Correct. However, Sun *is* taking the risk that pseudo-Java forks will dilute the Java community despite the trademark protection. Kaffe and GCJ are not technically "Java", but that doesn't stop the market from thinking of them as such.
The "community" already HAS altered Java(tm). SWT is preferred over Swing/AWT; Hibernate is preferred over EJB 1.x/2.x; and how many different web frameworks have come up to supplant JSP and Servlets? The point is that "control over Java(tm)" and "non-GPL JDK" are orthogonal issues: Sun has exactly as much control now as they did then, which is still a lot but not total.
The community had shown that it was willing to work around technical problems in the JDK with or without Sun's guidance. It was only a matter of time before the F/OSS stack gained some feature that made it more preferable than the Sun JDK for typical use. (If nothing else, improved reliability to the point that one wouldn't need a separate JRE for every major application.)
Sun was at risk of its implementation eventually becoming the secondary one, much like their C compiler on Solaris. (Even though "serious" people use cc, nearly everyone else uses gcc first.)
Microsoft was SO committed that they tried one last Embrace/Extend/Extinguish with J#. As it happens, Microsoft just released a new version of the J# package.
J# != Java.
These languages have not made any significant inroads into Sun's paying market. Unless it affects Sun's market directly, it's not an issue. I understand that the OSS community has a lot of interest in these platforms, but that doesn't mean that there are many paying jobs for them. Servlets/J2EE still rule the day in large companies.
Given that a whole generation of IT/CS students has come out with only Java background, I'm sure it will have a lasting presence of some kind. And J2EE is nice, I've done LOTS of work there. But there are lots of new problems out there, new markets and new jobs, and lots of money to be found, and those other languages are finding themselves a better fit than Java currently. I would expect Sun to desire for Java to be competitive in those new spaces. If Java doesn't aggressively move towards those markets -- and it needs the community behind it to do so -- then 15 years from now it might be just another Lisp or Scheme, used in a few places for teaching but not much else that pays money (Paul Graham notwithstanding).
"About?" Eclipse has been running on Kaffe for over 2 years now! If Sun was worried about Eclipse, they certainly took their sweet time doing something about it.
I guess the last couple years have really flown by for me. So Kaffe runs Eclipse, but also OOo, JBoss, Tomcat, and Azureus. Between all those that covers a lot of ground both desktop and server side.
And this pretty much seals the fate of your opinion having any impact. Java is a long way from "the new COBOL".
"java is the new cobol" garners 89 hits on Google, making it a legitimate phrase. Taking away the quotes you'll find over a millions hits along with vote counters and long blog discussions etc. Java can do lots of things COBOL can't, but in relation to every other language it is about the same as COBOL was long ago: a good middle-of-the-road language with a decent mix of function and syntax that fits very well within existing business processes. Most hits on "java is the new cobol" are actually backhanded nods to Java's popularity.
I have yet to see anyone who uses Java call it by that name.
I guess you haven't met enough professional Java programmers.
Explain this: If Java is the new COBOL, then why isn't COBOL run anywhere except on mainframes? Microcomputers ran BASIC. Today's cell phones (about the closest analog) run Java. Where are the COBOL video games? Video games were written in assembler back in the day. Now they're written in high-level languages like C++ and Java. Early networking work was done in C. Now our P2P apps are wri
This is just plain hubris. Anyone who has spent time in the Java community knows why Sun was so difficult about releasing control over Java: Microsoft.
I think Linus is right and you are wrong on Java:
1. Sun still retains "control" over Java-the-platform through the JSR/committee process. GPL'ing the reference implementation doesn't affect their control of the trademark.
2. The Microsoft lawsuit was settled for a LONG time before Sun started talking seriously about GPL. In the meantime MS was committed to.Net and won't touch Java with a ten-foot pole.
3. The 'it factor' was in danger of permanently moving away from Java. F/OSS was picking up Mono, Ruby, and Python instead. Java's reputation as "the new COBOL" was turning it into a platform that pays the bills but is otherwise very uninteresting.
4. Once Kaffe/Sabre/Classpath/etc. were about to run Eclipse, Sun got very serious about GPL'ing the JDK.
All in all this leads me to conclude that Linus was dead on right: Sun would prefer to have a non-GPL Java, but they ran out of options. It was either GPL Java and breathe new life/freshness into the platform and deal a blow to.Net/Mono, or keep the status quo and watch Java lost ground to Mono, Ruby, Python, and whatever else comes next.
