Yours is 14 inches in diameter?! Wow, that's... something, I guess. I would say "sorry for your inability to have sex, ever", but I doubt that your girth is the primary obstacle.
That can't be it, since there have existed 128-bit registers and instructions to load/store 128-bit values since SSE was introduced back in the Pentium II or III. The actual data buses in the processors weren't 128 bit until later, but this was invisible to software. For example the AMD Phenom had 128-bit data buses as a major feature, so it could do the full instructions in one chunk rather than splitting them into two. But software by and large did not have to be changed.
GPUs have wide data buses, not address buses. Data buses 128 bits and wider have been on mainstream cpus for a while now, though GPUs still have an advantage there.
You heard it here first, folks: 64-bit ought to be enough for anybody.
For a while, for a while!
I'm not falling into the Bill Gates trap. Though I will predict this: 64 bits will be enough for everyone for a hell of a lot longer than 640k RAM was enough for everyone! Seeing as it basically never was...
The original IBM System 38 and its descendants, such as OS/400, OS/500, etc., had a 128-bit address space. In these architectures, the large number of address bits were used to provide an address space that spanned both memory and disks and was used to provide processor-level protection for objects stored there. Using large address spaces to ensure hardware protection of system objects is a good start on a highly secure OS and is probably where this is going.
Sounds like classic IBM overkill, seeing as at the time you could have memory mapped every disk on earth into a single 64-bit address space.
Outside of normal page table protection, what does having extra address bits provide with regard to protecting hardware objects?
But neither size_t nor off_t need to exceed 64 bits. Ever...
Well, not for a long time, but they probably will need to increase.
In fact, in the amd64 instruction set, only 48 bits can be used to address memory -- the rest are for the CPU instruction, so that both the operation and the operand fit in one 64-bit word. The amd64-architecture is thus "limited" to 256 TB -- that's the largest RAM an amd64-machine can have and the largest file and amd64-machine can mmap
That's simply untrue. 48 bits for virtual and physical addresses is a limitation of current implementations, but the ISA definitely supports up to 64-bits. "The rest" of the bits are not used for anything, and in fact AMD quite intelligently designed it so that you can't use them for anything by requiring all addresses to be in "canonical form", meaning they must be sign extended from the MSB. That prevents programmers who are too clever for their own good from using those bits for extra state, meaning programs written for current AMD processors will still work when they increase the supported number of address bits in future implementations.
They've already done this once, increasing the supported physical address bits from 40 to 48.
As far as the instructions go... amd64 uses variable length instructions just like x86 always has. Even in ia32 you can get instructions up to 15 bytes long by chaining prefixes.
This probe impact is going to kick up vastly more material than a practical robot could ever dig. If your goal is an existence proof of water, and you don't know how common it is, then you want to go through as much material as possible. Phoenix barely scratched the surface of Mars. If signs of water had been more than a few inches deep, it wouldn't have found them before it died.
Maybe once we've confirmed there's water in those craters, it'll be worth sending a robot of some kind to take a closer look.
Okay, but the question is what does that mean? If it just means 128-bit operations or registers, then that's been around since the original SSE. If it means 128-bit addressing (like it usually does), then who the fuck is making those chips and why? Very few 64-bit chips actually support the full 64-bits of address space (certainly not Intel or AMD), simply because there's no need. You could make every computer on earth part of a huge shared-memory system and have room to spare, not that you'd ever do such a thing. Once systems get far enough apart, shared memory stops making sense as maintaining coherence/consistency becomes too much of an overhead. If you were building a cluster as a shared memory system, and each node had 1 TB of RAM, you could fit ten million nodes in before you started to have address space problems. Even the most wasteful of Stupid Virtual Memory Tricks aren't going to put a lot of pressure on 64-bit addressing any time soon.
I mean I guess I can see the point for the distant future, and hey who the hell knows when Windows 9 is planned for much less will actually arrive, so it can't hurt to make sure it's 'compatible'... I'm just more surprised that any of the partners listed would have 128-bit on even far-reaching roadmaps.
