So what Free Software do you make? What market do you compete in? What is the name of your company? Web site? What real business owner can resist a little free publicity?
Note than I am only half-heartedly calling your bluff. I am really hoping that you aren't. I prefer Free Software, but the overwhelming majority of software companies (and by extension job oppurtunities) I see could not exist on service and support contracts alone. It is always nice to hear the specifics of a Free Software business success story, not generalities. Perhaps we might be able to learn from your example.
And you have hit upon a major problem in the software world today, one which is not really getting better.
All program functionality code should be totally insulated from the user interface code. For example, take the Evolution PIM. Theoretically, all of the functionality should be written in a fully portable manner with a completely documented functionality-to-UI barrier. Think the bridge design pattern. This way, anyone who wished to make KDEvolution would merely have to fire up a Qt/KDE GUI designer and then link all of the event hooks into the libEvolution backend. The same could, in theory, be done for Windows, the MacOSX GUI toolkit, etc... That way, libEvolution itself would not depend on Gtk or Gnome, but at most Glib, while Evolution could depend on Gnome and KDEvolution could depend on KDE, etc... The Gaim project seems to be on the right track with this, as the major goal of the 1.0 push seems to be the complete separation of GUI and backend code. Also, Ximian is redoing the OpenOffice UI, so hopefully they will keep this in mind and do it in a modular way.
There are several barriers to this software design methodology actually reaching widespread adoption. For one, proper separation is difficult, and it requires a lot of thought and design before coding begins, or else it is very painful to do after the fact. The easier path for the naive coder is to mingle UI and functional code, ergo we have a big problem on our hands today.
Another problem is that people have vested interests. For example, Ximian, which controls the development of Evolution, has a vested interest in the Gnome desktop, and would probably not rearchitect Evolution merely for the benefit of KDE users. A fork could happen, but that would probably just end up making things more complex rather than less.
Finally, our infrastructure is not really ready to fully allow for this. Right now, it would be technically possible to separate Evolution functionality and UI and make a KDE version with the same featureset, but KDEvolution would be likely to feel very different from Gnome Evolution, which is a bad thing for end users. We really need a middle layer, between the raw functionality layer and the UI presentation layer. Basically, we need a layer which specifies the abstract program layout, without specifying any concrete GUI widgets. That way, KDEvolution developers would not have to redo the GUI from the ground up, but would simply implement the specified abstract interface in Qt/KDE. To my knowledge, such a middle layer does not exist, but this is what we really need to create and standardize on.
I have been using the latest Firebird and I really like it. However I am glad that they haven't switched official Mozilla to it yet, because it is still a bit too flaky for regular people to use.
For example, I had to patch Firebird's startup script with a patch from bugzilla just to get it to open a second window when I tried to open a second Firebird process, and that doesn't work over a network.
But for hacker use, Firebird is great and it shows great promise for Mozilla's future.
Actually, there were 1,579,566 arrests for drug law violations in 2000.
Well, I have no official numbers to back it up, as such things would be impossible to get, but I'm betting at least 20-30 million people used some kind of illegal drug in the last year in America. So only 1.5 mil arrests, that isn't very much enforcement percentage-wise.
Just imagine what it would be like if everyone got busted every time they used a drug...such a system would not be enforcible either technically or politically. Like traffic violations, drug enforcement requires selective prosecution to be feasible.
So you are telling me that you can honestly recall every single detail of every car trip you've made in the last month? If so, that's impressive.
Because the ticket you get in the mail is likely to refer to an incident that happened a month or more ago. And as more systems get deployed, there will inevitably be a backlog and it will take longer to issue each ticket. Which means one day in the future you may be asked by a judge to testify under oath about what you were thinking when you ran that red light or sped up beyond the legal limit 6 months ago.
Now, if an officer pulled you over right after you did it, you'd make a mental note of the circumstances, or perhaps even write it down. But if you simply get a note in the mail that says that you did something illegal two months before, are you really going to be able to remember the circumstances?
Or perhaps you will just resort to journalling every last little detail about all of your travels. Yeah, that will be fun:(
Aside from the percentages of people who violate the two kinds of laws, as other responders said, the most relevant difference between this proposal and drug law is enforcement. While we have very strict drug laws in America, they are not enforced very often. While I don't use any drugs, I know a number of people who use them (pot, E, etc) on a regular basis, and yet none of them have ever gotten so much as cited for it.
This proposal is not merely a strict regulation on driving, it is (theoretically) the perfect mechanism for citations. Presumably it will give you a citation for each and every violation of a traffic law. It is the equivalent of putting a government mandated sensor in your body that phones home every time it detects illegal chemicals in your body.
Once drivers realize how often they break the laws and how much it costs them, they will demand a change in the law. The only way to avoid this would be to have the prosecutor choose to not prosecute most people, like the police currently choose to not pull over most violations they witness. However, a traffic officer has at least some leeway to decide the dangerousness of a particular violation as he witnesses it; a prosecutor after the fact won't have nearly as much insight. The end result would be enormously unfair, and I am not sure if even the government has enough spin power to make people ignore it.
Not to jump on the meta-argument bandwagon, but you really need to learn to divorce your issues. By the time I got the the end of your post, I had forgotten that the original subject was software patenting.
By tying together what are, at best, very loosely related issues, such as software patents, social welfare, and environmentalism, you are weakening the argument for each. By equating car ownership, for example, with software patenting, you are making a car owner more likely to favor patents. In other words, let's say I own a car and am uninformed or undecided on the issue of software patents. Am I more likely to scrap my car and ride a bike to a protest against software patents, or would I simply think that you (mentally) live in a fantasy utopia and don't understand reality, ergo software patents must be acceptable?
