Writing the code for an embedded product under Linux provides one huge benefit. The embedded OS does not depend on the plans of an outside company for porting to the next hardware platform you choose. And the application should port easily as long as you avoid, or isolate, hardware dependent code. For companies for whom the OS they deliver their product on is a commodity item, open source OSs offer them a measure of control over the future of their product. Any hardware they choose can run the OS if the port is worth the effort. If having Linux run on your next hardware platform is worth enough to pay a few good programmers to do it, Linux will run on that hardware. No one can say no to you.
Something like DOpus could make X far more useable for the would be linux crowd who want to try it out, but cant figure out stuff like ls, cd, rm, cp, more...;)
I agree with the point that a complete GUI desktop environment is going to make Linux more accessible to the new or casual user. The reason is extremely simple. It is easier to recognize even infrequently used controls when they are visible in front of you than it is to remember how to access them when they are not visible. That is the entire secret to the real need for GUIs.
Let's be honest with ourselves. My average computer use has probably been around 10 hours/day for several years (down somewhat from the days when I didn't have kids and home-repair projects). I am probably around the 50th percentile among Slashdot readers. (Future poll topic?) And I am probably at least 1.5 to 2 sigmas out on the bell curve for the general population. Remembering an infrequently used command is not a problem for me. I know where and how to find the information.
The importance of a CLI however is often underrated. CLI tools lend themselves very well to scripting. That means that I can make frequently executed tasks even easier than a GUI makes them for my mother. I can reduce something that she clicks through menus to do into a shell script. I type a few characters and dozens of separate steps involving a variety of tools happen automatically, with the infinite patience and unparalleled repeatability that a computer brings to the task. I won't give up that power for all the windows, icons, menus and pointers in the world. GUIs don't speed up my interaction or make it easier a significant part of the time.
Most data has a useful lifetime after which it is of little use to the owner. My tax returns are only useful to keep for a few years, the same with the financial documents that support them. My birth certificate is useful for my lifetime and has some value to genealogists after that. Flame mail to the network that aired some boneheaded Y2K alarmist story 7 weeks ago is already obsolete.
The problem is to organize data in a way that highlights how long it is needed. It is difficult to give a date in advance after which some things will be obsolete. If I write a book, when I am finished writing it, if no one buys it, the file is useful as long as I want it. If it becomes a best-seller, my biographer will probably want the rough drafts in 20 years. But I don't know that when I save them.
The solution to this is to learn a better strategy for identifying data. Some file formats already make provisions for this. LaTeX and DocBook already provide tags for quite a bit of identifying information about the source. Meta information can be placed into HTML. CVS stores records of who made changes and why in addition to retaining a record of each revision.
In fact, now that I think about it, CVS provides a good model for data storage. You get a way to retrieve each version of a file. You get a way to link together corresponding revisions of several files. And you have a record of when, why and by whom all of the changes were made. But at its heart, it is a system for data that is still alive. It is not a system for organizing the historical records of a person, company or government. And it doesn't address the question of media decay because it is independent of the specific media.
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Yes, I know this was a joke. I did laugh. But I wanted to raise a point that isn't always obvious to monolingual English speakers.
I'm the team leader for the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. Esperanto is unusual among languages. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single monolingual Esperantist anywhere in the world, nor is there likely to be one any time soon. We have no native country as a language and aren't seeking one. For anyone who is confused by this, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887. It is usually learned as a second, third or subsequent language.
Everyone on the Esperanto Translation Team could be using free software under other languages for which the localization has already been done. I use Linux with English literals except when I an validating translations. But there is a reason to have complete locales for any language that users might want to use software in conjunction with. I can read English just fine, but when I want to write to a non-English-speaking friend in Esperanto, I need an e-mail client that can handle the character set. And when I am writing in Esperanto, it takes me a moment to switch back and forth. I don't do it instantly. Having messages, menus, etc., in the same language I am working in is a great help.
Teaching the entire world a single common language will not eliminate the need for computing environments that support their native languages. The only thing that would accomplish that would be if we all learned a single language and abandoned all others. That would involve abandoning names, literature, culture. It isn't a step many people are willing to take. Certainly, teach the world English, or French, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Esperanto or any other language. Don't ask them all to give up the perfectly good languages they already have.