What is the real use in this? When, within reasonable (I'm not a scientist, but lets use an 85% confidence interval) levels of knowing, would we be able to determine that in fact, yes, this thing is or is not going to hit us?
How's a 99.9996% confidence interval? Not the most obvious way to word it and it doesn't strictly apply, but you could say that in the population of hypothetical asteroid trajectories, 99.9996% of them don't hit earth. More study of its orbit is probably going to increase that number.
Not sure how saying it's odds of hitting us is 1 in 250,000 is less useful than saying it's definitely not going to hit us (with 85% certainty).:)
The article states that they aren't being given the funding to further fund research centers for adequate testing. Politics aside - is there any funding (and more importantly, scientific viability) for preventative action for any of this, or are we just providing confidence intervals of our ultimate doom?
Sadly, no in terms of funding. Even the agencies who could conceivably cobble together something at the last minute aren't getting enough funding. We aren't funding the finding of these object to see if we even need preventative action.
As far as viability... there are quite a few things that would work quite easily with today's technology. But it would take time to actually construct the solution. And they all take time. Virtually none of them would work with only a year before the impact. Even ignoring the silliness of the Armageddon Solution blowing apart a Texas-sized meteor with a nuke, all it would mean is that two California-sized meteors hit the earth instead. The solutions most likely to work are ones where we slowly push (or pull) it out of the way over the course of years.
I'm not really worried about an asteroid that we know about, and are tracking, that looks very unlikely to hit the earth. I'm much more worried about all the objects we don't know about, so we have no idea how likely they are to hit us. My biggest concern is that we discover an object that has a high probability of hitting earth in only a year or two.
I mean, who knows if the path of the asteroid may deviate a little bit due to gravitational pull of different planets/stars etc.
Well they're pretty certain that it will deviate due to the variety of forces on it, which is exactly why the result is given as a probability, rather than a "will hit" or "will miss by X miles". It's also why the probability changed with further observation. Conditional probability is basically serving as a stand-in for what we don't know and the fact that we can't solve N-body gravitational problems. The more we know about the asteroid's trajectory, the more we can say about it's potential future paths and the likely hood of it hitting earth. At the end of the day (or the planet), it will either be nudged onto a path that will impact us or it won't, but right now it looks unlikely that it'll happen.
No, because that could mean one of the many new rings found within the existing ring system. This headline is better because it suggests a ring even bigger than the known ones. It is a Giant in comparison. And indeed, that implication is quite correct.
Only to a Slashdot Pedant (a truly "special" kind of pedant) would the headline "NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn" not imply "previously unknown". Like there's a bunch of rings known to astronomers but not NASA!
I think you're mistaking realclimate.org for some other site. realclimate.org specifically refutes the inane misconceptions that are out there from AGW deniers.
Nope, I'm well aware. That was my whole point, that realclimate.org is basically a list of well-refuted misconceptions. So by creating a post by stringing those together, you're creating a post that is pre-refuted.
Even though my "theory" is just a joke, I don't think it's an accident that at least when I last looked at it, the OP was modded funny.:)
I don't think you need to link realclimate.org, because if I'm not mistaken, the OP was generated by a script that grabs random misconceptions from realclimate.org and strings them together. Or the same was done manually.:)
Yes you are correct that the climate has changed plenty of times in the past. The question is: How do you know that? Let me answer for you: Some dedicated researchers figured it out for you, told you, and you believed them. As you should, since they know what they're talking about.
Do you realize how much overlap there is between the people saying the thing you automatically believe, and the people saying the thing you automatically don't?
Fuck "common knowledge". Climatologists sure as fuck are aware that the climate has changed before without human intervention. Yet they have ample reason (as in evidence) to suggest this change is different, and those reasons even take into account previous change. Maybe you should tell one of them how the Sahara was a savannah, and therefore anthropogenic global climate change isn't occurring, because that's such a good argument!
So yeah. You won a fight against an imaginary layman less educated than yourself. Congratulations. Of course your implied counter-logic of "climate change happened before, therefore this time isn't our fault" is equally flawed.
