Nonetheless, the graphs demonstrate at the very least a massively larger number of calls.
One has to assume, despite the suggestions of others here, that they are NOT simply a large number of efficient calls to short routines, but multiple calls from multiple modules to the same system modules - which would imply poor modularity, i.e., spaghetti code. This is reinforced by the know abundance of Windows "features" in products that are never used or requested by anybody, but are present just to be able to sell them as "features". This, too, implies poor design and hence spaghetti code.
The bottom line is we may not know for sure because we can't see the source code - and that in itself is a point against Microsoft. In OSS, the issue can be cleared up quickly.
The onus is on anybody tending to dismiss the comparison to prove that Microsoft code is efficient - not the other way around. Speculating that it's all quite harmless and proves nothing itself proves nothing.
"The primitive portion of the brain, called the amygdala, feels fear and incites a fear-or-flight response, he pointed out. "It's very fast, faster than consciousness. But it can be overridden by higher parts of the brain."
But rarely is, in ninety-eight percent of the known cases, i.e., humans.
"The neocortex, which in a mammalian brain is associated with consciousness, is slower but "adaptive and flexible,"
Again, rarely - about two percent of the known cases at best.
Chimpanzees simply don't do well with the fear of death. You can blame evolution, but facts are facts.
"For all we know, based on the graphs, Apache is calling highly inefficient and gigantic system calls whereas Windows is doing a lot of fast and short calls."
In theory, you might be correct.
In reality, no fucking way. Microsoft is known for crap code and Apache is not - despite the origin of the Apache name as "a-patchy".
When you see a spaghetti call structure like this, Occam's Razor demands that you assume it IS spaghetti code until proven otherwise.
I never followed the whole TIVO thing, but fine - that's a specific case.
And what happened then?
Here's a quote from an article about the GPLv3:
The DRM provisions are designed to go after companies like TiVo, which uses Linux but collects information on consumers' actions. While TiVo complies with GPL 2.0, it may have more difficulty complying with GPLv3's anti-DRM provisions.
Asked if TiVo could avoid using GPL 3.0 when that license is released next year, Moglen said, "Once a GPL'd work has been relicensed under GPLv3, although a party having a copy under GPLv2 could continue to distribute it under that license, any further maintenance from upstream would force the license upgrade."
TiVo could avoid using GPL 3.0 even if, say, the Linux kernel were to change licenses, but only by freezing itself at the last version of the kernel that was licensed under GPL 2. "That will prove to be impracticable in almost every real commercial setting," Moglen said.
In other words, Moglen asserts that if Linux itself went to GPLv3, TIVO would be in trouble. That's obviously true. It is not so obviously true about the GNU utilities. Also kindly note that TIVO is considered to be in compliance with GPLv2 - evidently after they got jumped on for not being in compliance.
So where's the proof that any of this is going to destroy Linux or OSS if some other such cases arise?
There is none. It's FSF fanaticism and Stallman paranoia.
Again, having a GPLv3 that does make some efforts to refine GPLv2 to prevent companies from circumventing the point of the GPL license may well be a good idea. It's not clear that the Novell deal is entirely relevant to that purpose.
And being fanatical about it doesn't help the cause.
NOBODY distributes a kernel with NVidia's driver? Are you sure about that?
I just did a quick Google. Sabayon Linux includes both the ATI and NVidia drivers for their implementation of AIGLX.
While most distros prefer to use OSS drivers, not all apparently consider them a violation of the GPL - which is the point under discussion here.
We also are not talking about libraries, but drivers, which are not the same thing at all. In fact, it's the opposite situation. A proprietary software using GPL libraries would be in obvious violation. A GPL kernel loading a non-GPL driver is entirely different as even if the driver is loaded in kernel space, it is NOT actually PART of the kernel. In fact, you could avoid that issue entirely, as Linus says below, merely by moving the driver into user space - destroying your argument.
If it were part of the kernel, doesn't anybody think Linus would bitch?
Here is a quote from an article last year on this topic:
Characterizing the entire idea as "shortsighted" and "stupid," Linus Torvalds responded with relatively well-reasoned (and characteristically acerbic) criticisms, pointing out that an outright ban on binary drivers would simply compel companies to move their binary driver code into userspace where it isn't subject to the limitation. Torvalds also compares a binary driver ban to DRM, arguing that it would constitute an unreasonable limitation on what people can do with the Linux kernel. "I happen to believe that there shouldn't be technical measures that keep me from watching my DVD or listening to my music on whatever device I damn well please. Fair use, man," wrote Torvalds. "But it should go the other way too: we should not try to assert our copyright rules on other peoples (sic) code that wasn't derived from ours, or assert our technical measures that keep people from combining things their way."
Although Torvalds refused to be the one to merge the code into the kernel, he suggests that the developers "use somebody else... to push [their] political agendas," and has indicated that he will not prevent the binary module ban if the other kernel developers can build a consensus on the issue amongst major Linux distributors. If that condition has to be met, it means that the ban probably won't be imposed any time in the near future. It is highly unlikely that all the major Linux distributors are going to be willing to agree to an outright ban on binary modules in light of Ubuntu's recent decision to include proprietary drivers in the default Ubuntu installation. The Ubuntu developers behind the controversial decision are quick to point out that users overwhelmingly support the inclusion and availability of binary drivers. If instated, a ban on proprietary drivers would massively stifle adoption of the operating system and lead some users to switch to a different platform.
