Actually, GNU is inappropriate becasue GNU's Not Unix - so it ain't what it is, but it's not what it wants to be, when it already is what it wanted to be when it became what it's not.
"El Proyecto UTUTO es un proyecto de investigación y desarrollo de tecnología informática de aplicación social, con el objetivo de incentivar y promover la generación y apropiación del conocimiento en los paises en desarrollo, reduciendo la (así llamada) brecha digital entre los países que lideran el desarrollo tecnológico a nivel mundial y aquellos que hasta hoy se limitaban a importar y consumir desarrollos extranjeros.(...) Declarado de Interes Nacional por la Honorable Camara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina" --- HOW-TO-BREED-A-LINUX-HATER-HOWTO.
Most Linux fanboys are a buch of hypocrites. They would diss Linspire, but then go right ahead and install proprietary Flash and RealPlayer, and use a Windows codecs when available.
Lispire is the thing to give your papa, or granny. Power-users, shut up. Most of you aren't compiling stuff with MLTon anyway. So shut up. Even most of you don't need Debian or FreeBSD. It's just that fixing stuff that's breaking in Leenox distros feels like you're doing Real Work (TM). (Gee, look, I got Debian to install my package without removing the kernel!)
Just put "Linux" in people's mouth. Me, I'm happy they pronounce any word ending in *nix. Later we explain - "actually, that was just a Unix-like OS. Here, take PC-BSD. Give it a try."
To me, security is not even the question. The question is that health care has been persuing open standards (like HealthLevel7) and Microsoft and open standards do not mix - at least, that has been Microsoft's track record and policy for more than 20 years.
Governments have a huge stake in this. Anything to do with Microsoft-only solution is bound to hurt the public health sector. I understand that, the public health sector being virtually non-existent in the U.S., this doesn't represent a big problem there. Nevertheless, it's sad to see big names like the Mayo Clinic or the American Heart Association embrace this thing so eagerly. The problem is, this will be used in other less developed countries as an example. "If it's good for the AHA, it's good for us" mentality.
This is yet-another instance of Microsoft monopoly.
The lexicon in each language is just as complex. Every language needs to be able to describe a ball, a house, a car, etc.
Klingon failed as an experiment of creating a native speaker, because the computer scientist's kid who was the object of said experiment couldn't describe "tie my shoes" in Klingon.
Now...had the kid learned Esperanto, like the native Esperanto speakers (around a little over a 1000) he could say that.
This paper (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0006032), by Xerox Research Center Europe says non-English language presesence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English. Surprising data: Esperanto beats Welsh, Lithuainian and Latvian (amongst others).
English as a lingua franca is a losing proposition. I know no one truly fluent and with good command in English that has learned it from a school. They all lived abroad. OTOH, I know francophones and speakers of Italian that are fluent and indeed learned them at foreign language schools (including myself). Of course, this observation is biased.
I mean, it's absolutely amazing how some very smart people with over a decade of contact with English have absolutely terrible command of the spoken language (while being able to write pretty good English). This phenomenom happens because English is highly irregular(*). Of course, increasingly we will resort to automated tools when we could simply reach out to a language tool. I feel this problem will only grow in the field of documentation for free and open source software (ideally, we would document in an auxlang and machine-translated it to native). We tend to think that English is acceptable. But it is not. English is too difficult. Additionally, it is not fair. The UK saves 100 Euros/year/inhabitant just by speaking English, whereas other countries have to spend a huge amount on coaching students in a language most will inexorably fail in, despite the cultural invasion of US American music and films. Anyone who's a native English speaker and has ventured out of his bubble knows that the idea you can just go to any corner of the world and communicate in English is false. Ex-colonies give you a false impression, too.