If you get rid of the "common knowledge" aspect of your post, you're basically saying "Scientists say X which is true, and that obviously means the scientists who say Y are wrong." Except the scientists who say X don't agree with that conclusion. I wonder why? Oh yes, because it's bullshit. Your knowledge is no better than that of the strawman you burned.
To be told I cannot write what I want seems extremely.. limiting and unfree.
Just as people are free to write proprietary software, people should be allowed to write things with mono, it's their choice.
How is being told that you shouldn't use some product by someone with no actual authority over you in any way "unfree"? You obviously don't feel compelled to obey RMS, he can't make you stop, he can only explain why he thinks it's a bad idea. So you ARE "allowed" to do whatever you want.
That doesn't mean everyone will approve. When the goal is maximizing user freedom everywhere, you can say "Hey I'm going to go write proprietary software for Windows", and they will understandably not approve of your choice to use your personal freedom to limit the freedom of others. But it's still your choice. It's their choice to think that's a bad choice. So what was your point even?
You have to admit though, Stallman is hardline no grey area, if you can point at a specific patent for a piece of software, he will call it the devil and not free, even if the party has no intention on sueing for damages/royalties. This almost makes me actually want to go patent hunting, if it wasn't for the fact I love OSS software.
Oh yes RMS is very hardline and uncompromising on his principles. However, he is able to distinguish based on the nuances of the situation, which you seem to have trouble with which is why everything you said after "grey area" is bullshit. Samba vs Mono, it's that simple.
In sticking with the fat example.. it was KNOWN that linux violated the fat long filename support patent for quite some time.. but it was only changed when microsoft sued tom tom.. why? if the mere danger of the patent existing is enough shouldn't it have been re-written long before that and never been an issue?
Did I not mention it involves multiple factors? Do you not remember the.gif example from my previous posts, which was dealt with before anyone got sued? The answer is "different situations are different", something I find it amazing I even have to type.
Anyways, I tire of this, to some people RMS can do no wrong
Ugh. Yes, it is tiring talking to someone who refuses to distinguish.
I do apologise for not backing up my arguments earlier more though with references, hunting through patents really isn't the highlight of my day
That's fine. You could have at least read mine, and seen how different situations are different. What good would patent searches do when your basic postulate is that all situations are the same, so you don't need to know how the patent is used, who owns it, what the legal situation around the patent is, etc etc. Those things matter. You won't find them in a patent search.
Of course not, but he is against anything whatsoever covered by patents.. which is basically any standard ever made by microsoft.
Anyone who understands the nature of software is against software patents on principle. But that's a different discussion.
He is not against anything covered by patents. He's against anything covered by patents that could be used to reduce freedom. GPLv2 and v3 cover the patent issue in different ways, but in both cases, the basic point is: You can't use patents to prevent the distribution of GPL software.
It IS a ridiculously easy target.. that has not been attacked yet.
No, it really isn't. The Windows API is not patented. Microsoft can and would go after them if it was that easy. They already have for other free software products, but the key is they have to have an actual case.
Ah so it does implement things covered by patents now, but has an agreement? just like mono has a free use of patents agreement with microsoft for the ecma standard... so difference please?
I already explained this with links and everything, but the difference is one is a well-written arrangement that was required to comply with the terms of the EU anti-trust agreement, and the other is one that says its "irrevocable"... except for new versions of the standard, or for "non-conforming" implementations where MS decides what that means. I figured part of your problem was an inability to distinguish between different cases. Neither I nor RMS suffer from that problem, thus why your guesses as to what he would think are so wrong.
And of course part of the point here is that it was possible to implement parts of the standard without violating patents, because not everything is patented.
Please don't make me pull out trivial patents that effect other parts of the kernel, significant proportions of wifi code would have to be removed due to CSIRO wifi patents, etc.. without the patented parts the whole stack is useless.
Be my guest.
Chances are even ext3 infringes some patent if you look deep enough. The point, however is that people only seem to give a crap about this since it's both microsoft and non-native code.