I'm perfectly well aware of Ballmers pointless comments. It doesn't change the situation. They need to go to court and prove something first.
As for the effect of driving corporate users to Novell, I assume that's one reason Novell made the deal. While that isn't particularly endearing - in fact, one could correctly call it slimy - it's no threat to Linux or OSS in general.
"If you're the type that would follow the letter of their wishes, but not the spirit, then frankly, we don't need you in the Free Software community anyway."
This is where the fanaticism shows.
Let's turn it around. Why would anyone wanting to DRM a piece of code write it under the GPL in the first place?
If they aren't going to OSS that code, why would the GPL even be considered as the license for that code?
In other words, the whole anti-DRM provision is irrelevant, because nobody considering using DRM would be GPLing their code in the first place.
It's pointless. Even the DRM developers apparently don't understand this. You are correct that DRM and OSS are mutually contradictory - which makes both sides "wrong" in any attempt to mix the two.
As for the notion that OSS code will "wind up" in a product that is DRM'd so the code cannot be edited, this is mostly speculative. That it "violates their wishes" is mostly irrelevant. Since the DRM'd product is most likely NOT going to be OSS in the first place, any product that uses that code is a "derivative work" which - by not being OSS - is already in violation of GPLv2, let alone GPLv3.
The whole discussion seems pointless and speculative to me in the absence of a specific case.
And how anybody can conflate this with some wholesale attack on OSS that has even a slight probability of being successful is just rampant paranoia.
As somebody pointed out, you can distribute GPLv3 and GPLv2 together. So ninety percent of the distros aren't going to care if the utilities are under GPLv3.
So the ONLY people concerned about the issue will be those that violate GPLv3 - which at the moment is ONLY Novell (supposedly, depending on how the GPLv3 ends up being worded) - and they could probably go to court and prove they didn't violate even GPLv3 - again depending on how that ends up being worded.
What are the FSF fanatics going to do if GPLv3 goes to court and LOSES? Make GPLv4? GPLv5 if that loses?
Nobody else is going to care except some company that MIGHT try to admit patent violations for some reason.
This is bullshit. Nothing is going to happen except that the FSF fanatics are going to be exposed (again) as just that.
And if they become TOO fanatical, they will suddenly find they have no developers working on their utilities - and yes, they will be forked and adopted by those who aren't so fanatical.
GPLv2 has done very well. There may be a need for GPLv3 to avoid some possible problems, but the Novell deal is not a particularly good example.
Nobody's arguing that software shouldn't be "free" as in OSS, or even "free as in beer".
Where Stallman and the FSF fanatics go wrong is in presenting themselves as "the Messiah" in "saving the world" from ANY violation of their notions of "the way things MUST be done."
This whole bru-ha-ha over Novell is an example. Nothing Novell did was particularly damaging to OSS. Even if Microsoft TRIES to make the deal useful to them in some future patent court case, they aren't going to win it on the basis of the Novell deal.
But the FSF fanatics make every minor incident sound like "the sky is falling."
Nobody likes morally self-righteous assholes.
And morally self-righteous assholes are rarely right to boot.
It may be reasonable to produce a GPLv3 that prevents any future company from doing what Novell has explicitly denied doing, which is admit patent violations of GPL software, but it has little to do with the Novell deal and will have little or no effect on the future success of OSS in any event.
OSS software cannot be restrained by legal decisions - if for no other reason than that it can be developed in countries where such laws do not apply. As long as people need OSS software - and they do - OSS software cannot be derailed by Microsoft or any other company by legal means.
Look, ultimately, the goal of all this copyright/patent crap is that the state wants to make EVERYONE a criminal OR extort money from everyone who is too scared to be a criminal. That is the DEFINITION of the state. The only result is that everybody eventually BECOMES a "criminal" and eventually the state is overthrown by said "criminals".
So bring it on!
People need to stop panicking over every little thing.
The only issue with a Novell fork would be the cost to them, and whether they could find enough external developers who would prefer to keep the two versions in sync to assist them in reverse-engineering the GPLv3 utilities.
The other question would be could they reverse engineer the GPLv3 utilities and provide equivalent functionality without bringing their GPLv2 utilities as "derivative works" under the GPLv3.
It's not certain that either situation would be a fatal problem for Novell. It's all speculation.
And it's STUPID speculation because Novell hasn't done anything significant to OSS by their deal. The WORST anybody can claim about the deal is that Novell got a lot of money for ALLEGEDLY allowing Microsoft to POSSIBLY say in some FUTURE patent court case that the Novell deal SUPPORTS their contention that Linux infringes their IP.
This is hardly an earth-shaking disaster for OSS.
I'm really getting tired of hearing about this crap from FSF fanatics.