BTW, I know this is going to sound crazy, but Esperanto is the most cost-effective solutionhttp://www.lernu.net/. I'm saying rational, optimized, here. I have some fluency in Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese (native), and intermediate German, beginning Japanese and Russian - oh, and Esperanto (just started this last week and half, due to my reading on it), so you can imagine I have at least some ground to sustain an opinion like that. When you get to Level II, III, or IV languages - as defined by the USA's Defense Language Institute coming from a Level I standpoint you begin to appreciate what the difficulty for non-English/Romance language speakers must be. For instance, Russian verbal aspect is very poor compared to Portuguese, which has the most intricate verbal aspects of Indo-European languages, probably (and this is not an idea of my own, BTW). OTOH, the 6-case declension system of Russian can be really hard for those who speak a Romance tongue. One thesis I have as to why Linus Torvalds is such a smart guy is because speakers of Finnish must keep 16 cases of declension in their heads. That alone ought to make a child have a few more IQ points!:-))
For more on "the language problem", YouTube has a fascinating 9-part series by a gentleman who whas a UN translator for many years, Mr. Claude Piron (he has become an Esperanto proponent, due to the many problems he witnessed (**) and based also on his extensive knowledge and proficiency)(***)
Medicine, you can learn anywhere, as evidenced by the hordes of doctors in the US HMO medical system who only barely speak or understand English.
It would seem, then, that "the hordes" learn the same Medicine as the WASPs, because they have to take stringent board examinations in order to "invade" your emergency departments.
As a result it is far more profitable in corporate America to have a vague, cursory knowledge of a subject rather than a deep, applicable knowledge.
I really don't think so. I think the US of A is still the land of opportunity for the highly-skilled. It's a place where the niche markets are huge. You can sell robots, you can create highly specialized software - by domain specialists - and practically dominate the world market if you make it in the huge American market. Etc. I mean, the EU still has a tough time creating a nurturing entrepreneurial environment.
OTOH, yes, the US environment actually is a safe haven for the mediocre. One gets the impression that the opportunities are so huge even the mediocre survive, whereas on other spots of the world to merely survive with a business involves a very skilled and savvy type of person. But the mediocre are everywhere. In fact, not every business branch needs a genius. Sometimes, all you need is a bakery, and it's just perfect (not demeaning bakers, ok? - check the etimology for mediocre, if in doubt).
I watch flummoxed the current myopic debate about immigration in the U.S. If anything, the U.S. should make it extremely easy for highly-skilled workers. Yes, this will have an impact on your elite, because then you compete with the elite from other countries (and contrary to popular redneck opinion, other countries have smart people, too).
At least immigration was mentioned in the discussion. A lot of America's wealth was created by science and technology--and a whole lot of that was created by first and second generation immigrants.
This because of the two World Wars, which got the USA the opportunity to import the very best of European science and - I have the impression - a subsequent generation of immigrants with a hard-working Confucian ethos, mainly, who pushed their kids to excel in school.
They don't need to work to pay for school. They are not accruing massive debt.
Blame it on the American elitist system. In Europe and Latin America (don't know about Asia), most universities - in fact, I think the best ones - are publicly funded. Supposedly, that's what you pay taxes for (to have something in return). In the US, it's almost every man for himself. They hate paying taxes (well, who doesn't), but you see where it backlashes...
What really should be worrying the US is why graduates are actually going back, and not staying like the used to. Maybe it's got something to do with the current political climate (with all the hostility towards immigrants and whatnot).
You guys keep repeating phrases the FSF taught you. You refuse to think with your own heads.
What about the "freedom" to be suckered into a dual-licensing scam, such as GPL/Proprietary projects?
Does the GPL level the playing field in that case, or is the field tilted in favor of the owner of a dual-license?
The way you put it, it is as if the GPL were tit-for-tat. The GPL is not tit-for-tat. People are tit-for-tat, as in: a person chooses to cooperate or not with a project. As in: choosing not to cooperate with a dual-licensed project were only a small group has the right to sell the code, where the other group must be of free software. This is the scenario of dual-licenses. The GPL promotes the very same practices it seeks to condemn. You can't fight fire with fire...When one group has secured right the other group doesn't have, you have a losing situation. This happens with proprietary licenses and the GPL/proprietary combo. Futhermore, there's nothing in the GPL, due to copyright laws, that garantees that a further more advanced version cannot be closed under this group-exclusion mechanism. Of course, the same can be said of the BSDL except that, by its very design the same rules apply to everyone - whichever way they go. So, you can exclude me, but I can exclude you. Code stays where it is or it evolves. People choose to cooperate or not. But people are not constrained into cooperating while, at the same time, leaving a loophole for a group exclusion. The GPL can't fix that. Some laws are just above the Church of the FSF. That is why I said that the GPL is not tit-for-tat. GPL doesn't do a thing. People do things. The GPL doesn't garantee ethical behaviour, as I think some Linux developers illustrated recently. Boxing the human mind is a no-go proposition ever since eons ago.
