How many of those projects are compiled with a BSD-licensed compiler, or use BSD-licensed version control? Those projects survive because they benefit from the comunity built around the stable GPL projects - otherwise it would have long died to the UNIX wars long ago.
They've certainly benefited from the GPL community, but if the GPL community hadn't existed, something else might have sprung up. It's not clear that the GPL license was what made this possible.
How many people were using OpenBSD before 1991?
None of the modern BSDs were around before 1991: before 1993 it was only UC Berkeley BSD 4.3. This was the original Free UNIX, and was released in 1986 (in its free form in 1989). Which is to say, two years before Linux, but two years after GCC. I don't know whether GCC was used to compile it, but I doubt it: changing compilers so drastically mid-version seems unlikely.
BSD 4.3 is the ancestor of many, many software systems in use today. Some of them are open source and some are not, but its impact has been incalculable. Sure, the GPL has done a lot, but saying that it's saved Free Software is a bit strong.
I thought the person who puts their hands on the digital data is the one who decides what the creator should, or shouldn't be entitled to. I thought the copyright infringer is the one who gets to determine what sort of distribution methods are, or are not viable. Allow me to add another pinch of cynicism, this one slightly less bitter.
The RIAA are the big players in the game, and they're widely (and mostly correctly) regarded as jerks. They're known for screwing over their own artists, for filing shotgun-style lawsuits, for crippling their products with DRM, and for lobbying heavily to the government for draconian, abusable, innovation-chilling laws. Therefore, people can justify infringing their copyright, because they don't like "vicious bastard" as a business model. Similarly for Microsoft, MPAA and BSA. To a large degree, piracy is about free stuff, and justification of piracy is about Sticking It To The Man.
But here TurnItIn.com is The Man, as well as the infringer. The cheaters don't like them because they make it harder to cheat. The non-cheaters don't like them because they're treated as potential cheaters, because it makes it more annoying to turn in assignments, and because of the annoyance/risk of false positives. Half the professors don't like TurnItIn either. Mostly it's favored by the administrations, which are also The Man. And the students and professors have no choice but to use TurnItIn, because the administration controls university policy. So Slashdot (by which I mean the prevailing opinion in these threads) is happy, because The Man is Getting It Stuck To Him.
I thought information wanted to be free? I thought we don't mind other people "sharing" data. A lot of that rhetoric is actually justified, and consistent with this article. For many purposes, many Slashdotters choose (or feel that it is morally correct to choose) to license their work under permissive licenses, because if the work turns out to be useful, this maximizes social value. It might even help out the coder or artist, at least in the early stages of his career: it's easier to gain recognition for work if it's freely available, and good proprietary work is sometimes prejudicially ignored (this is particularly the case in my field, cryptography). Also, Slashdotters favor the GPL, which keeps derivative works Free, but TurnItIn.com is not Free (for pretty much any reasonable definition of that term).
Furthermore, the "information wants to be free" rhetoric does not mean what you think it means. At least originally, it was not a moral statement. The original rhetoric was that "information wants to be free" in the same way that "water wants to flow downhill". That is, it takes a lot of effort to stop useful information from being copied everywhere. It's best not to base your business model (or your society?) on restricting the flow of information, because this state will be hard to maintain. Of course, people now use it to mean that "information should be free", which is a stronger statement. In particular, the original meaning does not justify copyright infringement. It only says that copyright infringement is to be expected.
That condition is not a whim, is the only mechanism known to work to protect Free as in Speech in software. Free code as in the BSD and MIT licenses is how software was created at the beginning, and it quickly derived into an incompatible set of compiting closed, proprietary systems.
Seriously, though, the BSD license has worked out well for many projects. I don't know who said this, but "the goal of the GPL is to make all software free; the goal of the BSD license is to make all software better."
That's a weird argument. My undergrad school just has a policy that double-submission (either submitting previous work, or submitting the same new work for two classes) requires approval (from both instructors), and counts as cheating if you do it without approval.
The top coder stuff is showing you that the Russians are much better at math. If the International Math Olympiad means anything, Russians are not particularly better at math than Americans. It's the Chinese that are much better at math. And, given their population, the Romanians.
I was thinking more along the lines of VIA's Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Isaiah cores. Although I guess those are books of the Bible, not prophets.
Apparently you never attended a college commencement ceremony.
You're half-right. I graduated Harvard last year. I went to the main ceremony, but only one of the speeches. Almost all the seniors went to the ceremony itself, because after spending 4 years there, you really want some pomp and circumstance to cap it all off. So to speak.
Almost none of the graduating seniors are listening to the commencement speakers.