Do you internationlize the source (meaning comments, variable and function names, etc.)?
There's a problem with that. A variable or function has a name. The whole point of internationalization is to allow a program to dynamically look up message text at run-time for the user's language. That doesn't make a great deal of sense for a static part of the program, the source code.
However, I can see two ways in which your question, if not taken literally, is useful. First, there is good reason to internationalize programming tools. There's nothing wrong with the idea that gcc should be able to handle comments and literals in any language. Identifiers present a more difficult problem because the code may be compiled on a system that doesn't have the original programmer's locale. Thus, the set of valid characters for identifiers should not depend on the locale. For that matter, neither should the valid set of characters anywhere else in the code.
The other useful interpretation of this question is the obvious one that there is a need for documentation that can make the internals of the code clear to a non-English-speaking audience. Certainly, English is the language of programming. Any project in which programmers can't communicate with each other is likely to fragment. But that is no reason that a team of programmers sharing some non-English common language should not be able to read the system header files for example.
Yes, there is a project for localization of free software. The Free Translation Project is an ongoing project to localize free software into as many languages as possible. If yours isn't one of the one's we're already doing, there are a number of people who can mentor you in starting a translation team for your language.
This is not the only project handling translation of free software. Several of the distributions have projects going to translate their installation tools and documentation. And both Gnome and KDE have internationalization projects.
Waterworld was underwritten by a movie studio that expected to make money. The tickets were bought by people who expected to be entertained. What this makes clear is that the possibility of privately funded space exploration really exists. We don't have to just sit and wait for it to happen. And it might not be a bad thing for NASA. They have a lot of expertise and equipment already. If some aspects of the project were contracted out to NASA on private missions, they are in the loop, and have another source of revenue.
"Open source has made it possible for people with ideas and a message to build tools that either embody it or enable it if they have the talent."
False. Bill Gates got Windows out there, as well as writing a book about his ideas in the computer realm. The idea that Open Source created this ability is laughable. Open Source came after.
Perhaps I was a bit unclear. I didn't mean that open source made this possible for the first time. It made it possible for some people where it might not have been possible for them otherwise.
I will not only second the vote on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, but I will give some good reasons for reading it. Vinge is not one of the most prolific authors in science fiction, but he is one of the most thought provoking. He creates alien cultures that are believable and compeling, with real characters who are every bit as important to the story as the humans. In A Fire Upon the Deep, he creates several races at varying levels of detail. The Tines, we read a great deal about. We get to see more than one subculture among them. We find dear friends and menacing enemies.
Vinge also asks big questions. One of the running themes through his fiction is, "What will we become?" He is asking what humanity will develop itself into. And he only shows us indirectly in his references to singularity. There is a web page here giving some of his thoughts on the concept. He doesn't try to give a complete answer.
A Fire Upon the Deep is a very worthwhile read as are the compilation Across Realtime and the prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep which I am reading right now, A Deepness In the Sky. Calling it a prequel is perhaps a bit strong. It contains a character who appears in Fire and takes place in a setting that he described in that book, briefly.
If I had a single bookshelf labelled Books That Made Me Think every one of Vernor Vinge's books that I have read would be on it.
Innovator/inventor and enlightener/internalizer, to use the terms of this article, are not mutually exclusive. The open source community has far too many prominent examples of people who are extremely competent in building the messenger and who have also provided us with profound insights because they want to communicate their ideas:
Richard Stallman who brought us Emacs (among other things), and the GNU Public License
If you're trying to endear yourself to Slashdot readers, perhaps you shouldn't emphasize your ties to eToys and DoubleClick this month. Eh, Larry?
He's being honest. Yes, many Slashdot readers are annoyed at DoubleClick this week. Yes, many of us think it took eToys rather long to get around to doing the right thing. Both of them are potentially very lucrative longterm customers. And if they perceive the open source community as both a supplier of choice and an outspoken portion of their market, rather than a pack of rabid dogs, they would probably be flexible enough to listen to us. For all I know, they read or were told of the discussions here and elsewhere and rethought their strategies as a result. Let's not criticize Larry too harshly for telling us the truth. I vastly prefer uncomfortable truths to lies and evasion.
