If you bothered to read the article, you might find out that Katz was not calling posts like yours flames.
Katz writes about important topics, such as freedom of speech and censorship, and the nature of the new internet culture that is emerging. I don't often agree with him on these, but I have never found him vapid. Oh, and did you see that Hemos cited Katz's Hellmouth series as one of the most exciting moments on slashdot in the recent interview? If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
It is true in the UK, I think since the introduction of the modern form of limited company, which is rather before 1886. Not sure on the precise details, it has been a while since I studied this sort of thing.
Missed this thread until it came up in metamoderation... maybe someone is still reading it.
I agree with the point about +1 not being the default. I've seen more than a couple of `sorry for posting this with my +1 bunus' out there (done it myself), so there is a need.
Nice summary. I don't suppose you could be convinced to take over the ODP Kerberos page? It's at www.dmoz.org and could do with a well-informed editor...
The point is we can have an argument about what is moral and what is not, whilst to argue about what your or my preferences are is absurd. That kind of clinches it: expressions of preference are fundamentally different to moral judgements in their nature.
Sure, disagreements are often difficult to resolve, even interminable, but the same is true about disagreements about all kinds of matters where the evidence is contentious, or the nature of the subject is in dispute.
If you go back to where this thread started, there might be a lot of difference in peoples opinion as to what makes a good open source license, but there will be a great deal of overlap in what kinds of considerations people think are relevant, eg. freedom of the programmer, promoting quality, promoting community, protecting programmers from being exploited, etc. Some people will think some of these considerations are more important than others, or they may think some issues are tilting at windmills; some people will think more carefully about theirpositions whilst others will come up with their positions in the heat of debate, but where I don't see a great deal of lack is in people arguing for their positions. We talk about moral issues in quite a different way to matters of preference.
I'm probably sounding like a bit of a scratched record, I'm sorry, but I think the idea that moral views are a matter of private personal preference is both pernicious and indefensible.
In other words, morality is simply a matter of preference. Oh dear, right into one of my pet hates. Give me a moment to calm down, I will achieve nothing by flaming...
Morality is essentially a public thing. If I say that I don't like what you are doing, that only gives you a reason to stop if for some reason you care about what I like. Moral judgements are not intended to be taken that way: if I say what you are doing is immoral, the force of that statement is meant to be taken irrespective of what you or I might like. Indeed it is perfectly clear what someone means if they say something like `I know it is wrong, but I want to do it, so I shall.'
If Tom had said `I don't like the GPL and I don't like RMS' I wouldn't have bothered to reply. Fine, who cares? But if he is trying to convince people that the GPL is immoral, that is a bit different.
Traditionally stocks have commanded a risk premium over fixed income securities such as treasury bonds of 6%. So one would expect the value of the share to be a bit less than its amortised projected future income. One sign of irrationality in the market is that one pays a bit extra to carry this risk these days...
This is just what I don't get: why do some people think that the GPL is immoral? If someone wants to write code, but hates the idea of someone else selling their code in a proprietary format so much that they wouldn't write the code if that might happen, then why shouldn't they put a GPL license on their code?
I'm not writing this as some GPL ideologue: I think the test of the merit of an open sourceness license is how much good code it generates under some freely available license. Personally I think that a BSD style license is best, but one really does lose the development efforts of the kind of person described above. On the other hand, BSD has benefitted from code that has forked off for some time under a proprietary license, and then been rereleased under the BSD license.
And one thing that for me is very important about the GPL and FSF: reading it and Stallman's supposedly immoral rants was what made the idea of the free software development model `click' for me.
A way for Dell to create a big presence in the Linux market would be to buy a small company with lots of brand name recognition, like, say VA Linux. I'm sure that has crossed some investors minds...
I'm guessing the justification lies in the excellent growth figures the industry shows. The reasoning goes `these are the companies that have a foot in the door now, and so some of them might be the Microsoft/Disney/etc. of tomorrow'. The thinking is flawed, investors are not looking critically enough at what they are actually getting for their money, but it isn't completely crazy.
Presumably it will allow law enforcement agencies to identify which counterfeits were made by the same counterfeiter. Also, if they get hands on the copier, then that provides strong evidence of at least association with the guilty party.