A more convincing argument would keep focused on one issue, in this case software patents, rather than try to lump a number of issues together. That way people don't feel pressured to agree with you on all issues, in order to agree with you on one. From my experience, people are very open minded when you try to educate them on a single issue, and you can often change someone's mind on many issues by working on one small, isolated issue at a time. But when you try to challenge an entire world view, particularly the dominant world view of a culture, in one conversation you overreach, and most people take it more as a sour-grapes rant than a serious argument.
Read this article here titled "Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures." As demonstrated in the article, there really is no fool-proof way to connect a person's online identity to their real-world identity.
Cryptogram
A real world example -- 10 years in the future and the developed countries and businesses of the world have agreed to use some kind of digital "signature" to authenticate people. Technogeek Bob wants a fake online identity. He breaks into Joe Sixpack's unpatched computer, and finds the private key. He then installs a keystroke logger and waits a few weeks. Joe unwittingly uses his key to "sign" his latest phone bill payment, and voila, Bob has his identity. As long as he doesn't do anything outrageous with it, it's unlikely he will be caught. Or an even worse scenario -- someone leaks the government's key to the public or is bribed/coerced into "signing" fake certificates, and then all such "signatures" become meaningless and we are back where we started -- here. Like everything else security wise, the technology isn't the weakest link -- the people are.
Now that's not to say that this level of security isn't good enough for friendster. But because this type of attack is possible, it's doubtful that digital "signatures" will ever reach widespread usage for anything economically or legally important. And as such, it will be unlikely that businesses or governments will ever bother to use them in such a major way.
Wow! If you consider a pentium mmx to be shiny and new, I'd hate to see what you use normally! I personally use my dual Athlon 1800 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce4 and I like it a lot;-) I mean, even my sister's year-old ElCheapo brand $300 computer is a 900Mhz Pentium3 with 256MB RAM!
Come on, computing horsepower is really, really inexpensive nowadays. There is no reason to keep programming things as if anyone (who matters) is still using a 486 with 8MB RAM and a 256kB frame buffer. If you really want to use a desktop on an ancient computer, then you could use one of the myriad lightweight desktops, but please leave us modern computer users alone with our nice, pretty, functional, fun desktops.
I am sure it's been commercialized. Drexel University in Philadelphia, for one, has licensed it and is encouraging all faculty to use it for their classes.
Parent point valid despite foul language
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Worst Linux Annoyances?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The parent contains an insight that many Linux hackers simply don't get. It's better to have some process generate a thousand I/O errors than to have a computer that is not responsive to user input.
Having to use a command-line utility to track down and kill apps that are accessing a given device is a complete *failure* of the OS to just do what the end-user wants it to do. In the case of a disk eject, the OS needs to forcibly unmount the disk and allow the user to eject, and it should be the responsibility of any programs to gracefully fail, or even better, handle the error, if they really needed to access that disk.
It should never be the user's responsibility to clean up other programs so that the system can perform a task the user requested. When the user makes certain requests of the system, such as those of the "give me my disk" variety, the system should be expected to bend over backwards for the user, not the other way around. Anything less should be considered a severe usability bug.
The foul language used by the parent detracts from his argument, however in this case it can be forgiven due to the extreme annoyance of this bug^H^H^H feature.
Hmmm. Modded at 5, insightful? Well, even though I agree with the basic premise, that MS is effectively a monopoly, I will still disagree with your specific assertion. Let me give a little anecdotal evidence, and since I'm not giving out sensitive information, I will name names =)
In the last three years I have worked primarily for two large companies. At Raytheon's (enormous defense/aerospace contractor) Mt Laurel New Jersey facility everyone used Solaris desktops. A Windows terminal server was maintained for up to 5 simaltaneous users, but was rarely used.
At Thomson Scientific/ISI in Philadephia, Windows is required to be on employees' machines, however employees may install whatever other OS they want on the machine, although User Services will of course no longer support the machine. In my year and a half there, I never had to boot into Windows to do anything.
So while I grant you that the majority of businesses require you to tolerate Windows, you can find places where Windows is not run if you know where/how to look. I have hit 2 for 2 so far. I have not used Windows in any significant way in more than 2 years, and I am happier for it!
I agree with another response to this post that it is not a question, but a bit of rhetoric, and should thus be excluded from the interview.
However, I would like to point out that much of the "political/ethical/moral spin" attributed to open source may in fact not be "emotional baggage", but simply another level of non-functional software requirements specification.
For example, when I choose software, one of the first things I look at is license. I typically choose software with a free/open license (if available and adequate) over software with a proprietary license, even if the proprietary software happened to have a slightly larger feature set, slightly better performance, etc... That is not to say that I would never choose a piece of proprietary software, just that it has to have an *extremely* compelling feature for me to do so. Fortunately for me, virtually all tasks I do with software can be performed adequately by open source software.
I don't consider my choice to be an emotional one, I consider it to be a rational one. By choosing OSS, I guarantee that I am free from licensing/auditing issues, that I will not suffer unduly from an orphaned product or be forced to upgrade because of vendor lock-in, that I can more easily diagnose/fix bugs, etc... These are all what are known as non-functional software requirements.
Perhaps you have had no training in the engineering side of computer science, but there are two overall kinds of software requirements: functional and non-functional. Functional software requirements are the kind you clearly prefer, however not all software requirements can be boiled down to the cold, hard logic and math needed by functional requirements. You cannot specify non-functional requirements numerically, nor can you define them with predicate calculus, but they are requirements which have benefits, costs, and rationals none the less. When gathering software requirements, you ignore non-functional requirements at your own peril.
