The student council is paying them, and you actually believe that somehow that bill is not paid by yourself?
This deal actually makes everyone pay for the Windows licenses. It's just another way to pull money out of the Linux and Mac crowd by having them foot the bill for discounts that "benefit everyone". You know, crack dealers also give great discounts to poor college people to make them dependant on it.
Of course, if you think it through, you will notice that there is only one who benefits here -- Microsoft. Because people like yourself will now learn to use Windows and Windows based software. That in turn will lead businesses to use Windows, because that's all the new guys from college know. That in turn leeds to people believing that you have to use Windows because "that's what businesses use".
Oh, and I just love how you imply that everyone who has not bought a copy of Windows and Office is a pirate. I don't have a copy of Office. I wouldn't even own a Windows license if I could have bought my notebook without one.
The QuickTime file format is open. Which means nothing because AVI and ASF are documented as well, and at least for AVI Microsoft doesn't want royalties.
MPEG-4 is covered by more patents than the International Space Station. How anyone can call this "open" is beyond me. Maybe it's "open" as in "open your wallet any pay up, damnit!!!"?
But then, I don't get how anyone would want to watch movies on one of those tiny displays knowing that the CPU will drain the batteries within minutes.
At that time you either had SCSI or you had some proprietary bullshit. Just look in the Linux kernel, they still have all the drivers in it. Aztech CD-ROM, Sony CD-ROM, the whole enchilada.
At that time, I had a SCSI CD-ROM on my Pro Audio Spectrum because I couldn't afford a real SCSI controller. Those were the times...;-}
At one CeBIT show a several years ago, they showed an OS/2 running (in SMP mode, even!) on a dual CPU PowerPC box.
I think OS/2 died because their disk cache was so horribly bad. It always was at least an order of magnitude slower than the Linux one. Oh, and I have no idea why they smoked when they named their file system "HP"FS. High performance is about the last thing I would associate with HPFS.
But I was a geek, I would have tried to use it anyway, but my S3 graphics card (which was THE standard graphics chipset) did not work with their driver.
And don't believe anyone who tells you their internals were beautiful. An operating system where a 2d graphics driver (without video acceleration, even!) is over one Meg in size can't be beautiful internally. I once wrote a driver based 2d library for DOS any my S3 driver had about 1000 bytes. That's three orders of magnitude less!
What is all this hoopla about? Some soothsayer makes some outrageous prediction that is not backed by any data whatsoever, and all the world is acting as if it already happened!
Hold your horses, gentlemen.
Their German subsidiary just sold a well researched and completely unbiased prediction that Linux won't stand a chance against Windows on servers and desktops to the Swiss a few months ago. The study claims that Unix scales better than Linux and yet Unix will become a back-end, legacy OS platform by 2003.
Oh, and they also pumped out a different study (which is, by the way, also completely unbiased and astoundingly well-researched) where they predicted Linux will grow from 25% to 35% in the next 2 years, only to be outpaced by... Windows 2000?!
ROTFL! Nobody in their right mind can take these people seriously! I don't even have to contradict them, they do it themselves!
BTW: The PDF is in German, but the pretty figures are all English, so you should have no problem understanding what they are saying.
PS: What good luck we have that their study is a PDF! In it you will find the assertion that Star Office has "uncertainties" opening MS Office files and thus you can't use Linux. Um, well...;)
First of all, nobody was forced to contribute to MySQL. You can have the source code, you can read it, you can understand it, and you can patch it. Nowhere does the license force you to publicize your patches.
But let's talk about Free Software, not MySQL. The GPL forces me as software publisher to allow you to exploit my free software commercially. It also forces you to allow others to do the same. I don't see how this is exploiting anyone unfairly. Except maybe me, because I wrote the software, and I'm (in most cases) not getting any money out of it.
Sending you patches for bugs I found in your software could even be considered as payment! After all, you giving me the source code gave me the opportunity to have this bug fixed. So instead of saying the poor contributor was screwed, I'd say he got paid (he got to use my software in the first place) and he thanked me for it by sending me a patch. Using the patch is no less exploiting than him using my software in the first place!