If the kernel stays at v2, expect to see a lot of forks;
*sigh* OK, let's repeat what always comes around on every one of these discussions:
Point one:
THE KERNEL IS GPL V2 (TWO) ONLY. THE LINUX KERNEL CANNOT BE FORKED TO GPL V3 WITHOUT AN UNGODLY AMOUNT OF WORK AND THERE IS NO POINT IN DOING THAT.
Point two:
IT IS PERFECTLY FINE TO HAVE THE LINUX KERNEL AT GPL V2 AND THE REST OF A LINUX SYSTEM AT GPL V3, JUST AS PARTS OF ALL LINUX SYSTEMS TODAY HAVE CODE THAT IS UNDER BSD, APACHE, MOZILLA, ETC. LICENSES.
It shows how far fundamentalists can go to counter Reason in a way that hasn't been seen in France for centuries.
I suppose you are correct since you qualify this with "how far fundamentalists can go". However, widen the scope to include all things "para-normal" and France isn't far behind the USA at all when it comes to belief in palm reading, psychics, tarot, astral projection, and all the other superstitious nonsense.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0616-01.ht m : "The Bush administration has long claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and cited them as one reason for last year's invasion of Iraq. On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator ``had long established ties with al-Qaida.''"
Check out a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiNtpIpD6k About 20 seconds before the end Cheney is quoted on Meet the Press talking about an alleged meeting between Iraqi intelligence and Al-Qaida 5 months before 9/11.
And finally: http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_War_+_ Peace.htm : "FACT CHECK: The Washington Post reported Oct. 6 that Cheney often "skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers," especially by repeatedly citing the possibility that hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi official, a theory disputed by the 9/11 Commission."
Well, we'll both be heading into new territory.:) My wife and I are about to replace our main home desktop with a Mac Mini and might move over to Mail.App too.
I've been using Kmail for a few months now and really like it, but I should mention one weakness: if the disk with/tmp gets full during a POP run, it's possible for Kmail to lose mail, so I always make sure my disk has some free space. I also have it using mbox format and storing everything in ~/Mail, so with just an rsync command it's all backed up every few days. All in all it's really nice.
It's just a different transformative agenda than what the more far-left elements of the Democratic party want.
There are no "far-left elements" of the Democratic party. Certainly Dennis Kucinich would be the standard bearer for the left wing, and he could run quite easily as a centrist in most non-American elections. Wake me up when we see someone urging Hugo Chavez-like direct wealth redistribution from within the Democratic party.
GPL v3 is a disaster from a developer standpoint; and a dream come true for the end-user. The only group I see using GPL v3 is FSF.
Well, *I* intend to switch to v3 in a few more months for my OSS projects and I'm a developer. Though I do in general get RMS's idea about a commons of free software and laud his approach, my reasons for GPL are far more practical: in the unlikely event that I create some software that has lucrative market potential, and someone out there wants to use it in a non-free capacity, I want them to *pay me* for the privilege. I would gladly sell them a typical commercial-style license (i.e. *not* BSD) for the right amount of cash. Until a market need arises however my stuff is meant to be used by whomever and I get to mention it in job searches.
I also would never consider modifying, and distributing said modifications for anything under GPL v3.
Most of my modifications to existing projects are minor, and thus I license them "public domain" so the maintainers can do whatever they want with it. I see little point to a BSD-style license (public domain + attribution) when public domain itself is available.
No, what is interesting is how the film maker will decry the loss of liberties, the encroachments of freedom, and the institution of censorship -- in a film openly distributed and marketed to the general public, and all without the government shutting him down. Yessireee...a police state! That's what we're living in for sure. The jackbooted thugs will be here any minute now...any minute now...I'm sure they're almost here...somewhere. Well, maybe their black helicopters broke down or something, but I'm sure they're on their way!
That's how the modern police state works, you see. Freedom of speech is still allowed, dissent is still recorded, and people thus think they aren't really living in a police state.