So take care the next time you accuse people of making emotional decisions. Perhaps you simply are not looking at all of the layers of their decision-making process.
...named after a President who'd forget his on name on occassion!
Alright! Let's take cheap shots at someone who has a neuro-degenerative disease!
If you dislike Reagan's politics, or the politics that led to the naming of CVN-76 after him, then write about that, but please don't just poke fun of him for a disease he has. Perhaps you were trying to be funny, but the rest of your post sounded serious, and this cheap shot only detracts from it.
It sounds like you are asking if Nvidia's Linux binary drivers will work on FreeBSD. I kind of doubt that binary Linux drivers would work, but Nvidia does provide binary FreeBSD drivers on their web site as well. I don't know much about *BSD, so I don't know whether such FreeBSD drivers would also work for OpenBSD and NetBSD.
The RIAA representative feels very strongly that people should not steal anything, be it songs, movies, chairs, etc...
However, at one point in the debate, he mentions that some people distribute the Bible on Freenet and dismisses that saying, "we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited..."
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but those Gideons Bibles found in motels are supposed to stay in the motels, right? I always thought that you were not supposed to take them. Now I know that many people do take them, but isn't that considered stealing? So didn't the RIAA representative just suggest that we should all steal Bibles from our local motels rather than get them online from Freenet?
Clearly this post is newsworthy. While the issue may be cut-and-dry to some, it is confusing to others. I'm not saying anything new here, but I have worded things in a way that I think does a decent job of clarifying the situation:
Red Hat realizes that they will never make a profit selling Free Software all by itself, so they don't even bother trying. When they "sell" software, what they are actually selling is a bundle of both software and service. The bundle is both GPL and non-GPL. Specifically, the "GPL" part is the software, and the "non-GPL" part is the service. Because it contains both GPL work and non-GPL work, and each are distinctly separated, Red Hat is allowed to release the bundle (as a whole) under non-free terms, ergo the EULA.
You are still free to use the GPL part only, and you can download RHAS from Red Hat and use it for free (beer and speech).
However, as part of the EULA of the RHAS (software and service) bundle, you in effect agree that you will not use the GPL-only version of RHAS, and you agree that you will allow Red Hat to check your compliance if they wish. Because this bundle is collectively not GPLed Red Hat is allowed to attach any provisions that are legal under contract law.
If you don't agree to the terms of the RHAS (software and service) bundle, you can continue to use the GPL-only RHAS, you just won't get any support from Red Hat. If, however, you agree to those terms and then violate them, well, you get what anyone deserves when they violate an agreement.
This is some of the worst advice I have ever seen on Slashdot.
As some other posters mentioned, you can get into a lot of trouble by leaking code outside the company if you don't have a right to it. You should always make sure you have not just implied but explicit permission, preferably written on paper, before sending code outside the company. But there is a danger here far greater than just getting yourself into trouble.
Remember, whenever you contribute code to an F/OSS project, you have a moral obligation to the project and all of its users to ensure that you have a right to make that contribution. If you don't, you are setting the project up for potential legal trouble later on if your company decides to go after the project for use of unauthorized code. The project may be forced to rewrite significant parts of code, and it will make the project and all of F/OSS software look bad to the public.
I do not believe SCO's allegations about Linux, but if there is indeed any unauthorized SCO code in Linux, this method is how it got there.
Always, always, always be crystal clear that you have a right to code you contribute to F/OSS. If in doubt, don't contribute. It's not just you you should be worried about, it is the whole project!
Linux *can* effectively die if we aren't careful
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Today's SCO News
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Contrary to a popular hacker belief, Linux (for purposes of this post, Linux refers to the kernel, GNU, assorted tools and environments, etc) can effectively die if we, the community, aren't careful.
In order to stay "alive" Linux must continue to provide innovative and useful tools AND support for modern Internet standards and protocols on on modern hardware. Without support for new Internet standards/protocols and new hardware, fewer people will be inclined to try Linux, and some Linux users will be inclined to switch away. This process is a negative feedback loop, which is sometimes known as a death spiral. Each generation that a negative feedback loop is allowed to continue makes it more likely that it will continue for another generation. If allowed to continue for too long, you end up with an extremely small and insular group of coders developing software that is utterly useless to anyone but themselves.
To avoid this negative feedback loop, we must maintain and expand our current user base. This is an inherently positive process, as it means that new coders will join our ranks to help make better software. However, while we continue to gain new coders every year, the overwhelming majority of people who are new Linux users are not writing new code. As cliched as it may be, these kind of people expect Linux to just work with their (often new) hardware and with modern standards, protocols, and file formats, and if it doesn't they are unlikely to return.
The obvious response is that Free Software coders will code in support for new hardware, like they have done in the past. However, a few points bear mentioning. One is that much of the device support in the kernel is the direct result of contributions (code, money, extensive documentation) by hardware manufacturers. Another is that as devices become more advanced and complicated, it becomes exponentially more difficult to write adequate drivers for them without extensive documentation provided by hardware manufacturers. In both of these cases, hardware manufacturers may be unwilling to give their assistance unless Linux has sufficient market share, or the prospects of a larger market share in the future.
In a related vein, Internet standards and protocols, as well as office file formats, are under constant threat of patents and proprietary trickery. The only way to stop or prevent this is to have a large user population which can react negatively to any such proprietary encroachment. For example, the community just barely averted disaster with W3C patent policy, and it still was not a complete victory for us. This was just the tip of the iceberg, and we may not be so lucky in the future unless we continue to grow.