And speaking of uncomfortable truths, I will join the growing number asking that the AMD portion of the final question get answered. I'd be happy to accept valid business reasons for making a business decision. I just don't like the impression that the question was ducked. I don't think that was the impression he intended to give.
2.I patent it. Now I want to make my OSS program, and I need LZW. Hmmm, looks like Unisys would like to use my algorithm. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You let me have the rights to LZW, I let you have the rights to my algorithm.
The last time this issue came up, I suggested an extension to this approach. In order to encourage people and companies with potentially valuable patents to make them accessible to the open source community, we need to offer them an alternative where they can license them for open source use and retain the all the rights for commercial exploitation. I suggested that we offer them a license which grants use of the patented technology for open source projects (with some definition of what will qualify as open source). Now they will have to demonstrate that they haven't let their technology fall into the public domain, so they would probably have to require some sort of registration and approval process.
But your suggestion supplies the incentive that would encourage them to do it. If they will license their patents for free open source usage, they get access to all of the patents owned by the open source community. We could easily allow them to use the patented technology in commercial products. I know that would not be acceptable to some portions of the open source community. Can anyone think of another way that might be better?
I'm not trying to beat up the companies that hold the patents. One of the reasons they hold them is defensive, and I wouldn't ask them to give up that defense. I just want to give them a reason to play with open source projects.
The reality is that since NAFTA, the economies of countries like Mexico and Ecuador (keep your eye on the current beginnings of a revolution in Ecuador) have been devastated, despite the fact that a large amount of our factory work has moved there.
NAFTA is not exactly the equivalent of free trade. A free trade treaty doesn't require that level of detail.
The USSR proved that the welfare of people and the environment is ignored when power is put in the hands of the government, and it's my belief that the next 20 years are going to show that the welfare of people and the environment are non-existent when placed in the hands of multinational corporations and the capitalist class.
I agree with you there. Corporations don't have values. They exist to organize groups of people to produce products and services for a profit. Any care for our neighbors and environment is going to come from people. That is not to say that corporations can't participate, and they often do. Many companies will match charitable contributions of various sorts by their employees. But in the end, the choice of what causes to support and the support for them comes from individual people.
Personally, I am a bleeding heart libertarian. I want government out of the charity business, and I give generously to charities that I think are getting it right.
Something you might want to consider then next time your government talks about 'wonderful foreign trade opportunities with China.'
I certainly understand the gut reaction to the situation. However, trade restrictions generally hurt people on the side that is maintaining the restriction. This assertion follows from the arguments presented in Chapter 19: Applications - Conventional and Unconventional of David Friedman's book, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. Exchange of reliable information is essential to economic efficiency. As a result, free trade tends to develop channels for the exchange of information, regardless of the desires of anyone besides the participants. In the end, it will benefit both sides and make both sides more free.
The first and most obvious point I can think of is that this is not immortality in most of the senses that matter to me as an individual. Having a copy of me live on after my death does not change the fact of my death. I as an individual will experience the ultimate discontinuity.
I was also thinking just this morning about the boundary between man and machine and the nature of computer assisted intelligence. Wearable, networked computers are likely to become commonplace in the near future. The prototypes exist already, it is just a question of finding a balance between capabilities, durability, and price. But this point applies just as much to palmtops. If I use a portable computer to keep track of an enormous amount of information for me, it is still possible to distinguish me, the biological system, from the computer. As we have gone from portable computers, to laptops, to palmtops, to wearables, the accessibility as become more constant. However, there is still and distinction physically. And yet, they become more and more extentions of ourselves.
We entrust to external devices the tasks of memory. How do we enhance the various aspects of that trust? How do we protect ourselves from loss of the data or loss of access to the data? How do we protect that data from unauthorized access? The answers are obvious enough technologically. Backups, redundant components accessible on short notice, encryption. But how do we build those into the system, the expectation, the patterns of use?
