RMS has stated on many occasions, including in his writing, that he believes proprietary software is immoral. He's been almost explicit about the immorality of licenses he disagrees with, such as the BSD license. So yes, RMS wants everyone to buy into his philosophy, to the point of labelling everyone who doesn't as a bad person doing bad things.
I know he has said that proprietary software is immoral, but I don't ever recall him say it about the BSD licenses (and would be very surprissed if he did). In fact, I'm almost certain the fsf website lists that as a "good" free license (the modern versions of it, the older ones had some ambiguity and even BSD folks don't use those any more).
I'm very late to this I know, but I usually try to do at least a little proofreading before putting things up for RMS. Due to limited time, I don't catch everything, but I do try (as does RMS). When someone notices a typo or mistake on anything on stallman.org, they can email RMS (or me) and I try to fix it ASAP. Is that a perferct system, probably not, but it is better than what a lot of people and places do.
Wow, if that's the criteria, I think I had a datacenter in my office when I was at NASA just based on the machines we used for builds and tests of our software.
Everyone is always just a few clicks away from being caught in a phishing scam. In fact, wouldn't it be closer to say that everyone is just one click away (the link from their email)?
Some of us still use console based email clients (yay pine) so we're actually a a long, painful process involving config files and remembering how to start firefox on the local machine instead of the remote one along with a few clicks away from these scams. Usually by that point I don't even care what the link is anymore so no threat of clicking it.
I think we should call this 'security through frustration.'.
I'm not sure I understand the overwhelmingly negative reaction to javascript in pdf files. I realize that there is a danger in allowing executable content in files (and it is arguable whether or not the danger is worth it) but I do not understand why so many people don't seem to understand that there are at least possible benefits to it.
I used to make slides for talks using LaTeX. There are great ways to include animations directly in the pdf that use javascript. I always had far less trouble getting my animations to play than other people at conferences I went to because acrobat reader was all I needed and it is nearly always there. And for the record, the animations were things I really needed since they showed output from simulations.
I've also seen lots of forms that do some math or validation. How do people think that happens?
Again, I think we need to be very careful about executable code but that doesn't mean there are no possible good uses for it.
The parent sounds like the people who still use pine for checking their email. At some point, folks, the world is going to move on to new technology whether or not it is secure or you like it.
Hey, no need to be down on pine users. Some us of still use pine (or hopefully alpine) because we like how it works compared to other mail clients, not because we are stuck in the past. We use cvs because we are stuck in the past, but alpine/pine because we like it. And we even live in the modern world of html email and all that stuff. The anti-flash people are way worse then us. Really.
- BSD, Creative Commons licenses, and other licenses are geek versions of The Koran, Buddhist literature, or the Tanakh. These documents go against god (RMS)'s word and those who use them should have their Code assimilated by the GPL.
I realize I probably shouldn't take this post too seriously, but last I checked, RMS and the FSF are just fine with a lot of non-GNU licenses. That includes the modern BSD license, the X11 license, and a bunch of others. Some, like the old BSD one aren't liked for practical reasons, but it really isn't the crazy GNU only thing some people want to make it sound like. In fact, there are a whole bunch of things on RMS' personal site (stallman.org) that are Create Common licensed.
Anyone ever tried to get a C++ job? They are few and far between.
Actually I just did a couple of months ago. And I found more than one. In fact I'm sitting here at the one I took posting this while I wait for a whole lot of C++ code to compile.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something,
Text editors can be used for code and not just things like HTML. I highly doubt all coders have abandoned emacs or vi (yuck) for IDEs.
I know I find that sometimes being able to fit the whole body of a loop or maybe a whole function on the screen at once is a great thing for understanding what is going on.
But, on the other side, when doing things like LaTeX editing I want horizontal space more. So maybe it really does depend on the application.
Cool idea (although I'm more in the Free Software camp than the Open Source one, but what the hell, we can all be friends). Here's my stuff:
ZEUS-MP -- Not originally mine, but I've done a lot of work on it and released this version of an older parallel MHD code for astronomy.
Misc. Free stuff -- bunch of perl and python scripts along with some LaTeX macros (including one for making business cards).
Sadly, with all the work trying to finish my dissertation these days I haven't updated anything in a while.