However, start organizing against the state and see just how quickly you can get shut down. Your activist groups will be infiltrated, investigations into your personal life will begin, and at the slightest hint of significant success at changing the status quo you will be arrested and charged with a bogus crime to end your career as a political radical. Web sites will describe your fate and complacent onlookers will marvel that in their free society -- which is clearly free because people can read these stories -- some people can still go crazy about such fringe political topics.
This argument is funny. What it translates to is: "I want to write 'free' software, but I don't want anyone else to make money off my work" -- Or more directly, "I want to be greedy but not appear to be"
I see absolutely nothing wrong with "I want to write free software, but I'm also willing to license that code for reasonable compensation."
That's certainly no more greedy than "I see free code out there that I'd like to use, but I don't want to pay for it."
I guess I don't see why one license has to "win" over the other. Use what you like. Just don't bash other stuff.
Basically, I am very suspicious of anyone that wants to protect my freedom by limiting it. When you then justify the limitation by saying it doesn't really exist or is meaningless, I'm going to be downright scornful.
You already have the freedom to write your own code to accomplish a task. You already have the freedom to negotiate with other people to use their code to accomplish a task. Developers who use GPL (like you) grant you a new freedom to use our code, but only so long as you pass that same agreement to others.
Now where in all this have I or any other GPL-using developers taken away your freedom?
I won't touch whatever flame war was going on, but:
And I want some of what you're smoking if you consider Emacs to be "fast", or you consider an alternative to a full-fledged word processor (WTF?), especially for non-technical users. Are you going to require them to learn Lisp as well? And Latex? Emacs is confusing as hell to anyone who is not a developer.
Emacs out of the box is definitely a poor editor for most people, but after some configuration it's pretty darn good for all sorts of use. In fact it's the closest thing I've found to WordPerfect 5.x under Linux that runs in text mode. Outside of my.emacs, I don't touch Lisp either. LaTeX, well I use it but it's still a bit frustrating as I am at best only 30% up the learning curve. OTOH I really like it's PDF output.
It's not an end-user application.
My reference to WP 5.1 shows my bias. I grew up when WordStar was temporary king of a market with dozens of word processors. I remember when regular end-users on WP got the paper keyboard template to put over the function keys. Word's option to emulate WP's function keys was a brilliant move.
Whether you choose to admit it or not, regardless of what America does there will be those who seek her downfall.
You seem to think that the majority of people who "seek America's downfall" do so irrationally, as though all our Cold War sins never really happened. News flash: our government spread quite a bit more misery throughout the world between 1945 and 1990 than peace and prosperity.
The military will be out there defending your sorry ass whether or not you appreciate that service.
My particular "sorry ass" would rather our military actually spend its time on defense rather than re-enact adolescent boy fantasies of being the Toughest Shit in the 'Hood.
It's sad when someone like you who's clearly benefited from being an American is so clueless about the simple realities of life. If we have to rely on the likes of you for our future, I'm quite sure America will quickly achieve second-rate status in the world.
America already IS second-rate in most of the developed world, thanks largely to our aversion to actually use public money to further the public good because that's too "socialist".
Their sole and only influence is to make sure that nobody can use undue leverage against competitors and that competitors don't form a cartel to cooperate against workers, competition, customer and supplier.
There fixed it for you. You know, so that government's role in the economy includes the other 95% of the citizenry.
I can't even get applications to run under different versions of Linux without recompilation, given the differences betweeen glibc and gcc over recent years.
I found that to be especially true in the 1998-2002 timeframe, but much less so today. Nowadays all the applications I've run across post-2002 will at least run on all the major desktop Linux variants with minimal hassle. However, embedded systems still tend to require recompiling to the target libc as they don't often ship with multiple versions of it.
If you claim to have a BS in CS at the interview table, but didn't suffer through, e.g.,
I've got a BS in Comp Sci from a decent program in Texas.
a computer organization course (like Hennessy and Patterson style, which is common these days),
My Comp Org class described memory, buses, microcode, arithmetic, instruction encoding/decoding, and as a final project required us to develop a 4-bit ALU from logic gates. We also had a separate course called "Digital Logic" that was using Altera Max+Plus II to develop logical circuits and flash them to a chip (I don't know if it was a real FPGA or somthing else).
didn't have a course where you developed an operating system,
That was an elective I chose not to take.
didn't design a language starting from BNF and build a compiler for it,
"Systems Programming" involved writing an assembler, compiler, and linker for a hypothetical chip.