So failure to maintain and expand the Linux user base threatens our ability to support new hardware and standards/protocols, and failure to support new hardware and standards/protocols threatens our maintenance of the user base. A classic feedback loop. Now that we know why expanding the user base is important, the question remains, which potential converts do we target? The choices are individual users or companies.
Targetting individual users is difficult and manpower intensive (LUGs). Most end-users do not perceive immediate benefits of switching, and will thus resist switching. And even when they do switch, there is little benefit to the catalyst of the switch, other than a vague sense of accomplishment. Not that this isn't worth doing, but it's not the optimal strategy.
On the other hand, corporate switching has a much higher payoff. A single corporate switch can affect hundreds or thousands of users. Benefits of switching to corporations are quickly noticed (ie: cost savings, reliability, etc). And benefits to the catalyst (ie: money) are also palpable.
In conclusion we see that maintaining and growing the Linux user base is necessary for its long term viability. And we see that the best way to expand Linux's user base is to start by targetting businesses. Thus, anything that threatens that strategy threatens the long term viability and survival of Linux as a whole.
But then your logic would seem to lead to the assumption that a person who holds a PhD is 'more knowledgable' or somehow more able to make a decision... I thinkn [sic] that is a definite problem. Just because your folks had the cash to send you to school long enough to cram a degree down your throat does not in some magical way gift you with common-sense.
What you say is sadly very true for the Bachelors Degree mills that pass for many/most colleges today. Anyone with a little money can get a degree in something. However, I think you are underestimating the difficulty in acquiring a PhD. It is NOT easy to complete doctoral level work; you can't simply bullshit your way through a few classes and get one. You have to come up with some new idea and develop it in a lengthy thesis, then defend that against faculty whose job it is to try to debunk the thesis. Along the way you end up doing a *tonne* of research in your field.
Have some people slid through, particularly with rich parents? It has probably happened. Do some professors lack real world experience? Yes. But, in *general* you will find that a person with a PhD in a field *is* more knowledgable and more able to make good decisions relating to that field than a person with no formal training.
Actually, yes, I do have free email. I run my own smtp and imap email servers (no relaying, of course). And I have a flat rate 1.5Mbps DSL ISP, rather than an ISP with a per-meg/gig charge (speakeasy.net plug;-). So if I send no emails per day or 1000 emails per day, I don't pay one cent more or less. And if I get no spam or 1000 spams a day, I don't pay one cent more or less.
Sure, you can say that the amount of spam I download divided by the total amount of stuff I download is a quantifiable value, but that ratio is so small that it approaches zero;-)
And sure, technically the three seconds or so it takes me to visually identify and delete all of a day's spam (that makes it through spamassassin) has a value, but I don't consider the value of a few seconds a day to be worth a change in the way I send email.
What if your dinner table conversation was about planning some kind of protest, say to confront the local mayor about some abuse of government power? Would you still have that conversation if you knew there was a liklihood that the mayor could end up with tapes of your conversation? And what if your protest was going to be mildy illegal (say, a congregation in a public place for which police permission had been denied)? You might be prepared to take the consequences, indeed the media coverage would just serve to highlight the protest, but what if your conversation could be used to prevent the protest from taking place at all? (say, by arresting you prior to the protest?)
I am generally a conservative, and I do not condone disruptive protests, but even this disturbed me. In summary, the police learned that some people were going to perform an unpermitted protest, they infiltrated the group's temporary staging ground, and arrested them the night before they did anything. Sure, if the people's protest got disruptive, arrest them, but to preemptively arrest them... scary
Gnome has gone with usability tests because the first thing you learn in any Human-Computer Interaction course is that developers know squat about how regular people use computers. Gnome, through Red Hat, Sun, Ximian and others, are targetting regular people with their software, so it is natural that they perform usability tests. If Linux is going to remain relevant in the long term, we must gain users, and guess what, those users will be mostly regular people, not developers. Both Apple and MS make extensive use of such tests, I'm glad to see that we (the Linux community) are too.
The Internet really doesn't tell you much, as only geeks like us;-) comment on computer interfaces online, and we aren't necessarily the people they are targetting. That's not to say Gnome doesn't care about retaining existing users, as most Gnome users I know, except for a couple of die-hard "I must customize everything" uber-geeks, love 2.0. It just means that they want feedback from a new source, regular people, and the only way to get that is to conduct tests.
The results are about to pay off. Gnome made massive usability steps forward with 2.0. 2.2 didn't really improve the interface as noticably, but 2.4 will include such things as improved file dialogs, and many other fixes to a lot of the currently outstanding interface complaints.
As to your complaint about removal of features. Enlightenment was "removed" because Enlightenment's maintainers were moving it in a direction opposite of where Gnome's maintainers wanted to go. Sawfish was removed b/c its code was extremely complex (messy) and I believe I heard that its maintainer was quitting, hence Gnome wanted a lightweight WM that they could *properly* integrate into the desktop. As Metacity matures, expect to see it gain some more functionality, although it will never be as customizable (bloated) as Sawfish. Finally, I do not know what you mean by Balsa being removed. Sure, Evolution is now the default email client, because it offers an easier and more feature-rich interface than Balsa, but Balsa is still in active development and is only one install away from being on your system!
As far as your last comment on using politics as an excuse for the things they are doing, what they are doing is making the interface easier to use and attracting new users, all while making sure that the code is more easily maintainable for the future. Does that sound like the result of politics or pragmatism?
This should be a good thing. Google has genuinely improved the concept of the search engine, but their methods have been fairly secretive. Now with this patent protecting them, aren't they required to fully disclose those methods?