The FSF is really keen on metaphysically-dislocated concepts ("code" is free) and moralistic philosophy ("you must abide by my views of 'freedom' "). GPL v3 is but a further extension of this moralism. This time, they would like to take the power you have to develop exclusive solutions involving hardware.
The FSF is becoming an energy-sucking vortex. Stallman has even warned to expect further developments of the license. People want to go down this path, I'm sorry for them. But, in yet another example of the unfairness of the GPL, only big corporations have the wherewithal for the increasing legalese-junglespeak.
It's a very very poor choice that some doctors and psychologists are making (and other members of the health community) when they assume they can just reach for Excel instead of the more traditional choices (SAS, SPSS, S-PLUS, R).
and although some issues might have been addressed (and we haven't even mentioned the random number generator), the recent Sep 22 bug (multiplication) compiles Excel very poor history.
I'm even uder the impression that even Wall Street quants don't exactly trust Excel, prefering to do their number crunching with C++ and then connecting to Excel (just to display the graphics, for instance).
Excell has had multple bugs throughout the years. Some flaws have been pointed out by the statistics community in some papers and online publications. Issues in umercal stability and random number generation, for instance.
What's particularly troublesome is that some medical doctors and other members of the health community/industry actually use Excell (although, it has to be said, those not particularly well-acquainted with statistics). OTOH, you;d be hard pressed to find any professional statistician using Excell on any data.
Some people just assume that if Microsoft's behind the product, expertise is garanteed. Which, as we know from the MS track record in their main area - operating systems - is simply not true.
I mean, what the fuck? In the U.S., the police comes up to you and says your time's up when asking a question in a forum is up and then, if you delay a bit, they arrest you based on not complying with a police officer who was asking you to comply with what law, you say? Oh, then the officer proceeds to arrest the man for "resisting arrest"? This is so fucking devoid of logic! What was the law being broken? The law that says you must comply when being asked to comply, of course! Not complying with a police officer that admonished you that you were not complying...with him...and that you should, (but based on what LAW?) will get you arrested!
So, to make things clear: the law being broken was not the law that was broken when the officer asked him to comply with the law, because no law was broken. The law that was broken was the law that says you must comply when an officer asks you to comply with him or her when asked to comply with the law. The law that was never broken was the first that led the officer to require compliance. But then the citizen broke a SECOND law when he did not comply with the officer when asked to comply with the FIRST law that the officer acted upon to order the man to comply. If a law wasn't being broken, the officer would not ask him to comply with the law. THEREFORE the man broke TWO LAWS, and such a dangerous individual MUST be TASERED. LEST they risk a TERRORIST ATTACK from such a dangerous person, better to handcuff and put him to jail! Hell, he's lucky they don't send him to GITMO!
I find it odd that, these days, US Americans argue the technicalities of everything political, often missing the entire point (such as: were there any weapons of mass destruction?). In this case, the point would be: he was arrested precisely because of what? Because he was overtime?
Since when police men mediate college debates in the U.S. telling people their time is up? Since 9-11? This is fucking laughable...My God, people, you are really confortable with a police state, aren't you? I'm actually used to a civilian with a microphone saying somebody's time is up.
Fortunately, the US institutional design was the work of enlightened men and such an abuse typically will have its right unfolding in terms of consequences (like the guy suing whoever is reponsible for a hefty sum). But, oh my, how confortable the US police is about arresting the ordinary citizen.
Oh, I didn't realize you could use it on Mac OS X! Guess I'll replace fink (anything based on Debian's package management is due to face disaster sooner or later, because of combinatorial issues - people have published papers on this, BTW).
