Do you guys and gals remember when Richard did a short stint in a video for Sun following the announcement that Sun had decided to GPL Java ?
I can only imagine how happy Richard was on that day. He had every reason to be so. Not simply because Sun had chosen to use his license for Java-but rather because of a little bit of historical trivia that most Free Software users are too young to remember.
Now surely you know the name James Gosling. He was the one who created Java. But did you know that there is a rather interesting relationship between him and Richard ?
One of the single biggest reasons that Richard wrote the GPL and created what we now know as Free Software has everything to do with James Gosling.
"In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL."
Many people who are ignorant of this history have always been affronted by Stallman's use of the phrase "Java Trap". But is it really any wonder that Richard chose to use that expression-given what personally had transpired between him and James Gosling.
Bill Joy was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is also the guy who originally wrote Vi. Bill Joy was also friends with James Gosling- and made Gosling's baby practically synonymous with the name Sun.
This little bit of trivia adds a whole lot to all of the flamefests over the years about Emacs vs. Vi. SunOS, which we now know as OpenSolaris, was the first heavily commercialized version of what we now know as BSD. Bill Joy used the code written at Berkley to create the original SunOS.
That Java is now GPL is nothing less than Sun saying to Richard-"Richard, you were right". And if one day OpenSolaris embraces the GPL Richard's victory will be complete.
You may think this is nothing but propaganda-but I encourage you to actually *learn* about the history of these giants of the computer world.
Now that the OpenJDK is %100 Free, %100 GPL, Richard has received the kind of vindication that hardly *anyone* in life ever gets. Cheers to you Richard and Cheers to Sun for seeing the light.
Haleluja, praise be, be Healed! The second Exodus is here. Exherbo will lead themselves to the promised land.
And we Gentoo-ers can finally breathe a breath of fresh air. Finally the ex-Gentoo developers Poisonous People Clan have decided to do their own damned thing and leave Gentoo, leave Gentoo alone.
I wish Exherbo the best of luck. Good fucking riddance.
Their first day at the newly founded Thunderbird Mail Corporation? After all they, Scott and David, would have to leave the Mozilla Corporation, if they play to continue with Thunderbird, because TMC and MC are two *different* corporations....
Wow, I must admit I am deeply impressed by your deep insight into the issues at hand. Now that you have given us the "facts" everything is so much clearer. It is unfortunate that ones critical thinking skills can so effectively be shutdown by merely referencing "facts". But then again "facts" are kind of like ready-made mini-ideologies custom made for light consumption and easy listening.
Although it is pointless to argue against such "facts" I, nevertheless, feel it is important to point out a few things:
1. Congratulations you deserve a medal for having successfully grokked what science has been teaching us for the better part of a century-for most of earths history human habitation was unthinkable due to harsh climactic conditions. The rise of human kind corresponded to certain changes in the environment which facilitated our existence. Pointing out that the earth was previously warmer than it is now makes it seem as if all of this talk of global warming is just hot air. Yet comparing the earths current temperature to the temperature found in times prior to human life, or prior to organic life does little to reveal the role which humans have played in influencing the climate of the earth. Which of course is the whole point of the ongoing discussion. Your "fact" is irrelevant and more importantly misleading, because it evades the question of what impact human society has had on climate.
2. Stating that "C02 levels are not high now" is yet another fine example of brain-dead "facts". Sure such a statement is accurate given a time frame of millions of years. But then again no one is arguing about the human effects on the climate in that time frame, perhaps because human society only figures prominently in the last 10-15,000 years. The debate has been about what kind of impact human society has had on the climate and more specifically the human impact on the climate during the era of human industrial activity. Given this time frame the CO2 levels are incredibly high(ie. CO2 levels are currently quite high relative to the last several hundred years.) So yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading.
3. Yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. No one here is arguing that human activity is the sole agent of change or that the impact of human activity outweighs "cosmic forces". However it is misleading to state such a "fact" in a debate about global warming-such evades the question at hand by attempting to relativize human impact on the climate to being trivially insignificant.
4. Again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. The only relevance that such an argument can have in regards to global warming is the case where you can prove that the changes in climate being experienced are the product of long-term cycles of warming and cooling. Paradoxically a tremendous amount of evidence has been gathered which shows fluctuation in the earths temperature relative to the rate of industrial exploitation ie. changes in the earths temperature due to human impact. You don't need to be intelligent to be aware of the "ice-ages" but intelligence is required to distinguish between such long-term cycles and the relative impact of human society on our environment.
5. What may or may not happen in the next 5-100,000 years is not really interesting to me. Yet if my grandchildren are no longer capable of enjoying much of what I have taken for granted, due to my generation having taken such for granted, then
such issues become relevant. Nature did not bring mankind to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Mankind did. If in our nuclear powered insanity we had made the mistake of unleashing all out nuclear war, most if not all of the natural cycles, which to a large extent, historically, have determined our environment would have been negated. There is no reason to believe that any of the natural cycles would continue unabated in a world bereft of organic life.
6. Ibid.
And finally your brain-dead conclusion. Here we see a fascinating conjuncture of
But unfortunately correcting our reading of the second amendment will only go part of the way towards solving the problems. America has a love aware with violence-as a society we simply cannot get enough of it. The only thing americans love more than violence is living in a perpetual state of fear-which feeds directly into the violence. American culture glorifies violence to the point of no return-being beaten and beating others is practically a coming of age ritual. Paradoxically it is not the same people who legally own guns who actively perpetuate this fear and who so greatly value violence. Most legal gun owners are good upstanding citizens. Yet their possession of guns leads directly to the atmosphere of fear and violence. There are probably as many guns in circulation in America now as there are phones. Guns form an ubiquitous presence in American society-they permeate the social fabric, which itself is constantly being torn at and ripped asunder by the unrelenting gun violence. America as a culture and as a nation are simply not mature enough to be entrusted with guns. The frequency of gun related violence in America shows this to be true time and time again.
I know plenty of people who own guns. Of those people I can neither ascribe violence nor violent acts of intimidation using those guns. Why this disjunction-this apparent contradiction-because these people belong to a minority of Americans for whom violence is not a common sense approach to solving problems and disagreements. As much as I long for gun free society however- the reality is - as long as violence belongs to our collective common sense -not only in the sense of using violence to achieve an end, but also expecting violence as a reaction to certain behaviors- we will remain a society which defines itself in terms of it's own self-violence.
Now I know that many, many Americans would feel that their god-given right to own guns would be violated if it were to come to pass that the legislation in place corresponded to a more correct reading of the second amendment. But I feel the violence involved in cleansing our nation of guns, however painful that may be for those whose sense of entitlement would be hurt, still remains a violence much more minor than the never ending wave of gun related violence in American society. Violence still defines the experience of a large part of our society. Gun violence, of which most is domestic, plays a crucial role in the culture of violence in our society-at the same time the cultural products of America worship this same violence- we pay homage to this culture when we purchase the films and music which glorify it. Our fathers teach the value of violence to our sons, as men do to their woman, as children do to each other in our public school system. Many Americans can probably rightfully not identify themselves with the picture I paint here-but I suspect that a larger group of Americans will be able to identify themselves with such a picture as those who identify themselves as living in a civilized society of non-violence.
I did RTFA. And although I was quite impressed with how the author grasps many of the underlying issues, their entanglement and complexity I was bluffed by sheer naievete(sp?) of the underlying economic assumptions and the their theoretical underpinnings.
He documents quite accurately how 'IPR' works and how it effects the development of software and the *costs* this form of development has for society, yet these *costs* are not the subject of the mathetical extrapolations which he engages in. The mathematics used in this essay as well as the entirety of latent definitions of value/waste present in the text are based on a woefully inadequate naieve economic understanding.
I am not an economist and I have never formally studied economics but the assumptions at work in the economic understanding revealed in his terminology and his calculations are baffling to say the least. If such is what is taught to students of economy is it any wonder our economy is so supremely fucked.
It is a shame that otherwise good arguments and a good grasp of the complexities involved are so thoroughly underminded by such sophmoric misuse of mathematics (with their appeal to 'empirical reality' ie. facts) and woefully inept econcomic theory.
The profound weakness of the underlining economic theory at work in his paper is that each and every argument can be turned to it's opposite and equally proven. He states that if all software were available at 0 cost and freely modifiable that there would be no duplication of software-ie. no one would bother righting something already written. Anyone who has opened their eyes knows that the reality directly contradicts such nonsense. He forgets that where economy is understood merely as a system of incentives/disincentives, and that such are purely monetary in nature, that in order to prevent people from duplicating programs one would have to a) pay them not to do so or b) not pay them for having done so(two sides of same coin). But this negates his complaint against unnecessary duplication of software because those who do duplicate software are being paid to do so. In totality the economic assumptions underlying this essay are fundamentally incapable of grasping what FOSS is and how it works.
So at once the author is capable of providing a rather damning indictment of IPR and he succeeds in painting an accuarate picture of the *costs* of this regime, but he is incapable of grasping that which he wishes to see as an alternative to IPR, namely FOSS. His argument is that one can substitute FOSS for IPR by creating public corporations which employ FOSS programmers. In so doing he ignores that it was the contention of the conditions of employment as a software developer which gave birth to FOSS.
What FOSS is, is only relevant within the terms of reference which constitute the status quo. How FOSS is, is an insight into that which already is no longer captured in our grasp of the status quo-for it is different, different in the sort of way which makes a difference for those engaged in it.
Actually, it is really easy to see where human beings are significantly different from all other species of animal life.
We are the *only* ones concerned with explaining the difference or lack thereof.;)
And for us, this fact, is highly significant......
Does noone else find it peculiar that only from an evolutionary viewpoint are the differences between human beings and all other species of animal life insignificant, whereas the very act of adopting a viewpoint and empirically researching with a view towards developing theories, arguing and reasoning to convince and explain such insignificance are all activities which solely are pursued by human beings.
Personally, I do not believe that some "God" or "higher power" "created" human beings. But one has to have their head pretty firmly stuck in their butts to not see significant differences. Perhaps I should refer to Bateson here and point out that some difference make a difference, and being human is, at least for other humans, that kind of difference.
The only compelling work in evolutionary theory I have ever read came from Maturana and Varella(The Tree of Knowledge)- brilliant insight into the almost 1:1 fit of organic structure and environment, leaving just enough deviation for change to occur in both the organic structure and it's environment. But what worked so wonderfully in the description of single and multi-cell organism fails spectacularly when Maturana and Varella attempt to explain human cognition and cultural being as being a further extrapolation of the same principle.
To the extent that the evolutionary viewpoint,ie. the so lit world revealed in light of evolutionary theory, makes us more cognisant of our deep relation to all other animal life forms and aware that being human means being related to our bretheren creatures and help us in turn to more appreciate and value our earthliness and to appreciate and value our earthly environment -to this extent, evolution is a wonderful profound wise insight into nature, our nature within nature.
But where the differences are manifest they need not be explained, nor described, and really honestly, who but us human beings care?
