Why would I want to remove glibc? Maybe I simply don't know what it is (not everyone is a programmer). Or maybe I thought it was glib instead (which I don't need if I'm not using any GTK programs).
Try removing this on other Linux distros and you WILL GET A WARNING! That's my whole point. Gentoo will let you remove glibc without bitching about it. Every other distro you have to --force the issue.
An application is comprised of algorithms and data structures. One tiny minor subset of applications is a searching (algorithm) a database (data structure). For some bizarre reason a lot of people think the latter is the only kind of application there is.
Mozilla/XUL is suited for the latter, but it is far from appropriate to use for most applications. All it gives you a fancy UI on top of a database with some minor scriptability. We still need application toolkits like GTK and Qt, because most applications aren't suitable to be "webapps". Can a *usable* word processor or image processor be written in Mozilla/XUL (or Avalon/XAML)? I don't think so.
The only reason Avalon/XAML gives PHBs erections, is because they think they've finally found the technology that will enable them to fire all those pesky software developers. Every new technology is heralded as a means to get rid of the programmer. It's not going to happen.
The era we're talking about is roughly 1985 (300bps, EGA are considered 1337). Was Windows 2.0 even around then? Windows 1.0? Frankly I can't remember. The Mac had just barely arrived on the scene, and since Windows "copied" that, I don't think it was.
But so what? Even my brand new FreeBSD 5.2.1 supports EGA:-)
Holy crap, people actually paid more to use credit cards back then?
Get a clue, you still do. Or more precisely, most stores will raise the price on everything to cover the credit card company fees. That 3% is still there.
Says quite a lot of physicians and embryologists. Also the English dictionary. "Human being" means "homo sapiens". Biologically a fetus is an instance of the species homo sapiens.
Some references for you. I'll make sure they all come from non-religious sites, since I wouldn't want to offend your sensibilities with articles of faith...
Incorrect, and on so many levels. You've been drinking the.NET koolaid, haven't you? The two most obvious objections are:
1) As long as a certain company remains a monopoly, proprietary file formats are considered de rigeur, and binary closed source executables are the norm, the platform will remain intensely relevant. When the application that makes your platform valuable only runs under Windows, then only a fool would argue that the OS is irrelevant..NET isn't going to solve this "problem", because.NET is controlled by Microsoft. Major parts of the specification are still proprietary to Windows. Mono is going to be in a perpetual game of catchup with.NET, as Microsoft keeps embracing and extending its own standard.
2) Different operating systems and environments behave differently. The choice of OS makes a difference if I'm able to more easily use my application on one rather than the other. For example, if I'm trying to administer twelve hundred desktops remotely, a Unix OS is going to be more appropriate than Windows.
Again,.NET (or any other technology) isn't going to help because this is a problem beyond the application. All.NET can do is to provide a Lowest Common Denominator functionality set.
p.s. I don't know if you're a.NET person. I'm only using.NET as an example technology that promises to rid us forever of the scourge of OS dependency. Java, XUL, etc, aren't going to solve the problem either.
p.p.s. In fact, I don't think the server/desktop is a problem at all! I think this is something made up by pundits to bolster their own self-worth with grandiose visions of the future.
Windows supports almost every known video card out of the box
Actually, Windows supports very little video hardware out of the box. The last three video cards I had required me to install the manufacturer provided drivers in order to get out of VGA mode.
criminally-owned guns are reduced marginally less than guns held legally
Do you really believe your own rhetoric? Narcotics have been illegal in my country for seventy five years. Every year new sweeping crackdowns on drugs are enacted. Yet it's still absurdly simple to locate and purchase illegal drugs. The presence of illegal drugs has NOT been reduced even marginally!
Banning something does not make it go away.
it reduces the likelihood that criminals will feel the need to indulge in an arms race.
Criminals don't aquire guns in order to battle the evil gun toting police, they aquire guns in order to battle other criminals and coerce their victims.
As someone who doesn't use Linux, I could care less about your whining. It's petty thinking to want Sun to fail just because it isn't Linux. That's stupid. You're win is not predicated on someone else's loss. If you cannot win on your own merits you don't deserve to be in the game.
It's these "world domination" attitudes that are what's keeping Linux on the fringe. No one wants to deploy it because the perception is that all the users are arrogant assholes who will push old ladies into oncoming traffic just for using another OS.
No, it's not endemic to human thinking, only to organizations. Governments think this way. Corporations think this way. The FSF thinks this way. Slashdot as a collective thinks this way. But individuals, unless firmly mired in such organizations, do not think this way.