If a contributor has a problem with MySQL selling his contributed code, he can ask them to get paid for it. They can refuse to integrate his code then. Nobody will be the wiser. And this waste of resources (several people fixing the same bugs independently) is one of the things the GPL eliminates, because the first one to patch it knows that his patch is covered by the GPL, so he might as well send it back to the software author.
MySQL is a bad example because they sell non-GPL licenses. So they can't incorporate external fixes without explicit permission from the contributor to sell licenses of it.
I don't know what you have been smoking, but most free software is not written to bring people together.
I can say that I did not write my free software to help the third world. I did it because I learned from it and I made a living in the time, so I figured, if it's paid for, you can have it.
Writing software does not help the third world, by the way. Not exploiting them with amoral and abominable patent and "intellectual property" law, copyright bullshit and licensing crap, that would help the third world. Nullifying the debt we forced on them with our amoral patent and copyright bullshit, that would help the third world. Giving them free access to medication, stopping to take their natural resources, refining them and selling the result back at inflated prices, that would help the third world.
Software isn't even on the radar. Because there is not enough money to buy computers. They do buy some computers nonetheless, but they do it by adding to their substantial debt.
It's a shame that people have to pay for education and medication. Because medication is commercial, we have statistics that show that 80% of the medication does not even cure anything! Not only do we exploit the third world, we exploit our own population.
What good does free software do to some African starving or having AIDS? Please look up literacy statistics on the third world. What good does software do if the people can't read?
This "civil rights" license is bullshit. I can't blame them, I would be happy if I could cloud my mind from those issues like that. Unfortunately, I can't.
To make myself perfectly clear: what if I put "this software may not be used by US citizen while George W Bush is president" in my software licenses? I personally think that GW Bush needs to go ASAP, but do you honestly think that clause in a license would help? At all?
You don't want to recycle code. You want to use code. If you need to recycle it to be able to use it, the code wasn't worth it in the first place.
All the hoopla about refactoring is mostly good for one thing: to keep the incompetent idiots from doing harm. Let the idiots do the recycling, while the people who know what they are doing write code that doesn't need recycling to be useful.
This is bad (several reasons)
on
Software For Ransom
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
1. people should not start software projects to make money. It's good if you can make money off software, but software written not because you enjoy it or you need this particular problem solved usually sucks.
2. typical free software projects need external help the most in the very beginning. Most projects fail before the first working prototype is finished. Because of that, I won'd be contributing to ransom software; I can't even be sure that the software will be released as free software because I have no way to know how much money will be donated.
3. accountability. How do you know the author will not lie to you about how much money he made so far?
4. disincentive to cheat. If the author survival depends on this, he has an incentive to let you pay through your nose for updates and upgrades and new features, and you will probably hire him because nobody else knows the source code like him so he can be faster than others.
In my experience, free software projects work best if they are a) not paid for at all (you do it in your spare time) or b) they are paid for by one company who really needs this problem solved but you are allowed to release the software as GPL, too.
Even better: c) you start the project as GPL but get your work funded by some company who needs the problem solved. Many of my projects are category c) and it's really in the best interest of you (because you get the money and you get to write free software), the company (they get their problem solved and they get the source code and random people off the net will help them improve their software for free), and the world (because the world gets new free software as part of the creative commons world heritage). In contrast to the street performer protocol this is actually known to work in practice;)
It also is quite unlikely, since Ahmdahl's law is a trivial observation that is completely independent of parallelization or even software engineering (it also applies to hardware design or even accounting). Basically, it says: if initially only 10% of X (CPU cycles, money, whatever you are trying to save) is spent in the part you are optimizing, there is an upper bound of 10% to the X you can save.
So? Do you think nobody paid for those tickets?
on
The Last Comdex?
·
· Score: 1
If a company gives you a ticket, they paid for it.
Still, in the end the money goes to the Comdex makers. Apparently they spent too much on advertisement. I don't see how else they could possibly lose money essentially providing a few cheap fair halls and taking money from everyone else.
If you find a bug, you can announce it and publish a patch. I have never seen anyone publish a fixed version instead of a patch before, why do you insinuate that would be somehow a good idea?