Amazing how your post got modded +5 considering just how little thought you put into righting what you did.
While it is true that digital technology makes it easy to reproduce digitial content(ie.copying, transfering etc.) this very same functionality is dependant upon innumerable things which themselves are not digital and hence not digitally reproducable.
Sure I can take any given piece of data from a supported device and transfer it to some new supported device. Sure I can transform any given piece of supported data into any new form of supported data.
But the key word here is 'supported'- do any such devices still exist, if not is it possible to remanufacture such, does there exist any program which can acurately decipher the format of the data, if not is it possible to sufficiently reverse engineer the application which produced that format. 'Support' means *currently* in the state of production/manufacture- and when talking about the future what we can say for sure is that what will then be 'current' is *not* the same as it is now.
Open Source software goes a long way towards ensuring that future generations will be able still access data produced with/by such software. Of course with propietary software this is not the case -once the company which produced the propietary software vanishes, taking their propietary product with them, it is impossible to access data stored in the format of the defunct applications shy of reverse engineering of that format-but the ability to reverse engineer is not *simply* a given, and most propietary formats are never reverse engineered.
The possibility to reverse engineer a format does not mean that some format will be reverse engineered-and in all cases where some format is not reverse engineered there is palpable loss, ie. irretrievable loss of data. Beyond the software dimension all software is dependant upon the pre-existance of hardware-and hardware no longer produced must also be reverse engineered. Of course one can also reverse engineer hardware-but the same providos also are valid regarding hardware-and let us not forget the equipment/techniques/process methodologies used in producing said hardware.
To state this simply:
data is dependant upon the format utilized by the application used in it's production
data is dependant upon the medium of storage
applications are dependant upon OS's
applications are dependant upon the medium of storare of the OS
OS's are dependant hardware
OS's use certain mediums of storage
the hardware which constitutes computers is dependant upon the hardware used in it's production.
IF at some point in the future we longer have computers or devices which are sufficiently similiar(technologically speaking) to what we now call computers -if I wished to have access to some data found on/in some technological ruin I would need to reconstruct the conditions of that data(for data is nothing more than the codification and storage of itself(ie. binary self-representation))-which means I would need to reproduce the following:
the production methodologies, techniques, equipment and resources used in the production of the hardware which constitues computers which run specific OS's which in turn run specific versions of specific applications which in turn support specific formats of spefic kinds of data.
None of the above are *given*- their pre-existence is fundamental-if such does not already exist good luck trying to reproduce them-particularly given the fact that our hardware designs are not open, nor are the production methodologies, techniques, equipment used in the production of that hardware. Notwithsstanding whether the resources required to manufacture such things still exist.
The fact is that the vast majority of data produced and recorded in the last 30 years has already been lost:
There's another thing that bugs me about Creative Commons. When you see its licenses the wording will say something like "Creative Commons License: Public domain." This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain. So what's Creative Commons got to do with it? Public domain is public domain. It's not something granted by Creative Commons. Yet you see this over and over as if it were!...Either this is incredibly pretentious or people do not know what public domain means. If I write something on my blog, for example, and decide not to cover it with the general copyright notice, I can simply say that it is in the public domain and be done with it. I do not need permission from Creative Commons, nor do I need to mention Creative Commons or anything else. It's in the public domain by my personally allowing it to be so. This is my right!
This is where Dvorak most obviously misunderstands what he is talking about. In a hypothetical world it would be nice if something could simply be placed in the 'public domain', particularly if one could simply choose to publish directly into the 'public domain' but such is, alas, wishful thinking.
Firstly, things only become 'public domain' once they have been abandoned, ie. no longer legally tied to any particular entity. The standard way in which such occurs is when the statue of limitation embodied in the copyright law expires. There is no legal way to put something directly into the 'public domain' because the 'public domain' is nothing other, however unfortunate it may be, than a catch-all legal framework for things which are no longer under any applicable licenses or laws. This is not what is meant by the spirit of the popular conception of public domain but legally this is what it is. I can even write 'public domain' and append it to a text that I have published but if someone else copies the text I have written beyond the regulations regarding 'fair use' they have still violated the copyright which is automatically associated with the text from the moment the text is published. It could be that I do not have a problem with this yet the person who wishes to copy and use this text beyond the provisions of 'fair use' cannot know this and if no name is associated with the text it is not prudent for someone else to simply take it and use it for fear of possible violation.
Secondly, 'public domain' is a product of american legal system (I assume that it comes from brittish 'common law'). In most other legal sytems in the world there is no equivalent to 'public domain' hence something belonging to the 'public domain' does not afford it any kind of international legal protection. This is where so many people who oppose Free Software licenses wishing to release their code to the 'public domain'. They simply fail to grasp the legal reality- sure go ahead and state somewhere in your source code that the code is public domain-now wait till someone downloads this code in Germany where the concept of 'public domain' does not exist...
Commercialism is primarily a function of exlcusionary rights('my right' to something is defined and enforced by delimiting and excluding the rights of others to the thing in question.) If I exclusively hold the rights to something I can dictate the terms of it's usage and who may use it. The 'public domain' is not anti-commercial as much as it is orthogonal to issues of commercialism. 'Public Domain' means that no exclusive rightholder exists for a given work-the lack of an exclusive rightholder means that in a market all members of the market have equal(same) access and rights(is there such a thing as a non-exclusionary right?) to the work in question.
But what Dvorak really seems to miss is how the Creative Commons is a reaction against the perversion of fundamental assumptions reguarding accessibility which has taken place in the past 15 years in light of the so-called 'information age'.
And so ends round two in the battle to delimit the monopolist power which microsoft wields. Twice we have seen grand efforts by governments, the goverments of the most powerful economies in the world, fail utterably, resulting in little net gain for anyone-neither for the competitors of microsoft, which is basically anyone producing software which runs on or interacts with Windows, or for the consumers of said technology.
ok. The results are not yet in from untertakings of the EU-perhaps some good can still come out of their attempts. So perhaps I am jumping the gun-but I don't see any good coming of the measures taken by the EU.
The article referenced by this thread simply points out what anyone reasonable person could have expected. The decisions made by the EU are utterly and aboslutely impotent against the power of self-interest which is at work in the kind of monopoly which Microsoft is. We lack the technical, legal and conceptual tools, collectively, to trully deal adequately with such phenomen-which isn't so surprising considering that the kind of power which Microsoft yields is unique in history.
In America when one talks about monopolies one is talking about corporations which totally dominate a market. In Europe talk about monopolies is talk about the idea of state monopolies-most people in Europe think immediately of the Post, the Telecom etc. ie. state run monopolies. The differing social and political policies and their respective histories, in both America and Europe, are not sufficient to explain the divergence in meaning of the word monoploly as used in Europe and America. I have never studied law but it is obvious to me that our respective legal traditions are totally inequipped to adequately deal with such. I suspect this inability is due to the definitions (understandings-or lack thereof) of the terms(the phenomena to which the terms refer).
Microsoft was not and never will be in a position to wield monopoly power without the aiding and abetting of the entire consumer PC industry which organically(parasitically) has grown up around it. Microsoft, *alone*, was never, is not, and never shall be a monopoly-yet our legal institutions must handle Microsoft in and of itself. It has been clear to me for the last 15 years that the 'monopoly' of Microsoft Windows was also equally due to Microsoft and Intel. But, as this article points out, the 'monopoly' doesn't end with Microsoft and x86 chip manufacturers-the 'monopoly' also encompasses all of the major computer manufacturers, with the exception perhpas of Apple and Sun(if one can call them major).
It is insane to think that Dell would force it's customers in Europe to use a neutered Windows. The same hold for any major computer manufacturer- there never was any kind of consumer demand for neutered Windows and never will be. And how could people see Windows XP N as *not* being neutered, after all 'multimedia' is the sexy buzzword of all pc technology for the past X years- a pc not capable of multimedia playback is rightfully seen as neutered.
Now of course the goal of those actions taken by the EU was not for consumers to be forced to use neutered PC's. The goal was to level the playing field for competitors to actually have a chance to comepte fairly against the inevitable pre-installed Microsoft Media Player installation base. (this pre-installed base reminds me of 'encumbancy' in politics). But this 'fair playing field' is in and of itself almost impossible to achieve-because 90% of all pc's sold come with Windows XP and it usually costs more to buy a pc sans Windows than one with Windows, and of course this is the active part which the manufacturers/vendors play in the 'monopoly'. I don't have any concrete numbers in my head but I can't imagine more than 5% of Microsoft licenses being sold directly to consumers-the customers get their license with their pre-installed OS on their new PC's.
I certainly don't have a complete simple solution which would adre
Now once you have gone and gotten the correct glibc header files and taken another shot....then we can talk about professionalism....
The first insult was in the article itself which negated the differences between hackers who after years of hacking have convinced corporations that opensource is profitable for them and who are now gainfully emplyoed doing what they want to do and 'enterprise' coders who signed away their souls when they signed the dotted line.
Then you come along and due to your error you attack the 'professionalism' of hackers....give me a break...
Not really. After all this was exactly the same case with the first release of Ubunutu. Some number of gnome developers are also ubuntu developers, which means Ubuntu is closely tied to the gnome-development cycle. The only way another distro is going to beat Ubuntu to the punch of delivering the latest gnome is if another group of gnome developers join some other gnome tailored distro....
The ebuilds for 2.10 are already in portage but are hard masked. I expect it won't take long for them to get unmasked either because the 2.8->2.10 gnome transition is the smoothest I have yet experienced....
that this pathetic attempt by religous fundamentaists to impose a creationist curriculum makes the critique of evolution and the critique of modern science even more difficult.
Science is not about truth. The measurement appropriate to science is the measurement of correctness. It is not about truth because it is personally irrelevant-ie. it has nothing to do directly with you or your actions and values-unless you are a scientist engaged in scientific activities. But the dogma of school science is about truth and pupils are by and large incapable of NOT drawing personal conclusions, conclusions about there own being, life and meaning based on what they are taught about science.
And it is indeed questionable if such is having a detrimental effect on our society. That so many adults are turning to fundamentalist christian beliefs is a an ultra hardcore indictment of our public school instruction about science. The void of personal meaning present in that which is being taught is real and tangible. It's not as if these adults were not subject to evolution in their schools curriculum....
Being against the fundamentalist doctrine of creationism does not mean that by default one endorses the theory of evolution. But this kind of situation, where the state acts to prevent an endorsement of religion in the public school curriculum, forces the issue-rendering things black and white.
The whole argument of science vs religion overlooks that there is practically little difference, in terms of conviction, between religion and science. Science is the religion of many modern day earth dwellers. It is accepted with the same kind of passitivity as is the case in most modern christians. Only a tiny percentage of people are actually scientists yet their theories, facts, and findings, translated into language which the non-initiated can understand, form the basis for much of our public schools curriculum.
Much of the religious nature of modern science is due not to science itself but due to the science (pedagogic) which has evolved to enlighten our childrens minds by teaching them about science.