About half of them were at the commencement speech, from what I hear. It was raining, but maybe their parents forced them to go. Who knows if they were paying attention. More of them saw the class day speech, but fewer were physically there, because it was telecast to dry places.
Bill gates, in a speech about fighting SPAM:
An important thing about SPAM, if you're trying to filter it out, is that it's usually poorly targeted. (Slide of Bill Gates' inbox comes up, showing "Ref1nance your morgage!").
However, sometimes they hit just by random chance. (Next message in inbox is about "U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y.D.I.P.L.O.M.A.S").
This isn't out of the blue. He's speaking at Harvard commencement, and commencement speakers get honorary degrees. That's just how it works; refusing the degree would be a slap in the face.
Asking him to speak at commencement is more than just a stamp of approval: he's giving the last official speech to Harvard graduates before they leave the university. That's not only a big honor, it's a chance to make a difference to a generation of graduates.
I sense someone who still hasn't got over the US getting defeated by a bunch of little Asian peasants in black pyjamas. "We could have won if we'd really wanted to, that does it, I'm taking my ball and going home..."
We didn't just lose the Vietnam war to the Vietnamese; we lost the war largely to public opinion. When we pulled out (right after the Tet offensive) we were winning the war: most VC operatives had compromised themselves to participate in the Tet offensive, and the North Vietnamese army had taken very heavy casualties.
Certainly, the Vietnamese (and the Iraqis after them) demonstrated that conventional military might fares poorly against a resistance, but the reality of the Vietnam was not so simple as American folklore suggests.
I would guess North Korea. Sure, we outclass North Korea pretty badly anyway, but they do have plenty of fighters and SAMs, and stealth can't hurt there.
There are also highly developed states that are less friendly to the US than France. Like China, for instance. Of course, in the unlikely event of a war with china, we'll probably just nuke each other into oblivion.
... ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors. Yeah, I agree. An ablative coat would absorb ~3 hits from the laser; after that it would fail, but still, that's 3 more cards in your hand.
Thus saith Margo Seltzer:
The worst kind of bug is the kind that gives users not only the inclination to hunt you down, but also the free time to do so. Losing data is that kind of bug. ... and just think what happens if it's not a bug.
Did you notice that the only feature IE7 copied from other browsers is tabbed browsing?
Well, they also copied the other browsers by making the PNG support not suck, and the XML support not suck, and the CSS support not suck, and the SVG support not suck, and...
While I'm not a huge fan of the interface, I think they made significant progress toward parity. On the other hand, I'm mostly a Linux user, so I don't get much experience with IE.
That's funny... I've run my one (retail) copy of Windows XP on like 3 or 4 different machines as the second OS in a dual-boot, and usually have it installed on two of them at the same time. That probably makes me a pirate (not sure how the EULA plays with this), and it definitely makes me look like one. Anyway, old Toshiba laptop -> Athlon64 desktop -> MacBook is certainly a more drastic hardware change than swapping a sound card. Furthermore, I've swapped hardware around a fair amount on these machines (upgraded the RAM, switched the optical drive about three times,...).
I called up to reactivate, but only once, and didn't even have to talk to a human. Some machine just gave me a number to punch in, and I did, and it works.
RAID 50 is pretty fast for reads, and not very reliable. Fail the wrong two drives, and down it goes. With a dozen drives in the array, that's getting pretty scary: odds are low, but still significant, that if one drive fails, another will fail before you can resilver, and almost a half chance that it's the wrong one.
I'd go for RAID 6 or RAID 10 for a big storage cluster, if it needed to be decently reliable. RAID 10 is a lot smaller, but it's faster and about 5 times less likely to fail than RAID 50. RAID 6 is about as fast as RAID 50, has the same storage capacity, and is much more reliable, but you'll probably need a RAID controller.
When I read "digital credentials" I immediately thought "(SSL/SMIME) certs and (SSH/PGP) keys". Those are two standard and widely implemented forms of "strong" digital authentication. SSL certs are also already available in hardware tokens, etc, if you like the FOB route. (Just ask the DoD about CAC cards...)
I don't know why people keep trying to reinvent the wheel here. Well, if you'd read the summary, you'd have noticed that these add more privacy over traditional certs, while still allowing you to prove credentials. That is, you can prove that you're over 18 without giving any more information about yourself. Compare that with a cert, where at the very least your information can be linked together by cert id.
I'd like to see a package manager that allows any random user to install software privately, eg, in ~/bin. This would be good both for unprivileged or security-minded desktop users, and for server users where you usually don't have root.