Besides, the project has not been updated because there is no need. djbdns just works.
If you need more functionality than the stock package provides, there are several patches. I know because I wrote (and publish) one.
The rest of your "arguments" I will not go into because they rely on flawed assumptions.
I say this is good. These are the bane of the web anyway, let's kill them for good. I can't stand all those shockwave ads anyway, applets are dead and activex is disabled everywhere for security reasons.
I don't see how banning all of these could possibly be taken as a bad thing.
So now not only is the electronic "proof" easily faked, now you don't even have to tell the hacker whom he supposedly hacked?
Great! The perfect infrastructure to put arbitary people in jail. You can frame anyone!
And how can the hacker prove to the judge that the alleged victim had something to gain from framing him? And it makes it impossible that someone can can read about the trial in the newspaper and help prove the hacker's innocence.
Obviously they want to get rid of Kevin Mitnick for good this time.
fnord supports CGI and PHP can be run in CGI mode. Actually, at least two people are using fnord to host a PHP site.
Don't expect stellar performance, though. PHP is by no means a small interpreter. I guess it would be possible to be fast and PHP compatible with some sort of byte code cache. If there is enough demand, someone will implement it.
How dare they not adopt national US law!? Those terrorists are a threat to world peace and therefore we need to do a preemptive strike before they do even more damage.
This guy is giving away a free version of his software to help kernel developers and now you double standard hypocrites actually whine that he does not like this free version to be used by his competition?
Be grateful that he gave you this software in the first place!
The subversion guy should be talking to his customers and find out what they want instead of using Bitkeeper to copy. Respect must be earned, not copied.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me? How can you be so blind?
The student council is paying them, and you actually believe that somehow that bill is not paid by yourself?
This deal actually makes everyone pay for the Windows licenses. It's just another way to pull money out of the Linux and Mac crowd by having them foot the bill for discounts that "benefit everyone". You know, crack dealers also give great discounts to poor college people to make them dependant on it.
Of course, if you think it through, you will notice that there is only one who benefits here -- Microsoft. Because people like yourself will now learn to use Windows and Windows based software. That in turn will lead businesses to use Windows, because that's all the new guys from college know. That in turn leeds to people believing that you have to use Windows because "that's what businesses use".
Oh, and I just love how you imply that everyone who has not bought a copy of Windows and Office is a pirate. I don't have a copy of Office. I wouldn't even own a Windows license if I could have bought my notebook without one.
The QuickTime file format is open. Which means nothing because AVI and ASF are documented as well, and at least for AVI Microsoft doesn't want royalties.
MPEG-4 is covered by more patents than the International Space Station. How anyone can call this "open" is beyond me. Maybe it's "open" as in "open your wallet any pay up, damnit!!!"?
But then, I don't get how anyone would want to watch movies on one of those tiny displays knowing that the CPU will drain the batteries within minutes.
At that time you either had SCSI or you had some proprietary bullshit. Just look in the Linux kernel, they still have all the drivers in it. Aztech CD-ROM, Sony CD-ROM, the whole enchilada.
;-}
At that time, I had a SCSI CD-ROM on my Pro Audio Spectrum because I couldn't afford a real SCSI controller. Those were the times...
At one CeBIT show a several years ago, they showed an OS/2 running (in SMP mode, even!) on a dual CPU PowerPC box.
I think OS/2 died because their disk cache was so horribly bad. It always was at least an order of magnitude slower than the Linux one. Oh, and I have no idea why they smoked when they named their file system "HP"FS. High performance is about the last thing I would associate with HPFS.
But I was a geek, I would have tried to use it anyway, but my S3 graphics card (which was THE standard graphics chipset) did not work with their driver.
And don't believe anyone who tells you their internals were beautiful. An operating system where a 2d graphics driver (without video acceleration, even!) is over one Meg in size can't be beautiful internally. I once wrote a driver based 2d library for DOS any my S3 driver had about 1000 bytes. That's three orders of magnitude less!
No, OS/2 has always sucked. Good riddance.
http://www.isb.admin.ch/dok/dokumente/opensource/m etagroup-linux-w2000_2002-10-17.pdf
What is all this hoopla about? Some soothsayer makes some outrageous prediction that is not backed by any data whatsoever, and all the world is acting as if it already happened!