Now one can argue about whether the material being taught is really science. And in the process overlook the fact that the indoctrination of scientific values and assumptions in our pupils impressionable minds is anything but scientific. To the extent to which 'science' and 'evolution' have become doctrines administered to our youth in the public school system the issues of what rightly constitutes science is no longer a decision of 'scientists'.
Evolution, an incredibly broad and overgeneral term for multiple conflicting and competing theories has become the basis of biology and the whole slew of neo-scientific adventures which have sprung up in the past 40 years (socio-biology, pyscho-biology and what not). In these scientific field there exists a degree of consensus about what evolution implies. This consensus around 'evolution'-or rather the raster of interelated theories which form 'evolution' has become so central, so pivotal that such neo-scientific adventures would vanish in a puff of logic if the non-verifiable ultimate hypothesis implied in 'evolution' where sufficiently debunked.
'Evolution' is in the first place a working tool which aids in organizing, categorizing the abundance of material gathered and explicitly casting these findings in terms of teleological causes.
As a tool 'evolution' is usefull for these scientific pursuits. As is the case with all tools- this tool will be surplanted in time by newer and more appropriate tools-as the sitution requires. 'Evolution'(eg. Maturana and Varela and the concept of autopoesis, natural drift) of today has remarkably little to do with Charles Darwins "Origins of Species".
The problem with 'evolution' in specific and 'science' in general is not that they are based on theories. Aside from the fact that everything which is not a theory is either (fantasy, mythology, mystery, fiction) or the unmittigated
"But we cannot sacrifice personal liberty in the process without a compelling reason. I do not believe that compelling reason has yet been articulated under secular reasoning."
And precisely such a compelling reason cannot and never will be articulated under secular reasoning.
Now why do I say this ?
Because in the public domain, the domain which secularism establishes and necessitates, such issues have no relevance.
"such issues" are issues which deal with how indidivuals relate to themselves. In the case of "Internet Pornography"-it is an issue which deals with an aspect of ones own sexual self-relation.
Ones own sexual self-relation is not subject to any kind of public discourse. Although such currently forms the basis of much public discourse, this public discourse can only exist by constanly and continuously violating that which is private. Such public discourse is itself violent, violating not only those who are the victims of this discourse-those who supposedly suffer from "Internet Pornograghy" as well as those who in such discourse are marginalized and outcast- but also those who participate in said discourse.
Secular discourse, and the reasoning engaged in in the course thereof, is the only form of discourse which is admissable in the public sphere-the domain of public discourse.
Christiany itself is a religion which seeks to establish a domain of the public based on the self-relation(ones relation to God) of the individuals who constitute the community.
Yet our society was based on the priveledged role of secular discourse. One of the principal reasons given for this priviledge was to allow for the co-existance of differing Christian faiths. In a society composed soley of differing Christian faiths where there is no secular discourse there could be no public life, no public domain, for any public utterance would itself be merely an expression of ones own self-relation.
Living in a society where the public domain itself is secular obligates those who belong to a particular Christian faith to engage themselves in the public domain as secular members of a secular society, but this engagement is only admissable as long as that which is being expressed is not being expressed from the standpoint of, as an expression of, ones own self-relation.
Once those who engage themselves in public discourse fail to draw this distincition- for this distinction and the act of drawing it is constitutive of society itself- the public sphere itself becomes violated, it becomes the space from whence violence is propagated.
If one is genuinely oppossed to "Internet Pornography" one can engage in a secular discourse about the revenue strategies in use which enable such to exist. If consensus can be found that such revenue strategies are themselves not societally acceptable one can work towards enacting legislation which would, as consequence thereof, preclude the existance of "Internet Pornogrpahy".
What we are seeing here in "such issues" is the misuse of a public health discourse to propel values from the domain of the private into the domain of the public. And this in the name of Caring and Concern.
But perhaps one should not talk of "misuse" here- for the question remains whether there can be any kind of legitimate public health discourse-for this particular form of discourse is itself something which renders all forms of self-relation(how one relates to ones own body) as public issues. The public health discourse has the body as its subject-correspondily all forms of relation to ones own body become the subject of political, ie. public, discourse. This form of discourse threatens the secular discourse which is constitutive of society itself.
At this point in time the public health discourse coincides with many values expressed by particular Chistian faiths. But the day may come when such Christian faiths become the target of a public health discourse and be seen as a condition in demand of remedial policy decisions engende
Court: Spamming via HTML-Metatags is anti-competitive.
The all encompossing listing of several hundred of HTML-Metatags which have no relation to the content of the web page leads to the manipulation of Web Search Engines and is therefore anti-competitive as defined in 1 of the Fair Trade Law.
The district court of Essen, whose proceedings have now been published, arrived at this decision in a public trial on 24th of May 2004(Case Nr. 44 0 166/03.) The plaintiff in this case was a legally entitled buisness organization. According to the findings of the court such a use of search keywords lead to search engines placing webpages of the accused in the first positions and correspondingly causing these sites to be more frequented by users. The operaters by using hundreds of keywords, as found in a lexicon, grouped together, which even taken broadly, are without discernable relationship to the services and products being offered on the webpages and therefore could not be being used for the optimal presentation of their offerings. Rather the only conclusion to be drawn is that the use of such techniques only served to take advantage of technical weaknesses of the search engines in order to give the operators competitive advantage.
This, according the Essen Jugde, does not apply to all uses of HTML-metatags. Acccordingly a competitor must accept when a webpage(internet site) is full of such keywords when these are related to the service offerings of the operator. The same applies to the use of names, company names and logos, in as far as these are "constitutive of the internet sites' embedded advertising links", in order to enable the operator to do buisness with advertising partners.
The decision of the district court of Essen expands the otherwise totally non-uniform juristic findings of german courts conerning HTML-Metatags, which up to now have been concerned with the use of others' propietary('fremder') keywords in the Metatags, which is a different field of problems. A similiar decision was reached by the district court of Düsseldorf in March 2002 concerning the use of unrelated keywords in Metatags. This decision was however later revised by the superiror district cour of Düsseldorf. Whether or not the decision of Essen is to be appealed has not yet known.
I must admit-I am a bit suprised that SLASHDOT didn't pick up on it. It might just be a little insignificant thing which doesn't warrant much attention anyway-who knows. Of course everyone is mentioning the support for 4k stacks. And of course this is important. Anyone who has used Andrew Morton's patch set knows what a PITA this issue was. But nvidia even did more than fix the single most blocking issue regarding their drivers and the 2.6.x kernels.
They also:
Added support for ACPI
Fixed problem that prevented 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs.
Added support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language).
along with the new nvidia-settings utility-GPL'ed and written in GTK2....
and finally they added:
Added a new Xv adaptor on GeForce4 and GeForce FX which uses the 3D engine to do Xv PutImage requests.
Now I am not an expert on such things-25 years of experience and I am still left asking more questions than my ability to answer. _But I noticed this little innocuous "xv" thing and was like WOW-cool. I leave it up to those who know more to shoot me down-but doesn't this little "xv" thing mean that all those Linux users who use nvidia GeForce4 and FX cards suddenly got a a tremendous boost when doing much of anything with video ? After all XV is what all of the video players under Linux use for good quality full-screen video(mplayer, xine, totem, gxine, helixplayer etc.)
Now if I understand this correctly everytime a PutImage() request comes along under XV this is handed over to the 3D engine-automatically. It seems as if this would be a very, very significant reduction in CPU usage-particularly for older generation(PII/PIII) machines which happen to have fairly modern graphic cards. Full-screen divx under mplayer with the new drivers uses 12% CPU on average on my machine-I unfortunately did not do a benchmark to test this-but if my memory serves me correctly this is significantly less than what is was with the
older drivers.
Now the downside to this-at least for the time being- is that some apps don't quite work with these new changes-Xine-and it's siblings(totem,gxine, kxine etc.)
But I assume these will be fixed pronto.
Well where am I going qoing with this train of thought:
Putting this kind of support for XV in the NVIDIA drivers -is really simple for the NVIDIA guys-perhaps even trivial-but it can mean a tremendous improvement for the users of these cards. NVIDIA has always treated Linux like a second class citizen-but hey who can complain-at least they acknowledge that Linux exists-compared to the BSD's Linux support is great-of course only if you are using x86 CPU's. Now everyone knows that the graphic workstation market has all but disappeared. But what if NVIDIA was to decide to simply really take advantage of the X11 windowing system and it's features.
Imagine if NVIDIA would actually provide good RENDER support-wow what a difference that would make for 2D desktop support-particularly under GNOME which uses RENDER extensively in VTE/PANGO-ie. why text scrolling in gnome-terminal is so abysmal. I am still stumped by the fact that the open-source X11 nvidia drivers support RENDEr far, far better than NVIDIA's own in-house drivers.....
Imagine if NVIDIA would really support the libfixes, libdamages and libcomposite extensions which are currently being developed at Xorg-X11. Sun's Looking Glass is already using libdamages and libfixes-I got it up and running on my machine yesterday-and yes it is still pre-alpha-but I have never, ever seen such a fluid desktop environment. This tech is almost *evil*- the promise which it presents is simply baffling-rendering all previous X11 windowing experiences to the days of the stone age. I don't really care that much about Looking Glass-if NVIDIA properly supports the X11 extensions we will have cairo-enabled desktops inside of the next year which will fundamentally alter the X11 experience for X users.
Ok. So here is the point of this little essay: If NVIDIA would simpl
Kplusplus,
I am so pleased that you have been able to diagnose "my problem", years of introspection had failed to reveal the sublime simplicity of your diagnosis.
I really have no interest in iTunes or Rhythmbox, personally. There are at least a dozen open source music players in circulation. Go be happy with your iTunes- but your comment about xmms simply invalidates your claims about OSS.
OpenOffice offers several things which no version of Word offers- PDF export, for example. You call OpenOffice's autocompletition feature a "gimmick". Thank gawd OpenOffice doesn't come with as much "artificial intelligence" as Word does- I detest Microsoft Word-spending more time fighting with what it thinks(according to it's AI) about how my document should be formatted.
Feature parity is not the standard by which I judge software-OpenOffice is open source, free, usable on *NIX, Windows and MacOSX, and does what I need to do-moreover it finally ends years of propietary shit file formats-enabling ease of exchange. _The features which count for me are far beyond what MS has to offer. Oh, and I write professionally....
I did not "make the point that Linux is primarily a server"- those are your words. Linux is equally capable in a suprisingly large number of applications-as a desktop/as a server/as an embedded OS. The only OS which supports more architectures is NetBSD. Linux tends to be used more as a server- due to the enabling power of Linux using stock commodity PC's to do the work of specialized expensive workstations. I use Linux as a desktop and a server-both in one machine. I have 30 clients tied to my main machine running LTSP- ie. I have a desktop server...
OSS is itself original. Nothing more needs to be said. Most major open source projects also run on Windows and on Mac.
Your point is still lost, probably because you don't have one....