didn't take 2 years of a lab science,
2 years of a single lab science? That's almost enough to graduate in the other major if you're talking chemistry or biology. Ours required only 8 hours in a lab science.
didn't at least come close to a math minor,
One course away, but only because I had also been an engineering student before and run out to diff eq.
didn't have at least 4 courses at various levels of discrete math, automata, algorithm analyis,
Automata was a graduate level course. Algorithms, data structures, and discrete were required for undergrads.
and didn't have a course that, as a final project, you deliver a significant user app in a high level language
Our final project was a tiny web-based CGI app in C that took me all of two days to complete. This was circa 1998/1999 before web servers plugged in easily into anything but CGI and perl.
(on the order of an original multiplayer game, let's say)...
"Game Design" was an elective that I took -- 3 programmers + 1 artist from the Digital Arts major to design and implement an actual game using DirectX 5.x.
I'd say your school has some explaining to do.
Me too. The databases course was useless -- one week of full-time work with DB2 covered far more material on table and query design that two weeks of "predicate calculus". Nearly every other course could be reduced to about two weeks of full-time study each, and the profs had a tendency to ramble off-topic. The biggest drawback was that it was an "OK" prep for a Comp Sci graduate student and a "slightly-less-than OK" prep for an actual programmer. But then, I've never actually seen or heard of a really decent prep for professional programming work; it seems everyone needs at least two years of full-time experience before they can write passably usable code.
BTW--You forgot to mention an ethics course that covered at least a handful of the more famous fatal software glitches.
I used to be a slackware user. At some point, about four years ago, I decided to use debian and debian-based distributions.
I hated it and it felt stupid. Lot's of things I was used to worked differently. I kept trying and a few weeks later I had it sorta under control.
I had a similar experience, started with Slackware back when it was competing against SLS and Yggdrasil. Switched to RedHat based distros 1999-2001, then to Debian Woody. It took a few weeks to get used to the "Debian way", but now I'm hooked.
When something goes wrong, on Windows, I can play with my configuration and focus on the configuration itself. On Linux, I'm usually trying to figure out the order of the command-line arguments or figuring out the syntax of some configuration file, or something equally mundane.
That's odd. For me, when something goes wrong in Windows, I check the available menus/dialogs and see if any option fixes it, and if nothing works I have to give up right there. On Linux, I can hunt down the appropriate configuration files, find the application-specific error logs, and eventually fix the issue and move on.
Recent example: I installed the nVidia driver and it didn't work, but after renaming the nvidiafb.ko kernel module to ensure only the proprietary driver loaded, and then examining the X server log I found the two X11 modules that weren't loading correctly and fixed it. In all, about 1 hour to find and fix both issues, and able to do all that when the GUI itself was borked. I can't even imagine successfully fixing a Windows system facing a similar issue.
It's true that you might need to install software that comes with your DVD drive in order to watch movies on Windows, but most distributions of Linux, again, out of the box, do not play DVDs either.
Do you know offhand which distributions besides Ubuntu this applies to? Right now I'm using Debian Etch and have no trouble playing DVDs with Kaffeine.
I just recently discovered the joy that is VMWare. It makes life so much easier for those Windows apps that don't quite work right under WINE it's not even funny. I have a Win98SE image for the sole purpose of running the REAL Office 97 and one other Windows 3.x application, and it works very well for this purpose.
I don't know what your needs really are, but if your Windows applications don't require an awful lot of memory or CPU to run acceptably, VMWare (which is free) might be something to look at. Finally, my copies of VMWare are running smoothly under both Debian Sarge and Etch with KDE. I was very impressed at how well VMWare works.
Slashdot Mirror
How does Microsoft Speech API ActiveX control remote buffer overflow exploit for WinXP SP2 translate to a Linux exploit?
Correct. However, Sun *is* taking the risk that pseudo-Java forks will dilute the Java community despite the trademark protection. Kaffe and GCJ are not technically "Java", but that doesn't stop the market from thinking of them as such.
The "community" already HAS altered Java(tm). SWT is preferred over Swing/AWT; Hibernate is preferred over EJB 1.x/2.x; and how many different web frameworks have come up to supplant JSP and Servlets? The point is that "control over Java(tm)" and "non-GPL JDK" are orthogonal issues: Sun has exactly as much control now as they did then, which is still a lot but not total.