;)
Hold your horses, gentlemen.
Their German subsidiary just sold a well researched and completely unbiased prediction that Linux won't stand a chance against Windows on servers and desktops to the Swiss a few months ago. The study claims that Unix scales better than Linux and yet Unix will become a back-end, legacy OS platform by 2003.
Oh, and they also pumped out a different study (which is, by the way, also completely unbiased and astoundingly well-researched) where they predicted Linux will grow from 25% to 35% in the next 2 years, only to be outpaced by... Windows 2000?!
ROTFL! Nobody in their right mind can take these people seriously! I don't even have to contradict them, they do it themselves!
BTW: The PDF is in German, but the pretty figures are all English, so you should have no problem understanding what they are saying.
PS: What good luck we have that their study is a PDF! In it you will find the assertion that Star Office has "uncertainties" opening MS Office files and thus you can't use Linux. Um, well...
It's about learning a new point of view, it's about expanding your horizon.
I don't use Eiffel, but learning it taught me some concepts I didn't know before.
And that's why we need even more new languages. Life (and work) is about learning. If you stop trying to learn you might as well drop dead.
First of all, nobody was forced to contribute to MySQL. You can have the source code, you can read it, you can understand it, and you can patch it. Nowhere does the license force you to publicize your patches.
But let's talk about Free Software, not MySQL. The GPL forces me as software publisher to allow you to exploit my free software commercially. It also forces you to allow others to do the same. I don't see how this is exploiting anyone unfairly. Except maybe me, because I wrote the software, and I'm (in most cases) not getting any money out of it.
Sending you patches for bugs I found in your software could even be considered as payment! After all, you giving me the source code gave me the opportunity to have this bug fixed. So instead of saying the poor contributor was screwed, I'd say he got paid (he got to use my software in the first place) and he thanked me for it by sending me a patch. Using the patch is no less exploiting than him using my software in the first place!
If a contributor has a problem with MySQL selling his contributed code, he can ask them to get paid for it. They can refuse to integrate his code then. Nobody will be the wiser. And this waste of resources (several people fixing the same bugs independently) is one of the things the GPL eliminates, because the first one to patch it knows that his patch is covered by the GPL, so he might as well send it back to the software author.
MySQL is a bad example because they sell non-GPL licenses. So they can't incorporate external fixes without explicit permission from the contributor to sell licenses of it.
I don't know what you have been smoking, but most free software is not written to bring people together.
I can say that I did not write my free software to help the third world. I did it because I learned from it and I made a living in the time, so I figured, if it's paid for, you can have it.
Writing software does not help the third world, by the way. Not exploiting them with amoral and abominable patent and "intellectual property" law, copyright bullshit and licensing crap, that would help the third world. Nullifying the debt we forced on them with our amoral patent and copyright bullshit, that would help the third world. Giving them free access to medication, stopping to take their natural resources, refining them and selling the result back at inflated prices, that would help the third world.
Software isn't even on the radar. Because there is not enough money to buy computers. They do buy some computers nonetheless, but they do it by adding to their substantial debt.
It's a shame that people have to pay for education and medication. Because medication is commercial, we have statistics that show that 80% of the medication does not even cure anything! Not only do we exploit the third world, we exploit our own population.
What good does free software do to some African starving or having AIDS? Please look up literacy statistics on the third world. What good does software do if the people can't read?
This "civil rights" license is bullshit. I can't blame them, I would be happy if I could cloud my mind from those issues like that. Unfortunately, I can't.
To make myself perfectly clear: what if I put "this software may not be used by US citizen while George W Bush is president" in my software licenses? I personally think that GW Bush needs to go ASAP, but do you honestly think that clause in a license would help? At all?
The chapters are easily digested
One more fluff book full of trivial common sense. That's exactly what I have been missing in my daily analyses. Thank You so much, Slashdot!
You don't want to recycle code. You want to use code. If you need to recycle it to be able to use it, the code wasn't worth it in the first place.