Debian sucks, Ubuntu sucks. When my licensed Maple broke because of an upgrade (oh, and having to wade through Ubuntu's PHP forums...er, I mean "documentation") I just said - forget about it! I installed FreeBSD and read the nice, clean documentation and got it working with their Linux emulation layer. When I saw that BSD engineers were far more knowledgeable, I never looked back.
Here's the content (just so it stays in this Slashdot thread and gets archived here).
Re: BSD Licensed PCC Compiler Imported (mod 21/25) by Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) (espie@openbsd.org) on Sun Sep 16 13:28:48 2007 (GMT)
> > I am saying think this through and carefully. Rewriting a giant suite of programs just because you don't agree with the philosophy behind it sounds awful to people who have no stakes in BSD licenses. > > It's not just the licence that is a concern about the GCC suite, it's dropping support for hardware that OpenBSD supports, it's fluctuating compilation quality and it's licence are all matters for concern to users.
The licence is just the top of the iceberg.
GCC is developed by people who have vastly different goals from us. If you go back and read the GCC lists, you'll notice several messages by me where I violently disagree with the direction it's following. Here is some *more* flame material.
- GCC is mostly a commercial compiler, these days. Cygnus software has been bought by redhat. Most GCC development is done by commercial linux distributors, and also Apple. They mostly target *fast* i386 architectures and PowerPC. A lot of work has been done on specmarks, *but* the compiler is getting bigger and bigger, and slower and slower (very much so).
- GCC warnings are not *really* useful. The -Wall flag shows many right things, and quite a few wrong issues.
- There is a lot of churn in GCC which ends up with it no longer supporting some architectures that are still relevant to us.
- The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers.
- As a result, you cannot have the new interesting stuff from newer GCC without also losing stuff... every GCC update is an engineering nightmare, because there is NO simple choice. You gain some capabilities, and you also lose some important stuff.
- it's also very hard to do GCC development. Their branching system makes it very likely that some important work is falling between the cracks (and this happens all the time). If you develop code for GCC, you must do it on the most recent branch, which is kind of hard to do if your platform is currently broken (happens *all the time* if you're not running linux/i386). Even when you conform, it's hard to write code to the GNU coding standards, which are probably the most illegible coding guidelines for C. It's so obvious it was written by a lisp programmer. As a result, I've even lost interest into rewriting and getting in the GCC repository a few pieces.
- some of their most recent advances do not have a chance to work on OpenBSD, like preparsed includes, which depend on mmap() at a fixed location.
- there are quite a few places in GCC and G++ where you cannot have full functionality without having a glibc-equivalent around.
- some of the optimisation choices are downright dangerous, and wrong for us (like optimizing memory fills away, even if they deal with crypto keys).
- don't forget the total nightmare of autoconf/libtool/automake. Heck, even the GCC people have taken years to update their infrastructure to a recent autoconf. And GCC is *the only program in the ports tree* that actually uses its own libtool. Its configuration and reconfiguration fails abysmally when you try to use a system-wide libtool.
I could actually go on for pages...
I've actually been de facto maintainer of GCC on OpenBSD for a few years by now, and I will happily switch to another compiler, so frustrating has been the road with GCC.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, GNU is inappropriate becasue GNU's Not Unix - so it ain't what it is, but it's not what it wants to be, when it already is what it wanted to be when it became what it's not.
Hey, what's the name of that distro Stallman uses again? The one that's '100% Free Software'?
Oh, yeah, UTUTO.(accept phony certificate).
"El Proyecto UTUTO es un proyecto de investigación y desarrollo de tecnología informática de aplicación social, con el objetivo de incentivar y promover la generación y apropiación del conocimiento en los paises en desarrollo, reduciendo la (así llamada) brecha digital entre los países que lideran el desarrollo tecnológico a nivel mundial y aquellos que hasta hoy se limitaban a importar y consumir desarrollos extranjeros.(...) Declarado de Interes Nacional por la Honorable Camara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina" --- HOW-TO-BREED-A-LINUX-HATER-HOWTO.
