I don't think I have ever used a C compiler that takes any notice of the 'register' keyword. As far as I know, it has been made pretty much obsolete by advances in compiler technology.
I think the problem lies with the definition of a "derivative work". In the case of the GPL, this means that no matter how much GPL'd code I use, my whole product is a "derivative work".
Now, I'm a game programmer. I have a huge amount of closed source, and I don't particularly want to give it all away (perhaps some of it, when the time is right). Suppose someone writes a GPL'd library that makes it easier to port my game to Linux. If I use that library, then my whole game becomes a "derivative work" of that library.
Excuse me, but that is plainly ridiculous. If I modified the library itself, maybe optimised it a bit or added some useful functionality, I would happily share those modifications with the community. Giving you a codebase that represents over ten person-years of work is a completely different matter, and I can't see it as "sharing like-for-like".
I guess I see the situation in a similar way to you, but we are coming from different directions. I would really like to share more, but I don't think the GPL is fair. I am acting honourably in that I do not use GPL'd source against the wishes of the authors. I just think that the GPL is not helping to bring open and closed source developers together. (Well, of course, it's not supposed to. The GPL is about Free Software, not Open Source...)
Whoa! Nice Ad Hominem! Shall we proceed directly to the flaming?
Anyway, like you said, it's a matter of balance. Well, hey, if I only needed a few lines why don't I just steal it? In fact it probably falls under 'fair use'. Maybe I want a few more lines though. Maybe I actually want to participate in Open Source.
I agree that is only right that I give back modifications. But that's not what the GPL wants. I would willingly give back my improvements to GPL'd source, but it needs to be a fair exchange. As a Closed Source developer, any involvement with GPL'd source is going to involve me giving unreasonable amounts of my code to the community, with not much in return.
The LGPL is fine, and if I made modifications I would of course give them back to the community, but the GPL is asking too much.
Please try to imagine that I'm someone who disagrees with you, not someone who does not understand the issues involved. Perhaps that way we can have a more meaningful conversation.
Well, there's the problem. The GPL forces you to contibute everything back. That's hardly fair, when you use a few GPL'd functions, and you end up having to give away your entire source tree. In fact, that's almost you stealing from me, but I guess I can choose not to use the GPL.
But the original poster dude seems to think it funny that Microsoft made the changes. So funny in fact that he stopped reading in the middle of a sentence, and thus completely missed the point of the article...
"Our design goals for writing test applications were to keep the algorithms as similar as possible on all platforms (for comparability) as well as to write code that was easy to understand and quick to develop. Fast performance was not a goal."
"When performance does become important, various techniques are available that can make dramatic differences in speed."
(My bold, again)
What's funny is the hair-trigger, knee-jerk, tenuous-as-you-like anti-Microsoft brigade, like this guy and the moderators who thought he was meta-funny.
On a more serious note though, it's important to realise that different products are often aimed at different niches, and a "one size fits all" benchmark is close to useless.
Yeah, but it's not as funny if you don't selectively quote. Here's the entire paragraph:-
"For example, Microsoft Corp. has rewritten the Nile benchmark we used in these tests in several ways to demonstrate optimization techniques. The company ended up with an application with quite different application logic and database design from ours (but that generates the same pages we do) that runs about twice as fast as the speed of our version on similar hardware."
There you go, and I added some bold of my own. How do you like that?
Well thank you for agreeing with me, but not really:) You would have to get up earlier in the morning to get that one past me...
First of all, it's worrying that you think of the 'hacker community' as the set of people who support your point of view. Your reference to Mr. Tyberghein's beliefs are clearly clouded by what you expect him to think. In short, you're making a straw man of him.
I am reminded by the movement to 'keep sport free from politics'. For 'sport', replace 'computing'. Why shouldn't people compute to their hearts' content, without politics getting in the way? I think that is the biggest problem I have with RMS's view of the world. I think that Mr. Stallman has some great intentions; Unfortunately his idea of 'freedom' is only of worth if you follow his narrow ideas of what that means.