You sound like MS, talking about purely hypothetical patent violations from patents that weren't even theirs. Yes all software potentially violates some patents because it's such an insane minefield. There's a difference between "potentially" and "definitely", though.
If you can't tell the difference between "chances are if you look deep enough" and "definitely with 100% certainty" then there's no helping you; you are incapable of understanding this situation.
So what you are saying is we should wait until we are actually getting sued to remove that functionality, I completely agree, however microsoft has not sued yet, people are just fearing it like the plague.
Obviously that's not what I'm saying since no free software projects were sued over.gifs. You remove the functionality when there's an actual threat. Like, a patent you know you are using, with a license that makes it possible you could be sued, and a party you think it plausible would sue. libgif.so fit all three categories. Mono fits them in fucking spades.
Surprisingly, mono helps stop lock-in also, the sims 3 was written entirely in.net, and since mono is mostly there, was playable on release day on linux thanks to it. There are other instances of course.
There are a hundred other ways to do the same thing. Unfortunately since MS can revoke the license to these patents any time they bump up the version number or add a new feature, you're given a neat tool in the short term, and a big-ol trap in the long term. Once everyone is using.NET, they can lock everyone else out and make sure everyone tracks the only remaining up-to-date version, Microsoft's. It's like IE all over again, but now MS owns the standard. Only a retard would put their head in that bear trap, and defend it by saying "yeah well it's hypothetically possible that ext3 is an equally deadly bear trap on the head!"
Oh, I'm pretty sure he's aware of the patent situation. I have never seen him argue that Mono and Moonlight aren't patent encumbered, or that they won't exist merely by the grace of Microsoft. I've only seen him argue that in spite of the Patent Axe looming over head it will All Turn Out Okay. He either sincerely believes this, or sincerely wants us to believe it.
but c# is and open standard of a language, that's al lit is. If there are any patent problem with any of the libs then we develop around them. Just because the libs are written in c# does not make it any worse.
Mono is not just a c# compiler, it's an implementation of the runtime and the whole.NET framework. It is necessarily subject to certain Microsoft patents, neither side of this argument disputes this. You can't just "develop around them" because the whole point of patents is that they cover the concept not a particular implementation. You can only work around them like we worked around the patent on gif encoding -- by not using gifs!
Mono exists by the good grace of Microsoft and their "Community Promise" which includes an "irrevocable" license which doesn't apply to future versions of the standard. Gee, that doesn't sound like a set-up for the old "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", only this time they're trying to get us to willingly embrace them.
Your java, python, c or c++ code might infringe JUST AS BADLY on various patents and you don't see people running around in circles with flapping arms because of that.
"The code you write might hypothetically infringe patents" isn't anything anywhere close to "the very framework you are writing code in is encumbered by patents owned by a company known to be belligerent to free software." That's why nobody is concerned about those other things.
Duck Dodgers: Ah-ha! Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating pistol! And brother, when it disintegrates, it disintegrates! Duck Dodgers: Heh, what do you know... It disintegrated.
No sir. "Cold" is a human construct. There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."
Aside from "cold death" being a real but different concept... In "heat death" the amount of energy in the universe will not be 0, it will be exactly the same amount as it is today because energy is conserved. It will just be unusable for any ongoing processes like life or stellar fusion.
And sure, "cold" is basically a human construct, but so are positive charge carriers in circuits. It's still useful to talk about. While the existence of absolute zero means (unlike in circuits) you can't universally replace "heat" with "cold", when talking about temperature gradients and heat flow you can, just flip the sign and now it's "cold flow". Pointless mental exercise, but hey, thanks to Benjamin Franklin all us EEs have had to get used to doing it.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Yours is 14 inches in diameter?! Wow, that's... something, I guess. I would say "sorry for your inability to have sex, ever", but I doubt that your girth is the primary obstacle.
That can't be it, since there have existed 128-bit registers and instructions to load/store 128-bit values since SSE was introduced back in the Pentium II or III. The actual data buses in the processors weren't 128 bit until later, but this was invisible to software. For example the AMD Phenom had 128-bit data buses as a major feature, so it could do the full instructions in one chunk rather than splitting them into two. But software by and large did not have to be changed.