Most Linux fanboys are a buch of hypocrites. They would diss Linspire, but then go right ahead and install proprietary Flash and RealPlayer, and use a Windows codecs when available.
Lispire is the thing to give your papa, or granny. Power-users, shut up. Most of you aren't compiling stuff with MLTon anyway. So shut up. Even most of you don't need Debian or FreeBSD. It's just that fixing stuff that's breaking in Leenox distros feels like you're doing Real Work (TM). (Gee, look, I got Debian to install my package without removing the kernel!)
Just put "Linux" in people's mouth. Me, I'm happy they pronounce any word ending in *nix. Later we explain - "actually, that was just a Unix-like OS. Here, take PC-BSD. Give it a try."
To me, security is not even the question. The question is that health care has been persuing open standards (like HealthLevel7) and Microsoft and open standards do not mix - at least, that has been Microsoft's track record and policy for more than 20 years.
Governments have a huge stake in this. Anything to do with Microsoft-only solution is bound to hurt the public health sector. I understand that, the public health sector being virtually non-existent in the U.S., this doesn't represent a big problem there. Nevertheless, it's sad to see big names like the Mayo Clinic or the American Heart Association embrace this thing so eagerly. The problem is, this will be used in other less developed countries as an example. "If it's good for the AHA, it's good for us" mentality.
This is yet-another instance of Microsoft monopoly.
Inuktitut is the coolest alphabet ever invented!
One thing that English is losing that I have no regrets about is the silliness of elevating pedantic precision over effective communication.
The Hoi polloi is to blame!
The lexicon in each language is just as complex. Every language needs to be able to describe a ball, a house, a car, etc.
Klingon failed as an experiment of creating a native speaker, because the computer scientist's kid who was the object of said experiment couldn't describe "tie my shoes" in Klingon.
Now...had the kid learned Esperanto, like the native Esperanto speakers (around a little over a 1000) he could say that.
I think that's the Shapir-Whorf hypothesis and I'm not so sure everyone agrees on it.
English is wiping other languages out
:-))
This paper (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0006032), by Xerox Research Center Europe says non-English language presesence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English. Surprising data: Esperanto beats Welsh, Lithuainian and Latvian (amongst others).
English as a lingua franca is a losing proposition. I know no one truly fluent and with good command in English that has learned it from a school. They all lived abroad. OTOH, I know francophones and speakers of Italian that are fluent and indeed learned them at foreign language schools (including myself). Of course, this observation is biased.
I mean, it's absolutely amazing how some very smart people with over a decade of contact with English have absolutely terrible command of the spoken language (while being able to write pretty good English). This phenomenom happens because English is highly irregular(*). Of course, increasingly we will resort to automated tools when we could simply reach out to a language tool. I feel this problem will only grow in the field of documentation for free and open source software (ideally, we would document in an auxlang and machine-translated it to native). We tend to think that English is acceptable. But it is not. English is too difficult. Additionally, it is not fair. The UK saves 100 Euros/year/inhabitant just by speaking English, whereas other countries have to spend a huge amount on coaching students in a language most will inexorably fail in, despite the cultural invasion of US American music and films. Anyone who's a native English speaker and has ventured out of his bubble knows that the idea you can just go to any corner of the world and communicate in English is false. Ex-colonies give you a false impression, too.
BTW, I know this is going to sound crazy, but Esperanto is the most cost-effective solution http://www.lernu.net/. I'm saying rational, optimized, here. I have some fluency in Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese (native), and intermediate German, beginning Japanese and Russian - oh, and Esperanto (just started this last week and half, due to my reading on it), so you can imagine I have at least some ground to sustain an opinion like that. When you get to Level II, III, or IV languages - as defined by the USA's Defense Language Institute coming from a Level I standpoint you begin to appreciate what the difficulty for non-English/Romance language speakers must be. For instance, Russian verbal aspect is very poor compared to Portuguese, which has the most intricate verbal aspects of Indo-European languages, probably (and this is not an idea of my own, BTW). OTOH, the 6-case declension system of Russian can be really hard for those who speak a Romance tongue. One thesis I have as to why Linus Torvalds is such a smart guy is because speakers of Finnish must keep 16 cases of declension in their heads. That alone ought to make a child have a few more IQ points!