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So what Free Software do you make? What market do you compete in? What is the name of your company? Web site? What real business owner can resist a little free publicity?
Note than I am only half-heartedly calling your bluff. I am really hoping that you aren't. I prefer Free Software, but the overwhelming majority of software companies (and by extension job oppurtunities) I see could not exist on service and support contracts alone. It is always nice to hear the specifics of a Free Software business success story, not generalities. Perhaps we might be able to learn from your example.
And you have hit upon a major problem in the software world today, one which is not really getting better.
All program functionality code should be totally insulated from the user interface code. For example, take the Evolution PIM. Theoretically, all of the functionality should be written in a fully portable manner with a completely documented functionality-to-UI barrier. Think the bridge design pattern. This way, anyone who wished to make KDEvolution would merely have to fire up a Qt/KDE GUI designer and then link all of the event hooks into the libEvolution backend. The same could, in theory, be done for Windows, the MacOSX GUI toolkit, etc... That way, libEvolution itself would not depend on Gtk or Gnome, but at most Glib, while Evolution could depend on Gnome and KDEvolution could depend on KDE, etc... The Gaim project seems to be on the right track with this, as the major goal of the 1.0 push seems to be the complete separation of GUI and backend code. Also, Ximian is redoing the OpenOffice UI, so hopefully they will keep this in mind and do it in a modular way.
There are several barriers to this software design methodology actually reaching widespread adoption. For one, proper separation is difficult, and it requires a lot of thought and design before coding begins, or else it is very painful to do after the fact. The easier path for the naive coder is to mingle UI and functional code, ergo we have a big problem on our hands today.
Another problem is that people have vested interests. For example, Ximian, which controls the development of Evolution, has a vested interest in the Gnome desktop, and would probably not rearchitect Evolution merely for the benefit of KDE users. A fork could happen, but that would probably just end up making things more complex rather than less.
Finally, our infrastructure is not really ready to fully allow for this. Right now, it would be technically possible to separate Evolution functionality and UI and make a KDE version with the same featureset, but KDEvolution would be likely to feel very different from Gnome Evolution, which is a bad thing for end users. We really need a middle layer, between the raw functionality layer and the UI presentation layer. Basically, we need a layer which specifies the abstract program layout, without specifying any concrete GUI widgets. That way, KDEvolution developers would not have to redo the GUI from the ground up, but would simply implement the specified abstract interface in Qt/KDE. To my knowledge, such a middle layer does not exist, but this is what we really need to create and standardize on.
I have been using the latest Firebird and I really like it. However I am glad that they haven't switched official Mozilla to it yet, because it is still a bit too flaky for regular people to use.
For example, I had to patch Firebird's startup script with a patch from bugzilla just to get it to open a second window when I tried to open a second Firebird process, and that doesn't work over a network.
But for hacker use, Firebird is great and it shows great promise for Mozilla's future.
Actually, there were 1,579,566 arrests for drug law violations in 2000.
Well, I have no official numbers to back it up, as such things would be impossible to get, but I'm betting at least 20-30 million people used some kind of illegal drug in the last year in America. So only 1.5 mil arrests, that isn't very much enforcement percentage-wise.
Just imagine what it would be like if everyone got busted every time they used a drug...such a system would not be enforcible either technically or politically. Like traffic violations, drug enforcement requires selective prosecution to be feasible.
Of course, my guess could be wrong...
So you are telling me that you can honestly recall every single detail of every car trip you've made in the last month? If so, that's impressive.
:(
Because the ticket you get in the mail is likely to refer to an incident that happened a month or more ago. And as more systems get deployed, there will inevitably be a backlog and it will take longer to issue each ticket. Which means one day in the future you may be asked by a judge to testify under oath about what you were thinking when you ran that red light or sped up beyond the legal limit 6 months ago.
Now, if an officer pulled you over right after you did it, you'd make a mental note of the circumstances, or perhaps even write it down. But if you simply get a note in the mail that says that you did something illegal two months before, are you really going to be able to remember the circumstances?
Or perhaps you will just resort to journalling every last little detail about all of your travels. Yeah, that will be fun
Aside from the percentages of people who violate the two kinds of laws, as other responders said, the most relevant difference between this proposal and drug law is enforcement. While we have very strict drug laws in America, they are not enforced very often. While I don't use any drugs, I know a number of people who use them (pot, E, etc) on a regular basis, and yet none of them have ever gotten so much as cited for it.
This proposal is not merely a strict regulation on driving, it is (theoretically) the perfect mechanism for citations. Presumably it will give you a citation for each and every violation of a traffic law. It is the equivalent of putting a government mandated sensor in your body that phones home every time it detects illegal chemicals in your body.
Once drivers realize how often they break the laws and how much it costs them, they will demand a change in the law. The only way to avoid this would be to have the prosecutor choose to not prosecute most people, like the police currently choose to not pull over most violations they witness. However, a traffic officer has at least some leeway to decide the dangerousness of a particular violation as he witnesses it; a prosecutor after the fact won't have nearly as much insight. The end result would be enormously unfair, and I am not sure if even the government has enough spin power to make people ignore it.
Not to jump on the meta-argument bandwagon, but you really need to learn to divorce your issues. By the time I got the the end of your post, I had forgotten that the original subject was software patenting.
By tying together what are, at best, very loosely related issues, such as software patents, social welfare, and environmentalism, you are weakening the argument for each. By equating car ownership, for example, with software patenting, you are making a car owner more likely to favor patents. In other words, let's say I own a car and am uninformed or undecided on the issue of software patents. Am I more likely to scrap my car and ride a bike to a protest against software patents, or would I simply think that you (mentally) live in a fantasy utopia and don't understand reality, ergo software patents must be acceptable?