GPUs have wide data buses, not address buses. Data buses 128 bits and wider have been on mainstream cpus for a while now, though GPUs still have an advantage there.
You didn't make it to my last paragraph, did you?
I'm saying that if we blow up the moon, we can really see what it's made of!
You heard it here first, folks: 64-bit ought to be enough for anybody.
For a while, for a while!
I'm not falling into the Bill Gates trap. Though I will predict this: 64 bits will be enough for everyone for a hell of a lot longer than 640k RAM was enough for everyone! Seeing as it basically never was...
The original IBM System 38 and its descendants, such as OS/400, OS/500, etc., had a 128-bit address space. In these architectures, the large number of address bits were used to provide an address space that spanned both memory and disks and was used to provide processor-level protection for objects stored there. Using large address spaces to ensure hardware protection of system objects is a good start on a highly secure OS and is probably where this is going.
Sounds like classic IBM overkill, seeing as at the time you could have memory mapped every disk on earth into a single 64-bit address space.
Outside of normal page table protection, what does having extra address bits provide with regard to protecting hardware objects?
But neither size_t nor off_t need to exceed 64 bits. Ever...
Well, not for a long time, but they probably will need to increase.
In fact, in the amd64 instruction set, only 48 bits can be used to address memory -- the rest are for the CPU instruction, so that both the operation and the operand fit in one 64-bit word. The amd64-architecture is thus "limited" to 256 TB -- that's the largest RAM an amd64-machine can have and the largest file and amd64-machine can mmap
That's simply untrue. 48 bits for virtual and physical addresses is a limitation of current implementations, but the ISA definitely supports up to 64-bits. "The rest" of the bits are not used for anything, and in fact AMD quite intelligently designed it so that you can't use them for anything by requiring all addresses to be in "canonical form", meaning they must be sign extended from the MSB. That prevents programmers who are too clever for their own good from using those bits for extra state, meaning programs written for current AMD processors will still work when they increase the supported number of address bits in future implementations.
They've already done this once, increasing the supported physical address bits from 40 to 48.
As far as the instructions go... amd64 uses variable length instructions just like x86 always has. Even in ia32 you can get instructions up to 15 bytes long by chaining prefixes.
This probe impact is going to kick up vastly more material than a practical robot could ever dig. If your goal is an existence proof of water, and you don't know how common it is, then you want to go through as much material as possible. Phoenix barely scratched the surface of Mars. If signs of water had been more than a few inches deep, it wouldn't have found them before it died.
Maybe once we've confirmed there's water in those craters, it'll be worth sending a robot of some kind to take a closer look.
Clearly says architechture.
Okay, but the question is what does that mean? If it just means 128-bit operations or registers, then that's been around since the original SSE. If it means 128-bit addressing (like it usually does), then who the fuck is making those chips and why? Very few 64-bit chips actually support the full 64-bits of address space (certainly not Intel or AMD), simply because there's no need. You could make every computer on earth part of a huge shared-memory system and have room to spare, not that you'd ever do such a thing. Once systems get far enough apart, shared memory stops making sense as maintaining coherence/consistency becomes too much of an overhead. If you were building a cluster as a shared memory system, and each node had 1 TB of RAM, you could fit ten million nodes in before you started to have address space problems. Even the most wasteful of Stupid Virtual Memory Tricks aren't going to put a lot of pressure on 64-bit addressing any time soon.
I mean I guess I can see the point for the distant future, and hey who the hell knows when Windows 9 is planned for much less will actually arrive, so it can't hurt to make sure it's 'compatible'... I'm just more surprised that any of the partners listed would have 128-bit on even far-reaching roadmaps.
This post is better than mine and should be modded up.
What is the real use in this? When, within reasonable (I'm not a scientist, but lets use an 85% confidence interval) levels of knowing, would we be able to determine that in fact, yes, this thing is or is not going to hit us?