For more on "the language problem", YouTube has a fascinating 9-part series by a gentleman who whas a UN translator for many years, Mr. Claude Piron (he has become an Esperanto proponent, due to the many problems he witnessed (**) and based also on his extensive knowledge and proficiency)(***)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=claude+piron&search=Search (Spoken in French).
(*) "Query does not rhyme with very,
neither does fury sound like bury,
dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth,
job, Job, bo
Medicine, you can learn anywhere, as evidenced by the hordes of doctors in the US HMO medical system who only barely speak or understand English.
It would seem, then, that "the hordes" learn the same Medicine as the WASPs, because they have to take stringent board examinations in order to "invade" your emergency departments.
Clearly in dire need of psychiatric help...No health insurance, huh, dude?
Yeah, I know, "the globalists"...
As a result it is far more profitable in corporate America to have a vague, cursory knowledge of a subject rather than a deep, applicable knowledge.
I really don't think so. I think the US of A is still the land of opportunity for the highly-skilled. It's a place where the niche markets are huge. You can sell robots, you can create highly specialized software - by domain specialists - and practically dominate the world market if you make it in the huge American market. Etc. I mean, the EU still has a tough time creating a nurturing entrepreneurial environment.
OTOH, yes, the US environment actually is a safe haven for the mediocre. One gets the impression that the opportunities are so huge even the mediocre survive, whereas on other spots of the world to merely survive with a business involves a very skilled and savvy type of person. But the mediocre are everywhere. In fact, not every business branch needs a genius. Sometimes, all you need is a bakery, and it's just perfect (not demeaning bakers, ok? - check the etimology for mediocre, if in doubt).
I watch flummoxed the current myopic debate about immigration in the U.S. If anything, the U.S. should make it extremely easy for highly-skilled workers. Yes, this will have an impact on your elite, because then you compete with the elite from other countries (and contrary to popular redneck opinion, other countries have smart people, too).
Globalization. Tough it out.
At least immigration was mentioned in the discussion. A lot of America's wealth was created by science and technology--and a whole lot of that was created by first and second generation immigrants.
This because of the two World Wars, which got the USA the opportunity to import the very best of European science and - I have the impression - a subsequent generation of immigrants with a hard-working Confucian ethos, mainly, who pushed their kids to excel in school.
They don't need to work to pay for school. They are not accruing massive debt.
Blame it on the American elitist system. In Europe and Latin America (don't know about Asia), most universities - in fact, I think the best ones - are publicly funded. Supposedly, that's what you pay taxes for (to have something in return). In the US, it's almost every man for himself. They hate paying taxes (well, who doesn't), but you see where it backlashes...
What really should be worrying the US is why graduates are actually going back, and not staying like the used to. Maybe it's got something to do with the current political climate (with all the hostility towards immigrants and whatnot).
You guys keep repeating phrases the FSF taught you. You refuse to think with your own heads.
What about the "freedom" to be suckered into a dual-licensing scam, such as GPL/Proprietary projects?
Does the GPL level the playing field in that case, or is the field tilted in favor of the owner of a dual-license?
The way you put it, it is as if the GPL were tit-for-tat. The GPL is not tit-for-tat. People are tit-for-tat, as in: a person chooses to cooperate or not with a project. As in: choosing not to cooperate with a dual-licensed project were only a small group has the right to sell the code, where the other group must be of free software. This is the scenario of dual-licenses. The GPL promotes the very same practices it seeks to condemn. You can't fight fire with fire...When one group has secured right the other group doesn't have, you have a losing situation. This happens with proprietary licenses and the GPL/proprietary combo. Futhermore, there's nothing in the GPL, due to copyright laws, that garantees that a further more advanced version cannot be closed under this group-exclusion mechanism. Of course, the same can be said of the BSDL except that, by its very design the same rules apply to everyone - whichever way they go. So, you can exclude me, but I can exclude you. Code stays where it is or it evolves. People choose to cooperate or not. But people are not constrained into cooperating while, at the same time, leaving a loophole for a group exclusion. The GPL can't fix that. Some laws are just above the Church of the FSF. That is why I said that the GPL is not tit-for-tat. GPL doesn't do a thing. People do things. The GPL doesn't garantee ethical behaviour, as I think some Linux developers illustrated recently. Boxing the human mind is a no-go proposition ever since eons ago.