Sure, Novell maybe did a stupid deal. I don't approve of EVER dealing with Microsoft EITHER. But Novell got a ton of money from Microsoft and we have the ridiculous spectacle of Microsoft selling LINUX licenses to people.
It's a sideshow, nothing more. Linus is correct to ignore it.
- or at least a Web server - is more efficient than Windows.
This explains why Linux server editions tested in the past tend to outperform Windows Server versions by a factor of two in number of users they can handle linearly.
They obviously are calling a hell of a lot less than Windows is.
And it's not clear that those Windows calls are really necessary. I suspect they are mostly redundant calls to multiple versions of the same code from multiple calling modules. This is a result of the size of the Microsoft development teams re-inventing each others code regularly with every new release of the OS. This is pretty clearly what is going on based on Jim Allchin's remarks two years ago about how Vista would "never" be done if they didn't change their development practices.
And it's the only thing that explains the millions of new lines of code in each new release of the OS, without a concomitant increase in OS capability. Vista has what, twenty million new lines of code? For what capability over XP - DRM? I doubt it.
Look at the Linux shot. Regardless of anything, the "top-down" nature of the calls is obvious.
Look at the Windows shot - everything is tangled up in several clear bottlenecks, with multiple calls on several levels, indicating "sideways" calls that are a no-no in proper programming.
This also seems to indicate that Microsoft code tends to be redundant. I suspect a lot of those "sideways" calls and apparent "bottlenecks" are actually calls to similar code in several different modules called from multiple places, with multiple entry points. All of which is bad news for program efficiency, security, reliability and testing.
No matter how you interpret the shots with regard to security, the Microsoft version does not look good.
Duh! Big surprise...
The Microsoft policy of hiring 24-year-olds out of college without a clue about proper program code design clearly reflects in their code.
I rather doubt that California state prisons are so full of Scientologists that he has any real likelihood of being assassinated in there.
Even if that were true, it probably wouldn't be hard to gain the friendship of some other cons and be relatively protected.
Besides which, if he only has six months of sentence to do, he can do that in "The Hole" if he has to - it's not that bad. That would keep him out of general population and reduce his risk considerably.
As for the Scientologists themselves, somebody needs to do a "Rambo" on the whole organization and reduce it to rubble - including Tom Cruise, Travolta, and the rest of the celebrity shills.
You are correct that deaths not caused by US troops actions do not count as MURDERS BY US troops.
My point is that that fact is fundamentally irrelevant. It's semantics. The mere PRESENCE of US troops contributes to the problem, and the fact that the war was started at all by the US is the direct proximate cause of every death in Iraq that was not likely to happen had the war not occurred.
It's that simple. The semantics of whether "US troops personally killed each and every one of 600,000 people" are quite irrelevant, except purely for precision's sake. And I have nothing against precision, in general. But there comes a point where it does become quibbling.
And further, in EVERY war, almost EVERY soldier becomes a murderer by definition. War IS murder, simply because war is an action of the state. It's one thing to defend yourself against a direct attack by another person. It's quite another to take up arms, go to another country, and shoot people - even people in another uniform - that you do not know personally and who have not threatened you personally.
I was in Vietnam from 1967-1968. I never had the occasion to shoot anybody. However, at Vung Ro Bay in June, 1968, my facility came under attack. I was armed and prepared to respond to anybody attacking me. But I had no interest in fighting the war per se (even though I enlisted, I did so to avoid the draft, since being drafted at that time meant you would be infantry - and I wasn't that stupid even then.) And most of the other guys there were in the same boat.
Nonetheless, they didn't particularly like the Vietnamese. They disliked them based mostly on racial and ethnic prejudice. The majority of people in the Army are there because they are lower or middle class and don't have other opportunities. This is as true for the "new" Army as it was for the old. The only exceptions are officers. So you end up with people who are prone to racial and ethnic hatred being soldiers. And I'm sure had any of them been infantry, they would not have hesitated to take out their frustration with being there ON the Vietnamese. And that would have made them murderers, regardless of their basic feelings about murder. I may be wrong in my estimation of myself, but I feel that I would NOT have reacted in that way. In fact, I hated my comrades and the military in general far more than I cared one way or the other for the Vietnamese. I would have been more likely to frag a US NCO or officer or shoot a fellow soldier being an asshole (and there were plenty of those around, as usual) than I would have been interested in shooting Vietnamese.
If you read the accounts of US soldiers in Iraq, it all sounds exactly the same. Every Iraqi is a "raghead", a "haji" (the equivalent of the Vietnamese "gook"). And numerous US soldiers there have admitted to atrocities. Anybody starting a war KNOWS this is how their soldiers will react. And the soldiers do, too.
Which makes them all murderers by definition.
Sure, there are exceptions among the troops. But those exceptions are irrelevant to the overall situation. So it's not wrong to ignore the exceptions in making broad statements such as the one that triggered this discussion. Precision may be sacrificed, but as they say, "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." In science, this is not the case. In reality, it is.