Well, I'm finally moving from working on a FORTRAN 77 project to a C++ project in a few months, so I'm curious what you mean there. Maybe that like FORTRAN, C++ will never go away no matter how much we wish it would. And even worse that after using it for a while you secretly think it does some thing better than the more dominant languages but people look at you like you are crazy if you say so. For example, FORTRAN 77 has a better system for simple file IO than C/C++. There, I said it.
The Motorola Q has some really great features, and it turns out a lot of them are masked or outright disabled (Java support)
That's kind of a misrepresentation of things. The Q (at least the Verizon one) doesn't come with Java, but nothing stops you from installing it. And once installed there are no limitations on what programs you can install and run (whether or not they will work is a different story).
I've got IBM's J9 java on my Q and use MidpSSH (and java ssh client) and it works pretty well. Probably fails less than many of the built in apps.
Ask any Windows Mobile user how much they web browse on their pda/phone.
"Browse" is a pretty strong word for what I can do with the web browser on my Q. Struggling through quicksand or maybe tar to glimpse tiny bits of the information I want before something crashes or the battery dies is probably more accurate.
I said some of this in the post answering the post above yours, but enough browsers (Gecko-based, Webkit-based, and Opera) support enough of the standard that yes, I think people should code to the standard. And even IE is supposed to be moving towards better standards compliance, so I don't think I would call HTML 4 and XHTML unused standards.
There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.
Obviously one still needs to test against browsers. But Gecko, Webkit, and Opera all do a good job with all but the most exotic parts of the standards. And I do realize that realistically, IE represents a large portion of web traffic. But does that mean we should all give in and just code to IE? I certainly don't feel that way and think it would be pretty sad if everyone else did.
But the fewer cores the web devs need to support, the better.
I really have to disagree there. Web devs should not support any rendering engine. It may makes sense to test against more than one engine, but a website should never be written for a given rendering engine. We've seen the mess that gets us. Website should be written to standards and the people who write the rendering engines should then try to write their engines to that. Some of them do. No one gets that perfect, but with one exception, they all do at least an okay job. And supposedly even IE is doing better although I really have no way of testing that myself.
Considering how often my Motorola Q (Windows Mobile 5) reboots, freezes, or loses the ability to make network (voice or data) connections, there isn't much time left for it to be vulnerable. If that isn't secure (for a Microsoft product anyway), I don't know what is. And, if the battery life gets any worse, I'll probably only have minutes a day where the phone can even be turned on, which will shorten the window of opportunity for malware to get at it even more,
I'm sure the real UNIX greybeards are laughing at us for these comments, but I'm pretty sure I remember virtual desktops on a SGI in 1996 (which having just upgraded to Windows 95 recently on my own computer, was extremely impressive).
Interesting idea, but I'm pretty sure that even with a supermassive black hole, you would not be able to accelerate a whole star to any relativistic speeds. I work on models involving jets from AGN which are accelerated to relativistic speeds by supermassive black holes, and those are made up of individual particles (maybe electrons and positrons, but it isn't totally clear). So it looks like that is about the biggest thing you can accelerate that fast. Plus, if something gets close enough to actually get accelerated relativistically, it will also get shredded (not to mention all the x-rays from the accretion disk and things like that).
Encounters with regular black holes or stars can certainly throw objects out of a galaxy, but it will only get to something around the escape speed of the galaxy (hundreds of km per second at most I think).
I haven't read the article (or the paper it talks about), but since I'm an astronomer, I think I have an idea what the strange thing about this is.
Only massive stars end with a supernova, and massive stars are very short-lived. So generally, while a low mass star like our sun is likely to be found far from where it was born, massive stars usually are only found close to where they were born (since they don't live long enough to travel far). But, stars are usually born in dense areas in galaxies (so the space between galaxies would be a very unlikely place for star formation to happen).
So that is most likely why this is considered an odd case.
Teacher doesn't know all things about all things, makes request for perfectly reasonable action from child under his/her supervision. Child refuses on the grounds that child knows better than the teacher what the teacher was asking the child to do. Teacher gives child detention for disobedience.
