You tell those sick, needy ppl that saving their life from the ravages of disease and malnutrition is outwieghed by the need to have a slightly less buggy internet explorer. If you honestly believe this, you should be placed right next to Darl, because that is obtuse logic by anyones standards.
Interesting. Do you also think Microsoft's competitors should be outlawed in order to provide more income to the benevolent Mr. Gates? Is sending money to needy people in other countries which are too backwards to help themselves, more important than fostering a competitive environment in one of the world's leading technology nations? I think the idea that the ends justify the means here is rather shortsighted, but I'm not a sniveling Gates worshipper either.
Eprom programmers like the Willem programmer cost under $40 these days. If even that is too much, use another spare board to program the chip back to normal.
Elaborate. AFAIK, nobody is selling supported AFS implementations at the moment. The OpenAFS and Arla projects are free for anyone to contribute to, and there is even a stripped down AFS implementation provided by Red Hat.
I used to be a die-hard AFS user, but now have gone laptop and CVS replaces my need for network filesystems.
Guess what? Other people have different needs in a network filesystem besides using it as a text file repository. AFS's global namespace and the control it gives individual administrators over sections of that namespace is one of its most useful characteristic (besides caching, security, and compatibility with existing implementations, of which NFSv4 has finally added the first two at the expense of the latter).
Finally, what bloat is today, is necesary tomorrow. Imagine an oracle database on hardware from the seventies. Bloated beyond imagination, dog slow. But since the seventies the amount of data stored in a database has grown tremendiously, to the level where we simply need databases like Oracle or SQL Server to store it.
Bloat isn't an absolute metric. Bloat is the ratio of the memory and execution footprint of a program to the useful work it gets done. A program which does the same amount or less useful work than another program, and which is twice the size in core and uses twice as much CPU time as the more efficient program, is referred to as bloated. It would be illogical to refer to a database server such as Oracle simply as bloated, unless it were possible to point out a competing database server which is equally as useful and which has a smaller footprint, either due to careful coding or to better algorithms. In the case of Oracle, this might be true. But just because it doesn't produce useful work on the hardware of 30 years ago doesn't mean it isn't a well engineered piece of software.
A better label to use would be "complex". To respond to your argument that the only obstacles to db-fs are ignorance and blind conservatism, complex software is undesirable. It increases costs in terms of man hours to maintain it, it increases QA overhead, and it increases support calls from users who came to depend on a feature which was included for completeness, but was never audited for correctness or robustness. People don't code complex software unless they are paid to do it (and usually when a manager is making the technical decisions). This is the reason most open source/free software tools seem to follow the Unix philosophy; simple tools which do one task and do it well, but are yet flexible enough to build into more complex systems. A monolithic database filesystem does not appeal to the sort of psyche which produces open source code for that reason: Complexity doesn't make a programmer's job fun. In order to produce large amounts of code at a low cost as in the open source/free software world, the people behind the engineering of the software need to be having fun, and a complex database filesystem is a rather good example of something which is _not_ fun to produce and therefore unappealing to the hacker sort.
Of course, it doesn't end there. What about the user database, currently stored in/etc/passwd? The format is flawed, proved by the existence of/etc/shadow and setuid tools for mortals to edit them. Why not make a simple password file which only contains the encrypted password which a user can edit?
Um, the whole purpose of shadow passwords was to _hide_ a user's password hash from other users. Previously, the crypt hash was stored directly in/etc/passwd, as you suggest, and it was responsible for a lot of cracked root accounts on systems where a password change policy was not in place (i.e.: most). It's a lot easier to crack a password within a given amount of time given the hash and the hash function, than by brute forcing a login.
In many cases, you CAN do something worthwhile, even if it's a large project. I needed to "get under the hood" with glibc, gdb and vim, for example. In glibc's case, I found the problem, fixed it, went around to file a report with the fix and found out it was fixed in CVS, bummer:)
I can't count how many times this has happened to me. The most recent occurrence was in the XFree86 'chips' driver. Spent the better half of a day building a debug X server and isolating the problem, then discovering the fix was in X.org CVS.
