plans. Neither is getting sued by the FSF, should it ever decide that they need to actually sue someone instead of just blustering.
Misquote and misunderstand RMS, and sttempting to drag his name through mud. Fuck you.
I do not believe I'm either misquoting or misunderstanding him; I'm merely taking his ideas to their conclusion, and raising what I believe to be legitimate objections to that conclusion.
Further, RMS has made himself a public figure, and having his name dragged through the mud (though I do not agree that that's what I'm doing) comes with the territory. This objection is typically raised by cultists about the leader of their cult; is that the image you really wish to portray?
--
Well, let's see...Of the systems currently in the machine room (I should update that picture), there are:
Each system runs what it does to meet a specific requirement. In some cases, it's because it's the only OS that hardware will run; in others, it's because it's needed to perform a specific function (the Hercules development system is a case in point). In a couple of cases, the OS could be replaced; both of those cases are Linux boxes. I haven't done so mainly because I haven't wanted to subject those who use my systems to the extended service outage doing so would require. (And no, that's not just me.)
Finally, I don't see any inherent hypocrisy here...because I don't do significant development on GPVed software. The folks who put GPVed software out there do so in the expectation that others will use it, and I see nothing wrong with that. It's the idea that I can only work on it on their terms that I have a problem with.
--
Actually, this is largely due to the fact that Hercules was originally written on Linux, and the original developer didn't worry too much about other OSes. One of my ongoing tasks is to make Hercules pure ANSI C to remove the dependency on egcs; this is not so much for philosophical reasons as it is for portability reasons. Hercules doesn't run only on Linux or Windows, BTW; it's in the FreeBSD and NetBSD packages collections, and has been reported to run on AIX with minor modifications.
Hercules is distributed under the QPL, which appears to me to be only marginally less restrictive than the GPL (and more like the LGPL), including some language that looks very much like a 'coercive form of sharing' (with the "maintainer", at least).
The QPL is the license that most closely matches the original author's desires on licensing while still being an OSD-compliant license. The original author is even more hard over than I am about the GPV, BTW. (Bet you didn't know that was possible...) When I write code by myself to share with others, I do use a BSDish license.
I don't think Chip disagrees, either.
I do...else why would he say " it would be tempting for those of us who don't identify with ``Free Software'' to use as our primary reply that ``Open Source is more than the GPL.'' That would be a mistake."?
You arguments against the GPL have much in common with Microsoft's; including that they are mostly FUD. This helps Microsoft, not Open Source.
"There is no idea so good that you will not find a fool who supports it." -- Larry Niven
Not even Microsoft is wrong 100% of the time. As for FUD, if raisiing real issues with something is FUD, then it's a lot more prevalent than you would otherwise think.
--
One thing I asked for, and got, was an exemption in the standard "all your work are belong to us" employment agreement for work on open-source projects that isn't strictly related to GMI's business. A similar clause should be added to every employment agreement, IMAO, and doing that for these hires would make your company a lot more attractive to an open-source developer, because it removes any doubt that they could have legal problems later from continuing to work on the things that brought them to your attention in the first place.
--
"Preservation of nature"??!! Render unto me a ****ing break!
A datacenter isn't even on the same order of magnitude as other, probably more vital, things we're doing in Alaska. On the grand scale of things, it's hardly even a blip. Only the most rabid, anti-development environmentalist would even consider the idea that it might be a problem. $DEITY save us from rabid environmentalists.
--
It's not a matter of a fixed number of spinlocks. It's a matter of the whole kernel being *designed* to be run on more than one CPU, and only locking those resources that are absolutely needed to be locked and only for the minimum amount of time for which they need to be locked. One Big Kernel Lock fits neither condition. It's a kludge, designed to let marketroids (and yes, free OSes have them, too, even if they don't get paid for it) claim "SMP support" when in fact it's a poor imitation at best.
--
I can't claim 32, but I do have more than a little experience in the 4 to 8 range...and the 2.2 Linux kernels don't use more than 4 processors all that well. Testing real-world stuff that does more than just crunch cycles didn't show a lot of improvement when going from 4 to 8 processors in the same box (a Compaq ProLiant 8500 with 8 GB RAM, only 2 GB of which was used in testing).
Even so, the lack of SMP support in the BSDs (and no, One Big Kernel Lock is *not* SMP support) has been a real drawback, so I'm happy to see this happen.
--
You don't need z/Series hardware. Hercules will do the job on your Linux (or, with some restrictions, WinNT ot Win2K) box. I agree that, until recently, there was no need for IBM to provide a hobbyist license; Hercules has removed that barrier. Check it out...I think you'll be impressed.
--