This would be especially nice if there were an integrated way to make sure that installing software (or, heck, even running it, to the degree possible) wouldn't damage your system. That is, if packages could be annotated with the appropriate systrace-style permissions, users could be sure that they were safe to run. That one is more of a security researcher's pipe dream, but it would be really cool, and would have the side effect of protecting against poorly-written software.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of those projects are compiled with a BSD-licensed compiler, or use BSD-licensed version control? Those projects survive because they benefit from the comunity built around the stable GPL projects - otherwise it would have long died to the UNIX wars long ago.
They've certainly benefited from the GPL community, but if the GPL community hadn't existed, something else might have sprung up. It's not clear that the GPL license was what made this possible.
How many people were using OpenBSD before 1991?
None of the modern BSDs were around before 1991: before 1993 it was only UC Berkeley BSD 4.3. This was the original Free UNIX, and was released in 1986 (in its free form in 1989). Which is to say, two years before Linux, but two years after GCC. I don't know whether GCC was used to compile it, but I doubt it: changing compilers so drastically mid-version seems unlikely.
BSD 4.3 is the ancestor of many, many software systems in use today. Some of them are open source and some are not, but its impact has been incalculable. Sure, the GPL has done a lot, but saying that it's saved Free Software is a bit strong.
The RIAA are the big players in the game, and they're widely (and mostly correctly) regarded as jerks. They're known for screwing over their own artists, for filing shotgun-style lawsuits, for crippling their products with DRM, and for lobbying heavily to the government for draconian, abusable, innovation-chilling laws. Therefore, people can justify infringing their copyright, because they don't like "vicious bastard" as a business model. Similarly for Microsoft, MPAA and BSA. To a large degree, piracy is about free stuff, and justification of piracy is about Sticking It To The Man.
But here TurnItIn.com is The Man, as well as the infringer. The cheaters don't like them because they make it harder to cheat. The non-cheaters don't like them because they're treated as potential cheaters, because it makes it more annoying to turn in assignments, and because of the annoyance/risk of false positives. Half the professors don't like TurnItIn either. Mostly it's favored by the administrations, which are also The Man. And the students and professors have no choice but to use TurnItIn, because the administration controls university policy. So Slashdot (by which I mean the prevailing opinion in these threads) is happy, because The Man is Getting It Stuck To Him. I thought information wanted to be free? I thought we don't mind other people "sharing" data. A lot of that rhetoric is actually justified, and consistent with this article. For many purposes, many Slashdotters choose (or feel that it is morally correct to choose) to license their work under permissive licenses, because if the work turns out to be useful, this maximizes social value. It might even help out the coder or artist, at least in the early stages of his career: it's easier to gain recognition for work if it's freely available, and good proprietary work is sometimes prejudicially ignored (this is particularly the case in my field, cryptography). Also, Slashdotters favor the GPL, which keeps derivative works Free, but TurnItIn.com is not Free (for pretty much any reasonable definition of that term).
Furthermore, the "information wants to be free" rhetoric does not mean what you think it means. At least originally, it was not a moral statement. The original rhetoric was that "information wants to be free" in the same way that "water wants to flow downhill". That is, it takes a lot of effort to stop useful information from being copied everywhere. It's best not to base your business model (or your society?) on restricting the flow of information, because this state will be hard to maintain. Of course, people now use it to mean that "information should be free", which is a stronger statement. In particular, the original meaning does not justify copyright infringement. It only says that copyright infringement is to be expected.
So, have I been trolled?
That condition is not a whim, is the only mechanism known to work to protect Free as in Speech in software. Free code as in the BSD and MIT licenses is how software was created at the beginning, and it quickly derived into an incompatible set of compiting closed, proprietary systems.
Yeah, it was awful. All the BSDs went away, and nobody used their code anymore.
Seriously, though, the BSD license has worked out well for many projects. I don't know who said this, but "the goal of the GPL is to make all software free; the goal of the BSD license is to make all software better."
That's a weird argument. My undergrad school just has a policy that double-submission (either submitting previous work, or submitting the same new work for two classes) requires approval (from both instructors), and counts as cheating if you do it without approval.
I'm not sure Esther counts as a prophet. Also, I think there was a I Samuel and a II Samuel. But no Job. Hm.
I was thinking more along the lines of VIA's Samuel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther and Isaiah cores. Although I guess those are books of the Bible, not prophets.
(in other words, code names suck, but there is no way around them)
You could code-name things after, like, towns. Or mountains. Or lakes, or rivers, or prophets, or books, or characters in a book, or something.
Apparently you never attended a college commencement ceremony.
You're half-right. I graduated Harvard last year. I went to the main ceremony, but only one of the speeches. Almost all the seniors went to the ceremony itself, because after spending 4 years there, you really want some pomp and circumstance to cap it all off. So to speak.
Almost none of the graduating seniors are listening to the commencement speakers.