A more convincing argument would keep focused on one issue, in this case software patents, rather than try to lump a number of issues together. That way people don't feel pressured to agree with you on all issues, in order to agree with you on one. From my experience, people are very open minded when you try to educate them on a single issue, and you can often change someone's mind on many issues by working on one small, isolated issue at a time. But when you try to challenge an entire world view, particularly the dominant world view of a culture, in one conversation you overreach, and most people take it more as a sour-grapes rant than a serious argument.
Read this article here titled "Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures." As demonstrated in the article, there really is no fool-proof way to connect a person's online identity to their real-world identity.
Cryptogram
A real world example -- 10 years in the future and the developed countries and businesses of the world have agreed to use some kind of digital "signature" to authenticate people. Technogeek Bob wants a fake online identity. He breaks into Joe Sixpack's unpatched computer, and finds the private key. He then installs a keystroke logger and waits a few weeks. Joe unwittingly uses his key to "sign" his latest phone bill payment, and voila, Bob has his identity. As long as he doesn't do anything outrageous with it, it's unlikely he will be caught. Or an even worse scenario -- someone leaks the government's key to the public or is bribed/coerced into "signing" fake certificates, and then all such "signatures" become meaningless and we are back where we started -- here. Like everything else security wise, the technology isn't the weakest link -- the people are.
Now that's not to say that this level of security isn't good enough for friendster. But because this type of attack is possible, it's doubtful that digital "signatures" will ever reach widespread usage for anything economically or legally important. And as such, it will be unlikely that businesses or governments will ever bother to use them in such a major way.
But I am planning to insult every person in the Universe
Yes, but in alphabetical order?
Wow! If you consider a pentium mmx to be shiny and new, I'd hate to see what you use normally! I personally use my dual Athlon 1800 with 2GB RAM and a GeForce4 and I like it a lot ;-) I mean, even my sister's year-old ElCheapo brand $300 computer is a 900Mhz Pentium3 with 256MB RAM!
Come on, computing horsepower is really, really inexpensive nowadays. There is no reason to keep programming things as if anyone (who matters) is still using a 486 with 8MB RAM and a 256kB frame buffer. If you really want to use a desktop on an ancient computer, then you could use one of the myriad lightweight desktops, but please leave us modern computer users alone with our nice, pretty, functional, fun desktops.
I am sure it's been commercialized. Drexel University in Philadelphia, for one, has licensed it and is encouraging all faculty to use it for their classes.
The parent contains an insight that many Linux hackers simply don't get. It's better to have some process generate a thousand I/O errors than to have a computer that is not responsive to user input.
Having to use a command-line utility to track down and kill apps that are accessing a given device is a complete *failure* of the OS to just do what the end-user wants it to do. In the case of a disk eject, the OS needs to forcibly unmount the disk and allow the user to eject, and it should be the responsibility of any programs to gracefully fail, or even better, handle the error, if they really needed to access that disk.
It should never be the user's responsibility to clean up other programs so that the system can perform a task the user requested. When the user makes certain requests of the system, such as those of the "give me my disk" variety, the system should be expected to bend over backwards for the user, not the other way around. Anything less should be considered a severe usability bug.
The foul language used by the parent detracts from his argument, however in this case it can be forgiven due to the extreme annoyance of this bug^H^H^H feature.
Hmmm. Modded at 5, insightful? Well, even though I agree with the basic premise, that MS is effectively a monopoly, I will still disagree with your specific assertion. Let me give a little anecdotal evidence, and since I'm not giving out sensitive information, I will name names =)
In the last three years I have worked primarily for two large companies. At Raytheon's (enormous defense/aerospace contractor) Mt Laurel New Jersey facility everyone used Solaris desktops. A Windows terminal server was maintained for up to 5 simaltaneous users, but was rarely used.
At Thomson Scientific/ISI in Philadephia, Windows is required to be on employees' machines, however employees may install whatever other OS they want on the machine, although User Services will of course no longer support the machine. In my year and a half there, I never had to boot into Windows to do anything.
So while I grant you that the majority of businesses require you to tolerate Windows, you can find places where Windows is not run if you know where/how to look. I have hit 2 for 2 so far. I have not used Windows in any significant way in more than 2 years, and I am happier for it!
I agree with another response to this post that it is not a question, but a bit of rhetoric, and should thus be excluded from the interview.
However, I would like to point out that much of the "political/ethical/moral spin" attributed to open source may in fact not be "emotional baggage", but simply another level of non-functional software requirements specification.
For example, when I choose software, one of the first things I look at is license. I typically choose software with a free/open license (if available and adequate) over software with a proprietary license, even if the proprietary software happened to have a slightly larger feature set, slightly better performance, etc... That is not to say that I would never choose a piece of proprietary software, just that it has to have an *extremely* compelling feature for me to do so. Fortunately for me, virtually all tasks I do with software can be performed adequately by open source software.
I don't consider my choice to be an emotional one, I consider it to be a rational one. By choosing OSS, I guarantee that I am free from licensing/auditing issues, that I will not suffer unduly from an orphaned product or be forced to upgrade because of vendor lock-in, that I can more easily diagnose/fix bugs, etc... These are all what are known as non-functional software requirements.
Perhaps you have had no training in the engineering side of computer science, but there are two overall kinds of software requirements: functional and non-functional. Functional software requirements are the kind you clearly prefer, however not all software requirements can be boiled down to the cold, hard logic and math needed by functional requirements. You cannot specify non-functional requirements numerically, nor can you define them with predicate calculus, but they are requirements which have benefits, costs, and rationals none the less. When gathering software requirements, you ignore non-functional requirements at your own peril.