What human activities and enterprises will this access render obsolete? If I had all the answers with any certainty, and knew which products would be the winners, I'd be rich.
I have two comments on this. First, I have long insisted that any closed source product that is not at least as good than an open source alternative is defective. Second, you are right in your comment. Slashdot has set the standard. And since they are using the GPL, other sites that want to use the code will have to GPL modifications. It is just possible that this will lead to improvements. As much as I respect their work, the guys at Slashdot have to eat, sleep, and post articles. They can't be coding round the clock.
Many of the technologies that have radically changed society, reshaping every institution have been communication technologies:
The printing press
Telegraph
Telephone
Radio
Television
Computer networking
Public key encryption
To the extent that they facilitate dissemination of the same information to a large body of people, communication technologies have been a homogenizing force. They have brought the same ideas, in the same language, to a larger audience than would have seen them otherwise.
To the extent that they facilitate one-on-one discussion, they have allowed varied interests to endure. What might have been the ideas or hobbies of isolated individuals or groups can be made more widely available.
And to the extent that they have protected communication from ourside observation or censorship, they have encouraged dissenting opinion to flourish. That protects us from tyrany from any source. I have never feared what people of good will would do with power over my communication. I have feared whose hands that power would eventually reside in.
Of course it was worth the time! The value of time spent on something is in what the person doing it gets out of it. It doesn't matter if it is useful to him or anybody else unless that was part of the goal.
If I gave up reading books that weren't useful, I'd have to throw out most of my fiction. Of course, I wouldn't miss some of the non-fiction that should be thrown out as useless.
As for getting paid for your time, as we become wealthier, time quickly becomes the most valuable commodity we have. An hour spent can never be reclaimed. I spent the last hour reading to my son. I had a good day today. I gave my employer good value for my salary. But that last hour, for which I wasn't paid a penny, is the one I will remember longest and treasure most.
Wouldn't it be a bit cooler to spend this time doing something remotely useful, and getting paid for it? Perhaps this is just my way of thinking...
What he did may not be valuable to you. Enjoy the diversity of the world. It is part of the reason that the world needs you as well as him. I could try to say something deep and profound here, but the point is too obvious.
Chorus of thousands of massed followers under a window: "We are all individuals!"
The text of the article mentioned that Linux provides the ability to use the standard Unix tools in scripts to automate tasks across a network. As far as getting consistent system administration done quickly across a large network, that is much more useful than running a GUI for each one.
They mentioned scalability, and one important factor with scalability is how administration scales with the number of servers. I don't expect to see many benchmarks that do it, but I would like to see a real scalability test with 1, 10, and 100 server configurations. The ability to learn the details once, and then automate them out of your way is a big plus with a rich, mature CLI environment.
I don't mean to say that there is no place for a set of GUI system administration tools. The single server in a small business will be easier to maintain that way. The file server at home serving my machine, my wife's and my kids' would be easier as well. It opens doors at the low end of the scale, which represents a larger number of sites. If you are a captive of the GUI for every configuration task, it slows you down significantly as the number of servers grows.
He can be amazed all he wants
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Free Solaris 8
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IBM is still embracing Linux, regardless of what Sun says. I think the real point is that Linux is portable across an amazing range of hardware. It is easy enough to leverage a known OS, with a good reputation, and an active community of open source developers. If you want it on your own hardware, you dedicate a team of programmers to writing device drivers and any other code you need specific to your iron.
Now I am well aware that AIX has some things going for it that Linux doesn't have... yet. Solaris can say the same. But the question is whether Sun can sustain Solaris development as a freebie. If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like. We'll all have to watch and see if it works for them.
I for one am not going to criticize them for keeping Solaris closed source. It isn't my choice. It doesn't detract from the open source OSs that I have to choose from. Hmm. Linux CDs are still here. FreeBSD was still on the bookstore shelves at lunchtime.
In economics, there is a concept called price discrimination. Usually, it is discussed in terms of a monopoly which can charge different customers different prices, based on location or some other sorting criteria. But there is another situation where it can occur easily enough. Where the product can be diversified, giving different customers different packaging, there can be price discrimination.