The community had shown that it was willing to work around technical problems in the JDK with or without Sun's guidance. It was only a matter of time before the F/OSS stack gained some feature that made it more preferable than the Sun JDK for typical use. (If nothing else, improved reliability to the point that one wouldn't need a separate JRE for every major application.)
Sun was at risk of its implementation eventually becoming the secondary one, much like their C compiler on Solaris. (Even though "serious" people use cc, nearly everyone else uses gcc first.)
Microsoft was SO committed that they tried one last Embrace/Extend/Extinguish with J#. As it happens, Microsoft just released a new version of the J# package.
J# != Java.
These languages have not made any significant inroads into Sun's paying market. Unless it affects Sun's market directly, it's not an issue. I understand that the OSS community has a lot of interest in these platforms, but that doesn't mean that there are many paying jobs for them. Servlets/J2EE still rule the day in large companies.
Given that a whole generation of IT/CS students has come out with only Java background, I'm sure it will have a lasting presence of some kind. And J2EE is nice, I've done LOTS of work there. But there are lots of new problems out there, new markets and new jobs, and lots of money to be found, and those other languages are finding themselves a better fit than Java currently. I would expect Sun to desire for Java to be competitive in those new spaces. If Java doesn't aggressively move towards those markets -- and it needs the community behind it to do so -- then 15 years from now it might be just another Lisp or Scheme, used in a few places for teaching but not much else that pays money (Paul Graham notwithstanding).
"About?" Eclipse has been running on Kaffe for over 2 years now! If Sun was worried about Eclipse, they certainly took their sweet time doing something about it.
I guess the last couple years have really flown by for me. So Kaffe runs Eclipse, but also OOo, JBoss, Tomcat, and Azureus. Between all those that covers a lot of ground both desktop and server side.
And this pretty much seals the fate of your opinion having any impact. Java is a long way from "the new COBOL".
"java is the new cobol" garners 89 hits on Google, making it a legitimate phrase. Taking away the quotes you'll find over a millions hits along with vote counters and long blog discussions etc. Java can do lots of things COBOL can't, but in relation to every other language it is about the same as COBOL was long ago: a good middle-of-the-road language with a decent mix of function and syntax that fits very well within existing business processes. Most hits on "java is the new cobol" are actually backhanded nods to Java's popularity.
I have yet to see anyone who uses Java call it by that name.
I guess you haven't met enough professional Java programmers.
Explain this: If Java is the new COBOL, then why isn't COBOL run anywhere except on mainframes? Microcomputers ran BASIC. Today's cell phones (about the closest analog) run Java. Where are the COBOL video games? Video games were written in assembler back in the day. Now they're written in high-level languages like C++ and Java. Early networking work was done in C. Now our P2P apps are wri
This is just plain hubris. Anyone who has spent time in the Java community knows why Sun was so difficult about releasing control over Java: Microsoft.
.Net and won't touch Java with a ten-foot pole.
.Net/Mono, or keep the status quo and watch Java lost ground to Mono, Ruby, Python, and whatever else comes next.
I think Linus is right and you are wrong on Java:
1. Sun still retains "control" over Java-the-platform through the JSR/committee process. GPL'ing the reference implementation doesn't affect their control of the trademark.
2. The Microsoft lawsuit was settled for a LONG time before Sun started talking seriously about GPL. In the meantime MS was committed to
3. The 'it factor' was in danger of permanently moving away from Java. F/OSS was picking up Mono, Ruby, and Python instead. Java's reputation as "the new COBOL" was turning it into a platform that pays the bills but is otherwise very uninteresting.
4. Once Kaffe/Sabre/Classpath/etc. were about to run Eclipse, Sun got very serious about GPL'ing the JDK.
All in all this leads me to conclude that Linus was dead on right: Sun would prefer to have a non-GPL Java, but they ran out of options. It was either GPL Java and breathe new life/freshness into the platform and deal a blow to
If the kernel stays at v2, expect to see a lot of forks;
*sigh* OK, let's repeat what always comes around on every one of these discussions:
Point one:
THE KERNEL IS GPL V2 (TWO) ONLY. THE LINUX KERNEL CANNOT BE FORKED TO GPL V3 WITHOUT AN UNGODLY AMOUNT OF WORK AND THERE IS NO POINT IN DOING THAT.