Right now, Iraq is no longer the issue. Iran is. Bush intends to use nuclear bunker-buster bombs on Iran. Estimates are that this action ALONE will kill tens of thousands of civilians near the Iranian nuclear sites, not even counting the thousands of technicians at the sites. Depending on how poorly the bunker busters penetrate the earth and the increased incidence of radiation-caused health problems, the resulting fallout has been estimated to be capable of killing up to THREE MILLION people across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
The resulting war with Iran will undoubtedly kill ten times the number killed in Iraq so far.
"I know a little bit about statistics and i have some concerns about the methodology of the study, but i've only taken a college statistics class, and the people who made the study are fucking professionals, so i will go ahead and grant them that their number is probably accurate."
Gee, I'm sure they appreciate your condescending acceptance that their methodology - which is standard and used in all such studies - was "probably" accurate.
The point of the "US murdering Iraqis" is that the US STARTED THE FUCKING WAR FOR NO GOOD REASON!
Can you grasp that, Bush shill? You tried to in your LAST SENTENCE, but apparently it didn't sink in.
And if that isn't enough, the US supported the UN sanctions policy in the 1990's which killed another half million or so - not to mention supporting Saddam in the '80's in the Iran-Iraq war.
Not to mention trying to start ANOTHER war with Iran NOW which will kill ten times the numbers involved so far.
Get a clue.
And if you'll examine that study more closely, you'll see that the stats - at least in the earlier study that did not include the last year or so when the civil war heated up - indicate that much, if not MOST, of the death toll is DIRECTLY the result of US airstrikes, US civilian annihilation campaigns like Fallujah, and random murders by US troops on the streets.
If you haven't bothered to read up on the numerous reports from Iraq over the last three years of US troops simply machinegunning entire cars and busses full of people and randomly shooting teenage kids in the head, you haven't been paying attention. And these come directly from quotes from actual US soldiers who DID this shit.
Yes, US troops are murdering Iraqi civilians. And your quibble is whether it's 600,000 or 400,000 or 200,000.
one of the "research" organizations - I think it was IDC - to produce a "comparison" between Linux and Windows that was favorable to Windows, after Gartner told them they wouldn't do it.
Then they argued over whether they should ADMIT that Microsoft sponsored the study because they KNEW that admitting it would blow the game - so they argued for LYING about it.
In an email dated 1 November, 2002, Kevin Johnson, now the head of Windows, wrote: "I don't like it to be public on the doc that we sponsored it because I don't think the outcome is as favourable as we had hoped. I just don't like competitors using it as ammo against us. It is easier if it doesn't mention that we sponsored it."
And another:
And the month before, Houston wrote Johnson a message that intimated pressure had been put on IDC to tweak the report so it would put Microsoft in a better light. "I hate to put it like this, but at this point, IDC is done negotiating with us. We have moved them quite a bit already, but they are now holding the line, saying that if we want the names of their 'big' analysts on the report, this is it."
I had four or five shills troll me, thus exposing themselves as shills. So you got the same response the rest of them got - which doesn't make me the troll.
"Testers tend to get very focused on the technical questions, and lose sight of the overall project objectives."
Yeah, testers tend to think the product should work.
Very limited comprehension of Bill's objectives in life.
I recall last year a couple Microsoft testers posted on a Microsoft employee's blog that Vista repeatedly failed tests, and management proceeded to mark the results "Approved for Component."
And we can see the results in the early reports of how screwed up Vista is (not to mention a security exploit barely a couple months into the product release.)
I'm not exactly sure, but I recall reading recently that XP will be supported out through 2009 or something.
Another couple years anyway.
Of course, if Vista sales don't improve, that will change dramatically - like maybe down to a year - until some major corporations bitch, then it will go back up X months.
Happened with Windows 98 - it will happen with XP.
Sounds like typical Microsoft programming: just sit there with no ability to kill what's happening for twenty minutes while it retries something 5000 times that failed the first 4,999 times.
Then when you DO try to kill it - it asks you if you want to kill it.
And Microsoft is supposed to have "brilliant" programmers.
What they have is 24-year-old morons just out of college without a fucking clue about end user usability.
I DO have to admit that I've had the latest Firefox crash on me a number of times with heavy JavaScript sites as well. But as I've said before, bad programming is an industry epidemic that shows no signs of abating.
Microsoft just has more of it because they have more programmers in one place.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonetheless, the graphs demonstrate at the very least a massively larger number of calls.
One has to assume, despite the suggestions of others here, that they are NOT simply a large number of efficient calls to short routines, but multiple calls from multiple modules to the same system modules - which would imply poor modularity, i.e., spaghetti code. This is reinforced by the know abundance of Windows "features" in products that are never used or requested by anybody, but are present just to be able to sell them as "features". This, too, implies poor design and hence spaghetti code.
The bottom line is we may not know for sure because we can't see the source code - and that in itself is a point against Microsoft. In OSS, the issue can be cleared up quickly.
The onus is on anybody tending to dismiss the comparison to prove that Microsoft code is efficient - not the other way around. Speculating that it's all quite harmless and proves nothing itself proves nothing.
"The primitive portion of the brain, called the amygdala, feels fear and incites a fear-or-flight response, he pointed out. "It's very fast, faster than consciousness. But it can be overridden by higher parts of the brain."