Firstly, your argument about "catch up efforts" vs. "originals" is bogus. Linux due to it's origins and it's development process has always been so open-ended that is has always had a superset of functionality, in contrast to Mac and Windows, as it's target.
Your point that Linux on the desktop is playing catch up to the Macintosh is negated by the fact that Mac is playing catch up to Linux in terms of server fucntionality. The point being- Linux can be used as a server, can be used as a desktop, can be used as emdedded OS-etc.it's genericness means that it can be used for most anything and most anything as the same time.
Only with the introduction of MacOSX is Apple producing anything of interest for uses beyond the desktop. Opensource software is *not* a substitute for propietary apps. Opensource software is the software which exists which runs on opensource platforms-the biggest of which is Linux.
If all of the applications were cross platform and ran equally well on each platform then your comparison would make sense. But I can't use ITunes on Linux. Moreover the only people who are really trying to do cross platform development are the opensources folks. Now why do you think that iTunes is superior to Rhythmbox- could it perhaps be, at least partially, due to the fact that Apple can integrate iTunes perfectly to the rest of the aspects of the system because they themselves have exclusively written the system- and that this system is only available for very specific hardware constellation which they themselves dictate and design?
Rhythmbox, based on gstreamer, is attempting to provide similiar functionality where the sound cards is an unknown-ie. is it supported or not by Alsa. This ranging on machines from PPC it x86-from 486 to AMD64, from Sun workstations to Linspire boxes at Walmart. The OpenOffice folks are in a similiar dilemna-they do not control the OS like windows does- they can't take advantage of hacking the OS itself to enable it to do certain things. OpenOffice runs on mulitple OS's with multiple differing hardware platforms.
So everywhere you see OSS as lacking in terms of this or that feature- I say well iTune and Word are really, really lacking in a massive way- I can't use them under Linux- or one of a half-dozen other *NIX variants. Rhythmbox may not provide you with all the functionality you need- but it least you can use it- whereas iTunes is simply not available to the *NIX world.
If Apple would open up the Openstep API and disclose the differences between that and cocoa and allow for independent development of the propietarty parts of cocoa GNUSTEP could become a viable platform for common Apple/Linux applications.
Apple has already taken far more form the OSS community than it has ever given back. If it were not for the GNU toolset which underlies the modern OSX, OSX would merely be a cute, some say sexy, desktop GUI for elitist snobs-and not the computing platform that it is becomming.
Firstly, that blog was intense. Bordering, due to it's length, on the edge of unreadability, it was fascinating-not due to it's indepth-ness, but that it lightly touched on so many interrelated threads. (the wideness of the wide is the "depth" of the superficial)
He dared mention Rhapsody, for the love of gawd, HE DARED to MENTION it. Dazed,confused and oft bitterly disilussioned developers and dreamers bitten once by that dream never really have recovered- I loved her, she was so beautiful, but she was a....lie. Has enough time passed to heal the wounds of betrayal, could it be her beauty was just premature(ie. not 16 yet)
Rhapsody promised more than any other computing project worth mentioning in the last 20 years. It was friggin incredible. The entire landscape of desktop computing would be markedly different today if Rhapsody had ever materialized. But no. Apple killed it, killed the best project that they ever actually came up with.
The author of the blog appears to not have a clue about Linux-land. Neither did he mention GNUstep, nor did he acknowledge what is now being developed at X.org-ie.cairo+opengl+xdamages+xfixes+xcomposite. in other words the tech that will bring the GUI desktop of the Linux world into the 21st century-farther along that trajectory in fact than either Acqua or Longhorn.
If Apple would just open up their API's new apps could be developed for a combined market-Apple + Linux. Now is the time to overcome the desire for attaining windows compatibility-if app developers could count on a market of Apple and Linux users this would push both Apple and Linux beyond the effects of the chicken-egg dilemna which both have been struggling with
The propietary parts of Aqua are being realized now, in an opensource form, in cairo, which is in a state of very active development. If the GNUstep coders use cairo as the basis of their new developments they finally have an answer to the display postcript issues which have dogged them.There is already a great deal of convergence going on between the MACOSX and Linux world-if nothing more than the GNU utilities which compose our common toolkits.
Now is the time for Apple to heal wounds with the development community. They should open up their API's, provide exact documentation as to the point where cocoa and OpenStep meet and where the specific differences lie and they should support GNUstep as the basis for developing cross platform apps. With the developments at X.org ongoing GNUstep could be made very viable for such purposes in short order,ie GNUstep + cairo >= cocoa
I'm sure this is all just pipe-dream stuff, but combining the markets for Apple and desktop Linux just make sense for both Apple and Linux users....
Now someone with more of a clue about these issues-go ahead shoot this idea down...
Unlike the ober-cool slacker types who dominate these threads, who view any kind of 'political stance' as being uncool and passe- I find great resonance with the feelings expressed by this former LUG president.
I don't really understand why he chose to to connect his anti-war sentiment to his status as president of a LUG in LA. After all resigning as a president of a LUG has no real impact on anything beyond the LUG itself. Although protest is not something which can and should be measured solely in terms of effectiveness. (If that were the case the RAF or Kazinsky would be THE appropriate forms of protest)
Most of the people who post on slashdot earn their living in the high-tech industry, or wish, or plan to do so. With the tumltuous events of the market over the past years many have been forced to become ultra-pragmatists-ie. too closely interweaving of ones ideals and ones willingness to work for the bread which one later eats is a self-punishing endeavor. Unless you like looking like a POW.
The FOSS movement was borne as a reaction against the propietary culture which established itself over the past 25 years. Many talented people really saw something wrong with the provisions of their contracts-ie. once you signed the dotted lign,that company 0w3nd your soul-all of your thoughts, ideas, creations and talent.
Those who constantly were forced to adapt to the ever changing market conditions went through a fairly understandable process of self-disassociation. And of course this is where the obercool- 'I wouldn't have a "political" stance even if you paid me' comes from. Those who persisted in interweaving their ideals and willingness to bring home the bread too closely suffered the consequences thereof in a highly personal way.
The market has changed a lot over the past years. Now many, many talented people find ways of inversting their private time in FOSS software development and an increasingly large number of people are actually getting paid to do so and *god forbid* actually enjoy what they are doing, not being mere programmer 'prostitutes', willing to turn a line of code for a dime(dollar adjusted for inflation).
Yet I specifically chose not to enter the high-tech industry in the mid-eighties because of the fact that %80 percent of the funding for the engineering department at the university I attended came from the pentagon. I was really, really pissed off that my tax payer money was being used by the contras to rape nuns and burn down villages in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatamala etc.
I knew then, that If I was successful in my pursuit of microprocessor design, as a carreer, that I, as a lowly engineer working at Motorola, would have nothing to say with how stuff I developed was going to be used-ie. if I design a microprocessor for small education computers and the execs in the company simply decide to modify my design and sell it to the pentagon as the ultra-microprocess for the newest ICBM's.
To this very day I have no regrets for the decision I made, fully aware of the fact that I would be earning more than 10 times what I am earning now.
But I hve no qualms in the free-usage aspect of FOSS development. Ultimately FOSS will break the back of the monopoly-based IP economy and usher our mega-corporations built thereon to the days of the dinosaurs. And this will profoundly impact the military-industrial complex, which has already been eclipsed by the more recent healthcare-industrial complex and the brand-spanking-new "security"-industrial complex.
But this development isn't going to happen in 3, 5 or 10 years-although it is already happening. I expect it will take at least two full generations before we really start seeing the *societal* effects of FOSS. In the meantime the military will make use of FOSS technology to further their own ends-remember the military and it's mandate by the State marks the real hallmark of propietary markets.
It was the mandate of the State which created modern "democratic" military structures which were de
I am glad that Nat and Miguel finally spoke out. Heise, the oh-so respectd german IT publication, either knowingly or unknowingly allowed itself to be used in a rumor/speculation propaganda war-a power push from A group of hackers within Novell against another group of hackers within Novell to force some big "decision", which when the Novell execs, who are new to Linux and are prone to make such noobie mistakes, start thinking clearly again isn't even a question.
The depths of ridiculousness which comments here at slashdot have reached are mindboggling. People attacking Nat and Miguel, questioning their position, their right to speak as representatives of Novell...utterly assinine. The whole "QT is not free (enough)" stuff is also pretty braindead-if this were the case(already) KDE would not be so widely used.
Freedesktop.org is the organization which *is* the answer to the common desktop which Novell exec's are looking for. KDE developers and GNOME developers are already working together on a variety of projects-this will only increase with time. There is far more consistency across the GNOME/KDE divide today than ever before- even SuSE used a cvs-patched version of KDE in 9.0 so that KDE and GNOME used the same.desktop files. Gstreamer is already being integrated into kdemultimedia, sodipodi is integrating optional KDE-dialogs, both KDE and GNOME have adopted DBUS-GNOME is going to use cairo for 2.8, KDE/QT won't be far behind.
SuSE has a whole lot of expertise in kernel and XFree86 hacking-their enterprise offerings, based on cooperation with IBM makes SuSE from the server point of view invalualble. For many home users SuSE has been known as a good desktop distribution- but SuSE has not made any big splash on the desktop in the corporate world. Novell purchased SuSE primarily due to the SuSE-IBM connection and the quality of their programmers.
In Europe SuSE reigns uncontested as *the* Linux distribution-but yet again, more so because of SuSE as a server than as a desktop-corporations are only now beginning to show an interest in the Linux desktop.
Ximian is all about the desktop and all about integrating/migrating Windows data, applications, users and developers into the Linux world. Why is it that none of computers at the brainshare conference were running KDE -but all of them were running ximian-patched GNOME ? Why is it that Ximian is an unknown name to those who work primarily in the server world?
Novell has made a brilliant decision purchasing both Ximian and SuSE. They, Novell, have great kernel hackers, xfree86 hackers, desktop specialists par excellance-the best in the Linux world and the developers of one of the most trusted names in enterprise server Linux in addition to great QT/KDE programmers.
Novell will itself onl be producing a very small set of software-perhaps in total in 5 years 1/2 of one of the 6 CD 's ditributed in the Novell/SuSE distribution. Even if at some point down the road Novell chose to use QT# for it's development projects-who really cares ? QT# is dependendant upon MONO-and that is one of the key technologies which Ximian brings to the table.
Novell is not going to single handely re-write the Linux desktop with QT-such is pure and utter nonsense-as if any singly company could do so-hello- Linux consists of thousands of programs written by 10's of thousands of hackers from all over the globe.
For the near future the desktop applications released by Novell will be written in Mono + GTK#-this is already clear-the iFolders software is already being written in GTK# and it is not the only GTK# project being written right now, as we speak, at Novell. Once the QT# library get's up to speed their will probably be some desktop apps written to use this new library-think integration with YAST-appending new modules to administer the OpenSever technology which Novell wants to integrate with their Novel/SuSE distribution.
If and when Novell's customers start to want to build new application
Slashdot Mirror
Do you guys and gals remember when Richard did a short stint in a video for Sun following the announcement that Sun had decided to GPL Java ?