I might seem some kind of apologist but I really can't see Jorrit's communication as trying to annoy RMS. If you will allow me to quote J.T's response to your Kuro5hin post:-
"Sorry, but being famous does NOT excuse somebody for not answering the question"...
... and I believe he has a perfectly valid point. It is not reasonable to expect RMS's correspondents to think exactly like him.
Sorry to piggyback on a low numbered article, but hey...
This whole episode makes me very sad.
You know, when I was at university (around 1990-92) I encountered RMS's work and it had an effect on me. I remembered my sysop's unhappiness when I devoted my entire quota, and some of the (hehe) unquota'd/tmp directory to the compilation of emacs. He wasn't too happy about the amount of system resources it used either... I was a bit of an RMS fan. Well, hey, at the time they were trying to make us learn vi! The sight of ^[ blah blah blah appearing when you hit cursor keys was just too much... I think you know what I'm talking about:)
But Mr. Tyberghien is an enterprising fellow. I am a game programmer myself. I think I have a (closed source) system that's somewhat better than Crystal Space... But he and his team are certainly making strides towards an interesting system. I have seen his posts on a mailing list recently and I have respect for his position.
You know, people often talk about an 'Ivory Tower' situation in reference to academic situations. I think Mr. Stallman may have neglected to keep on top of the real world recently.
When I was at university I was friends with a few Union women's officers. Three 'generations' actually. I got interested in feminism. And I realised that you get some people with some really strong views. Like Andrea Dworkin:) And it's fine to have those radical views floating about, but the cold harsh reality is that most people will take a moderate view. It might be that in a few years time we will be all touting the radical view (that we're all closet rapists:) but some (most?) people are not ready for that change.
It worries me that Jorrit's obvious enthusiasm is being dampened by a torrent of idealistic politics.
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ cannot use a GC.
.NET provides an environment in which you can use GC with managed C++. If you don't want it, don't use it.
If you want to develop speed critical stuff, then you could use unmanaged C++.
You should also realise that your precious C++ goes through various representations on its way to native code.
So how are you going to get your platform independence when you compile directly to native code? Hmm yeah, I'll just go to this site, uh oh, it's got an applet on it. I'll just download the source, check it for security issues, run it through gcc, etc... The world has moved on.
Well, if you don't like it, do something about it! Stop being so negative... Get off your arse and make something better. Stop fucking whining, you make me sick.
I really hate that stupid phrase.
"Can you say X?"
Duh, well of course I can freaking say it.
How about:
"X?"
"Shades of X?"
"It seems to have the X nature"
"Teetering on the edge of the precipitous cliff over the chasm of X?"
So when someone stands up for what they believe, that makes them pricks?
Suppose I start a service, let's call it "Gnutster", whereby people trade bits of GPL'd source for inclusion into their closed source apps.
Do you think Mr. Stallman would get upset? I think he might, and I think the FSF might open an eye or two.
When that time comes, will I be justified in calling my detractors "pricks"?
I'm not stealing, because I'm just copying information. Heck, I'm not even doing it myself, I'm just enabling others to do so. Well, a few people don't get their wishes, but hey, they shouldn't have made their source available.
I was having this conversation with a colleague (yes, I work in a cathedral:) a week or two ago. I was thinking that broadband is pretty much necessary for the internet to progress to the next level. I was bemoaning the fact that our 'merkin friends (I'm a Brit) are a bit lucky in the broadband area. James (t'other guy) said that although Silicon Valley and a few other places have good net access, there are still plenty of places in the States that could be called 'backwards' (in more way than one hehe:)
I guess he was right. Which makes this story interesting.
I was initially thinking of satellite access. As far as I know, satellite access is awful right now, being horribly expensive. The MSN developments are interesting w.r.t. bidirectional access, but it remains to be seen whether the price will be prohibitive.