This is precisely why in the end, there will be more than one Linux distribution. There is room for several with different goals. There is no reason why one can't specialize in merely bundling the latest stable versions of everything, while another goes for rock solid security, and a third concentrates on an easy install and good support for new users.
And that's what's great about open source. The barriers to entry are low. But as LinuxOne is demonstrating, they aren't zero. If you want to introduce a new distribution, you have to at least make an attempt. The Linux community will shread you if you don't. Now, will Joe Newbie read the reviews on Slashdot? No. Will J. Random Reporter for some magazine that Joe reads read us? Probably. Will Big Retail Software, Inc. read us or a source that does read us before they stock their shelves? Almost certainly. If you don't do a credible job of putting together a real distribution, you aren't going to be taken seriously.
There are an enormous number of slightly different compiles of the kernel and various commonly used programs out there. Because everyone can get the source, every distribution and many users compile it for themselves. This is going to mean that a virus that attacks a binary is likely to simply break it on at least some subset of systems, making detection relatively easy.
The Linux security model is different from that of Windows. If you aren't running as root or another account with access to various things, such as bin, there are a lot of files you just can't change.
Different distributions structure their configurations differently. This makes targetting rc scripts harder, but not impossible.
Because a large part of the configuration is found in scripts and text files, detecting the damage and determining what was done is potentially more straightforward. Joe Average User may not find it, but the local Users' Group can probably track the source of the problem for him.
Because we all have documentation for the configuration of everything, building tools that detect subtle changes and keep archived copies of config files is something a good and thorough programmer on a tight budget can do.
Because we have source, proving that you are a Real Programmer on an Open Source OS can be accomplished by a number of constructive avenues that are only available through Open Source. These may reduce the number of people seeking attention in negative ways... maybe.
Some things that are going to make Linux easier to attack:
J. Virus Writer has access to full documentation and source for the programs he wants to attack. Finding the existance of buffers that can be overrun and the consequences is not a trial and error effort.
Text is easy to manipulate and most config files and start-up scripts are text. Thus, the virus can do its work by spawning sed, perl, awk, ed, emacs or several other tools. Those scripts are likely to be smaller and more portable across releases and distributions than the equivalent binaries. And they can be embedded in binaries.
LILO. Somebody who can install a hacked version of LILO can do some damage. And the LILO config is easy enough to edit. See my previous point.
Trusted binaries can be compromised in useful ways, as described by Ken Thompson in Reflections on Trusting Trust. I have some thoughts on how to make such a compromised binary nearly undetectable on the system on which it was built. I won't detail them here.
One of the things that I notice about Linux is that there is some overlap between these lists. It seems to point to the idea of tamper-evident packaging.
The bottom line is that there will be people who will do destructive things. There will be security holes that they will take advantage of. There is a need for security conscious people willing to patch them. A virus is just one way of taking advantage of security holes.
Now, let's see how many ways this is a bad idea...
You forgot that the addresses will certainly be derived by some obvious algorithm (e.g., 123_main_st@9-digit-zip-code.usps.gov) or they will simply be a sequence of nonsense addresses that fit an obvious pattern (e.g., e-mail-box-74351a@usps.gov). Either way, building spam lists with hundreds of millions of addresses will be trivial. Those e-mail addresses will all be in a single domain. I can just imagine the volume of spam that will start hitting them days after this scheme starts.
Oh, and the mailbox will effectively carry the name Resident and will be passed on to the next occupant of the house. That raises the possibility of people subscribing other people to all sorts of exciting mailing lists.
Re:One problem with open source books
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GPL for Books?
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Can you offer a shred of evidence to support that claim? AFAIK, Tom C. doesn't hesitate to apply an editor's perogative to any documentation in the Perl core.
Yeah, I couldn't remember exactly where I had read the comment when I originally posted, but I remembered that I had found it in the past couple of weeks through Slashdot. With a little searching I turned it up. It is in an article entitled The Sins of Perl Revisited. I'm not trying to complain about the great job that the authors of the Perl man pages have done. I keep a printed copy in my office, and just knowing where to look things up has branded me as the local Perl guru. I couldn't do that without good documentation.
One problem with open source books
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GPL for Books?