About half of them were at the commencement speech, from what I hear. It was raining, but maybe their parents forced them to go. Who knows if they were paying attention. More of them saw the class day speech, but fewer were physically there, because it was telecast to dry places.
(Slide of Bill Gates' inbox comes up, showing "Ref1nance your morgage!").
However, sometimes they hit just by random chance.
(Next message in inbox is about "U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y.D.I.P.L.O.M.A.S").
This isn't out of the blue. He's speaking at Harvard commencement, and commencement speakers get honorary degrees. That's just how it works; refusing the degree would be a slap in the face.
Asking him to speak at commencement is more than just a stamp of approval: he's giving the last official speech to Harvard graduates before they leave the university. That's not only a big honor, it's a chance to make a difference to a generation of graduates.
Mauro: What's wrong with being elitist?
Warren (?): Well, it'll get you beat up in some places.
Mauro: Yeah, but not anywhere that matters.
He meant CMOS, and probably VLSI CMOS at that.
I sense someone who still hasn't got over the US getting defeated by a bunch of little Asian peasants in black pyjamas. "We could have won if we'd really wanted to, that does it, I'm taking my ball and going home..."
We didn't just lose the Vietnam war to the Vietnamese; we lost the war largely to public opinion. When we pulled out (right after the Tet offensive) we were winning the war: most VC operatives had compromised themselves to participate in the Tet offensive, and the North Vietnamese army had taken very heavy casualties.
Certainly, the Vietnamese (and the Iraqis after them) demonstrated that conventional military might fares poorly against a resistance, but the reality of the Vietnam was not so simple as American folklore suggests.
who the hell do you need stealth to fight anyway?
I would guess North Korea. Sure, we outclass North Korea pretty badly anyway, but they do have plenty of fighters and SAMs, and stealth can't hurt there.
There are also highly developed states that are less friendly to the US than France. Like China, for instance. Of course, in the unlikely event of a war with china, we'll probably just nuke each other into oblivion.
... ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors. Yeah, I agree. An ablative coat would absorb ~3 hits from the laser; after that it would fail, but still, that's 3 more cards in your hand.Did you notice that the only feature IE7 copied from other browsers is tabbed browsing?
...
Well, they also copied the other browsers by making the PNG support not suck, and the XML support not suck, and the CSS support not suck, and the SVG support not suck, and
While I'm not a huge fan of the interface, I think they made significant progress toward parity. On the other hand, I'm mostly a Linux user, so I don't get much experience with IE.
That's funny... I've run my one (retail) copy of Windows XP on like 3 or 4 different machines as the second OS in a dual-boot, and usually have it installed on two of them at the same time. That probably makes me a pirate (not sure how the EULA plays with this), and it definitely makes me look like one. Anyway, old Toshiba laptop -> Athlon64 desktop -> MacBook is certainly a more drastic hardware change than swapping a sound card. Furthermore, I've swapped hardware around a fair amount on these machines (upgraded the RAM, switched the optical drive about three times, ...).
I called up to reactivate, but only once, and didn't even have to talk to a human. Some machine just gave me a number to punch in, and I did, and it works.
RAID 50 is pretty fast for reads, and not very reliable. Fail the wrong two drives, and down it goes. With a dozen drives in the array, that's getting pretty scary: odds are low, but still significant, that if one drive fails, another will fail before you can resilver, and almost a half chance that it's the wrong one.
I'd go for RAID 6 or RAID 10 for a big storage cluster, if it needed to be decently reliable. RAID 10 is a lot smaller, but it's faster and about 5 times less likely to fail than RAID 50. RAID 6 is about as fast as RAID 50, has the same storage capacity, and is much more reliable, but you'll probably need a RAID controller.
I believe you mean 0.5985 kiB per second.
I don't know why people keep trying to reinvent the wheel here. Well, if you'd read the summary, you'd have noticed that these add more privacy over traditional certs, while still allowing you to prove credentials. That is, you can prove that you're over 18 without giving any more information about yourself. Compare that with a cert, where at the very least your information can be linked together by cert id.
No, because "sig" is a predicate nominative, not an object.
I'd like to see a package manager that allows any random user to install software privately, eg, in ~/bin. This would be good both for unprivileged or security-minded desktop users, and for server users where you usually don't have root.
This would be especially nice if there were an integrated way to make sure that installing software (or, heck, even running it, to the degree possible) wouldn't damage your system. That is, if packages could be annotated with the appropriate systrace-style permissions, users could be sure that they were safe to run. That one is more of a security researcher's pipe dream, but it would be really cool, and would have the side effect of protecting against poorly-written software.
Well, look on the bright side. At least it wasn't Linus vs Theo.