Individuals do not walk around thinking that there every action is going to lead to a win or a lose. When I cross the street it's not a race with the other pedestrians. When I shop for milk it's not a fight to get the first carton. Other people don't bemoan their horrid fate if I happen to grab the front seat of the bus.
Even in overtly competitive situations we don't tend think that way as individuals. We play a game of pick-up basketball and it doesn't matter to us who wins or loses.
Sorta like the question of where does the power for your electric car come from. People dont like to answer those type of queries.
"Now that we've finally paved over the Mojave desert with solar cells, the Green Revolution(tm) is won! The evil petro-demon is dead! Hmmm, now if only we could figure out why the global weather system is going haywire..."
Today people think the phrase "if guns were outlawed only outlaws would have guns" is silly. While it certainly is trite, there is a lot of truth behind it.
It doesn't matter where you stand on the issue of gun control, only a fool would think that a total ban on firearms would result in their total elimination. Every nation in the world, regardless of their gun control laws, has criminals possessing guns.
The purpose of gun control is not to eliminate firearm possession, but to eliminate legal ownership of firearms. To some this may sound like nonsense, but it does provide for some small amount of social engineering, if that's the goal.
The point is that when nanotech arrives no one is going to be able to put that efrit back in the bottle. You might be able to outlaw it, but you won't eliminate it.
Every class of weapon that has ever been developed has been used in warfare, from the stick to the nuke. The reason we haven't annihilated ourselves with nukes is because it's too difficult for a solitary madmen to aquire nukes, let alone enough of them for annihilation purposes.
If nukes were as easy to build as writing software, we would already have had terrorist nuclear strikes. Unfortunately, nanotech weaponry will be as easy to build as writing software.
That argument doesn't work because kde-look simply doesn't present the licenses with the works
But it does! Go take a look! I've got content of my own on kde-look, so I know how it works. You cannot upload any content with specifying the license. And that license is displaying in the summary information of the content.
Immediately above the link labeled "download" is a line that specifies the license. If Slashdot would let me include a screenshot I would include one here to show you how close in proximity the two are.
The "other" license requires you to specify your terms in an edit box. Most people who do not choose a named license will use variations of either "free for all" or "not for commercial use".
Did you even bother to read the link you cited? Really? Let me quote [emphasis added]:
"The purpose of an implied license is to allow the licensee (the party who licenses the work from the copyright owner) some right to use the copyrighted work, but only to the extent that the copyright owner would have allowed had the parties negotiated an agreement."
Given the preponderance of wallpapers at kde-look that are licensed under "not for commercial use" terms, it's a wild leap of the imagination to assume that an implied license for a kde-look wallpaper includes the right to modify and incorporate the image into a for-profit corporate advertisement.
Furthermore: "Rather, attorneys argue, courts should find that the Web page author has given end users an implied license to download and view the Web page."
That's about downloading and viewing stuff. Not about redistributing it, modifying it, or incorporating it into corporate advertisements. It does not imply [sic] any rights beyond those minimum required to use the work for its intended purpose (viewing).
Your link is a page full of supposition and what-ifs. It's trying to sell its services!
To quote: "Many legal analysts said there is a growing belief that employers will be subjected to a wave of lawsuits if they don't implement systems to stop spam."
This is a "belief". I'm hardly going to stick my neck out and sue my fortune 500 company on the basis of this. I don't want to be the legal guinea pig.
RMS considers it wrong only because he does not like the generalization. Personally, I tend to agree. But that does not negate the fact that millions of people generalize "intellectual property" every day.
The term "intellectual property" was used correctly in the summary. That RMS doesn't want people using the term is irrelevant.
Copyright law grants the author of a creative work (eg. wallpaper) certain exclusive rights. Since these rights are exclusive, ONLY the author has them. No one else has them unless the author has given permission. These exclusive rights include the exclusive right to copy the work, the exclusive right to distribute the work, and the exclusive right to modify the work.
That's why we have such licenses as the GPL, BSD, MPL, etc. Because without them the user has no legal right or permission to copy, distribute or modify the free software. Merely posting the software on sourceforge without a copyright notice is insufficient.
In the absence of an explicit license, one can assume a limited "implied" license. But this implied license is not all encompassing. File traders seem to think this, but they're completely wrong. Don't get your legal advice from a bunch of 14 year old music thieves. Geez Louise!