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The issue has been cited with the existing Perl man pages that they have grown to an unmanagable size. The problem is that anyone can contribute material to them, but there is a genuine reluctance to cut anything written by another author. They are clearly huge and it is obviously hard for some newbiews to find a starting point. This issue is discussed at the Open Content web site.
This problem could be solved by finding individuals willing to act as the editors for particular sections. Make it clear to your contributors that their contributions will be proofread. They may not be accepted, or they may be reworded to make them more concise. Such a move will probably discourage some contributors, but it is probably the necessary balance to maintain a good book over time.
By the way, the home of the Open Content License is here.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing the code for an embedded product under Linux provides one huge benefit. The embedded OS does not depend on the plans of an outside company for porting to the next hardware platform you choose. And the application should port easily as long as you avoid, or isolate, hardware dependent code. For companies for whom the OS they deliver their product on is a commodity item, open source OSs offer them a measure of control over the future of their product. Any hardware they choose can run the OS if the port is worth the effort. If having Linux run on your next hardware platform is worth enough to pay a few good programmers to do it, Linux will run on that hardware. No one can say no to you.
Something like DOpus could make X far more useable for the would be linux crowd who want to try it out, but cant figure out stuff like ls, cd, rm, cp, more... ;)
I agree with the point that a complete GUI desktop environment is going to make Linux more accessible to the new or casual user. The reason is extremely simple. It is easier to recognize even infrequently used controls when they are visible in front of you than it is to remember how to access them when they are not visible. That is the entire secret to the real need for GUIs.
Let's be honest with ourselves. My average computer use has probably been around 10 hours/day for several years (down somewhat from the days when I didn't have kids and home-repair projects). I am probably around the 50th percentile among Slashdot readers. (Future poll topic?) And I am probably at least 1.5 to 2 sigmas out on the bell curve for the general population. Remembering an infrequently used command is not a problem for me. I know where and how to find the information.
The importance of a CLI however is often underrated. CLI tools lend themselves very well to scripting. That means that I can make frequently executed tasks even easier than a GUI makes them for my mother. I can reduce something that she clicks through menus to do into a shell script. I type a few characters and dozens of separate steps involving a variety of tools happen automatically, with the infinite patience and unparalleled repeatability that a computer brings to the task. I won't give up that power for all the windows, icons, menus and pointers in the world. GUIs don't speed up my interaction or make it easier a significant part of the time.
Most data has a useful lifetime after which it is of little use to the owner. My tax returns are only useful to keep for a few years, the same with the financial documents that support them. My birth certificate is useful for my lifetime and has some value to genealogists after that. Flame mail to the network that aired some boneheaded Y2K alarmist story 7 weeks ago is already obsolete.
The problem is to organize data in a way that highlights how long it is needed. It is difficult to give a date in advance after which some things will be obsolete. If I write a book, when I am finished writing it, if no one buys it, the file is useful as long as I want it. If it becomes a best-seller, my biographer will probably want the rough drafts in 20 years. But I don't know that when I save them.
The solution to this is to learn a better strategy for identifying data. Some file formats already make provisions for this. LaTeX and DocBook already provide tags for quite a bit of identifying information about the source. Meta information can be placed into HTML. CVS stores records of who made changes and why in addition to retaining a record of each revision.
In fact, now that I think about it, CVS provides a good model for data storage. You get a way to retrieve each version of a file. You get a way to link together corresponding revisions of several files. And you have a record of when, why and by whom all of the changes were made. But at its heart, it is a system for data that is still alive. It is not a system for organizing the historical records of a person, company or government. And it doesn't address the question of media decay because it is independent of the specific media.
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Yes, I know this was a joke. I did laugh. But I wanted to raise a point that isn't always obvious to monolingual English speakers.
I'm the team leader for the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. Esperanto is unusual among languages. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single monolingual Esperantist anywhere in the world, nor is there likely to be one any time soon. We have no native country as a language and aren't seeking one. For anyone who is confused by this, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887. It is usually learned as a second, third or subsequent language.