So take care the next time you accuse people of making emotional decisions. Perhaps you simply are not looking at all of the layers of their decision-making process.
Alright! Let's take cheap shots at someone who has a neuro-degenerative disease!
If you dislike Reagan's politics, or the politics that led to the naming of CVN-76 after him, then write about that, but please don't just poke fun of him for a disease he has. Perhaps you were trying to be funny, but the rest of your post sounded serious, and this cheap shot only detracts from it.
This is a bit late, but what the heck...
It sounds like you are asking if Nvidia's Linux binary drivers will work on FreeBSD. I kind of doubt that binary Linux drivers would work, but Nvidia does provide binary FreeBSD drivers on their web site as well. I don't know much about *BSD, so I don't know whether such FreeBSD drivers would also work for OpenBSD and NetBSD.
The RIAA representative feels very strongly that people should not steal anything, be it songs, movies, chairs, etc...
However, at one point in the debate, he mentions that some people distribute the Bible on Freenet and dismisses that saying, "we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited..."
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but those Gideons Bibles found in motels are supposed to stay in the motels, right? I always thought that you were not supposed to take them. Now I know that many people do take them, but isn't that considered stealing? So didn't the RIAA representative just suggest that we should all steal Bibles from our local motels rather than get them online from Freenet?
Clearly this post is newsworthy. While the issue may be cut-and-dry to some, it is confusing to others. I'm not saying anything new here, but I have worded things in a way that I think does a decent job of clarifying the situation:
Red Hat realizes that they will never make a profit selling Free Software all by itself, so they don't even bother trying. When they "sell" software, what they are actually selling is a bundle of both software and service. The bundle is both GPL and non-GPL. Specifically, the "GPL" part is the software, and the "non-GPL" part is the service. Because it contains both GPL work and non-GPL work, and each are distinctly separated, Red Hat is allowed to release the bundle (as a whole) under non-free terms, ergo the EULA.
You are still free to use the GPL part only, and you can download RHAS from Red Hat and use it for free (beer and speech).
However, as part of the EULA of the RHAS (software and service) bundle, you in effect agree that you will not use the GPL-only version of RHAS, and you agree that you will allow Red Hat to check your compliance if they wish. Because this bundle is collectively not GPLed Red Hat is allowed to attach any provisions that are legal under contract law.
If you don't agree to the terms of the RHAS (software and service) bundle, you can continue to use the GPL-only RHAS, you just won't get any support from Red Hat. If, however, you agree to those terms and then violate them, well, you get what anyone deserves when they violate an agreement.
This is some of the worst advice I have ever seen on Slashdot.
As some other posters mentioned, you can get into a lot of trouble by leaking code outside the company if you don't have a right to it. You should always make sure you have not just implied but explicit permission, preferably written on paper, before sending code outside the company. But there is a danger here far greater than just getting yourself into trouble.
Remember, whenever you contribute code to an F/OSS project, you have a moral obligation to the project and all of its users to ensure that you have a right to make that contribution. If you don't, you are setting the project up for potential legal trouble later on if your company decides to go after the project for use of unauthorized code. The project may be forced to rewrite significant parts of code, and it will make the project and all of F/OSS software look bad to the public.
I do not believe SCO's allegations about Linux, but if there is indeed any unauthorized SCO code in Linux, this method is how it got there.
Always, always, always be crystal clear that you have a right to code you contribute to F/OSS. If in doubt, don't contribute. It's not just you you should be worried about, it is the whole project!
Contrary to a popular hacker belief, Linux (for purposes of this post, Linux refers to the kernel, GNU, assorted tools and environments, etc) can effectively die if we, the community, aren't careful.
In order to stay "alive" Linux must continue to provide innovative and useful tools AND support for modern Internet standards and protocols on on modern hardware. Without support for new Internet standards/protocols and new hardware, fewer people will be inclined to try Linux, and some Linux users will be inclined to switch away. This process is a negative feedback loop, which is sometimes known as a death spiral. Each generation that a negative feedback loop is allowed to continue makes it more likely that it will continue for another generation. If allowed to continue for too long, you end up with an extremely small and insular group of coders developing software that is utterly useless to anyone but themselves.
To avoid this negative feedback loop, we must maintain and expand our current user base. This is an inherently positive process, as it means that new coders will join our ranks to help make better software. However, while we continue to gain new coders every year, the overwhelming majority of people who are new Linux users are not writing new code. As cliched as it may be, these kind of people expect Linux to just work with their (often new) hardware and with modern standards, protocols, and file formats, and if it doesn't they are unlikely to return.
The obvious response is that Free Software coders will code in support for new hardware, like they have done in the past. However, a few points bear mentioning. One is that much of the device support in the kernel is the direct result of contributions (code, money, extensive documentation) by hardware manufacturers. Another is that as devices become more advanced and complicated, it becomes exponentially more difficult to write adequate drivers for them without extensive documentation provided by hardware manufacturers. In both of these cases, hardware manufacturers may be unwilling to give their assistance unless Linux has sufficient market share, or the prospects of a larger market share in the future.
In a related vein, Internet standards and protocols, as well as office file formats, are under constant threat of patents and proprietary trickery. The only way to stop or prevent this is to have a large user population which can react negatively to any such proprietary encroachment. For example, the community just barely averted disaster with W3C patent policy, and it still was not a complete victory for us. This was just the tip of the iceberg, and we may not be so lucky in the future unless we continue to grow.