I can only imagine how happy Richard was on that day. He had every reason to be so. Not simply because Sun had chosen to use his license for Java-but rather because of a little bit of historical trivia that most Free Software users are too young to remember.
Now surely you know the name James Gosling. He was the one who created Java. But did you know that there is a rather interesting relationship between him and Richard ?
One of the single biggest reasons that Richard wrote the GPL and created what we now know as Free Software has everything to do with James Gosling.
"In the early years (1984 to 1988), the GNU Project did not have a single license to cover all its software. What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs. While Stallman created the first Emacs in 1975, Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs (Gosling Emacs) running on Unix in 1982. Gosling initally allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code, which Stallman used in early 1985 in the first version (15.34) of GNU Emacs. Gosling later sold rights to Gosling Emacs to UniPress, and Gosling Emacs became UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman was forced to comply. He later replace these parts with his own code. (Emacs version 16.56). (See the Emacs Timeline) To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL."
http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/Many people who are ignorant of this history have always been affronted by Stallman's use of the phrase "Java Trap". But is it really any wonder that Richard chose to use that expression-given what personally had transpired between him and James Gosling.
Bill Joy was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. He is also the guy who originally wrote Vi. Bill Joy was also friends with James Gosling- and made Gosling's baby practically synonymous with the name Sun.
This little bit of trivia adds a whole lot to all of the flamefests over the years about Emacs vs. Vi. SunOS, which we now know as OpenSolaris, was the first heavily commercialized version of what we now know as BSD. Bill Joy used the code written at Berkley to create the original SunOS.
That Java is now GPL is nothing less than Sun saying to Richard-"Richard, you were right". And if one day OpenSolaris embraces the GPL Richard's victory will be complete.
You may think this is nothing but propaganda-but I encourage you to actually *learn* about the history of these giants of the computer world.
Now that the OpenJDK is %100 Free, %100 GPL, Richard has received the kind of vindication that hardly *anyone* in life ever gets. Cheers to you Richard and Cheers to Sun for seeing the light.
Haleluja, praise be, be Healed! The second Exodus is here. Exherbo will lead themselves to the promised land.
And we Gentoo-ers can finally breathe a breath of fresh air. Finally the ex-Gentoo developers Poisonous People Clan have decided to do their own damned thing and leave Gentoo, leave Gentoo alone.
I wish Exherbo the best of luck. Good fucking riddance.
Their first day at the newly founded Thunderbird Mail Corporation? After all they, Scott and David, would have to leave the Mozilla Corporation, if they play to continue with Thunderbird, because TMC and MC are two *different* corporations....
Although it is pointless to argue against such "facts" I, nevertheless, feel it is important to point out a few things:
1. Congratulations you deserve a medal for having successfully grokked what science has been teaching us for the better part of a century-for most of earths history human habitation was unthinkable due to harsh climactic conditions. The rise of human kind corresponded to certain changes in the environment which facilitated our existence. Pointing out that the earth was previously warmer than it is now makes it seem as if all of this talk of global warming is just hot air. Yet comparing the earths current temperature to the temperature found in times prior to human life, or prior to organic life does little to reveal the role which humans have played in influencing the climate of the earth. Which of course is the whole point of the ongoing discussion. Your "fact" is irrelevant and more importantly misleading, because it evades the question of what impact human society has had on climate.
2. Stating that "C02 levels are not high now" is yet another fine example of brain-dead "facts". Sure such a statement is accurate given a time frame of millions of years. But then again no one is arguing about the human effects on the climate in that time frame, perhaps because human society only figures prominently in the last 10-15,000 years. The debate has been about what kind of impact human society has had on the climate and more specifically the human impact on the climate during the era of human industrial activity. Given this time frame the CO2 levels are incredibly high(ie. CO2 levels are currently quite high relative to the last several hundred years.) So yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading.
3. Yet again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. No one here is arguing that human activity is the sole agent of change or that the impact of human activity outweighs "cosmic forces". However it is misleading to state such a "fact" in a debate about global warming-such evades the question at hand by attempting to relativize human impact on the climate to being trivially insignificant.
4. Again this "fact" is irrelevant and misleading. The only relevance that such an argument can have in regards to global warming is the case where you can prove that the changes in climate being experienced are the product of long-term cycles of warming and cooling. Paradoxically a tremendous amount of evidence has been gathered which shows fluctuation in the earths temperature relative to the rate of industrial exploitation ie. changes in the earths temperature due to human impact. You don't need to be intelligent to be aware of the "ice-ages" but intelligence is required to distinguish between such long-term cycles and the relative impact of human society on our environment.
5. What may or may not happen in the next 5-100,000 years is not really interesting to me. Yet if my grandchildren are no longer capable of enjoying much of what I have taken for granted, due to my generation having taken such for granted, then such issues become relevant. Nature did not bring mankind to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Mankind did. If in our nuclear powered insanity we had made the mistake of unleashing all out nuclear war, most if not all of the natural cycles, which to a large extent, historically, have determined our environment would have been negated. There is no reason to believe that any of the natural cycles would continue unabated in a world bereft of organic life.
6. Ibid.
And finally your brain-dead conclusion. Here we see a fascinating conjuncture of
But unfortunately correcting our reading of the second amendment will only go part of the way towards solving the problems. America has a love aware with violence-as a society we simply cannot get enough of it. The only thing americans love more than violence is living in a perpetual state of fear-which feeds directly into the violence. American culture glorifies violence to the point of no return-being beaten and beating others is practically a coming of age ritual. Paradoxically it is not the same people who legally own guns who actively perpetuate this fear and who so greatly value violence. Most legal gun owners are good upstanding citizens. Yet their possession of guns leads directly to the atmosphere of fear and violence. There are probably as many guns in circulation in America now as there are phones. Guns form an ubiquitous presence in American society-they permeate the social fabric, which itself is constantly being torn at and ripped asunder by the unrelenting gun violence. America as a culture and as a nation are simply not mature enough to be entrusted with guns. The frequency of gun related violence in America shows this to be true time and time again.
I know plenty of people who own guns. Of those people I can neither ascribe violence nor violent acts of intimidation using those guns. Why this disjunction-this apparent contradiction-because these people belong to a minority of Americans for whom violence is not a common sense approach to solving problems and disagreements. As much as I long for gun free society however- the reality is - as long as violence belongs to our collective common sense -not only in the sense of using violence to achieve an end, but also expecting violence as a reaction to certain behaviors- we will remain a society which defines itself in terms of it's own self-violence.
Now I know that many, many Americans would feel that their god-given right to own guns would be violated if it were to come to pass that the legislation in place corresponded to a more correct reading of the second amendment. But I feel the violence involved in cleansing our nation of guns, however painful that may be for those whose sense of entitlement would be hurt, still remains a violence much more minor than the never ending wave of gun related violence in American society. Violence still defines the experience of a large part of our society. Gun violence, of which most is domestic, plays a crucial role in the culture of violence in our society-at the same time the cultural products of America worship this same violence- we pay homage to this culture when we purchase the films and music which glorify it. Our fathers teach the value of violence to our sons, as men do to their woman, as children do to each other in our public school system. Many Americans can probably rightfully not identify themselves with the picture I paint here-but I suspect that a larger group of Americans will be able to identify themselves with such a picture as those who identify themselves as living in a civilized society of non-violence.
I did RTFA. And although I was quite impressed with how the author grasps many of the underlying issues, their entanglement and complexity I was bluffed by sheer naievete(sp?) of the underlying economic assumptions and the their theoretical underpinnings.
He documents quite accurately how 'IPR' works and how it effects the development of software and the *costs* this form of development has for society, yet these *costs* are not the subject of the mathetical extrapolations which he engages in. The mathematics used in this essay as well as the entirety of latent definitions of value/waste present in the text are based on a woefully inadequate naieve economic understanding.
I am not an economist and I have never formally studied economics but the assumptions at work in the economic understanding revealed in his terminology and his calculations are baffling to say the least. If such is what is taught to students of economy is it any wonder our economy is so supremely fucked.
It is a shame that otherwise good arguments and a good grasp of the complexities involved are so thoroughly underminded by such sophmoric misuse of mathematics (with their appeal to 'empirical reality' ie. facts) and woefully inept econcomic theory.
The profound weakness of the underlining economic theory at work in his paper is that each and every argument can be turned to it's opposite and equally proven. He states that if all software were available at 0 cost and freely modifiable that there would be no duplication of software-ie. no one would bother righting something already written. Anyone who has opened their eyes knows that the reality directly contradicts such nonsense. He forgets that where economy is understood merely as a system of incentives/disincentives, and that such are purely monetary in nature, that in order to prevent people from duplicating programs one would have to a) pay them not to do so or b) not pay them for having done so(two sides of same coin). But this negates his complaint against unnecessary duplication of software because those who do duplicate software are being paid to do so. In totality the economic assumptions underlying this essay are fundamentally incapable of grasping what FOSS is and how it works.
So at once the author is capable of providing a rather damning indictment of IPR and he succeeds in painting an accuarate picture of the *costs* of this regime, but he is incapable of grasping that which he wishes to see as an alternative to IPR, namely FOSS. His argument is that one can substitute FOSS for IPR by creating public corporations which employ FOSS programmers. In so doing he ignores that it was the contention of the conditions of employment as a software developer which gave birth to FOSS.
What FOSS is, is only relevant within the terms of reference which constitute the status quo. How FOSS is, is an insight into that which already is no longer captured in our grasp of the status quo-for it is different, different in the sort of way which makes a difference for those engaged in it.
Actually, it is really easy to see where human beings are significantly different from all other species of animal life.
We are the *only* ones concerned with explaining the difference or lack thereof. ;)
And for us, this fact, is highly significant......
Does noone else find it peculiar that only from an evolutionary viewpoint are the differences between human beings and all other species of animal life insignificant, whereas the very act of adopting a viewpoint and empirically researching with a view towards developing theories, arguing and reasoning to convince and explain such insignificance are all activities which solely are pursued by human beings.
Personally, I do not believe that some "God" or "higher power" "created" human beings. But one has to have their head pretty firmly stuck in their butts to not see significant differences. Perhaps I should refer to Bateson here and point out that some difference make a difference, and being human is, at least for other humans, that kind of difference.
The only compelling work in evolutionary theory I have ever read came from Maturana and Varella(The Tree of Knowledge)- brilliant insight into the almost 1:1 fit of organic structure and environment, leaving just enough deviation for change to occur in both the organic structure and it's environment. But what worked so wonderfully in the description of single and multi-cell organism fails spectacularly when Maturana and Varella attempt to explain human cognition and cultural being as being a further extrapolation of the same principle.
To the extent that the evolutionary viewpoint,ie. the so lit world revealed in light of evolutionary theory, makes us more cognisant of our deep relation to all other animal life forms and aware that being human means being related to our bretheren creatures and help us in turn to more appreciate and value our earthliness and to appreciate and value our earthly environment -to this extent, evolution is a wonderful profound wise insight into nature, our nature within nature.