Point two:
IT IS PERFECTLY FINE TO HAVE THE LINUX KERNEL AT GPL V2 AND THE REST OF A LINUX SYSTEM AT GPL V3, JUST AS PARTS OF ALL LINUX SYSTEMS TODAY HAVE CODE THAT IS UNDER BSD, APACHE, MOZILLA, ETC. LICENSES.
It shows how far fundamentalists can go to counter Reason in a way that hasn't been seen in France for centuries.
I suppose you are correct since you qualify this with "how far fundamentalists can go". However, widen the scope to include all things "para-normal" and France isn't far behind the USA at all when it comes to belief in palm reading, psychics, tarot, astral projection, and all the other superstitious nonsense.
Lazy much? Google "cheney iraq 911":
c gi/4/5151 : "The vice president has asserted long-standing links between the former Iraqi president and Osama Bin Laden's Islamist militant network."
t m : "The Bush administration has long claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and cited them as one reason for last year's invasion of Iraq.
_ Peace.htm : "FACT CHECK: The Washington Post reported Oct. 6 that Cheney often "skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers," especially by repeatedly citing the possibility that hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi official, a theory disputed by the 9/11 Commission."
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0616-01.h
On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator ``had long established ties with al-Qaida.''"
Check out a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiNtpIpD6k About 20 seconds before the end Cheney is quoted on Meet the Press talking about an alleged meeting between Iraqi intelligence and Al-Qaida 5 months before 9/11.
And finally: http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick_Cheney_War_+
Well, we'll both be heading into new territory. :) My wife and I are about to replace our main home desktop with a Mac Mini and might move over to Mail.App too.
/tmp gets full during a POP run, it's possible for Kmail to lose mail, so I always make sure my disk has some free space. I also have it using mbox format and storing everything in ~/Mail, so with just an rsync command it's all backed up every few days. All in all it's really nice.
I've been using Kmail for a few months now and really like it, but I should mention one weakness: if the disk with
It's just a different transformative agenda than what the more far-left elements of the Democratic party want.
There are no "far-left elements" of the Democratic party. Certainly Dennis Kucinich would be the standard bearer for the left wing, and he could run quite easily as a centrist in most non-American elections. Wake me up when we see someone urging Hugo Chavez-like direct wealth redistribution from within the Democratic party.
Is this a rehash of "the great right-wing fraud to repudiate George W. Bush" in which we find out that GWB is actually a liberal?
Mail.App is the best (graphical) email client I've ever used (mutt is still better :).
Have you used Kmail, and it so how does it compare to Mail.App?
You say this:
Finally gave up and sold the printer to a windows-only relative.
But earlier you said:
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20.
So which is it? Is the fact the Canon printer works only with Windows a problem with the printer or a problem with the Mac?
GPL v3 is a disaster from a developer standpoint; and a dream come true for the end-user. The only group I see using GPL v3 is FSF.
Well, *I* intend to switch to v3 in a few more months for my OSS projects and I'm a developer. Though I do in general get RMS's idea about a commons of free software and laud his approach, my reasons for GPL are far more practical: in the unlikely event that I create some software that has lucrative market potential, and someone out there wants to use it in a non-free capacity, I want them to *pay me* for the privilege. I would gladly sell them a typical commercial-style license (i.e. *not* BSD) for the right amount of cash. Until a market need arises however my stuff is meant to be used by whomever and I get to mention it in job searches.
I also would never consider modifying, and distributing said modifications for anything under GPL v3.
Most of my modifications to existing projects are minor, and thus I license them "public domain" so the maintainers can do whatever they want with it. I see little point to a BSD-style license (public domain + attribution) when public domain itself is available.
No, what is interesting is how the film maker will decry the loss of liberties, the encroachments of freedom, and the institution of censorship -- in a film openly distributed and marketed to the general public, and all without the government shutting him down. Yessireee...a police state! That's what we're living in for sure. The jackbooted thugs will be here any minute now...any minute now...I'm sure they're almost here...somewhere. Well, maybe their black helicopters broke down or something, but I'm sure they're on their way!