How's a 99.9996% confidence interval? Not the most obvious way to word it and it doesn't strictly apply, but you could say that in the population of hypothetical asteroid trajectories, 99.9996% of them don't hit earth. More study of its orbit is probably going to increase that number.
Not sure how saying it's odds of hitting us is 1 in 250,000 is less useful than saying it's definitely not going to hit us (with 85% certainty). :)
The article states that they aren't being given the funding to further fund research centers for adequate testing. Politics aside - is there any funding (and more importantly, scientific viability) for preventative action for any of this, or are we just providing confidence intervals of our ultimate doom?
Sadly, no in terms of funding. Even the agencies who could conceivably cobble together something at the last minute aren't getting enough funding. We aren't funding the finding of these object to see if we even need preventative action.
As far as viability... there are quite a few things that would work quite easily with today's technology. But it would take time to actually construct the solution. And they all take time. Virtually none of them would work with only a year before the impact. Even ignoring the silliness of the Armageddon Solution blowing apart a Texas-sized meteor with a nuke, all it would mean is that two California-sized meteors hit the earth instead. The solutions most likely to work are ones where we slowly push (or pull) it out of the way over the course of years.
I'm not really worried about an asteroid that we know about, and are tracking, that looks very unlikely to hit the earth. I'm much more worried about all the objects we don't know about, so we have no idea how likely they are to hit us. My biggest concern is that we discover an object that has a high probability of hitting earth in only a year or two.
More funding for finding and tracking, pls k thx.
I mean, who knows if the path of the asteroid may deviate a little bit due to gravitational pull of different planets/stars etc.
Well they're pretty certain that it will deviate due to the variety of forces on it, which is exactly why the result is given as a probability, rather than a "will hit" or "will miss by X miles". It's also why the probability changed with further observation. Conditional probability is basically serving as a stand-in for what we don't know and the fact that we can't solve N-body gravitational problems. The more we know about the asteroid's trajectory, the more we can say about it's potential future paths and the likely hood of it hitting earth. At the end of the day (or the planet), it will either be nudged onto a path that will impact us or it won't, but right now it looks unlikely that it'll happen.
It's in regard to earth volumes.
No, because that could mean one of the many new rings found within the existing ring system. This headline is better because it suggests a ring even bigger than the known ones. It is a Giant in comparison. And indeed, that implication is quite correct.
Only to a Slashdot Pedant (a truly "special" kind of pedant) would the headline "NASA Discovers Giant Ring Around Saturn" not imply "previously unknown". Like there's a bunch of rings known to astronomers but not NASA!
i refuse to buy into this bullshit that CO2 is evil - CO2 is a key component to beer, and nothing related to beer can be evil, so shove it.
What a simple view! Beer is like the Yin and Yang, both good and evil simultaneously in a delicious paradox.
To quote the Pope of Beer, Homer Simpson: "Here's to alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems."
I think you're mistaking realclimate.org for some other site. realclimate.org specifically refutes the inane misconceptions that are out there from AGW deniers.
Nope, I'm well aware. That was my whole point, that realclimate.org is basically a list of well-refuted misconceptions. So by creating a post by stringing those together, you're creating a post that is pre-refuted.
Even though my "theory" is just a joke, I don't think it's an accident that at least when I last looked at it, the OP was modded funny. :)
I don't think you need to link realclimate.org, because if I'm not mistaken, the OP was generated by a script that grabs random misconceptions from realclimate.org and strings them together. Or the same was done manually. :)
Yes you are correct that the climate has changed plenty of times in the past. The question is: How do you know that? Let me answer for you: Some dedicated researchers figured it out for you, told you, and you believed them. As you should, since they know what they're talking about.
Do you realize how much overlap there is between the people saying the thing you automatically believe, and the people saying the thing you automatically don't?
Fuck "common knowledge". Climatologists sure as fuck are aware that the climate has changed before without human intervention. Yet they have ample reason (as in evidence) to suggest this change is different, and those reasons even take into account previous change. Maybe you should tell one of them how the Sahara was a savannah, and therefore anthropogenic global climate change isn't occurring, because that's such a good argument!