But where the differences are manifest they need not be explained, nor described, and really honestly, who but us human beings care?
Amazing how your post got modded +5 considering just how little thought you put into righting what you did.
While it is true that digital technology makes it easy to reproduce digitial content(ie.copying, transfering etc.) this very same functionality is dependant upon innumerable things which themselves are not digital and hence not digitally reproducable.
Sure I can take any given piece of data from a supported device and transfer it to some new supported device. Sure I can transform any given piece of supported data into any new form of supported data.
But the key word here is 'supported'- do any such devices still exist, if not is it possible to remanufacture such, does there exist any program which can acurately decipher the format of the data, if not is it possible to sufficiently reverse engineer the application which produced that format. 'Support' means *currently* in the state of production/manufacture- and when talking about the future what we can say for sure is that what will then be 'current' is *not* the same as it is now.
Open Source software goes a long way towards ensuring that future generations will be able still access data produced with/by such software. Of course with propietary software this is not the case -once the company which produced the propietary software vanishes, taking their propietary product with them, it is impossible to access data stored in the format of the defunct applications shy of reverse engineering of that format-but the ability to reverse engineer is not *simply* a given, and most propietary formats are never reverse engineered.
The possibility to reverse engineer a format does not mean that some format will be reverse engineered-and in all cases where some format is not reverse engineered there is palpable loss, ie. irretrievable loss of data. Beyond the software dimension all software is dependant upon the pre-existance of hardware-and hardware no longer produced must also be reverse engineered. Of course one can also reverse engineer hardware-but the same providos also are valid regarding hardware-and let us not forget the equipment/techniques/process methodologies used in producing said hardware.
To state this simply:
IF at some point in the future we longer have computers or devices which are sufficiently similiar(technologically speaking) to what we now call computers -if I wished to have access to some data found on/in some technological ruin I would need to reconstruct the conditions of that data(for data is nothing more than the codification and storage of itself(ie. binary self-representation))-which means I would need to reproduce the following:
the production methodologies, techniques, equipment and resources used in the production of the hardware which constitues computers which run specific OS's which in turn run specific versions of specific applications which in turn support specific formats of spefic kinds of data.
None of the above are *given*- their pre-existence is fundamental-if such does not already exist good luck trying to reproduce them-particularly given the fact that our hardware designs are not open, nor are the production methodologies, techniques, equipment used in the production of that hardware. Notwithsstanding whether the resources required to manufacture such things still exist.
The fact is that the vast majority of data produced and recorded in the last 30 years has already been lost:
1) the
Dvorak states in hist article,
This is where Dvorak most obviously misunderstands what he is talking about. In a hypothetical world it would be nice if something could simply be placed in the 'public domain', particularly if one could simply choose to publish directly into the 'public domain' but such is, alas, wishful thinking.
Firstly, things only become 'public domain' once they have been abandoned, ie. no longer legally tied to any particular entity. The standard way in which such occurs is when the statue of limitation embodied in the copyright law expires. There is no legal way to put something directly into the 'public domain' because the 'public domain' is nothing other, however unfortunate it may be, than a catch-all legal framework for things which are no longer under any applicable licenses or laws. This is not what is meant by the spirit of the popular conception of public domain but legally this is what it is. I can even write 'public domain' and append it to a text that I have published but if someone else copies the text I have written beyond the regulations regarding 'fair use' they have still violated the copyright which is automatically associated with the text from the moment the text is published. It could be that I do not have a problem with this yet the person who wishes to copy and use this text beyond the provisions of 'fair use' cannot know this and if no name is associated with the text it is not prudent for someone else to simply take it and use it for fear of possible violation.
Secondly, 'public domain' is a product of american legal system (I assume that it comes from brittish 'common law'). In most other legal sytems in the world there is no equivalent to 'public domain' hence something belonging to the 'public domain' does not afford it any kind of international legal protection. This is where so many people who oppose Free Software licenses wishing to release their code to the 'public domain'. They simply fail to grasp the legal reality- sure go ahead and state somewhere in your source code that the code is public domain-now wait till someone downloads this code in Germany where the concept of 'public domain' does not exist...
Commercialism is primarily a function of exlcusionary rights('my right' to something is defined and enforced by delimiting and excluding the rights of others to the thing in question.) If I exclusively hold the rights to something I can dictate the terms of it's usage and who may use it. The 'public domain' is not anti-commercial as much as it is orthogonal to issues of commercialism. 'Public Domain' means that no exclusive rightholder exists for a given work-the lack of an exclusive rightholder means that in a market all members of the market have equal(same) access and rights(is there such a thing as a non-exclusionary right?) to the work in question.
But what Dvorak really seems to miss is how the Creative Commons is a reaction against the perversion of fundamental assumptions reguarding accessibility which has taken place in the past 15 years in light of the so-called 'information age'.
In
And so ends round two in the battle to delimit the monopolist power which microsoft wields. Twice we have seen grand efforts by governments, the goverments of the most powerful economies in the world, fail utterably, resulting in little net gain for anyone-neither for the competitors of microsoft, which is basically anyone producing software which runs on or interacts with Windows, or for the consumers of said technology.
ok. The results are not yet in from untertakings of the EU-perhaps some good can still come out of their attempts. So perhaps I am jumping the gun-but I don't see any good coming of the measures taken by the EU.
The article referenced by this thread simply points out what anyone reasonable person could have expected. The decisions made by the EU are utterly and aboslutely impotent against the power of self-interest which is at work in the kind of monopoly which Microsoft is. We lack the technical, legal and conceptual tools, collectively, to trully deal adequately with such phenomen-which isn't so surprising considering that the kind of power which Microsoft yields is unique in history.
In America when one talks about monopolies one is talking about corporations which totally dominate a market. In Europe talk about monopolies is talk about the idea of state monopolies-most people in Europe think immediately of the Post, the Telecom etc. ie. state run monopolies. The differing social and political policies and their respective histories, in both America and Europe, are not sufficient to explain the divergence in meaning of the word monoploly as used in Europe and America. I have never studied law but it is obvious to me that our respective legal traditions are totally inequipped to adequately deal with such. I suspect this inability is due to the definitions (understandings-or lack thereof) of the terms(the phenomena to which the terms refer).
Microsoft was not and never will be in a position to wield monopoly power without the aiding and abetting of the entire consumer PC industry which organically(parasitically) has grown up around it. Microsoft, *alone*, was never, is not, and never shall be a monopoly-yet our legal institutions must handle Microsoft in and of itself. It has been clear to me for the last 15 years that the 'monopoly' of Microsoft Windows was also equally due to Microsoft and Intel. But, as this article points out, the 'monopoly' doesn't end with Microsoft and x86 chip manufacturers-the 'monopoly' also encompasses all of the major computer manufacturers, with the exception perhpas of Apple and Sun(if one can call them major).
It is insane to think that Dell would force it's customers in Europe to use a neutered Windows. The same hold for any major computer manufacturer- there never was any kind of consumer demand for neutered Windows and never will be. And how could people see Windows XP N as *not* being neutered, after all 'multimedia' is the sexy buzzword of all pc technology for the past X years- a pc not capable of multimedia playback is rightfully seen as neutered.
Now of course the goal of those actions taken by the EU was not for consumers to be forced to use neutered PC's. The goal was to level the playing field for competitors to actually have a chance to comepte fairly against the inevitable pre-installed Microsoft Media Player installation base. (this pre-installed base reminds me of 'encumbancy' in politics). But this 'fair playing field' is in and of itself almost impossible to achieve-because 90% of all pc's sold come with Windows XP and it usually costs more to buy a pc sans Windows than one with Windows, and of course this is the active part which the manufacturers/vendors play in the 'monopoly'. I don't have any concrete numbers in my head but I can't imagine more than 5% of Microsoft licenses being sold directly to consumers-the customers get their license with their pre-installed OS on their new PC's.
I certainly don't have a complete simple solution which would adre
German Humour:
"Man wird als AK geboren, einmal AK immer AK."
Translation:
AK is an abbreviation for Arschlochkind, or Asshole-Child
One is born an asshole-child, once an asshole-child always an asshole-child ;)
And the owner of sys-con just showed what kind of an AK he actually is ;)
Brilliant.
What a dweeb
Now once you have gone and gotten the correct glibc header files and taken another shot....then we can talk about professionalism....
The first insult was in the article itself which negated the differences between hackers who after years of hacking have convinced corporations that opensource is profitable for them and who are now gainfully emplyoed doing what they want to do and 'enterprise' coders who signed away their souls when they signed the dotted line.
Then you come along and due to your error you attack the 'professionalism' of hackers....give me a break...
Not really. After all this was exactly the same case with the first release of Ubunutu. Some number of gnome developers are also ubuntu developers, which means Ubuntu is closely tied to the gnome-development cycle. The only way another distro is going to beat Ubuntu to the punch of delivering the latest gnome is if another group of gnome developers join some other gnome tailored distro....
The ebuilds for 2.10 are already in portage but are hard masked. I expect it won't take long for them to get unmasked either because the 2.8->2.10 gnome transition is the smoothest I have yet experienced....
"You know I've been running Gentoo since '92 with "~arch" in my make.conf as my main distro....."
Really? Gosh I didn't know that either Gentoo or Debian even existed in 1992.....that this pathetic attempt by religous fundamentaists to impose a creationist curriculum makes the critique of evolution and the critique of modern science even more difficult.
Science is not about truth. The measurement appropriate to science is the measurement of correctness. It is not about truth because it is personally irrelevant-ie. it has nothing to do directly with you or your actions and values-unless you are a scientist engaged in scientific activities. But the dogma of school science is about truth and pupils are by and large incapable of NOT drawing personal conclusions, conclusions about there own being, life and meaning based on what they are taught about science.
And it is indeed questionable if such is having a detrimental effect on our society. That so many adults are turning to fundamentalist christian beliefs is a an ultra hardcore indictment of our public school instruction about science. The void of personal meaning present in that which is being taught is real and tangible. It's not as if these adults were not subject to evolution in their schools curriculum....
Being against the fundamentalist doctrine of creationism does not mean that by default one endorses the theory of evolution. But this kind of situation, where the state acts to prevent an endorsement of religion in the public school curriculum, forces the issue-rendering things black and white.
The whole argument of science vs religion overlooks that there is practically little difference, in terms of conviction, between religion and science. Science is the religion of many modern day earth dwellers. It is accepted with the same kind of passitivity as is the case in most modern christians. Only a tiny percentage of people are actually scientists yet their theories, facts, and findings, translated into language which the non-initiated can understand, form the basis for much of our public schools curriculum.
Much of the religious nature of modern science is due not to science itself but due to the science (pedagogic) which has evolved to enlighten our childrens minds by teaching them about science.