But rarely is, in ninety-eight percent of the known cases, i.e., humans.
"The neocortex, which in a mammalian brain is associated with consciousness, is slower but "adaptive and flexible,"
Again, rarely - about two percent of the known cases at best.
Chimpanzees simply don't do well with the fear of death. You can blame evolution, but facts are facts.
"For all we know, based on the graphs, Apache is calling highly inefficient and gigantic system calls whereas Windows is doing a lot of fast and short calls."
In theory, you might be correct.
In reality, no fucking way. Microsoft is known for crap code and Apache is not - despite the origin of the Apache name as "a-patchy".
When you see a spaghetti call structure like this, Occam's Razor demands that you assume it IS spaghetti code until proven otherwise.
Sorry - botched my address tag. The highlighted part goes to the Wikipedia article on "Tivoization' which clarifies the issues.
I never followed the whole TIVO thing, but fine - that's a specific case.
And what happened then?
Here's a quote from an article about the GPLv3:
The DRM provisions are designed to go after companies like TiVo, which uses Linux but collects information on consumers' actions. While TiVo complies with GPL 2.0, it may have more difficulty complying with GPLv3's anti-DRM provisions.
Asked if TiVo could avoid using GPL 3.0 when that license is released next year, Moglen said, "Once a GPL'd work has been relicensed under GPLv3, although a party having a copy under GPLv2 could continue to distribute it under that license, any further maintenance from upstream would force the license upgrade."
TiVo could avoid using GPL 3.0 even if, say, the Linux kernel were to change licenses, but only by freezing itself at the last version of the kernel that was licensed under GPL 2. "That will prove to be impracticable in almost every real commercial setting," Moglen said.
In other words, Moglen asserts that if Linux itself went to GPLv3, TIVO would be in trouble. That's obviously true. It is not so obviously true about the GNU utilities. Also kindly note that TIVO is considered to be in compliance with GPLv2 - evidently after they got jumped on for not being in compliance.
clarifies the issues - including Linus's disagreement with Stallman.
So where's the proof that any of this is going to destroy Linux or OSS if some other such cases arise?
There is none. It's FSF fanaticism and Stallman paranoia.
Again, having a GPLv3 that does make some efforts to refine GPLv2 to prevent companies from circumventing the point of the GPL license may well be a good idea. It's not clear that the Novell deal is entirely relevant to that purpose.
And being fanatical about it doesn't help the cause.
NOBODY distributes a kernel with NVidia's driver? Are you sure about that?
... to push [their] political agendas," and has indicated that he will not prevent the binary module ban if the other kernel developers can build a consensus on the issue amongst major Linux distributors. If that condition has to be met, it means that the ban probably won't be imposed any time in the near future. It is highly unlikely that all the major Linux distributors are going to be willing to agree to an outright ban on binary modules in light of Ubuntu's recent decision to include proprietary drivers in the default Ubuntu installation. The Ubuntu developers behind the controversial decision are quick to point out that users overwhelmingly support the inclusion and availability of binary drivers. If instated, a ban on proprietary drivers would massively stifle adoption of the operating system and lead some users to switch to a different platform.
I just did a quick Google. Sabayon Linux includes both the ATI and NVidia drivers for their implementation of AIGLX.
While most distros prefer to use OSS drivers, not all apparently consider them a violation of the GPL - which is the point under discussion here.
We also are not talking about libraries, but drivers, which are not the same thing at all. In fact, it's the opposite situation. A proprietary software using GPL libraries would be in obvious violation. A GPL kernel loading a non-GPL driver is entirely different as even if the driver is loaded in kernel space, it is NOT actually PART of the kernel. In fact, you could avoid that issue entirely, as Linus says below, merely by moving the driver into user space - destroying your argument.
If it were part of the kernel, doesn't anybody think Linus would bitch?
Here is a quote from an article last year on this topic:
Characterizing the entire idea as "shortsighted" and "stupid," Linus Torvalds responded with relatively well-reasoned (and characteristically acerbic) criticisms, pointing out that an outright ban on binary drivers would simply compel companies to move their binary driver code into userspace where it isn't subject to the limitation. Torvalds also compares a binary driver ban to DRM, arguing that it would constitute an unreasonable limitation on what people can do with the Linux kernel. "I happen to believe that there shouldn't be technical measures that keep me from watching my DVD or listening to my music on whatever device I damn well please. Fair use, man," wrote Torvalds. "But it should go the other way too: we should not try to assert our copyright rules on other peoples (sic) code that wasn't derived from ours, or assert our technical measures that keep people from combining things their way."
Although Torvalds refused to be the one to merge the code into the kernel, he suggests that the developers "use somebody else
I'm perfectly well aware of Ballmers pointless comments. It doesn't change the situation. They need to go to court and prove something first.
As for the effect of driving corporate users to Novell, I assume that's one reason Novell made the deal. While that isn't particularly endearing - in fact, one could correctly call it slimy - it's no threat to Linux or OSS in general.
I tend to agree with this.
The whole world isn't about the Free Software Foundation, and they are likely to discover this if they get TOO fanatical.