Everyone on the Esperanto Translation Team could be using free software under other languages for which the localization has already been done. I use Linux with English literals except when I an validating translations. But there is a reason to have complete locales for any language that users might want to use software in conjunction with. I can read English just fine, but when I want to write to a non-English-speaking friend in Esperanto, I need an e-mail client that can handle the character set. And when I am writing in Esperanto, it takes me a moment to switch back and forth. I don't do it instantly. Having messages, menus, etc., in the same language I am working in is a great help.
Teaching the entire world a single common language will not eliminate the need for computing environments that support their native languages. The only thing that would accomplish that would be if we all learned a single language and abandoned all others. That would involve abandoning names, literature, culture. It isn't a step many people are willing to take. Certainly, teach the world English, or French, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Esperanto or any other language. Don't ask them all to give up the perfectly good languages they already have.
Do you internationlize the source (meaning comments, variable and function names, etc.)?
There's a problem with that. A variable or function has a name. The whole point of internationalization is to allow a program to dynamically look up message text at run-time for the user's language. That doesn't make a great deal of sense for a static part of the program, the source code.
However, I can see two ways in which your question, if not taken literally, is useful. First, there is good reason to internationalize programming tools. There's nothing wrong with the idea that gcc should be able to handle comments and literals in any language. Identifiers present a more difficult problem because the code may be compiled on a system that doesn't have the original programmer's locale. Thus, the set of valid characters for identifiers should not depend on the locale. For that matter, neither should the valid set of characters anywhere else in the code.
The other useful interpretation of this question is the obvious one that there is a need for documentation that can make the internals of the code clear to a non-English-speaking audience. Certainly, English is the language of programming. Any project in which programmers can't communicate with each other is likely to fragment. But that is no reason that a team of programmers sharing some non-English common language should not be able to read the system header files for example.
Yes, there is a project for localization of free software. The Free Translation Project is an ongoing project to localize free software into as many languages as possible. If yours isn't one of the one's we're already doing, there are a number of people who can mentor you in starting a translation team for your language.
This is not the only project handling translation of free software. Several of the distributions have projects going to translate their installation tools and documentation. And both Gnome and KDE have internationalization projects.
Waterworld was underwritten by a movie studio that expected to make money. The tickets were bought by people who expected to be entertained. What this makes clear is that the possibility of privately funded space exploration really exists. We don't have to just sit and wait for it to happen. And it might not be a bad thing for NASA. They have a lot of expertise and equipment already. If some aspects of the project were contracted out to NASA on private missions, they are in the loop, and have another source of revenue.
"Open source has made it possible for people with ideas and a message to build tools that either embody it or enable it if they have the talent."
False. Bill Gates got Windows out there, as well as writing a book about his ideas in the computer realm. The idea that Open Source created this ability is laughable. Open Source came after.
Perhaps I was a bit unclear. I didn't mean that open source made this possible for the first time. It made it possible for some people where it might not have been possible for them otherwise.
I will not only second the vote on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, but I will give some good reasons for reading it. Vinge is not one of the most prolific authors in science fiction, but he is one of the most thought provoking. He creates alien cultures that are believable and compeling, with real characters who are every bit as important to the story as the humans. In A Fire Upon the Deep, he creates several races at varying levels of detail. The Tines, we read a great deal about. We get to see more than one subculture among them. We find dear friends and menacing enemies.
Vinge also asks big questions. One of the running themes through his fiction is, "What will we become?" He is asking what humanity will develop itself into. And he only shows us indirectly in his references to singularity. There is a web page here giving some of his thoughts on the concept. He doesn't try to give a complete answer.
A Fire Upon the Deep is a very worthwhile read as are the compilation Across Realtime and the prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep which I am reading right now, A Deepness In the Sky. Calling it a prequel is perhaps a bit strong. It contains a character who appears in Fire and takes place in a setting that he described in that book, briefly.
If I had a single bookshelf labelled Books That Made Me Think every one of Vernor Vinge's books that I have read would be on it.
Open source has made it possible for people with ideas and a message to build tools that either embody it or enable it if they have the talent.
If you're trying to endear yourself to Slashdot readers, perhaps you shouldn't emphasize your ties to eToys and DoubleClick this month. Eh, Larry?