Wireless (over here we call it 'radio':) networking has a special place in my heart. I remember reading about packet radio in PCW magazine years before I encountered the Internet. Maybe you need some pretty powerful transmitters to cover big rural areas, but let's face it, no-one wants to run cables everywhere...
Kornelia, the world #1 female Quake player, was at ECTS, gathering one of the most consistent crowds.
It was dead funny watching the line of spotty kids lining up to have a go.
I've never seen a pro player in action before, but basically it's like this:
Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag!
7-0 to Kornelia!
On Monday I think she was fragged 4 times all day. No-one fragged her twice.
She needs to get out more...
Maybe the machine itself should own the rights?
Or, the 'phenotype' of the idea, so if machine A invents a better machine B, B should own itself?
I know this might seem wierd, but if (in the far future) machines end up being in any way like humans, you could understand their resentment at being 0wned by us:)
Sorry to nitpick, but Atheism doesn't preach, although some Atheists do.
As for the evils of religion, you do not have to look hard to find them. People of the same religion attract each other, but those of different religion repel each other.
That's kinda what I meant.
I can't agree with your second line though.
Atheism:
1) Doesn't preach
2) Says there isn't a god, but doesn't say there are no ETs
3) Doesn't say that about immoral behaviour. Morality doesn't have to involve a supernatural being.
You christians really have a problem with being lonely, don't you?
Surely you meant to say, "we really are alone in the cosmos, except for our buddy jesus."
Re:Dreamcast games are not run in WinCE
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Can't agree with you there. Windows CE is optional. I don't have a list of games that use it, but I know that Sega Rally 2 did. You can include the web browsing stuff and re-link the kernal image if you need it. You can also browse with the Sega libraries.
(I'm a Dreamcast developer, so consider youself 'told':)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I have ever used a C compiler that takes any notice of the 'register' keyword. As far as I know, it has been made pretty much obsolete by advances in compiler technology.
I think the problem lies with the definition of a "derivative work". In the case of the GPL, this means that no matter how much GPL'd code I use, my whole product is a "derivative work".
Now, I'm a game programmer. I have a huge amount of closed source, and I don't particularly want to give it all away (perhaps some of it, when the time is right). Suppose someone writes a GPL'd library that makes it easier to port my game to Linux. If I use that library, then my whole game becomes a "derivative work" of that library.
Excuse me, but that is plainly ridiculous. If I modified the library itself, maybe optimised it a bit or added some useful functionality, I would happily share those modifications with the community. Giving you a codebase that represents over ten person-years of work is a completely different matter, and I can't see it as "sharing like-for-like".
I guess I see the situation in a similar way to you, but we are coming from different directions. I would really like to share more, but I don't think the GPL is fair. I am acting honourably in that I do not use GPL'd source against the wishes of the authors. I just think that the GPL is not helping to bring open and closed source developers together. (Well, of course, it's not supposed to. The GPL is about Free Software, not Open Source...)
Whoa! Nice Ad Hominem! Shall we proceed directly to the flaming?
Anyway, like you said, it's a matter of balance. Well, hey, if I only needed a few lines why don't I just steal it? In fact it probably falls under 'fair use'. Maybe I want a few more lines though. Maybe I actually want to participate in Open Source.
I agree that is only right that I give back modifications. But that's not what the GPL wants. I would willingly give back my improvements to GPL'd source, but it needs to be a fair exchange. As a Closed Source developer, any involvement with GPL'd source is going to involve me giving unreasonable amounts of my code to the community, with not much in return.
The LGPL is fine, and if I made modifications I would of course give them back to the community, but the GPL is asking too much.
Please try to imagine that I'm someone who disagrees with you, not someone who does not understand the issues involved. Perhaps that way we can have a more meaningful conversation.
"not contribute anything back."
Well, there's the problem. The GPL forces you to contibute everything back. That's hardly fair, when you use a few GPL'd functions, and you end up having to give away your entire source tree. In fact, that's almost you stealing from me, but I guess I can choose not to use the GPL.