No one really expects (or at least I hope they don't) for a teacher to know everything. What people should expect is that the teacher should be at least somewhat aware of what they don't know (and occasionally even try to fix that). In this case, if computers are used in the classroom, it would seem reasonable to expect the teacher to know a little bit about them (at least at the level of what a web browser is). And if they see something they don't understand, they should maybe consider finding out what it is. That doesn't sound like I'm asking for an omniscient teacher. Just one who knows that they aren't omniscient.
I do of course admit that without the full story (which only the people there probably have) it is hard to say who had what attitude (the student could very well have been totally out of line in his response). But I am a bit surprised by how pro-authority so many of the comments on slashdot have become.
I don't think so.. Google maps rocks.. the mobile version is killer if you have a java enabled phone..
If you are on Verizon that means you are screwed since they Hacked out java.
Google maps works fine on my Motorola Q from Verizon. It might actually be the only thing that works fine on this phone. And it isn't a java app (although with far too much effort it is possible to get java apps to run on this phone as well). But that is just a minor correction. I agree that google maps is great on a mobile and that Verizon customers (like me) are getting screwed.
Actually, the non-smooth playback seems to be related to the use of a still frame as a placeholder for graceful failure (i.e., with xpdf). In fullscreen, I get smooth playback on every machine I've tried except my work desktop (Mandrake 10 with some serious video issues). If I do not include that fallback frame, then the playback is smooth on pretty much anything. I thought the problem was limited to my desktop, so I kept the frame in since I prefer to use xpdf when composing things (thanks to its ability to reload pdfs and its speed compared to acrobat reader).
I'm not sure why I've never tried beamer's \animate command. It would have the advantage over pdfanim that you could use any image format that pdflatex understands instead of just pdfs. And it might work with xpdf. I may play around with that next time.
The movie15 package looks pretty interesting. The ability to include any file type is nice (pdfanim requires each frame be a pdf which is a pain, but imagemagick can do it just fine). And it is very cool that it also completely embeds the attached file in the pdf. But the downside is that movie15 depends on an external program to play the file. That seems dangerous. For any of its flaws, pdfanim has the plus that acrobat reader handles playing the movie all by itself. It requires acrobat reader 7 or greater, but that isn't exactly uncommon. If you don't know what machine you'll be using, this is a big plus.
Of course movie15 still looks interesting enough that I'm going to look at it a bit more closely once I get the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS has stated on many occasions, including in his writing, that he believes proprietary software is immoral. He's been almost explicit about the immorality of licenses he disagrees with, such as the BSD license. So yes, RMS wants everyone to buy into his philosophy, to the point of labelling everyone who doesn't as a bad person doing bad things.
I know he has said that proprietary software is immoral, but I don't ever recall him say it about the BSD licenses (and would be very surprissed if he did). In fact, I'm almost certain the fsf website lists that as a "good" free license (the modern versions of it, the older ones had some ambiguity and even BSD folks don't use those any more).
I'm very late to this I know, but I usually try to do at least a little proofreading before putting things up for RMS. Due to limited time, I don't catch everything, but I do try (as does RMS). When someone notices a typo or mistake on anything on stallman.org, they can email RMS (or me) and I try to fix it ASAP. Is that a perferct system, probably not, but it is better than what a lot of people and places do.
Wow, if that's the criteria, I think I had a datacenter in my office when I was at NASA just based on the machines we used for builds and tests of our software.
No mod points so I'll just have to reply to say that you sir, could not be more right. Nothing in the DC area that is anything like a Garbage Plate.
Some of us still use console based email clients (yay pine) so we're actually a a long, painful process involving config files and remembering how to start firefox on the local machine instead of the remote one along with a few clicks away from these scams. Usually by that point I don't even care what the link is anymore so no threat of clicking it.
I think we should call this 'security through frustration.'.
I used to make slides for talks using LaTeX. There are great ways to include animations directly in the pdf that use javascript. I always had far less trouble getting my animations to play than other people at conferences I went to because acrobat reader was all I needed and it is nearly always there. And for the record, the animations were things I really needed since they showed output from simulations.
I've also seen lots of forms that do some math or validation. How do people think that happens?
Again, I think we need to be very careful about executable code but that doesn't mean there are no possible good uses for it.