So failure to maintain and expand the Linux user base threatens our ability to support new hardware and standards/protocols, and failure to support new hardware and standards/protocols threatens our maintenance of the user base. A classic feedback loop. Now that we know why expanding the user base is important, the question remains, which potential converts do we target? The choices are individual users or companies.
Targetting individual users is difficult and manpower intensive (LUGs). Most end-users do not perceive immediate benefits of switching, and will thus resist switching. And even when they do switch, there is little benefit to the catalyst of the switch, other than a vague sense of accomplishment. Not that this isn't worth doing, but it's not the optimal strategy.
On the other hand, corporate switching has a much higher payoff. A single corporate switch can affect hundreds or thousands of users. Benefits of switching to corporations are quickly noticed (ie: cost savings, reliability, etc). And benefits to the catalyst (ie: money) are also palpable.
In conclusion we see that maintaining and growing the Linux user base is necessary for its long term viability. And we see that the best way to expand Linux's user base is to start by targetting businesses. Thus, anything that threatens that strategy threatens the long term viability and survival of Linux as a whole.
But then your logic would seem to lead to the assumption that a person who holds a PhD is 'more knowledgable' or somehow more able to make a decision... I thinkn [sic] that is a definite problem. Just because your folks had the cash to send you to school long enough to cram a degree down your throat does not in some magical way gift you with common-sense.
What you say is sadly very true for the Bachelors Degree mills that pass for many/most colleges today. Anyone with a little money can get a degree in something. However, I think you are underestimating the difficulty in acquiring a PhD. It is NOT easy to complete doctoral level work; you can't simply bullshit your way through a few classes and get one. You have to come up with some new idea and develop it in a lengthy thesis, then defend that against faculty whose job it is to try to debunk the thesis. Along the way you end up doing a *tonne* of research in your field.
Have some people slid through, particularly with rich parents? It has probably happened. Do some professors lack real world experience? Yes. But, in *general* you will find that a person with a PhD in a field *is* more knowledgable and more able to make good decisions relating to that field than a person with no formal training.
Actually, yes, I do have free email. I run my own smtp and imap email servers (no relaying, of course). And I have a flat rate 1.5Mbps DSL ISP, rather than an ISP with a per-meg/gig charge (speakeasy.net plug ;-). So if I send no emails per day or 1000 emails per day, I don't pay one cent more or less. And if I get no spam or 1000 spams a day, I don't pay one cent more or less.
;-)
Sure, you can say that the amount of spam I download divided by the total amount of stuff I download is a quantifiable value, but that ratio is so small that it approaches zero
And sure, technically the three seconds or so it takes me to visually identify and delete all of a day's spam (that makes it through spamassassin) has a value, but I don't consider the value of a few seconds a day to be worth a change in the way I send email.
What if your dinner table conversation was about planning some kind of protest, say to confront the local mayor about some abuse of government power? Would you still have that conversation if you knew there was a liklihood that the mayor could end up with tapes of your conversation? And what if your protest was going to be mildy illegal (say, a congregation in a public place for which police permission had been denied)? You might be prepared to take the consequences, indeed the media coverage would just serve to highlight the protest, but what if your conversation could be used to prevent the protest from taking place at all? (say, by arresting you prior to the protest?)
You mean like this?
I am generally a conservative, and I do not condone disruptive protests, but even this disturbed me. In summary, the police learned that some people were going to perform an unpermitted protest, they infiltrated the group's temporary staging ground, and arrested them the night before they did anything. Sure, if the people's protest got disruptive, arrest them, but to preemptively arrest them... scary(Search on page for Puppetistas)
Gnome has gone with usability tests because the first thing you learn in any Human-Computer Interaction course is that developers know squat about how regular people use computers. Gnome, through Red Hat, Sun, Ximian and others, are targetting regular people with their software, so it is natural that they perform usability tests. If Linux is going to remain relevant in the long term, we must gain users, and guess what, those users will be mostly regular people, not developers. Both Apple and MS make extensive use of such tests, I'm glad to see that we (the Linux community) are too.
;-) comment on computer interfaces online, and we aren't necessarily the people they are targetting. That's not to say Gnome doesn't care about retaining existing users, as most Gnome users I know, except for a couple of die-hard "I must customize everything" uber-geeks, love 2.0. It just means that they want feedback from a new source, regular people, and the only way to get that is to conduct tests.
The Internet really doesn't tell you much, as only geeks like us
The results are about to pay off. Gnome made massive usability steps forward with 2.0. 2.2 didn't really improve the interface as noticably, but 2.4 will include such things as improved file dialogs, and many other fixes to a lot of the currently outstanding interface complaints.
As to your complaint about removal of features. Enlightenment was "removed" because Enlightenment's maintainers were moving it in a direction opposite of where Gnome's maintainers wanted to go. Sawfish was removed b/c its code was extremely complex (messy) and I believe I heard that its maintainer was quitting, hence Gnome wanted a lightweight WM that they could *properly* integrate into the desktop. As Metacity matures, expect to see it gain some more functionality, although it will never be as customizable (bloated) as Sawfish. Finally, I do not know what you mean by Balsa being removed. Sure, Evolution is now the default email client, because it offers an easier and more feature-rich interface than Balsa, but Balsa is still in active development and is only one install away from being on your system!
As far as your last comment on using politics as an excuse for the things they are doing, what they are doing is making the interface easier to use and attracting new users, all while making sure that the code is more easily maintainable for the future. Does that sound like the result of politics or pragmatism?
This should be a good thing. Google has genuinely improved the concept of the search engine, but their methods have been fairly secretive. Now with this patent protecting them, aren't they required to fully disclose those methods?