It's 512 nodes, with 16 processors each.
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server supports 32 processors per node.
No shit, Sherlock!
But the original poster dude seems to think it funny that Microsoft made the changes. So funny in fact that he stopped reading in the middle of a sentence, and thus completely missed the point of the article...
"Our design goals for writing test applications were to keep the algorithms as similar as possible on all platforms (for comparability) as well as to write code that was easy to understand and quick to develop. Fast performance was not a goal."
"When performance does become important, various techniques are available that can make dramatic differences in speed."
(My bold, again)
What's funny is the hair-trigger, knee-jerk, tenuous-as-you-like anti-Microsoft brigade, like this guy and the moderators who thought he was meta-funny.
On a more serious note though, it's important to realise that different products are often aimed at different niches, and a "one size fits all" benchmark is close to useless.
Yeah, but it's not as funny if you don't selectively quote. Here's the entire paragraph:-
"For example, Microsoft Corp. has rewritten the Nile benchmark we used in these tests in several ways to demonstrate optimization techniques. The company ended up with an application with quite different application logic and database design from ours (but that generates the same pages we do) that runs about twice as fast as the speed of our version on similar hardware."
There you go, and I added some bold of my own. How do you like that?
VMS is not Unix.
What are you, some kind of wind up merchant?
Well thank you for agreeing with me, but not really :) You would have to get up earlier in the morning to get that one past me...
First of all, it's worrying that you think of the 'hacker community' as the set of people who support your point of view. Your reference to Mr. Tyberghein's beliefs are clearly clouded by what you expect him to think. In short, you're making a straw man of him.
I am reminded by the movement to 'keep sport free from politics'. For 'sport', replace 'computing'. Why shouldn't people compute to their hearts' content, without politics getting in the way? I think that is the biggest problem I have with RMS's view of the world. I think that Mr. Stallman has some great intentions; Unfortunately his idea of 'freedom' is only of worth if you follow his narrow ideas of what that means.
I might seem some kind of apologist but I really can't see Jorrit's communication as trying to annoy RMS. If you will allow me to quote J.T's response to your Kuro5hin post:-
"Sorry, but being famous does NOT excuse somebody for not answering the question"...
... and I believe he has a perfectly valid point. It is not reasonable to expect RMS's correspondents to think exactly like him.
Sorry to piggyback on a low numbered article, but hey...
/tmp directory to the compilation of emacs. He wasn't too happy about the amount of system resources it used either... I was a bit of an RMS fan. Well, hey, at the time they were trying to make us learn vi! The sight of ^[ blah blah blah appearing when you hit cursor keys was just too much... I think you know what I'm talking about :)
:) And it's fine to have those radical views floating about, but the cold harsh reality is that most people will take a moderate view. It might be that in a few years time we will be all touting the radical view (that we're all closet rapists :) but some (most?) people are not ready for that change.
This whole episode makes me very sad.
You know, when I was at university (around 1990-92) I encountered RMS's work and it had an effect on me. I remembered my sysop's unhappiness when I devoted my entire quota, and some of the (hehe) unquota'd
But Mr. Tyberghien is an enterprising fellow. I am a game programmer myself. I think I have a (closed source) system that's somewhat better than Crystal Space... But he and his team are certainly making strides towards an interesting system. I have seen his posts on a mailing list recently and I have respect for his position.
You know, people often talk about an 'Ivory Tower' situation in reference to academic situations. I think Mr. Stallman may have neglected to keep on top of the real world recently.
When I was at university I was friends with a few Union women's officers. Three 'generations' actually. I got interested in feminism. And I realised that you get some people with some really strong views. Like Andrea Dworkin
It worries me that Jorrit's obvious enthusiasm is being dampened by a torrent of idealistic politics.
Anybody with me?
It means 'anywhere' in Japanese.
It would more normally be romanised as 'dokomo'.
Please direct me to the chapter in Stroustrup where it says that C++ cannot use a GC.