The "implied" license implies that since the download is a wallpaper, it's okay to copy it to a wallpaper directory or other location suitable for use. Such permission is implied since that's the only way to use the wallpaper. But the lack of explicit copyright notice or license does NOT IMPLY that the author has granted permission to distribute or modify the wallpaper.
You say there's an established legal precedent. I'm calling your bluff. Please cite one decision where a court has ruled that the absence of an explicit license granted the public the rights to distribute and/or modify the work in question.
Except we were talking about OO Languages, and not OO Programming. So I was assuming C++. In C++ you don't have to manually allocate memory for strings. And you don't have to allocate memory for arrays either. In fact, with the STL you don't even have to allocate anything for the linked lists either. Of course you could, if you wanted to, but you don't have to.
Because this is C++, I am using "new" and "delete". On the surface these seem to be about memory allocation, but they are really abstractions for generic resource allocations. I have to match my news with deletes, but I have to do that for any resource.
Consider a GUI. I allocate memory for a widget with the call "new Widget". A GC will manage the deallocation for me, but I *still* need the destructor because that widget is more than mere memory. I need to properly destroy it because it has logical parents and children. I may have handles to the GUI library I need to release. Etc, etc. So if I have to write a destructor anyway, what's so terribly evil about deallocating the memory there?
OK, the numbers are off, and the analogy isn't perfect
It's a bad analogy because Jack's basic arguments is that the law needs to be applied uniformly to everyone. I myself am sympathetic to this viewpoint (though not the particular law in question).
We should not be arguing that there should be exceptions to broadcast flag for video engineers. Instead we should be arguing that there shouldn't be a broadcast flag at all! Taking this back to your analogy, it would be ludicrous to argue that circumcision should be legal for Orthodox Jews, but an illegal and imprisonable offense for everyone else. It should be legal for everyone even though only a very very few would want to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I want to remove glibc? Maybe I simply don't know what it is (not everyone is a programmer). Or maybe I thought it was glib instead (which I don't need if I'm not using any GTK programs).
Try removing this on other Linux distros and you WILL GET A WARNING! That's my whole point. Gentoo will let you remove glibc without bitching about it. Every other distro you have to --force the issue.
--unmerge will not check for any dependent packages. If you unmerge qt, for example, you will utterly discombobulate KDE.
An application is comprised of algorithms and data structures. One tiny minor subset of applications is a searching (algorithm) a database (data structure). For some bizarre reason a lot of people think the latter is the only kind of application there is.
Mozilla/XUL is suited for the latter, but it is far from appropriate to use for most applications. All it gives you a fancy UI on top of a database with some minor scriptability. We still need application toolkits like GTK and Qt, because most applications aren't suitable to be "webapps". Can a *usable* word processor or image processor be written in Mozilla/XUL (or Avalon/XAML)? I don't think so.
The only reason Avalon/XAML gives PHBs erections, is because they think they've finally found the technology that will enable them to fire all those pesky software developers. Every new technology is heralded as a means to get rid of the programmer. It's not going to happen.
The portage system takes one of the best features of FreeBSD and actually *improved* on the idea
Until it's safe to do an "emerge --unmerge", it's not an improvement. Portage has some nice polish, but a few basic pieces simply aren't complete.
The era we're talking about is roughly 1985 (300bps, EGA are considered 1337). Was Windows 2.0 even around then? Windows 1.0? Frankly I can't remember. The Mac had just barely arrived on the scene, and since Windows "copied" that, I don't think it was.
:-)
But so what? Even my brand new FreeBSD 5.2.1 supports EGA
Holy crap, people actually paid more to use credit cards back then?
Get a clue, you still do. Or more precisely, most stores will raise the price on everything to cover the credit card company fees. That 3% is still there.
Fake! The post mentions a friend emailing from Windows, but this was the era of 300 baud modems and EGA screens.
Says quite a lot of physicians and embryologists. Also the English dictionary. "Human being" means "homo sapiens". Biologically a fetus is an instance of the species homo sapiens.
Some references for you. I'll make sure they all come from non-religious sites, since I wouldn't want to offend your sensibilities with articles of faith...
Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League
Libertarians for Life
Some specific articles:
Abortion and the Question of the Person, and, Why a Human Embryo or Fetus is Not a Parasite
The apps make the platform valuable, not the OS.
.NET koolaid, haven't you? The two most obvious objections are:
.NET isn't going to solve this "problem", because .NET is controlled by Microsoft. Major parts of the specification are still proprietary to Windows. Mono is going to be in a perpetual game of catchup with .NET, as Microsoft keeps embracing and extending its own standard.