The gdb case was more important, 'cos that bug was getting in our way to debug our application. If it were a closed source debugger, my only bet would be to mail the developers/publishers and hope for the best.
<troll>If it were a closed source application, it would have been higher quality because it went through QA, and not had such obvious bugs in the first place.</troll>
I think he hit th enail on the head - how many times do you see someone looking for an OSS aka "free" counterpart to a CSS aka "cost money" product? They're looking for free as in no cost, not as in I can mod it.
You're generalizing based on your own opinion or the opinions of people you know. In the circles I travel within, the prevailing taste is the opposite. The first thing we look for when doing a software search is something that we can freely modify. Only once those options have been exhausted according to the project requirements, do we turn to proprietary alternatives.
In the Southwest, Mexicans were immigrating illegally in large numbers, taking up jobs that should have gone to Americans (in their opinion) and building shoddy neighborhoods, ruining the scenery. The locales resented this and demanded that the federal government make marijuana illegal, which a significant proportion of the illegal immigrants happened to use. The Marijuana Tax Act was passed as a result. It doesn't sound so bad, except the government wouldn't actually sell the stamps, effectively outlawing marijuana. The Mexicans who continued to use it were jailed, and a massive government propaganda campaign was launched in support of the motion so that people wouldn't be too bothered that it was an unconstitutional act.
We don't want the child to succumb to temptations of pleasure, because such acts would be against our value system. Therefore, we alter the child to limit the pleasurable rewards of succumbing to temptation, in the hopes that he won't grow up to enjoy doing things that we don't approve of. This is the best way to ensure that the next generation conforms to the value system of the current generation.
(c) it's virtually impossible to remove XFree packages from a Debian installation and not remove every other program that uses X on the system, which is why I had to just plain install source-built XF over the top of the Debian installed one.
You're talking crazy talk. The client-side libraries are the only thing that X clients depend upon. You can have X applications installed on a Debian system with _no_ X server. An X application only needs the client libraries to talk to whatever server it feels like.
I've never even cracked the bindings of XFree source. I imagine, that it's probably a myriad of horrible hacked crap dating back 10-15 years or more in several places.
No, actually most of the code (excepting the display drivers) is quite clean, modular, and well-documented. But you couldn't be bothered to look before spouting off a sensational opinion, could you now?
P2P isn't any more convenient than the half-dozen music stores that already exist. It's a halfway convenient source for movies and television--but the former you have extant mail-order services, and for the latter you can just build a box and record the darn shows yourself.
It's very convenient for sharing documents, legal media, free software, etc. Should such a medium be outlawed because pirates like to use it too? Shall we also outlaw FTP, or TCP/IP?
How exactly is Red Hat a "freeloading" company? If you would bother with the facts for a moment, RH people do more work on the GNU toolchain than any other commercial distribution. Also, you seem to have this misconception that RMS intends for software to have no value. If you actually bother to read the GPL or GNU stuff, he has nothing against profiting off software. What he has something against is the author keeping the user from exercising what he believes is a basic right in software: modification and redistribution. You may not agree that such things should be a basic right, but a lot of users seem to like his approach. I wonder why? Maybe they care more about having useful and supportable software than keeping food on your table?
Bottom line: thanks to the donations of many people, many other people will lose the value of their skills.
Boo fucking hoo. Keeping people employed for the sake of keeping them employed is a false economy. It is obvious that if they are losing their jobs, that there is a more efficient way to get the same work done (or the business is simply being irrational). Use your skills to find new niches and explore new innovations. That's called competition, and is actually the essence of capitalism, as opposed to your assertion that people doing something they love in their free time (or for pay) is somehow a communist zeitgeist, trying to assimilate opportunities for authors of crappy shareware and crappily supported business software.
Good for you if you are able to find users who don't care if you disappear tomorrow and they are stuck with an unsupported mass of bits for their money. I suspect the number of such users is dwindling daily as they get burned and vow "never again".