That's how the modern police state works, you see. Freedom of speech is still allowed, dissent is still recorded, and people thus think they aren't really living in a police state.
However, start organizing against the state and see just how quickly you can get shut down. Your activist groups will be infiltrated, investigations into your personal life will begin, and at the slightest hint of significant success at changing the status quo you will be arrested and charged with a bogus crime to end your career as a political radical. Web sites will describe your fate and complacent onlookers will marvel that in their free society -- which is clearly free because people can read these stories -- some people can still go crazy about such fringe political topics.
This argument is funny. What it translates to is: "I want to write 'free' software, but I don't want anyone else to make money off my work" -- Or more directly, "I want to be greedy but not appear to be"
:)
I see absolutely nothing wrong with "I want to write free software, but I'm also willing to license that code for reasonable compensation."
That's certainly no more greedy than "I see free code out there that I'd like to use, but I don't want to pay for it."
I guess I don't see why one license has to "win" over the other. Use what you like. Just don't bash other stuff.
We agree completely.
Oops: s/Developers who use GPL (like you)/Developers who use GPL (like me)/g
Need to preview first more often.
Basically, I am very suspicious of anyone that wants to protect my freedom by limiting it. When you then justify the limitation by saying it doesn't really exist or is meaningless, I'm going to be downright scornful.
You already have the freedom to write your own code to accomplish a task. You already have the freedom to negotiate with other people to use their code to accomplish a task. Developers who use GPL (like you) grant you a new freedom to use our code, but only so long as you pass that same agreement to others.
Now where in all this have I or any other GPL-using developers taken away your freedom?
I won't touch whatever flame war was going on, but:
.emacs, I don't touch Lisp either. LaTeX, well I use it but it's still a bit frustrating as I am at best only 30% up the learning curve. OTOH I really like it's PDF output.
And I want some of what you're smoking if you consider Emacs to be "fast", or you consider an alternative to a full-fledged word processor (WTF?), especially for non-technical users. Are you going to require them to learn Lisp as well? And Latex? Emacs is confusing as hell to anyone who is not a developer.
Emacs out of the box is definitely a poor editor for most people, but after some configuration it's pretty darn good for all sorts of use. In fact it's the closest thing I've found to WordPerfect 5.x under Linux that runs in text mode. Outside of my
It's not an end-user application.
My reference to WP 5.1 shows my bias. I grew up when WordStar was temporary king of a market with dozens of word processors. I remember when regular end-users on WP got the paper keyboard template to put over the function keys. Word's option to emulate WP's function keys was a brilliant move.
Whether you choose to admit it or not, regardless of what America does there will be those who seek her downfall.
You seem to think that the majority of people who "seek America's downfall" do so irrationally, as though all our Cold War sins never really happened. News flash: our government spread quite a bit more misery throughout the world between 1945 and 1990 than peace and prosperity.
The military will be out there defending your sorry ass whether or not you appreciate that service.
My particular "sorry ass" would rather our military actually spend its time on defense rather than re-enact adolescent boy fantasies of being the Toughest Shit in the 'Hood.
It's sad when someone like you who's clearly benefited from being an American is so clueless about the simple realities of life. If we have to rely on the likes of you for our future, I'm quite sure America will quickly achieve second-rate status in the world.
America already IS second-rate in most of the developed world, thanks largely to our aversion to actually use public money to further the public good because that's too "socialist".
Their sole and only influence is to make sure that nobody can use undue leverage against competitors and that competitors don't form a cartel to cooperate against workers, competition, customer and supplier.
There fixed it for you. You know, so that government's role in the economy includes the other 95% of the citizenry.
I can't even get applications to run under different versions of Linux without recompilation, given the differences betweeen glibc and gcc over recent years.
I found that to be especially true in the 1998-2002 timeframe, but much less so today. Nowadays all the applications I've run across post-2002 will at least run on all the major desktop Linux variants with minimal hassle. However, embedded systems still tend to require recompiling to the target libc as they don't often ship with multiple versions of it.