.NET (or any other technology) isn't going to help because this is a problem beyond the application. All .NET can do is to provide a Lowest Common Denominator functionality set.
.NET person. I'm only using .NET as an example technology that promises to rid us forever of the scourge of OS dependency. Java, XUL, etc, aren't going to solve the problem either.
Incorrect, and on so many levels. You've been drinking the
1) As long as a certain company remains a monopoly, proprietary file formats are considered de rigeur, and binary closed source executables are the norm, the platform will remain intensely relevant. When the application that makes your platform valuable only runs under Windows, then only a fool would argue that the OS is irrelevant.
2) Different operating systems and environments behave differently. The choice of OS makes a difference if I'm able to more easily use my application on one rather than the other. For example, if I'm trying to administer twelve hundred desktops remotely, a Unix OS is going to be more appropriate than Windows.
Again,
p.s. I don't know if you're a
p.p.s. In fact, I don't think the server/desktop is a problem at all! I think this is something made up by pundits to bolster their own self-worth with grandiose visions of the future.
Windows supports almost every known video card out of the box
Actually, Windows supports very little video hardware out of the box. The last three video cards I had required me to install the manufacturer provided drivers in order to get out of VGA mode.
criminally-owned guns are reduced marginally less than guns held legally
Do you really believe your own rhetoric? Narcotics have been illegal in my country for seventy five years. Every year new sweeping crackdowns on drugs are enacted. Yet it's still absurdly simple to locate and purchase illegal drugs. The presence of illegal drugs has NOT been reduced even marginally!
Banning something does not make it go away.
it reduces the likelihood that criminals will feel the need to indulge in an arms race.
Criminals don't aquire guns in order to battle the evil gun toting police, they aquire guns in order to battle other criminals and coerce their victims.
BTW a fetus is a human being, and BTW it doesn't matter if it's yours or not.
As someone who doesn't use Linux, I could care less about your whining. It's petty thinking to want Sun to fail just because it isn't Linux. That's stupid. You're win is not predicated on someone else's loss. If you cannot win on your own merits you don't deserve to be in the game.
It's these "world domination" attitudes that are what's keeping Linux on the fringe. No one wants to deploy it because the perception is that all the users are arrogant assholes who will push old ladies into oncoming traffic just for using another OS.
Sun doesn't hurt Linux, Linux users hurt Linux.
No, it's not endemic to human thinking, only to organizations. Governments think this way. Corporations think this way. The FSF thinks this way. Slashdot as a collective thinks this way. But individuals, unless firmly mired in such organizations, do not think this way.
Individuals do not walk around thinking that there every action is going to lead to a win or a lose. When I cross the street it's not a race with the other pedestrians. When I shop for milk it's not a fight to get the first carton. Other people don't bemoan their horrid fate if I happen to grab the front seat of the bus.
Even in overtly competitive situations we don't tend think that way as individuals. We play a game of pick-up basketball and it doesn't matter to us who wins or loses.
The MPAA doesn't want people to pirate movies. It still happens. The RIAA doesn't want people to trade songs. It still happens.
In short, it doesn't matter what corporations or governments want or don't want.
Sorta like the question of where does the power for your electric car come from. People dont like to answer those type of queries.
"Now that we've finally paved over the Mojave desert with solar cells, the Green Revolution(tm) is won! The evil petro-demon is dead! Hmmm, now if only we could figure out why the global weather system is going haywire..."
Absolutely!
Today people think the phrase "if guns were outlawed only outlaws would have guns" is silly. While it certainly is trite, there is a lot of truth behind it.
It doesn't matter where you stand on the issue of gun control, only a fool would think that a total ban on firearms would result in their total elimination. Every nation in the world, regardless of their gun control laws, has criminals possessing guns.
The purpose of gun control is not to eliminate firearm possession, but to eliminate legal ownership of firearms. To some this may sound like nonsense, but it does provide for some small amount of social engineering, if that's the goal.
The point is that when nanotech arrives no one is going to be able to put that efrit back in the bottle. You might be able to outlaw it, but you won't eliminate it.
Every class of weapon that has ever been developed has been used in warfare, from the stick to the nuke. The reason we haven't annihilated ourselves with nukes is because it's too difficult for a solitary madmen to aquire nukes, let alone enough of them for annihilation purposes.
If nukes were as easy to build as writing software, we would already have had terrorist nuclear strikes. Unfortunately, nanotech weaponry will be as easy to build as writing software.