So yeah. You won a fight against an imaginary layman less educated than yourself. Congratulations. Of course your implied counter-logic of "climate change happened before, therefore this time isn't our fault" is equally flawed.
If you get rid of the "common knowledge" aspect of your post, you're basically saying "Scientists say X which is true, and that obviously means the scientists who say Y are wrong." Except the scientists who say X don't agree with that conclusion. I wonder why? Oh yes, because it's bullshit. Your knowledge is no better than that of the strawman you burned.
To be told I cannot write what I want seems extremely.. limiting and unfree.
Just as people are free to write proprietary software, people should be allowed to write things with mono, it's their choice.
How is being told that you shouldn't use some product by someone with no actual authority over you in any way "unfree"? You obviously don't feel compelled to obey RMS, he can't make you stop, he can only explain why he thinks it's a bad idea. So you ARE "allowed" to do whatever you want.
That doesn't mean everyone will approve. When the goal is maximizing user freedom everywhere, you can say "Hey I'm going to go write proprietary software for Windows", and they will understandably not approve of your choice to use your personal freedom to limit the freedom of others. But it's still your choice. It's their choice to think that's a bad choice. So what was your point even?
You have to admit though, Stallman is hardline no grey area, if you can point at a specific patent for a piece of software, he will call it the devil and not free, even if the party has no intention on sueing for damages/royalties. This almost makes me actually want to go patent hunting, if it wasn't for the fact I love OSS software.
Oh yes RMS is very hardline and uncompromising on his principles. However, he is able to distinguish based on the nuances of the situation, which you seem to have trouble with which is why everything you said after "grey area" is bullshit. Samba vs Mono, it's that simple.
In sticking with the fat example.. it was KNOWN that linux violated the fat long filename support patent for quite some time.. but it was only changed when microsoft sued tom tom.. why? if the mere danger of the patent existing is enough shouldn't it have been re-written long before that and never been an issue?
Did I not mention it involves multiple factors? Do you not remember the .gif example from my previous posts, which was dealt with before anyone got sued? The answer is "different situations are different", something I find it amazing I even have to type.
Anyways, I tire of this, to some people RMS can do no wrong
Ugh. Yes, it is tiring talking to someone who refuses to distinguish.
I do apologise for not backing up my arguments earlier more though with references, hunting through patents really isn't the highlight of my day
That's fine. You could have at least read mine, and seen how different situations are different. What good would patent searches do when your basic postulate is that all situations are the same, so you don't need to know how the patent is used, who owns it, what the legal situation around the patent is, etc etc. Those things matter. You won't find them in a patent search.
Of course not, but he is against anything whatsoever covered by patents.. which is basically any standard ever made by microsoft.
Anyone who understands the nature of software is against software patents on principle. But that's a different discussion.
He is not against anything covered by patents. He's against anything covered by patents that could be used to reduce freedom. GPLv2 and v3 cover the patent issue in different ways, but in both cases, the basic point is: You can't use patents to prevent the distribution of GPL software.
It IS a ridiculously easy target.. that has not been attacked yet.
No, it really isn't. The Windows API is not patented. Microsoft can and would go after them if it was that easy. They already have for other free software products, but the key is they have to have an actual case.
Ah so it does implement things covered by patents now, but has an agreement? just like mono has a free use of patents agreement with microsoft for the ecma standard... so difference please?
I already explained this with links and everything, but the difference is one is a well-written arrangement that was required to comply with the terms of the EU anti-trust agreement, and the other is one that says its "irrevocable"... except for new versions of the standard, or for "non-conforming" implementations where MS decides what that means. I figured part of your problem was an inability to distinguish between different cases. Neither I nor RMS suffer from that problem, thus why your guesses as to what he would think are so wrong.
And of course part of the point here is that it was possible to implement parts of the standard without violating patents, because not everything is patented.
Please don't make me pull out trivial patents that effect other parts of the kernel, significant proportions of wifi code would have to be removed due to CSIRO wifi patents, etc.. without the patented parts the whole stack is useless.