The FSF is really keen on metaphysically-dislocated concepts ("code" is free) and moralistic philosophy ("you must abide by my views of 'freedom' "). GPL v3 is but a further extension of this moralism. This time, they would like to take the power you have to develop exclusive solutions involving hardware.
The FSF is becoming an energy-sucking vortex. Stallman has even warned to expect further developments of the license. People want to go down this path, I'm sorry for them. But, in yet another example of the unfairness of the GPL, only big corporations have the wherewithal for the increasing legalese-junglespeak.
Freedom is a category that relates to people.
Freedom can never relate to an inanimate object, such as code.
It's a very very poor choice that some doctors and psychologists are making (and other members of the health community) when they assume they can just reach for Excel instead of the more traditional choices (SAS, SPSS, S-PLUS, R).
Se, for example: Use of Excel for Statistical Analysis
and
Should Microsoft Excel Software Be Used For Statistical Analysis ?
and although some issues might have been addressed (and we haven't even mentioned the random number generator), the recent Sep 22 bug (multiplication) compiles Excel very poor history.
I'm even uder the impression that even Wall Street quants don't exactly trust Excel, prefering to do their number crunching with C++ and then connecting to Excel (just to display the graphics, for instance).
Excell has had multple bugs throughout the years. Some flaws have been pointed out by the statistics community in some papers and online publications. Issues in umercal stability and random number generation, for instance.
What's particularly troublesome is that some medical doctors and other members of the health community/industry actually use Excell (although, it has to be said, those not particularly well-acquainted with statistics). OTOH, you;d be hard pressed to find any professional statistician using Excell on any data.
Some people just assume that if Microsoft's behind the product, expertise is garanteed. Which, as we know from the MS track record in their main area - operating systems - is simply not true.
But a multiplication bug tops it all!
Interesting.
I mean, what the fuck? In the U.S., the police comes up to you and says your time's up when asking a question in a forum is up and then, if you delay a bit, they arrest you based on not complying with a police officer who was asking you to comply with what law, you say? Oh, then the officer proceeds to arrest the man for "resisting arrest"? This is so fucking devoid of logic! What was the law being broken? The law that says you must comply when being asked to comply, of course! Not complying with a police officer that admonished you that you were not complying...with him...and that you should, (but based on what LAW?) will get you arrested!
So, to make things clear: the law being broken was not the law that was broken when the officer asked him to comply with the law, because no law was broken. The law that was broken was the law that says you must comply when an officer asks you to comply with him or her when asked to comply with the law. The law that was never broken was the first that led the officer to require compliance. But then the citizen broke a SECOND law when he did not comply with the officer when asked to comply with the FIRST law that the officer acted upon to order the man to comply. If a law wasn't being broken, the officer would not ask him to comply with the law. THEREFORE the man broke TWO LAWS, and such a dangerous individual MUST be TASERED. LEST they risk a TERRORIST ATTACK from such a dangerous person, better to handcuff and put him to jail! Hell, he's lucky they don't send him to GITMO!
t's the localized stun mode designed to get the guy to shut up, listen, and comply.
Oh, gee, thanks for informing that. So, he was screaming like he was because he's a drama queen, right?
Can we use tasers on granny too, if she scream she's anti-war? It's non-lethal, right? Like waterboarding, right?
You are pathetic.
I find it odd that, these days, US Americans argue the technicalities of everything political, often missing the entire point (such as: were there any weapons of mass destruction?). In this case, the point would be: he was arrested precisely because of what? Because he was overtime?
Since when police men mediate college debates in the U.S. telling people their time is up? Since 9-11? This is fucking laughable...My God, people, you are really confortable with a police state, aren't you? I'm actually used to a civilian with a microphone saying somebody's time is up.