That argument doesn't work because kde-look simply doesn't present the licenses with the works
But it does! Go take a look! I've got content of my own on kde-look, so I know how it works. You cannot upload any content with specifying the license. And that license is displaying in the summary information of the content.
Immediately above the link labeled "download" is a line that specifies the license. If Slashdot would let me include a screenshot I would include one here to show you how close in proximity the two are.
The "other" license requires you to specify your terms in an edit box. Most people who do not choose a named license will use variations of either "free for all" or "not for commercial use".
Did you even bother to read the link you cited? Really? Let me quote [emphasis added]:
"The purpose of an implied license is to allow the licensee (the party who licenses the work from the copyright owner) some right to use the copyrighted work, but only to the extent that the copyright owner would have allowed had the parties negotiated an agreement."
Given the preponderance of wallpapers at kde-look that are licensed under "not for commercial use" terms, it's a wild leap of the imagination to assume that an implied license for a kde-look wallpaper includes the right to modify and incorporate the image into a for-profit corporate advertisement.
Furthermore: "Rather, attorneys argue, courts should find that the Web page author has given end users an implied license to download and view the Web page."
That's about downloading and viewing stuff. Not about redistributing it, modifying it, or incorporating it into corporate advertisements. It does not imply [sic] any rights beyond those minimum required to use the work for its intended purpose (viewing).
Your link is a page full of supposition and what-ifs. It's trying to sell its services!
To quote: "Many legal analysts said there is a growing belief that employers will be subjected to a wave of lawsuits if they don't implement systems to stop spam."
This is a "belief". I'm hardly going to stick my neck out and sue my fortune 500 company on the basis of this. I don't want to be the legal guinea pig.
RMS considers it wrong only because he does not like the generalization. Personally, I tend to agree. But that does not negate the fact that millions of people generalize "intellectual property" every day.
The term "intellectual property" was used correctly in the summary. That RMS doesn't want people using the term is irrelevant.
Copyright law grants the author of a creative work (eg. wallpaper) certain exclusive rights. Since these rights are exclusive, ONLY the author has them. No one else has them unless the author has given permission. These exclusive rights include the exclusive right to copy the work, the exclusive right to distribute the work, and the exclusive right to modify the work.
That's why we have such licenses as the GPL, BSD, MPL, etc. Because without them the user has no legal right or permission to copy, distribute or modify the free software. Merely posting the software on sourceforge without a copyright notice is insufficient.
In the absence of an explicit license, one can assume a limited "implied" license. But this implied license is not all encompassing. File traders seem to think this, but they're completely wrong. Don't get your legal advice from a bunch of 14 year old music thieves. Geez Louise!
The "implied" license implies that since the download is a wallpaper, it's okay to copy it to a wallpaper directory or other location suitable for use. Such permission is implied since that's the only way to use the wallpaper. But the lack of explicit copyright notice or license does NOT IMPLY that the author has granted permission to distribute or modify the wallpaper.
You say there's an established legal precedent. I'm calling your bluff. Please cite one decision where a court has ruled that the absence of an explicit license granted the public the rights to distribute and/or modify the work in question.
Except we were talking about OO Languages, and not OO Programming. So I was assuming C++. In C++ you don't have to manually allocate memory for strings. And you don't have to allocate memory for arrays either. In fact, with the STL you don't even have to allocate anything for the linked lists either. Of course you could, if you wanted to, but you don't have to.
Because this is C++, I am using "new" and "delete". On the surface these seem to be about memory allocation, but they are really abstractions for generic resource allocations. I have to match my news with deletes, but I have to do that for any resource.
Consider a GUI. I allocate memory for a widget with the call "new Widget". A GC will manage the deallocation for me, but I *still* need the destructor because that widget is more than mere memory. I need to properly destroy it because it has logical parents and children. I may have handles to the GUI library I need to release. Etc, etc. So if I have to write a destructor anyway, what's so terribly evil about deallocating the memory there?
OK, the numbers are off, and the analogy isn't perfect
It's a bad analogy because Jack's basic arguments is that the law needs to be applied uniformly to everyone. I myself am sympathetic to this viewpoint (though not the particular law in question).
We should not be arguing that there should be exceptions to broadcast flag for video engineers. Instead we should be arguing that there shouldn't be a broadcast flag at all! Taking this back to your analogy, it would be ludicrous to argue that circumcision should be legal for Orthodox Jews, but an illegal and imprisonable offense for everyone else. It should be legal for everyone even though only a very very few would want to do it.