Be my guest.
Chances are even ext3 infringes some patent if you look deep enough. The point, however is that people only seem to give a crap about this since it's both microsoft and non-native code.
You sound like MS, talking about purely hypothetical patent violations from patents that weren't even theirs. Yes all software potentially violates some patents because it's such an insane minefield. There's a difference between "potentially" and "definitely", though.
If you can't tell the difference between "chances are if you look deep enough" and "definitely with 100% certainty" then there's no helping you; you are incapable of understanding this situation.
So what you are saying is we should wait until we are actually getting sued to remove that functionality, I completely agree, however microsoft has not sued yet, people are just fearing it like the plague.
Obviously that's not what I'm saying since no free software projects were sued over .gifs. You remove the functionality when there's an actual threat. Like, a patent you know you are using, with a license that makes it possible you could be sued, and a party you think it plausible would sue. libgif.so fit all three categories. Mono fits them in fucking spades.
Surprisingly, mono helps stop lock-in also, the sims 3 was written entirely in .net, and since mono is mostly there, was playable on release day on linux thanks to it. There are other instances of course.
There are a hundred other ways to do the same thing. Unfortunately since MS can revoke the license to these patents any time they bump up the version number or add a new feature, you're given a neat tool in the short term, and a big-ol trap in the long term. Once everyone is using .NET, they can lock everyone else out and make sure everyone tracks the only remaining up-to-date version, Microsoft's. It's like IE all over again, but now MS owns the standard. Only a retard would put their head in that bear trap, and defend it by saying "yeah well it's hypothetically possible that ext3 is an equally deadly bear trap on the head!"
Oh, I'm pretty sure he's aware of the patent situation. I have never seen him argue that Mono and Moonlight aren't patent encumbered, or that they won't exist merely by the grace of Microsoft. I've only seen him argue that in spite of the Patent Axe looming over head it will All Turn Out Okay. He either sincerely believes this, or sincerely wants us to believe it.
but c# is and open standard of a language, that's al lit is. If there are any patent problem with any of the libs then we develop around them. Just because the libs are written in c# does not make it any worse.
Mono is not just a c# compiler, it's an implementation of the runtime and the whole .NET framework. It is necessarily subject to certain Microsoft patents, neither side of this argument disputes this. You can't just "develop around them" because the whole point of patents is that they cover the concept not a particular implementation. You can only work around them like we worked around the patent on gif encoding -- by not using gifs!
Mono exists by the good grace of Microsoft and their "Community Promise" which includes an "irrevocable" license which doesn't apply to future versions of the standard. Gee, that doesn't sound like a set-up for the old "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", only this time they're trying to get us to willingly embrace them.
Your java, python, c or c++ code might infringe JUST AS BADLY on various patents and you don't see people running around in circles with flapping arms because of that.
"The code you write might hypothetically infringe patents" isn't anything anywhere close to "the very framework you are writing code in is encumbered by patents owned by a company known to be belligerent to free software." That's why nobody is concerned about those other things.
Duck Dodgers: Ah-ha! Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating pistol! And brother, when it disintegrates, it disintegrates!
Duck Dodgers: Heh, what do you know... It disintegrated.
No sir. "Cold" is a human construct. There is only heat, and absence of heat. That is why they call it "heat death" since the universe's heat (or to be more scientific, ENERGY) eventually reduces to 0, thereby causing the universe to "die."
Aside from "cold death" being a real but different concept... In "heat death" the amount of energy in the universe will not be 0, it will be exactly the same amount as it is today because energy is conserved. It will just be unusable for any ongoing processes like life or stellar fusion.
And sure, "cold" is basically a human construct, but so are positive charge carriers in circuits. It's still useful to talk about. While the existence of absolute zero means (unlike in circuits) you can't universally replace "heat" with "cold", when talking about temperature gradients and heat flow you can, just flip the sign and now it's "cold flow". Pointless mental exercise, but hey, thanks to Benjamin Franklin all us EEs have had to get used to doing it. :P