All the hoopla about refactoring is mostly good for one thing: to keep the incompetent idiots from doing harm. Let the idiots do the recycling, while the people who know what they are doing write code that doesn't need recycling to be useful.
1. people should not start software projects to make money. It's good if you can make money off software, but software written not because you enjoy it or you need this particular problem solved usually sucks.
;)
2. typical free software projects need external help the most in the very beginning. Most projects fail before the first working prototype is finished. Because of that, I won'd be contributing to ransom software; I can't even be sure that the software will be released as free software because I have no way to know how much money will be donated.
3. accountability. How do you know the author will not lie to you about how much money he made so far?
4. disincentive to cheat. If the author survival depends on this, he has an incentive to let you pay through your nose for updates and upgrades and new features, and you will probably hire him because nobody else knows the source code like him so he can be faster than others.
In my experience, free software projects work best if they are a) not paid for at all (you do it in your spare time) or b) they are paid for by one company who really needs this problem solved but you are allowed to release the software as GPL, too.
Even better: c) you start the project as GPL but get your work funded by some company who needs the problem solved. Many of my projects are category c) and it's really in the best interest of you (because you get the money and you get to write free software), the company (they get their problem solved and they get the source code and random people off the net will help them improve their software for free), and the world (because the world gets new free software as part of the creative commons world heritage). In contrast to the street performer protocol this is actually known to work in practice
If you think doing it is so trivial, where is your live CD?
It's always easy to talk down on the work of others. But it's not very convincing unless you have own work to show.
No.
Please write and publish a paper about it!
This is a major breakthrough in computer science.
It also is quite unlikely, since Ahmdahl's law is a trivial observation that is completely independent of parallelization or even software engineering (it also applies to hardware design or even accounting). Basically, it says: if initially only 10% of X (CPU cycles, money, whatever you are trying to save) is spent in the part you are optimizing, there is an upper bound of 10% to the X you can save.
I'm very interested in how you can disprove that.
No, you will need a Pentium 4 for that.
Still, in the end the money goes to the Comdex makers. Apparently they spent too much on advertisement. I don't see how else they could possibly lose money essentially providing a few cheap fair halls and taking money from everyone else.
Besides, the project has not been updated because there is no need. djbdns just works. If you need more functionality than the stock package provides, there are several patches. I know because I wrote (and publish) one.
The rest of your "arguments" I will not go into because they rely on flawed assumptions.
I say this is good. These are the bane of the web anyway, let's kill them for good. I can't stand all those shockwave ads anyway, applets are dead and activex is disabled everywhere for security reasons.
I don't see how banning all of these could possibly be taken as a bad thing.
So now not only is the electronic "proof" easily faked, now you don't even have to tell the hacker whom he supposedly hacked?
Great! The perfect infrastructure to put arbitary people in jail. You can frame anyone!
And how can the hacker prove to the judge that the alleged victim had something to gain from framing him? And it makes it impossible that someone can can read about the trial in the newspaper and help prove the hacker's innocence.
Obviously they want to get rid of Kevin Mitnick for good this time.
I wrote a fearly full-featured ls for embutils (http://www.fefe.de/embutils/); it has large file support and even does colors.
/opt/diet/bin/ls /opt/diet/bin/ls /opt/diet/bin/ls /opt/diet/bin/ls: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17256 Aug 31 17:22
$ file
$
It's this small because of the diet libc, of course (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/).
fnord supports CGI and PHP can be run in CGI mode.
Actually, at least two people are using fnord to host a PHP site.
Don't expect stellar performance, though. PHP is by no means a small interpreter. I guess it would be possible to be fast and PHP compatible with some sort of byte code cache. If there is enough demand, someone will implement it.
BOMB THEM!
How dare they not adopt national US law!?
Those terrorists are a threat to world peace and therefore we need to do a preemptive strike before they do even more damage.
This guy is giving away a free version of his software to help kernel developers and now you double standard hypocrites actually whine that he does not like this free version to be used by his competition?
Be grateful that he gave you this software in the first place!
The subversion guy should be talking to his customers and find out what they want instead of using Bitkeeper to copy. Respect must be earned, not copied.
Looks like we have to re-think that "You have the right to remain silent" thing...