Patents have become a big problem in recent years. It is much easier to simply not publish your documentation, than the alternative: to publish it (either openly or under NDA), have a competitor catch wind of your design and locate some vague patent they have that seems to cover some aspect of it, and spend years in a costly court battle, only to end up cross-licensing your valuable portfolio just to avoid being sunk by deliberately anti-competitive licensing fees.
It's only going to get worse from here on out. Ironically, while the patent system was originally designed to encourage publication, it is rife with problems currently which actually encourage secrecy, because that's the only way to avoid being the target of a lawsuit over some vague concept that a competitor happened to hold a patent on. Of course, you will have your own patents on vague concepts, so it's only a matter of who fires first. The hope with the secrecy approach is that nobody fires, because in the end the only winners are the lawyers.
So playing imported commercial software, and developing one's own homebrew software or using others' homebrew software on the console that you own are not valid reasons to own a modchip? I think the water is a bit too muddy to be jerking your knee around in.
How is this a big blow to piracy? Piracy was _already_ illegal. What does making a potential piracy tool illegal accomplish? Is piracy somehow now "more" illegal now that the digital equivalent of a lockpick has been outlawed?
No, I want to use someone else's code because they said that it was "free". However, we've demonstrated that it really isn't free in any objective sense, thus proving once again the point that GPL is no more "free" than commercial software.
Right. A piece of GPL software that you are guaranteed the right to use for any purpose including private modification, and granted the additional right to modify and redistribute as long as it is done under the same terms, is no more free than a piece of commercial software which you are forbidden by the EULA to backup, reverse engineer, share, modify, benchmark,...
Are you absolutely out of your mind or have you just had too much to drink this week?
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Sorry, you're the one that doesn't know "what the fuck" you're talking about. Use (including private modification) and redistribution are two completely different things as far as copyright law is concerned. Your insinuation, that using a piece of software or modifying it for private use requires one to accept the GPL, communicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what actions a copyright license covers.
Another important use of OSS is as a learning tool. Seeing how another programmer attacked a related problem can give you powerful insight in how to solve your problem.
Yes, and exactly how does the GPL prevent you from doing that? That is exactly what has been done in FreeBSD development to engineer many hardware drivers - look at the GPL linux driver, and write their own driver from scratch. That is not a copyright violation, nor is it against the spirit of the GPL. If you want to use the code under different terms, you get to do the footwork. Simple as that.
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A better label to use would be "complex". To respond to your argument that the only obstacles to db-fs are ignorance and blind conservatism, complex software is undesirable. It increases costs in terms of man hours to maintain it, it increases QA overhead, and it increases support calls from users who came to depend on a feature which was included for completeness, but was never audited for correctness or robustness. People don't code complex software unless they are paid to do it (and usually when a manager is making the technical decisions). This is the reason most open source/free software tools seem to follow the Unix philosophy; simple tools which do one task and do it well, but are yet flexible enough to build into more complex systems. A monolithic database filesystem does not appeal to the sort of psyche which produces open source code for that reason: Complexity doesn't make a programmer's job fun. In order to produce large amounts of code at a low cost as in the open source/free software world, the people behind the engineering of the software need to be having fun, and a complex database filesystem is a rather good example of something which is _not_ fun to produce and therefore unappealing to the hacker sort.
Good for you if you are able to find users who don't care if you disappear tomorrow and they are stuck with an unsupported mass of bits for their money. I suspect the number of such users is dwindling daily as they get burned and vow "never again".
Innovate or die, pal.
It's only going to get worse from here on out. Ironically, while the patent system was originally designed to encourage publication, it is rife with problems currently which actually encourage secrecy, because that's the only way to avoid being the target of a lawsuit over some vague concept that a competitor happened to hold a patent on. Of course, you will have your own patents on vague concepts, so it's only a matter of who fires first. The hope with the secrecy approach is that nobody fires, because in the end the only winners are the lawyers.
Are you absolutely out of your mind or have you just had too much to drink this week?