Fortunately, the US institutional design was the work of enlightened men and such an abuse typically will have its right unfolding in terms of consequences (like the guy suing whoever is reponsible for a hefty sum). But, oh my, how confortable the US police is about arresting the ordinary citizen.
This is nice...funded by UK's defense agency...BSD license...
The very nice part; they say one of their goals is to formally verify correctness with ACL2.
Oh, I didn't realize you could use it on Mac OS X! Guess I'll replace fink (anything based on Debian's package management is due to face disaster sooner or later, because of combinatorial issues - people have published papers on this, BTW).
Debian sucks, Ubuntu sucks. When my licensed Maple broke because of an upgrade (oh, and having to wade through Ubuntu's PHP forums...er, I mean "documentation") I just said - forget about it! I installed FreeBSD and read the nice, clean documentation and got it working with their Linux emulation layer. When I saw that BSD engineers were far more knowledgeable, I never looked back.
by Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) (espie@openbsd.org) on Sun Sep 16 13:28:48 2007 (GMT)
> > I am saying think this through and carefully. Rewriting a giant suite of programs just because you don't agree with the philosophy behind it sounds awful to people who have no stakes in BSD licenses.
>
> It's not just the licence that is a concern about the GCC suite, it's dropping support for hardware that OpenBSD supports, it's fluctuating compilation quality and it's licence are all matters for concern to users.
The licence is just the top of the iceberg.
GCC is developed by people who have vastly different goals from us. If you go back and read the GCC lists, you'll notice several messages by me where I violently disagree with the direction it's following. Here is some *more* flame material.
- GCC is mostly a commercial compiler, these days. Cygnus software has been bought by redhat. Most GCC development is done by commercial linux distributors, and also Apple. They mostly target *fast* i386 architectures and PowerPC. A lot of work has been done on specmarks, *but* the compiler is getting bigger and bigger, and slower and slower (very much so).
- GCC warnings are not *really* useful. The -Wall flag shows many right things, and quite a few wrong issues.
- There is a lot of churn in GCC which ends up with it no longer supporting some architectures that are still relevant to us.
- The whole design of GCC is perverted so that someone cannot easily extract a front-end or back-end. This is broken by design, as the GPL people do believe this would make it easier for commercial entities to `steal' a front-end or back-end and attach it to a proprietary code-generator (or language). This is probably true. This also makes it impossible to write interesting tools, such as intermediate analyzers. This also makes it impossible to plug old legacy back-ends for old architectures into newer compilers.
- As a result, you cannot have the new interesting stuff from newer GCC without also losing stuff... every GCC update is an engineering nightmare, because there is NO simple choice. You gain some capabilities, and you also lose some important stuff.
- it's also very hard to do GCC development. Their branching system makes it very likely that some important work is falling between the cracks (and this happens all the time). If you develop code for GCC, you must do it on the most recent branch, which is kind of hard to do if your platform is currently broken (happens *all the time* if you're not running linux/i386). Even when you conform, it's hard to write code to the GNU coding standards, which are probably the most illegible coding guidelines for C. It's so obvious it was written by a lisp programmer. As a result, I've even lost interest into rewriting and getting in the GCC repository a few pieces.
- some of their most recent advances do not have a chance to work on OpenBSD, like preparsed includes, which depend on mmap() at a fixed location.
- there are quite a few places in GCC and G++ where you cannot have full functionality without having a glibc-equivalent around.
- some of the optimisation choices are downright dangerous, and wrong for us (like optimizing memory fills away, even if they deal with crypto keys).
- don't forget the total nightmare of autoconf/libtool/automake. Heck, even the GCC people have taken years to update their infrastructure to a recent autoconf. And GCC is *the only program in the ports tree* that actually uses its own libtool. Its configuration and reconfiguration fails abysmally when you try to use a system-wide libtool.
I could actually go on for pages...
I've actually been de facto maintainer of GCC on OpenBSD for a few years by now, and I will happily switch to another compiler, so frustrating has been the road with GCC.