It seems to me that the main difficulty is deciding whether code satifies the requirements of the contracting party. I remember this issue being hashed out in previous slashdot discussions, and I don't recall ever seeing a good system proposed. How does one arbitrate a dispute where the programmer maintains his code is up to scratch and the contractor says it is not? If one doesn't get this right then opportunists could potentially swamp any good work done under the system.
An idea that doesn't solve the problem, but at least has the potential to limit abuse is to associate with each coder and contractor an `employment profile' which lists the contracts offered, code supplied and any disputes that may arise. Coders and contractors with a long history will build up trust, and so not suffer by association with opportunists.
Agreed, and this is point may have unexpected ramifications. No-one can be held accountable for a plain newsgroup, but what about moderated groups? If an offensive email slips through onto a moderated group, are the moderators held responsible because they have editorial powers over that group? What about those moderated mailing lists that have `spam pages' that show all the posts rejected by moderators: an editorial process, albeit a negative one, is responsible for creating those pages...
I'm sorry if this looked to you like an anti-Linux/Debian flame, it certainly wasn't meant to be. I do think there is a more casual approach to building operating systems in the Linux world than in the BSD world, and that isn't always a bad thing. `Fine grained' package management is very much a symptom of this difference.
As for my remark about the unambitious nature of the grafting of Debian onto the FreeBSD kernel, I was referring to Wichert's comment about it being done through the Linux compatibility patches. This was less ambitious than I first understood the effort to be, namely a port of glibc and a recompilation of the source against BSD libraries.
My initial thoughts about grafting Debian on top of FreeBSD were: uh-oh, the `pile anything on top of each other approach' to package management is coming to the BSD world.
On reflection I think it is a good idea: getting Debian to work of top of FreeBSD is a good test of the Linux compatibility mode. Its a shame the Debian effort doesn't look very ambitious, but I guess its a voluntary effort. A port of glibc would be a very good thing for BSD...
Read the article. It doesn't say that Win2k might be banned in Germany, it just says that it might be the case that some state governments will not use it.
No, the WTO is more like a court. It is meant to decide whether or not the policies of member governments violates free trade agreements to which they have signed.
If you want to name international organisations that resemble federal governments, the IMF and World Bank would be better choices.
While I am always glad to see people taking an interest in these things, I think they have chosen the wrong target. There are teething problems with the WTO, but on the whole I agree with what it stands for. If one is upset about big organisations destroying the environment, look at the World Bank's history of corrupt projects. If one is upset about undermining of labour standards, look at the undemocratic policies unilaterally imposed by the IMF on poor countries.
Ageless does have a point: these preliminary injunctions can be crucial in business. So even if Amazon's patent is found to be unworkable in law, they still got the lead on Barnes & Noble through this maneuvre.
It's an old strategy in anti-trust law: company invokes an anti-dumping lawsuit against a foreign competitor, gets injunction. Case eventually reaches trial after lots of delaying tactics, evidence shows foreign competitor's prices were profitable. Case dropped plaintiff ordered to pay costs which were a small price to pay for the market advantage achieved by the whole legal fiasco.
The purpose of the WTO isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of design. The argument for the expansion of free trade is based upon Ricardo's theory of comparative advanatge, which shows that all parties to trade benefit from it regardless of relative wealth.
Also the WTO is a multilateral organisation, so it is not simply a vehicle for US interests. There are grounds for concern that in the Uruguay round of the GATT (which created the WTO) that third world interests were not well represented. Even so, pretty much all economists, of all schools, agree that the GATT is in the broad interests of third world countries.
I do have concerns about the WTO (see my original post) but I think being ignorant of its point is not a good thing. Even if you are opposed to it, you should at least find out the actual arguments that support it.
Good post, just one main thing to add. In a cluster system hwat you can do is very much constrained by the way you glue the individual nodes together. The 100Mbits per second throughput of a fast ethernet connection may sound as if it gives you all the connectivity you need but if a machine sends each 100bit opacket to a different machine, it will slow down to a snails pace as it is not very fast at these kind of switching tasks.
Good routing software can make up for this, as can careful forethought about the network geometry. An ATM network is the best of all worlds, but very expensive... actually what happened about all those claims that ATM routers would become as cheap as water? A last point: look at the Parallel processing HOWTO.
Slashdot Mirror
not calling posts like yours flames.
Katz writes about important topics, such as freedom of speech and
censorship, and the nature of the new internet culture that is
emerging. I don't often agree with him on these, but I have never
found him vapid. Oh, and did you see that Hemos cited Katz's
Hellmouth series as one of the most exciting moments on slashdot in
the recent interview? If you don't like it, you don't have to read
it.