.NET provides an environment in which you can use GC with managed C++. If you don't want it, don't use it.
If you want to develop speed critical stuff, then you could use unmanaged C++.
You should also realise that your precious C++ goes through various representations on its way to native code.
So how are you going to get your platform independence when you compile directly to native code? Hmm yeah, I'll just go to this site, uh oh, it's got an applet on it. I'll just download the source, check it for security issues, run it through gcc, etc... The world has moved on.
I do drugs to make you seem more interesting...
Well, if you don't like it, do something about it! Stop being so negative... Get off your arse and make something better. Stop fucking whining, you make me sick.
I really hate that stupid phrase.
"Can you say X?"
Duh, well of course I can freaking say it.
How about:
"X?"
"Shades of X?"
"It seems to have the X nature"
"Teetering on the edge of the precipitous cliff over the chasm of X?"
So when someone stands up for what they believe, that makes them pricks?
Suppose I start a service, let's call it "Gnutster", whereby people trade bits of GPL'd source for inclusion into their closed source apps.
Do you think Mr. Stallman would get upset? I think he might, and I think the FSF might open an eye or two.
When that time comes, will I be justified in calling my detractors "pricks"?
I'm not stealing, because I'm just copying information. Heck, I'm not even doing it myself, I'm just enabling others to do so. Well, a few people don't get their wishes, but hey, they shouldn't have made their source available.
I was having this conversation with a colleague (yes, I work in a cathedral :) a week or two ago. I was thinking that broadband is pretty much necessary for the internet to progress to the next level. I was bemoaning the fact that our 'merkin friends (I'm a Brit) are a bit lucky in the broadband area. James (t'other guy) said that although Silicon Valley and a few other places have good net access, there are still plenty of places in the States that could be called 'backwards' (in more way than one hehe :)
:) networking has a special place in my heart. I remember reading about packet radio in PCW magazine years before I encountered the Internet. Maybe you need some pretty powerful transmitters to cover big rural areas, but let's face it, no-one wants to run cables everywhere...
I guess he was right. Which makes this story interesting.
I was initially thinking of satellite access. As far as I know, satellite access is awful right now, being horribly expensive. The MSN developments are interesting w.r.t. bidirectional access, but it remains to be seen whether the price will be prohibitive.
Wireless (over here we call it 'radio'
Kornelia, the world #1 female Quake player, was at ECTS, gathering one of the most consistent crowds.
It was dead funny watching the line of spotty kids lining up to have a go.
I've never seen a pro player in action before, but basically it's like this:
Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag! Frag!
7-0 to Kornelia!
On Monday I think she was fragged 4 times all day. No-one fragged her twice.
She needs to get out more...
Maybe the machine itself should own the rights? :)
Or, the 'phenotype' of the idea, so if machine A invents a better machine B, B should own itself?
I know this might seem wierd, but if (in the far future) machines end up being in any way like humans, you could understand their resentment at being 0wned by us
I think you need to go back and read the thread again. You seem to have grasped the wrong end of the stick somewhere.
Heated? I dont think so.
Sorry to nitpick, but Atheism doesn't preach, although some Atheists do.
As for the evils of religion, you do not have to look hard to find them. People of the same religion attract each other, but those of different religion repel each other.
That's kinda what I meant.
I can't agree with your second line though.
Atheism:
1) Doesn't preach
2) Says there isn't a god, but doesn't say there are no ETs
3) Doesn't say that about immoral behaviour. Morality doesn't have to involve a supernatural being.
You christians really have a problem with being lonely, don't you?
Surely you meant to say, "we really are alone in the cosmos, except for our buddy jesus."
Can't agree with you there. Windows CE is optional. I don't have a list of games that use it, but I know that Sega Rally 2 did. You can include the web browsing stuff and re-link the kernal image if you need it. You can also browse with the Sega libraries. :)
(I'm a Dreamcast developer, so consider youself 'told'