Hey, no need to be down on pine users. Some us of still use pine (or hopefully alpine) because we like how it works compared to other mail clients, not because we are stuck in the past. We use cvs because we are stuck in the past, but alpine/pine because we like it. And we even live in the modern world of html email and all that stuff. The anti-flash people are way worse then us. Really.
I realize I probably shouldn't take this post too seriously, but last I checked, RMS and the FSF are just fine with a lot of non-GNU licenses. That includes the modern BSD license, the X11 license, and a bunch of others. Some, like the old BSD one aren't liked for practical reasons, but it really isn't the crazy GNU only thing some people want to make it sound like. In fact, there are a whole bunch of things on RMS' personal site (stallman.org) that are Create Common licensed.
Actually I just did a couple of months ago. And I found more than one. In fact I'm sitting here at the one I took posting this while I wait for a whole lot of C++ code to compile.
I know I find that sometimes being able to fit the whole body of a loop or maybe a whole function on the screen at once is a great thing for understanding what is going on.
But, on the other side, when doing things like LaTeX editing I want horizontal space more. So maybe it really does depend on the application.
Cool idea (although I'm more in the Free Software camp than the Open Source one, but what the hell, we can all be friends). Here's my stuff:
ZEUS-MP -- Not originally mine, but I've done a lot of work on it and released this version of an older parallel MHD code for astronomy.
Misc. Free stuff -- bunch of perl and python scripts along with some LaTeX macros (including one for making business cards).
Sadly, with all the work trying to finish my dissertation these days I haven't updated anything in a while.
I've got IBM's J9 java on my Q and use MidpSSH (and java ssh client) and it works pretty well. Probably fails less than many of the built in apps.
There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.
Obviously one still needs to test against browsers. But Gecko, Webkit, and Opera all do a good job with all but the most exotic parts of the standards. And I do realize that realistically, IE represents a large portion of web traffic. But does that mean we should all give in and just code to IE? I certainly don't feel that way and think it would be pretty sad if everyone else did.
Considering how often my Motorola Q (Windows Mobile 5) reboots, freezes, or loses the ability to make network (voice or data) connections, there isn't much time left for it to be vulnerable. If that isn't secure (for a Microsoft product anyway), I don't know what is. And, if the battery life gets any worse, I'll probably only have minutes a day where the phone can even be turned on, which will shorten the window of opportunity for malware to get at it even more,
I'm sure the real UNIX greybeards are laughing at us for these comments, but I'm pretty sure I remember virtual desktops on a SGI in 1996 (which having just upgraded to Windows 95 recently on my own computer, was extremely impressive).
Interesting idea, but I'm pretty sure that even with a supermassive black hole, you would not be able to accelerate a whole star to any relativistic speeds. I work on models involving jets from AGN which are accelerated to relativistic speeds by supermassive black holes, and those are made up of individual particles (maybe electrons and positrons, but it isn't totally clear). So it looks like that is about the biggest thing you can accelerate that fast. Plus, if something gets close enough to actually get accelerated relativistically, it will also get shredded (not to mention all the x-rays from the accretion disk and things like that).
Encounters with regular black holes or stars can certainly throw objects out of a galaxy, but it will only get to something around the escape speed of the galaxy (hundreds of km per second at most I think).
I haven't read the article (or the paper it talks about), but since I'm an astronomer, I think I have an idea what the strange thing about this is.
Only massive stars end with a supernova, and massive stars are very short-lived. So generally, while a low mass star like our sun is likely to be found far from where it was born, massive stars usually are only found close to where they were born (since they don't live long enough to travel far). But, stars are usually born in dense areas in galaxies (so the space between galaxies would be a very unlikely place for star formation to happen).
So that is most likely why this is considered an odd case.
I do of course admit that without the full story (which only the people there probably have) it is hard to say who had what attitude (the student could very well have been totally out of line in his response). But I am a bit surprised by how pro-authority so many of the comments on slashdot have become.
I'm not sure why I've never tried beamer's \animate command. It would have the advantage over pdfanim that you could use any image format that pdflatex understands instead of just pdfs. And it might work with xpdf. I may play around with that next time.
Of course movie15 still looks interesting enough that I'm going to look at it a bit more closely once I get the chance.