Now one can argue about whether the material being taught is really science. And in the process overlook the fact that the indoctrination of scientific values and assumptions in our pupils impressionable minds is anything but scientific. To the extent to which 'science' and 'evolution' have become doctrines administered to our youth in the public school system the issues of what rightly constitutes science is no longer a decision of 'scientists'.
Evolution, an incredibly broad and overgeneral term for multiple conflicting and competing theories has become the basis of biology and the whole slew of neo-scientific adventures which have sprung up in the past 40 years (socio-biology, pyscho-biology and what not). In these scientific field there exists a degree of consensus about what evolution implies. This consensus around 'evolution'-or rather the raster of interelated theories which form 'evolution' has become so central, so pivotal that such neo-scientific adventures would vanish in a puff of logic if the non-verifiable ultimate hypothesis implied in 'evolution' where sufficiently debunked.
'Evolution' is in the first place a working tool which aids in organizing, categorizing the abundance of material gathered and explicitly casting these findings in terms of teleological causes.
As a tool 'evolution' is usefull for these scientific pursuits. As is the case with all tools- this tool will be surplanted in time by newer and more appropriate tools-as the sitution requires. 'Evolution'(eg. Maturana and Varela and the concept of autopoesis, natural drift) of today has remarkably little to do with Charles Darwins "Origins of Species".
The problem with 'evolution' in specific and 'science' in general is not that they are based on theories. Aside from the fact that everything which is not a theory is either (fantasy, mythology, mystery, fiction) or the unmittigated
You are *not* alone !
Surely someone knows where to get them-karma points for the poster who posts a URL pointing to that wallpaper.
please, pretty please, pretty pretty please ;)
"But we cannot sacrifice personal liberty in the process without a compelling reason. I do not believe that compelling reason has yet been articulated under secular reasoning."
And precisely such a compelling reason cannot and never will be articulated under secular reasoning.
Now why do I say this ?
Because in the public domain, the domain which secularism establishes and necessitates, such issues have no relevance.
"such issues" are issues which deal with how indidivuals relate to themselves. In the case of "Internet Pornography"-it is an issue which deals with an aspect of ones own sexual self-relation.
Ones own sexual self-relation is not subject to any kind of public discourse. Although such currently forms the basis of much public discourse, this public discourse can only exist by constanly and continuously violating that which is private. Such public discourse is itself violent, violating not only those who are the victims of this discourse-those who supposedly suffer from "Internet Pornograghy" as well as those who in such discourse are marginalized and outcast- but also those who participate in said discourse.
Secular discourse, and the reasoning engaged in in the course thereof, is the only form of discourse which is admissable in the public sphere-the domain of public discourse.
Christiany itself is a religion which seeks to establish a domain of the public based on the self-relation(ones relation to God) of the individuals who constitute the community.
Yet our society was based on the priveledged role of secular discourse. One of the principal reasons given for this priviledge was to allow for the co-existance of differing Christian faiths. In a society composed soley of differing Christian faiths where there is no secular discourse there could be no public life, no public domain, for any public utterance would itself be merely an expression of ones own self-relation.
Living in a society where the public domain itself is secular obligates those who belong to a particular Christian faith to engage themselves in the public domain as secular members of a secular society, but this engagement is only admissable as long as that which is being expressed is not being expressed from the standpoint of, as an expression of, ones own self-relation.
Once those who engage themselves in public discourse fail to draw this distincition- for this distinction and the act of drawing it is constitutive of society itself- the public sphere itself becomes violated, it becomes the space from whence violence is propagated.
If one is genuinely oppossed to "Internet Pornography" one can engage in a secular discourse about the revenue strategies in use which enable such to exist. If consensus can be found that such revenue strategies are themselves not societally acceptable one can work towards enacting legislation which would, as consequence thereof, preclude the existance of "Internet Pornogrpahy".
What we are seeing here in "such issues" is the misuse of a public health discourse to propel values from the domain of the private into the domain of the public. And this in the name of Caring and Concern.
But perhaps one should not talk of "misuse" here- for the question remains whether there can be any kind of legitimate public health discourse-for this particular form of discourse is itself something which renders all forms of self-relation(how one relates to ones own body) as public issues. The public health discourse has the body as its subject-correspondily all forms of relation to ones own body become the subject of political, ie. public, discourse. This form of discourse threatens the secular discourse which is constitutive of society itself.
At this point in time the public health discourse coincides with many values expressed by particular Chistian faiths. But the day may come when such Christian faiths become the target of a public health discourse and be seen as a condition in demand of remedial policy decisions engende
Court: Spamming via HTML-Metatags is anti-competitive.
The all encompossing listing of several hundred of HTML-Metatags which have no relation to the content of the web page leads to the manipulation of Web Search Engines and is therefore anti-competitive as defined in 1 of the Fair Trade Law.
The district court of Essen, whose proceedings have now been published, arrived at this decision in a public trial on 24th of May 2004(Case Nr. 44 0 166/03.) The plaintiff in this case was a legally entitled buisness organization. According to the findings of the court such a use of search keywords lead to search engines placing webpages of the accused in the first positions and correspondingly causing these sites to be more frequented by users. The operaters by using hundreds of keywords, as found in a lexicon, grouped together, which even taken broadly, are without discernable relationship to the services and products being offered on the webpages and therefore could not be being used for the optimal presentation of their offerings. Rather the only conclusion to be drawn is that the use of such techniques only served to take advantage of technical weaknesses of the search engines in order to give the operators competitive advantage.
This, according the Essen Jugde, does not apply to all uses of HTML-metatags. Acccordingly a competitor must accept when a webpage(internet site) is full of such keywords when these are related to the service offerings of the operator. The same applies to the use of names, company names and logos, in as far as these are "constitutive of the internet sites' embedded advertising links", in order to enable the operator to do buisness with advertising partners.
The decision of the district court of Essen expands the otherwise totally non-uniform juristic findings of german courts conerning HTML-Metatags, which up to now have been concerned with the use of others' propietary('fremder') keywords in the Metatags, which is a different field of problems. A similiar decision was reached by the district court of Düsseldorf in March 2002 concerning the use of unrelated keywords in Metatags. This decision was however later revised by the superiror district cour of Düsseldorf. Whether or not the decision of Essen is to be appealed has not yet known.
I must admit-I am a bit suprised that SLASHDOT didn't pick up on it. It might just be a little insignificant thing which doesn't warrant much attention anyway-who knows. Of course everyone is mentioning the support for 4k stacks. And of course this is important. Anyone who has used Andrew Morton's patch set knows what a PITA this issue was. But nvidia even did more than fix the single most blocking issue regarding their drivers and the 2.6.x kernels.
They also:
Added support for ACPI
Fixed problem that prevented 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs.
Added support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language).
along with the new nvidia-settings utility-GPL'ed and written in GTK2....
and finally they added:
Added a new Xv adaptor on GeForce4 and GeForce FX which uses the 3D engine to do Xv PutImage requests.
Now I am not an expert on such things-25 years of experience and I am still left asking more questions than my ability to answer. _But I noticed this little innocuous "xv" thing and was like WOW-cool. I leave it up to those who know more to shoot me down-but doesn't this little "xv" thing mean that all those Linux users who use nvidia GeForce4 and FX cards suddenly got a a tremendous boost when doing much of anything with video ? After all XV is what all of the video players under Linux use for good quality full-screen video(mplayer, xine, totem, gxine, helixplayer etc.)
Now if I understand this correctly everytime a PutImage() request comes along under XV this is handed over to the 3D engine-automatically. It seems as if this would be a very, very significant reduction in CPU usage-particularly for older generation(PII/PIII) machines which happen to have fairly modern graphic cards. Full-screen divx under mplayer with the new drivers uses 12% CPU on average on my machine-I unfortunately did not do a benchmark to test this-but if my memory serves me correctly this is significantly less than what is was with the older drivers.
Now the downside to this-at least for the time being- is that some apps don't quite work with these new changes-Xine-and it's siblings(totem,gxine, kxine etc.)
But I assume these will be fixed pronto.
Well where am I going qoing with this train of thought:
Putting this kind of support for XV in the NVIDIA drivers -is really simple for the NVIDIA guys-perhaps even trivial-but it can mean a tremendous improvement for the users of these cards. NVIDIA has always treated Linux like a second class citizen-but hey who can complain-at least they acknowledge that Linux exists-compared to the BSD's Linux support is great-of course only if you are using x86 CPU's. Now everyone knows that the graphic workstation market has all but disappeared. But what if NVIDIA was to decide to simply really take advantage of the X11 windowing system and it's features.
Imagine if NVIDIA would actually provide good RENDER support-wow what a difference that would make for 2D desktop support-particularly under GNOME which uses RENDER extensively in VTE/PANGO-ie. why text scrolling in gnome-terminal is so abysmal. I am still stumped by the fact that the open-source X11 nvidia drivers support RENDEr far, far better than NVIDIA's own in-house drivers.....
Imagine if NVIDIA would really support the libfixes, libdamages and libcomposite extensions which are currently being developed at Xorg-X11. Sun's Looking Glass is already using libdamages and libfixes-I got it up and running on my machine yesterday-and yes it is still pre-alpha-but I have never, ever seen such a fluid desktop environment. This tech is almost *evil*- the promise which it presents is simply baffling-rendering all previous X11 windowing experiences to the days of the stone age. I don't really care that much about Looking Glass-if NVIDIA properly supports the X11 extensions we will have cairo-enabled desktops inside of the next year which will fundamentally alter the X11 experience for X users.
Ok. So here is the point of this little essay: If NVIDIA would simpl
Kplusplus, I am so pleased that you have been able to diagnose "my problem", years of introspection had failed to reveal the sublime simplicity of your diagnosis. I really have no interest in iTunes or Rhythmbox, personally. There are at least a dozen open source music players in circulation. Go be happy with your iTunes- but your comment about xmms simply invalidates your claims about OSS. OpenOffice offers several things which no version of Word offers- PDF export, for example. You call OpenOffice's autocompletition feature a "gimmick". Thank gawd OpenOffice doesn't come with as much "artificial intelligence" as Word does- I detest Microsoft Word-spending more time fighting with what it thinks(according to it's AI) about how my document should be formatted. Feature parity is not the standard by which I judge software-OpenOffice is open source, free, usable on *NIX, Windows and MacOSX, and does what I need to do-moreover it finally ends years of propietary shit file formats-enabling ease of exchange. _The features which count for me are far beyond what MS has to offer. Oh, and I write professionally.... I did not "make the point that Linux is primarily a server"- those are your words. Linux is equally capable in a suprisingly large number of applications-as a desktop/as a server/as an embedded OS. The only OS which supports more architectures is NetBSD. Linux tends to be used more as a server- due to the enabling power of Linux using stock commodity PC's to do the work of specialized expensive workstations. I use Linux as a desktop and a server-both in one machine. I have 30 clients tied to my main machine running LTSP- ie. I have a desktop server... OSS is itself original. Nothing more needs to be said. Most major open source projects also run on Windows and on Mac. Your point is still lost, probably because you don't have one....