As I've said before, nobody likes morally self-righteous assholes.
"If you're the type that would follow the letter of their wishes, but not the spirit, then frankly, we don't need you in the Free Software community anyway."
This is where the fanaticism shows.
Let's turn it around. Why would anyone wanting to DRM a piece of code write it under the GPL in the first place?
If they aren't going to OSS that code, why would the GPL even be considered as the license for that code?
In other words, the whole anti-DRM provision is irrelevant, because nobody considering using DRM would be GPLing their code in the first place.
It's pointless. Even the DRM developers apparently don't understand this. You are correct that DRM and OSS are mutually contradictory - which makes both sides "wrong" in any attempt to mix the two.
As for the notion that OSS code will "wind up" in a product that is DRM'd so the code cannot be edited, this is mostly speculative. That it "violates their wishes" is mostly irrelevant. Since the DRM'd product is most likely NOT going to be OSS in the first place, any product that uses that code is a "derivative work" which - by not being OSS - is already in violation of GPLv2, let alone GPLv3.
The whole discussion seems pointless and speculative to me in the absence of a specific case.
And how anybody can conflate this with some wholesale attack on OSS that has even a slight probability of being successful is just rampant paranoia.
In other words, FSF fanaticism again.
As somebody pointed out, you can distribute GPLv3 and GPLv2 together. So ninety percent of the distros aren't going to care if the utilities are under GPLv3.
So the ONLY people concerned about the issue will be those that violate GPLv3 - which at the moment is ONLY Novell (supposedly, depending on how the GPLv3 ends up being worded) - and they could probably go to court and prove they didn't violate even GPLv3 - again depending on how that ends up being worded.
What are the FSF fanatics going to do if GPLv3 goes to court and LOSES? Make GPLv4? GPLv5 if that loses?
Nobody else is going to care except some company that MIGHT try to admit patent violations for some reason.
This is bullshit. Nothing is going to happen except that the FSF fanatics are going to be exposed (again) as just that.
And if they become TOO fanatical, they will suddenly find they have no developers working on their utilities - and yes, they will be forked and adopted by those who aren't so fanatical.
GPLv2 has done very well. There may be a need for GPLv3 to avoid some possible problems, but the Novell deal is not a particularly good example.
Nobody's arguing that software shouldn't be "free" as in OSS, or even "free as in beer".
Where Stallman and the FSF fanatics go wrong is in presenting themselves as "the Messiah" in "saving the world" from ANY violation of their notions of "the way things MUST be done."
This whole bru-ha-ha over Novell is an example. Nothing Novell did was particularly damaging to OSS. Even if Microsoft TRIES to make the deal useful to them in some future patent court case, they aren't going to win it on the basis of the Novell deal.
But the FSF fanatics make every minor incident sound like "the sky is falling."
Nobody likes morally self-righteous assholes.
And morally self-righteous assholes are rarely right to boot.
It may be reasonable to produce a GPLv3 that prevents any future company from doing what Novell has explicitly denied doing, which is admit patent violations of GPL software, but it has little to do with the Novell deal and will have little or no effect on the future success of OSS in any event.
OSS software cannot be restrained by legal decisions - if for no other reason than that it can be developed in countries where such laws do not apply. As long as people need OSS software - and they do - OSS software cannot be derailed by Microsoft or any other company by legal means.
Look, ultimately, the goal of all this copyright/patent crap is that the state wants to make EVERYONE a criminal OR extort money from everyone who is too scared to be a criminal. That is the DEFINITION of the state. The only result is that everybody eventually BECOMES a "criminal" and eventually the state is overthrown by said "criminals".
So bring it on!
People need to stop panicking over every little thing.
Chimpanzees.
The only issue with a Novell fork would be the cost to them, and whether they could find enough external developers who would prefer to keep the two versions in sync to assist them in reverse-engineering the GPLv3 utilities.
The other question would be could they reverse engineer the GPLv3 utilities and provide equivalent functionality without bringing their GPLv2 utilities as "derivative works" under the GPLv3.
It's not certain that either situation would be a fatal problem for Novell. It's all speculation.
And it's STUPID speculation because Novell hasn't done anything significant to OSS by their deal. The WORST anybody can claim about the deal is that Novell got a lot of money for ALLEGEDLY allowing Microsoft to POSSIBLY say in some FUTURE patent court case that the Novell deal SUPPORTS their contention that Linux infringes their IP.
This is hardly an earth-shaking disaster for OSS.
I'm really getting tired of hearing about this crap from FSF fanatics.
Sure, Novell maybe did a stupid deal. I don't approve of EVER dealing with Microsoft EITHER. But Novell got a ton of money from Microsoft and we have the ridiculous spectacle of Microsoft selling LINUX licenses to people.
It's a sideshow, nothing more. Linus is correct to ignore it.
The FSF people need to grow up.
BULLCRAP!
Most users today are interacting with a DESKTOP.
Does that mean we have to call Linux "KDE/Linux" or "GNOME/Linux"?
This destroys the argument utterly.
The FSF utilities are no more important to the overall name of the SYSTEM than the desktops.