If you claim to have a BS in CS at the interview table, but didn't suffer through, e.g.,
I've got a BS in Comp Sci from a decent program in Texas.
a computer organization course (like Hennessy and Patterson style, which is common these days),
My Comp Org class described memory, buses, microcode, arithmetic, instruction encoding/decoding, and as a final project required us to develop a 4-bit ALU from logic gates. We also had a separate course called "Digital Logic" that was using Altera Max+Plus II to develop logical circuits and flash them to a chip (I don't know if it was a real FPGA or somthing else).
didn't have a course where you developed an operating system,
That was an elective I chose not to take.
didn't design a language starting from BNF and build a compiler for it,
"Systems Programming" involved writing an assembler, compiler, and linker for a hypothetical chip.
didn't take 2 years of a lab science,
2 years of a single lab science? That's almost enough to graduate in the other major if you're talking chemistry or biology. Ours required only 8 hours in a lab science.
didn't at least come close to a math minor,
One course away, but only because I had also been an engineering student before and run out to diff eq.
didn't have at least 4 courses at various levels of discrete math, automata, algorithm analyis,
Automata was a graduate level course. Algorithms, data structures, and discrete were required for undergrads.
and didn't have a course that, as a final project, you deliver a significant user app in a high level language
Our final project was a tiny web-based CGI app in C that took me all of two days to complete. This was circa 1998/1999 before web servers plugged in easily into anything but CGI and perl.
(on the order of an original multiplayer game, let's say)...
"Game Design" was an elective that I took -- 3 programmers + 1 artist from the Digital Arts major to design and implement an actual game using DirectX 5.x.
I'd say your school has some explaining to do.
Me too. The databases course was useless -- one week of full-time work with DB2 covered far more material on table and query design that two weeks of "predicate calculus". Nearly every other course could be reduced to about two weeks of full-time study each, and the profs had a tendency to ramble off-topic. The biggest drawback was that it was an "OK" prep for a Comp Sci graduate student and a "slightly-less-than OK" prep for an actual programmer. But then, I've never actually seen or heard of a really decent prep for professional programming work; it seems everyone needs at least two years of full-time experience before they can write passably usable code.
BTW--You forgot to mention an ethics course that covered at least a handful of the more famous fatal software glitches.
One nice thing about having only computers and not set-top DVD boxes at my house: they all run Linux, and they all ignore DVD restrictions.
I used to be a slackware user. At some point, about four years ago, I decided to use debian and debian-based distributions.
I hated it and it felt stupid. Lot's of things I was used to worked differently. I kept trying and a few weeks later I had it sorta under control.
I had a similar experience, started with Slackware back when it was competing against SLS and Yggdrasil. Switched to RedHat based distros 1999-2001, then to Debian Woody. It took a few weeks to get used to the "Debian way", but now I'm hooked.
Are you still a Debian user?
When something goes wrong, on Windows, I can play with my configuration and focus on the configuration itself. On Linux, I'm usually trying to figure out the order of the command-line arguments or figuring out the syntax of some configuration file, or something equally mundane.
That's odd. For me, when something goes wrong in Windows, I check the available menus/dialogs and see if any option fixes it, and if nothing works I have to give up right there. On Linux, I can hunt down the appropriate configuration files, find the application-specific error logs, and eventually fix the issue and move on.
Recent example: I installed the nVidia driver and it didn't work, but after renaming the nvidiafb.ko kernel module to ensure only the proprietary driver loaded, and then examining the X server log I found the two X11 modules that weren't loading correctly and fixed it. In all, about 1 hour to find and fix both issues, and able to do all that when the GUI itself was borked. I can't even imagine successfully fixing a Windows system facing a similar issue.
If it aint broke, don't fix it.
Agree completely.
It's true that you might need to install software that comes with your DVD drive in order to watch movies on Windows, but most distributions of Linux, again, out of the box, do not play DVDs either.
Do you know offhand which distributions besides Ubuntu this applies to? Right now I'm using Debian Etch and have no trouble playing DVDs with Kaffeine.
I just recently discovered the joy that is VMWare. It makes life so much easier for those Windows apps that don't quite work right under WINE it's not even funny. I have a Win98SE image for the sole purpose of running the REAL Office 97 and one other Windows 3.x application, and it works very well for this purpose.
I don't know what your needs really are, but if your Windows applications don't require an awful lot of memory or CPU to run acceptably, VMWare (which is free) might be something to look at. Finally, my copies of VMWare are running smoothly under both Debian Sarge and Etch with KDE. I was very impressed at how well VMWare works.