Firstly, your argument about "catch up efforts" vs. "originals" is bogus. Linux due to it's origins and it's development process has always been so open-ended that is has always had a superset of functionality, in contrast to Mac and Windows, as it's target.
Your point that Linux on the desktop is playing catch up to the Macintosh is negated by the fact that Mac is playing catch up to Linux in terms of server fucntionality. The point being- Linux can be used as a server, can be used as a desktop, can be used as emdedded OS-etc.it's genericness means that it can be used for most anything and most anything as the same time.
Only with the introduction of MacOSX is Apple producing anything of interest for uses beyond the desktop. Opensource software is *not* a substitute for propietary apps. Opensource software is the software which exists which runs on opensource platforms-the biggest of which is Linux.
If all of the applications were cross platform and ran equally well on each platform then your comparison would make sense. But I can't use ITunes on Linux. Moreover the only people who are really trying to do cross platform development are the opensources folks. Now why do you think that iTunes is superior to Rhythmbox- could it perhaps be, at least partially, due to the fact that Apple can integrate iTunes perfectly to the rest of the aspects of the system because they themselves have exclusively written the system- and that this system is only available for very specific hardware constellation which they themselves dictate and design?
Rhythmbox, based on gstreamer, is attempting to provide similiar functionality where the sound cards is an unknown-ie. is it supported or not by Alsa. This ranging on machines from PPC it x86-from 486 to AMD64, from Sun workstations to Linspire boxes at Walmart. The OpenOffice folks are in a similiar dilemna-they do not control the OS like windows does- they can't take advantage of hacking the OS itself to enable it to do certain things. OpenOffice runs on mulitple OS's with multiple differing hardware platforms.
So everywhere you see OSS as lacking in terms of this or that feature- I say well iTune and Word are really, really lacking in a massive way- I can't use them under Linux- or one of a half-dozen other *NIX variants. Rhythmbox may not provide you with all the functionality you need- but it least you can use it- whereas iTunes is simply not available to the *NIX world.
If Apple would open up the Openstep API and disclose the differences between that and cocoa and allow for independent development of the propietarty parts of cocoa GNUSTEP could become a viable platform for common Apple/Linux applications.
Apple has already taken far more form the OSS community than it has ever given back. If it were not for the GNU toolset which underlies the modern OSX, OSX would merely be a cute, some say sexy, desktop GUI for elitist snobs-and not the computing platform that it is becomming.
Firstly, that blog was intense. Bordering, due to it's length, on the edge of unreadability, it was fascinating-not due to it's indepth-ness, but that it lightly touched on so many interrelated threads. (the wideness of the wide is the "depth" of the superficial)
He dared mention Rhapsody, for the love of gawd, HE DARED to MENTION it. Dazed,confused and oft bitterly disilussioned developers and dreamers bitten once by that dream never really have recovered- I loved her, she was so beautiful, but she was a....lie. Has enough time passed to heal the wounds of betrayal, could it be her beauty was just premature(ie. not 16 yet)
Rhapsody promised more than any other computing project worth mentioning in the last 20 years. It was friggin incredible. The entire landscape of desktop computing would be markedly different today if Rhapsody had ever materialized. But no. Apple killed it, killed the best project that they ever actually came up with.
The author of the blog appears to not have a clue about Linux-land. Neither did he mention GNUstep, nor did he acknowledge what is now being developed at X.org-ie.cairo+opengl+xdamages+xfixes+xcomposite. in other words the tech that will bring the GUI desktop of the Linux world into the 21st century-farther along that trajectory in fact than either Acqua or Longhorn.
If Apple would just open up their API's new apps could be developed for a combined market-Apple + Linux. Now is the time to overcome the desire for attaining windows compatibility-if app developers could count on a market of Apple and Linux users this would push both Apple and Linux beyond the effects of the chicken-egg dilemna which both have been struggling with
The propietary parts of Aqua are being realized now, in an opensource form, in cairo, which is in a state of very active development. If the GNUstep coders use cairo as the basis of their new developments they finally have an answer to the display postcript issues which have dogged them.There is already a great deal of convergence going on between the MACOSX and Linux world-if nothing more than the GNU utilities which compose our common toolkits.
Now is the time for Apple to heal wounds with the development community. They should open up their API's, provide exact documentation as to the point where cocoa and OpenStep meet and where the specific differences lie and they should support GNUstep as the basis for developing cross platform apps. With the developments at X.org ongoing GNUstep could be made very viable for such purposes in short order,ie GNUstep + cairo >= cocoa
I'm sure this is all just pipe-dream stuff, but combining the markets for Apple and desktop Linux just make sense for both Apple and Linux users....
Now someone with more of a clue about these issues-go ahead shoot this idea down...
Unlike the ober-cool slacker types who dominate these threads, who view any kind of 'political stance' as being uncool and passe- I find great resonance with the feelings expressed by this former LUG president.
I don't really understand why he chose to to connect his anti-war sentiment to his status as president of a LUG in LA. After all resigning as a president of a LUG has no real impact on anything beyond the LUG itself. Although protest is not something which can and should be measured solely in terms of effectiveness. (If that were the case the RAF or Kazinsky would be THE appropriate forms of protest)
Most of the people who post on slashdot earn their living in the high-tech industry, or wish, or plan to do so. With the tumltuous events of the market over the past years many have been forced to become ultra-pragmatists-ie. too closely interweaving of ones ideals and ones willingness to work for the bread which one later eats is a self-punishing endeavor. Unless you like looking like a POW.
The FOSS movement was borne as a reaction against the propietary culture which established itself over the past 25 years. Many talented people really saw something wrong with the provisions of their contracts-ie. once you signed the dotted lign,that company 0w3nd your soul-all of your thoughts, ideas, creations and talent.
Those who constantly were forced to adapt to the ever changing market conditions went through a fairly understandable process of self-disassociation. And of course this is where the obercool- 'I wouldn't have a "political" stance even if you paid me' comes from. Those who persisted in interweaving their ideals and willingness to bring home the bread too closely suffered the consequences thereof in a highly personal way.
The market has changed a lot over the past years. Now many, many talented people find ways of inversting their private time in FOSS software development and an increasingly large number of people are actually getting paid to do so and *god forbid* actually enjoy what they are doing, not being mere programmer 'prostitutes', willing to turn a line of code for a dime(dollar adjusted for inflation).
Yet I specifically chose not to enter the high-tech industry in the mid-eighties because of the fact that %80 percent of the funding for the engineering department at the university I attended came from the pentagon. I was really, really pissed off that my tax payer money was being used by the contras to rape nuns and burn down villages in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatamala etc.
I knew then, that If I was successful in my pursuit of microprocessor design, as a carreer, that I, as a lowly engineer working at Motorola, would have nothing to say with how stuff I developed was going to be used-ie. if I design a microprocessor for small education computers and the execs in the company simply decide to modify my design and sell it to the pentagon as the ultra-microprocess for the newest ICBM's.
To this very day I have no regrets for the decision I made, fully aware of the fact that I would be earning more than 10 times what I am earning now.
But I hve no qualms in the free-usage aspect of FOSS development. Ultimately FOSS will break the back of the monopoly-based IP economy and usher our mega-corporations built thereon to the days of the dinosaurs. And this will profoundly impact the military-industrial complex, which has already been eclipsed by the more recent healthcare-industrial complex and the brand-spanking-new "security"-industrial complex.
But this development isn't going to happen in 3, 5 or 10 years-although it is already happening. I expect it will take at least two full generations before we really start seeing the *societal* effects of FOSS. In the meantime the military will make use of FOSS technology to further their own ends-remember the military and it's mandate by the State marks the real hallmark of propietary markets.
It was the mandate of the State which created modern "democratic" military structures which were de
I am glad that Nat and Miguel finally spoke out. Heise, the oh-so respectd german IT publication, either knowingly or unknowingly allowed itself to be used in a rumor/speculation propaganda war-a power push from A group of hackers within Novell against another group of hackers within Novell to force some big "decision", which when the Novell execs, who are new to Linux and are prone to make such noobie mistakes, start thinking clearly again isn't even a question.
The depths of ridiculousness which comments here at slashdot have reached are mindboggling. People attacking Nat and Miguel, questioning their position, their right to speak as representatives of Novell...utterly assinine. The whole "QT is not free (enough)" stuff is also pretty braindead-if this were the case(already) KDE would not be so widely used.
Freedesktop.org is the organization which *is* the answer to the common desktop which Novell exec's are looking for. KDE developers and GNOME developers are already working together on a variety of projects-this will only increase with time. There is far more consistency across the GNOME/KDE divide today than ever before- even SuSE used a cvs-patched version of KDE in 9.0 so that KDE and GNOME used the same .desktop files. Gstreamer is already being integrated into kdemultimedia, sodipodi is integrating optional KDE-dialogs, both KDE and GNOME have adopted DBUS-GNOME is going to use cairo for 2.8, KDE/QT won't be far behind.
SuSE has a whole lot of expertise in kernel and XFree86 hacking-their enterprise offerings, based on cooperation with IBM makes SuSE from the server point of view invalualble. For many home users SuSE has been known as a good desktop distribution- but SuSE has not made any big splash on the desktop in the corporate world. Novell purchased SuSE primarily due to the SuSE-IBM connection and the quality of their programmers.
In Europe SuSE reigns uncontested as *the* Linux distribution-but yet again, more so because of SuSE as a server than as a desktop-corporations are only now beginning to show an interest in the Linux desktop.
Ximian is all about the desktop and all about integrating/migrating Windows data, applications, users and developers into the Linux world. Why is it that none of computers at the brainshare conference were running KDE -but all of them were running ximian-patched GNOME ? Why is it that Ximian is an unknown name to those who work primarily in the server world?
Novell has made a brilliant decision purchasing both Ximian and SuSE. They, Novell, have great kernel hackers, xfree86 hackers, desktop specialists par excellance-the best in the Linux world and the developers of one of the most trusted names in enterprise server Linux in addition to great QT/KDE programmers.
Novell will itself onl be producing a very small set of software-perhaps in total in 5 years 1/2 of one of the 6 CD 's ditributed in the Novell/SuSE distribution. Even if at some point down the road Novell chose to use QT# for it's development projects-who really cares ? QT# is dependendant upon MONO-and that is one of the key technologies which Ximian brings to the table.
Novell is not going to single handely re-write the Linux desktop with QT-such is pure and utter nonsense-as if any singly company could do so-hello- Linux consists of thousands of programs written by 10's of thousands of hackers from all over the globe.
For the near future the desktop applications released by Novell will be written in Mono + GTK#-this is already clear-the iFolders software is already being written in GTK# and it is not the only GTK# project being written right now, as we speak, at Novell. Once the QT# library get's up to speed their will probably be some desktop apps written to use this new library-think integration with YAST-appending new modules to administer the OpenSever technology which Novell wants to integrate with their Novel/SuSE distribution.
If and when Novell's customers start to want to build new application
how's it going oGalaxy...... your really should make a book about this....