It is true in the UK, I think since the introduction of the modern form of limited company, which is rather before 1886. Not sure on the precise details, it has been a while since I studied this sort of thing.
If you aim is to get a `why might anyone prefer FreeBSD to Linux'
response, then why don't you just ask instead of trolling? My own
reasons are:
- I can get my ATAPI CD-ROM drive to record painlessly under FreeBSD,
which I never could under Linux (a long and sorry story);
- I trust the security model more.
Not quite right: if you elect to post anonymously then moderation
totals don't count; they couldn't since the server doesn't rememebr
your identity.
Missed this thread until it came up in metamoderation... maybe someone
is still reading it.
I agree with the point about +1 not being the default. I've seen more
than a couple of `sorry for posting this with my +1 bunus' out there
(done it myself), so there is a need.
Nice summary. I don't suppose you could be convinced to take over the
ODP Kerberos page? It's at www.dmoz.org and could do with a well-informed editor...
The point is we can have an argument about what is moral and what is
not, whilst to argue about what your or my preferences are is absurd.
That kind of clinches it: expressions of preference are fundamentally
different to moral judgements in their nature.
Sure, disagreements are often difficult to resolve, even interminable,
but the same is true about disagreements about all kinds of matters
where the evidence is contentious, or the nature of the subject is in
dispute.
If you go back to where this thread started, there might be a lot of
difference in peoples opinion as to what makes a good open source
license, but there will be a great deal of overlap in what kinds of
considerations people think are relevant, eg. freedom of the
programmer, promoting quality, promoting community, protecting
programmers from being exploited, etc. Some people will think some of
these considerations are more important than others, or they may think
some issues are tilting at windmills; some people will think more
carefully about theirpositions whilst others will come up with their
positions in the heat of debate, but where I don't see a great deal of
lack is in people arguing for their positions. We talk about
moral issues in quite a different way to matters of preference.
I'm probably sounding like a bit of a scratched record, I'm sorry, but
I think the idea that moral views are a matter of private personal
preference is both pernicious and indefensible.
right into one of my pet hates. Give me a moment to calm down, I will
achieve nothing by flaming...
Morality is essentially a public thing. If I say that I don't like
what you are doing, that only gives you a reason to stop if for some
reason you care about what I like. Moral judgements are not intended
to be taken that way: if I say what you are doing is immoral, the
force of that statement is meant to be taken irrespective of what you
or I might like. Indeed it is perfectly clear what someone means if
they say something like `I know it is wrong, but I want to do it, so I
shall.'
If Tom had said `I don't like the GPL and I don't like RMS' I
wouldn't have bothered to reply. Fine, who cares? But if he is
trying to convince people that the GPL is immoral, that is a bit
different.
Traditionally stocks have commanded a risk premium over fixed income
securities such as treasury bonds of 6%. So one would expect the
value of the share to be a bit less than its amortised projected
future income. One sign of irrationality in the market is that one
pays a bit extra to carry this risk these days...
is immoral? If someone wants to write code, but hates the idea of
someone else selling their code in a proprietary format so much that
they wouldn't write the code if that might happen, then why shouldn't
they put a GPL license on their code?
I'm not writing this as some GPL ideologue: I think the test of the
merit of an open sourceness license is how much good code it generates
under some freely available license. Personally I think that a BSD
style license is best, but one really does lose the development
efforts of the kind of person described above. On the other hand, BSD
has benefitted from code that has forked off for some time under a
proprietary license, and then been rereleased under the BSD license.
And one thing that for me is very important about the GPL and FSF:
reading it and Stallman's supposedly immoral rants was what made the
idea of the free software development model `click' for me.
A way for Dell to create a big presence in the Linux market would be
to buy a small company with lots of brand name recognition, like, say
VA Linux. I'm sure that has crossed some investors minds...
I'm guessing the justification lies in the excellent growth figures
the industry shows. The reasoning goes `these are the companies that
have a foot in the door now, and so some of them might be the
Microsoft/Disney/etc. of tomorrow'. The thinking is flawed, investors
are not looking critically enough at what they are actually getting
for their money, but it isn't completely crazy.