EVERY SINGLE UTILITY EVER WRITTEN FOR UNIX IS A SIMPLE AND REPLACEABLE PART OF THE SYSTEM - BY DESIGN!
Period.
Goddamn FSF fanatics are becoming a pain in the ass.
You LOST the name argument. Get over it.
A driver implemented as a module is NOT part of the kernel, any more than the desktop on TOP of the kernel is part of the kernel.
The fact that the GPL kernel calls a non-GPL piece of software does not make the non-GPL software a violation of the GPL on the part of the kernel.
Whole thing is nonsense, except to FSF fanatics.
- or at least a Web server - is more efficient than Windows.
This explains why Linux server editions tested in the past tend to outperform Windows Server versions by a factor of two in number of users they can handle linearly.
They obviously are calling a hell of a lot less than Windows is.
And it's not clear that those Windows calls are really necessary. I suspect they are mostly redundant calls to multiple versions of the same code from multiple calling modules. This is a result of the size of the Microsoft development teams re-inventing each others code regularly with every new release of the OS. This is pretty clearly what is going on based on Jim Allchin's remarks two years ago about how Vista would "never" be done if they didn't change their development practices.
And it's the only thing that explains the millions of new lines of code in each new release of the OS, without a concomitant increase in OS capability. Vista has what, twenty million new lines of code? For what capability over XP - DRM? I doubt it.
is the degree of lack of modularity in Windows.
Look at the Linux shot. Regardless of anything, the "top-down" nature of the calls is obvious.
Look at the Windows shot - everything is tangled up in several clear bottlenecks, with multiple calls on several levels, indicating "sideways" calls that are a no-no in proper programming.
This also seems to indicate that Microsoft code tends to be redundant. I suspect a lot of those "sideways" calls and apparent "bottlenecks" are actually calls to similar code in several different modules called from multiple places, with multiple entry points. All of which is bad news for program efficiency, security, reliability and testing.
No matter how you interpret the shots with regard to security, the Microsoft version does not look good.
Duh! Big surprise...
The Microsoft policy of hiring 24-year-olds out of college without a clue about proper program code design clearly reflects in their code.
I rather doubt that California state prisons are so full of Scientologists that he has any real likelihood of being assassinated in there.
Even if that were true, it probably wouldn't be hard to gain the friendship of some other cons and be relatively protected.
Besides which, if he only has six months of sentence to do, he can do that in "The Hole" if he has to - it's not that bad. That would keep him out of general population and reduce his risk considerably.
As for the Scientologists themselves, somebody needs to do a "Rambo" on the whole organization and reduce it to rubble - including Tom Cruise, Travolta, and the rest of the celebrity shills.
You are correct that deaths not caused by US troops actions do not count as MURDERS BY US troops.
My point is that that fact is fundamentally irrelevant. It's semantics. The mere PRESENCE of US troops contributes to the problem, and the fact that the war was started at all by the US is the direct proximate cause of every death in Iraq that was not likely to happen had the war not occurred.
It's that simple. The semantics of whether "US troops personally killed each and every one of 600,000 people" are quite irrelevant, except purely for precision's sake. And I have nothing against precision, in general. But there comes a point where it does become quibbling.
And further, in EVERY war, almost EVERY soldier becomes a murderer by definition. War IS murder, simply because war is an action of the state. It's one thing to defend yourself against a direct attack by another person. It's quite another to take up arms, go to another country, and shoot people - even people in another uniform - that you do not know personally and who have not threatened you personally.
I was in Vietnam from 1967-1968. I never had the occasion to shoot anybody. However, at Vung Ro Bay in June, 1968, my facility came under attack. I was armed and prepared to respond to anybody attacking me. But I had no interest in fighting the war per se (even though I enlisted, I did so to avoid the draft, since being drafted at that time meant you would be infantry - and I wasn't that stupid even then.) And most of the other guys there were in the same boat.
Nonetheless, they didn't particularly like the Vietnamese. They disliked them based mostly on racial and ethnic prejudice. The majority of people in the Army are there because they are lower or middle class and don't have other opportunities. This is as true for the "new" Army as it was for the old. The only exceptions are officers. So you end up with people who are prone to racial and ethnic hatred being soldiers. And I'm sure had any of them been infantry, they would not have hesitated to take out their frustration with being there ON the Vietnamese. And that would have made them murderers, regardless of their basic feelings about murder. I may be wrong in my estimation of myself, but I feel that I would NOT have reacted in that way. In fact, I hated my comrades and the military in general far more than I cared one way or the other for the Vietnamese. I would have been more likely to frag a US NCO or officer or shoot a fellow soldier being an asshole (and there were plenty of those around, as usual) than I would have been interested in shooting Vietnamese.
If you read the accounts of US soldiers in Iraq, it all sounds exactly the same. Every Iraqi is a "raghead", a "haji" (the equivalent of the Vietnamese "gook"). And numerous US soldiers there have admitted to atrocities. Anybody starting a war KNOWS this is how their soldiers will react. And the soldiers do, too.
Which makes them all murderers by definition.
Sure, there are exceptions among the troops. But those exceptions are irrelevant to the overall situation. So it's not wrong to ignore the exceptions in making broad statements such as the one that triggered this discussion. Precision may be sacrificed, but as they say, "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." In science, this is not the case. In reality, it is.
Right now, Iraq is no longer the issue. Iran is. Bush intends to use nuclear bunker-buster bombs on Iran. Estimates are that this action ALONE will kill tens of thousands of civilians near the Iranian nuclear sites, not even counting the thousands of technicians at the sites. Depending on how poorly the bunker busters penetrate the earth and the increased incidence of radiation-caused health problems, the resulting fallout has been estimated to be capable of killing up to THREE MILLION people across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
The resulting war with Iran will undoubtedly kill ten times the number killed in Iraq so far.
It's on. And it's g
"I know a little bit about statistics and i have some concerns about the methodology of the study, but i've only taken a college statistics class, and the people who made the study are fucking professionals, so i will go ahead and grant them that their number is probably accurate."
Gee, I'm sure they appreciate your condescending acceptance that their methodology - which is standard and used in all such studies - was "probably" accurate.
The point of the "US murdering Iraqis" is that the US STARTED THE FUCKING WAR FOR NO GOOD REASON!
Can you grasp that, Bush shill? You tried to in your LAST SENTENCE, but apparently it didn't sink in.
And if that isn't enough, the US supported the UN sanctions policy in the 1990's which killed another half million or so - not to mention supporting Saddam in the '80's in the Iran-Iraq war.
Not to mention trying to start ANOTHER war with Iran NOW which will kill ten times the numbers involved so far.
Get a clue.
And if you'll examine that study more closely, you'll see that the stats - at least in the earlier study that did not include the last year or so when the civil war heated up - indicate that much, if not MOST, of the death toll is DIRECTLY the result of US airstrikes, US civilian annihilation campaigns like Fallujah, and random murders by US troops on the streets.
If you haven't bothered to read up on the numerous reports from Iraq over the last three years of US troops simply machinegunning entire cars and busses full of people and randomly shooting teenage kids in the head, you haven't been paying attention. And these come directly from quotes from actual US soldiers who DID this shit.
Yes, US troops are murdering Iraqi civilians. And your quibble is whether it's 600,000 or 400,000 or 200,000.
Asshole.
one of the "research" organizations - I think it was IDC - to produce a "comparison" between Linux and Windows that was favorable to Windows, after Gartner told them they wouldn't do it.
Then they argued over whether they should ADMIT that Microsoft sponsored the study because they KNEW that admitting it would blow the game - so they argued for LYING about it.
Here's a quote from the story:
In an email dated 1 November, 2002, Kevin Johnson, now the head of Windows, wrote: "I don't like it to be public on the doc that we sponsored it because I don't think the outcome is as favourable as we had hoped. I just don't like competitors using it as ammo against us. It is easier if it doesn't mention that we sponsored it."
And another:
And the month before, Houston wrote Johnson a message that intimated pressure had been put on IDC to tweak the report so it would put Microsoft in a better light. "I hate to put it like this, but at this point, IDC is done negotiating with us. We have moved them quite a bit already, but they are now holding the line, saying that if we want the names of their 'big' analysts on the report, this is it."
"Legit commentary" by a Microsoft shill.
Yeah, right.
THAT'S why the moderators mod you down, shill.
I had four or five shills troll me, thus exposing themselves as shills. So you got the same response the rest of them got - which doesn't make me the troll.
"Testers tend to get very focused on the technical questions, and lose sight of the overall project objectives."
Yeah, testers tend to think the product should work.
Very limited comprehension of Bill's objectives in life.
I recall last year a couple Microsoft testers posted on a Microsoft employee's blog that Vista repeatedly failed tests, and management proceeded to mark the results "Approved for Component."
And we can see the results in the early reports of how screwed up Vista is (not to mention a security exploit barely a couple months into the product release.)
"I'm at the north end of building 26, lab 3117"
That would be the Paid Shill Lab, right?
"No, I said that copying your competitor's entire application was a bad business strategy"
As in Windows copying the Apple interface?
Oh, right, Microsoft made it "better".
Right.
YAMS (Yet Another Microsoft Shill).
Bill is trying to call you - answer your cell.
I'm not exactly sure, but I recall reading recently that XP will be supported out through 2009 or something.
Another couple years anyway.
Of course, if Vista sales don't improve, that will change dramatically - like maybe down to a year - until some major corporations bitch, then it will go back up X months.
Happened with Windows 98 - it will happen with XP.
Sounds like typical Microsoft programming: just sit there with no ability to kill what's happening for twenty minutes while it retries something 5000 times that failed the first 4,999 times.
Then when you DO try to kill it - it asks you if you want to kill it.
And Microsoft is supposed to have "brilliant" programmers.
What they have is 24-year-old morons just out of college without a fucking clue about end user usability.
I DO have to admit that I've had the latest Firefox crash on me a number of times with heavy JavaScript sites as well. But as I've said before, bad programming is an industry epidemic that shows no signs of abating.
Microsoft just has more of it because they have more programmers in one place.