Presumably it will allow law enforcement agencies to identify which
counterfeits were made by the same counterfeiter. Also, if they get
hands on the copier, then that provides strong evidence of at least
association with the guilty party.
satifies the requirements of the contracting party. I remember this
issue being hashed out in previous slashdot discussions, and I don't
recall ever seeing a good system proposed. How does one arbitrate a
dispute where the programmer maintains his code is up to scratch and
the contractor says it is not? If one doesn't get this right then
opportunists could potentially swamp any good work done under the
system.
An idea that doesn't solve the problem, but at least has the
potential to limit abuse is to associate with each coder and
contractor an `employment profile' which lists the contracts offered,
code supplied and any disputes that may arise. Coders and contractors
with a long history will build up trust, and so not suffer by
association with opportunists.
Agreed, and this is point may have unexpected ramifications. No-one
can be held accountable for a plain newsgroup, but what about
moderated groups? If an offensive email slips through onto a
moderated group, are the moderators held responsible because they have
editorial powers over that group? What about those moderated mailing
lists that have `spam pages' that show all the posts rejected by
moderators: an editorial process, albeit a negative one, is
responsible for creating those pages...
I'm sorry if this looked to you like an anti-Linux/Debian flame, it
certainly wasn't meant to be. I do think there is a more casual
approach to building operating systems in the Linux world than in the
BSD world, and that isn't always a bad thing. `Fine grained' package
management is very much a symptom of this difference.
As for my remark about the unambitious nature of the grafting of Debian
onto the FreeBSD kernel, I was referring to Wichert's comment about it
being done through the Linux compatibility patches. This was less
ambitious than I first understood the effort to be, namely a port of
glibc and a recompilation of the source against BSD libraries.
I suspect the first poster to receive a total of 17 moderator points (and counting) attached to a single post...
uh-oh, the `pile anything on top of each other approach' to package
management is coming to the BSD world.
On reflection I think it is a good idea: getting Debian to work of
top of FreeBSD is a good test of the Linux compatibility mode. Its a
shame the Debian effort doesn't look very ambitious, but I guess its a
voluntary effort. A port of glibc would be a very good thing for
BSD...
Indeed. I've long thought there to be a fine line between troll/flamebait and funny, but a first post? I... ah... never mind.
Read the article. It doesn't say that Win2k might be banned in
Germany, it just says that it might be the case that some state
governments will not use it.
not the policies of member governments violates free trade agreements
to which they have signed.
If you want to name international organisations that resemble
federal governments, the IMF and World Bank would be better choices.
While I am always glad to see people taking an interest in these
things, I think they have chosen the wrong target. There are teething
problems with the WTO, but on the whole I agree with what it stands
for. If one is upset about big organisations destroying the
environment, look at the World Bank's history of corrupt projects. If
one is upset about undermining of labour standards, look at the
undemocratic policies unilaterally imposed by the IMF on poor
countries.
It occurs to me that if a post really deserves the rating `troll',
then everyone who replies to it should automatically be moderated
down...
crucial in business. So even if Amazon's patent is found to be
unworkable in law, they still got the lead on Barnes & Noble through
this maneuvre.
It's an old strategy in anti-trust law: company invokes
an anti-dumping lawsuit against a foreign competitor, gets injunction.
Case eventually reaches trial after lots of delaying tactics, evidence
shows foreign competitor's prices were profitable. Case dropped
plaintiff ordered to pay costs which were a small price to pay for the
market advantage achieved by the whole legal fiasco.
Also the WTO is a multilateral organisation, so it is not simply a vehicle for US interests. There are grounds for concern that in the Uruguay round of the GATT (which created the WTO) that third world interests were not well represented. Even so, pretty much all economists, of all schools, agree that the GATT is in the broad interests of third world countries.
I do have concerns about the WTO (see my original post) but I think being ignorant of its point is not a good thing. Even if you are opposed to it, you should at least find out the actual arguments that support it.
Good post, just one main thing to add. In a cluster system hwat you
... actually what happened about all those claims
can do is very much constrained by the way you glue the individual
nodes together. The 100Mbits per second throughput of a fast ethernet
connection may sound as if it gives you all the connectivity you need
but if a machine sends each 100bit opacket to a different machine, it
will slow down to a snails pace as it is not very fast at these kind
of switching tasks.
Good routing software can make up for this, as can careful forethought
about the network geometry. An ATM network is the best of all worlds,
but very expensive
that ATM routers would become as cheap as water? A last point: look
at the Parallel processing HOWTO.