He's being honest. Yes, many Slashdot readers are annoyed at DoubleClick this week. Yes, many of us think it took eToys rather long to get around to doing the right thing. Both of them are potentially very lucrative longterm customers. And if they perceive the open source community as both a supplier of choice and an outspoken portion of their market, rather than a pack of rabid dogs, they would probably be flexible enough to listen to us. For all I know, they read or were told of the discussions here and elsewhere and rethought their strategies as a result. Let's not criticize Larry too harshly for telling us the truth. I vastly prefer uncomfortable truths to lies and evasion.
And speaking of uncomfortable truths, I will join the growing number asking that the AMD portion of the final question get answered. I'd be happy to accept valid business reasons for making a business decision. I just don't like the impression that the question was ducked. I don't think that was the impression he intended to give.
2.I patent it. Now I want to make my OSS program, and I need LZW. Hmmm, looks like Unisys would like to use my algorithm. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You let me have the rights to LZW, I let you have the rights to my algorithm.
The last time this issue came up, I suggested an extension to this approach. In order to encourage people and companies with potentially valuable patents to make them accessible to the open source community, we need to offer them an alternative where they can license them for open source use and retain the all the rights for commercial exploitation. I suggested that we offer them a license which grants use of the patented technology for open source projects (with some definition of what will qualify as open source). Now they will have to demonstrate that they haven't let their technology fall into the public domain, so they would probably have to require some sort of registration and approval process.
But your suggestion supplies the incentive that would encourage them to do it. If they will license their patents for free open source usage, they get access to all of the patents owned by the open source community. We could easily allow them to use the patented technology in commercial products. I know that would not be acceptable to some portions of the open source community. Can anyone think of another way that might be better?
I'm not trying to beat up the companies that hold the patents. One of the reasons they hold them is defensive, and I wouldn't ask them to give up that defense. I just want to give them a reason to play with open source projects.
The reality is that since NAFTA, the economies of countries like Mexico and Ecuador (keep your eye on the current beginnings of a revolution in Ecuador) have been devastated, despite the fact that a large amount of our factory work has moved there.
NAFTA is not exactly the equivalent of free trade. A free trade treaty doesn't require that level of detail.
The USSR proved that the welfare of people and the environment is ignored when power is put in the hands of the government, and it's my belief that the next 20 years are going to show that the welfare of people and the environment are non-existent when placed in the hands of multinational corporations and the capitalist class.
I agree with you there. Corporations don't have values. They exist to organize groups of people to produce products and services for a profit. Any care for our neighbors and environment is going to come from people. That is not to say that corporations can't participate, and they often do. Many companies will match charitable contributions of various sorts by their employees. But in the end, the choice of what causes to support and the support for them comes from individual people.
Personally, I am a bleeding heart libertarian. I want government out of the charity business, and I give generously to charities that I think are getting it right.
Something you might want to consider then next time your government talks about 'wonderful foreign trade opportunities with China.'
I certainly understand the gut reaction to the situation. However, trade restrictions generally hurt people on the side that is maintaining the restriction. This assertion follows from the arguments presented in Chapter 19: Applications - Conventional and Unconventional of David Friedman's book, Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. Exchange of reliable information is essential to economic efficiency. As a result, free trade tends to develop channels for the exchange of information, regardless of the desires of anyone besides the participants. In the end, it will benefit both sides and make both sides more free.
The first and most obvious point I can think of is that this is not immortality in most of the senses that matter to me as an individual. Having a copy of me live on after my death does not change the fact of my death. I as an individual will experience the ultimate discontinuity.
I was also thinking just this morning about the boundary between man and machine and the nature of computer assisted intelligence. Wearable, networked computers are likely to become commonplace in the near future. The prototypes exist already, it is just a question of finding a balance between capabilities, durability, and price. But this point applies just as much to palmtops. If I use a portable computer to keep track of an enormous amount of information for me, it is still possible to distinguish me, the biological system, from the computer. As we have gone from portable computers, to laptops, to palmtops, to wearables, the accessibility as become more constant. However, there is still and distinction physically. And yet, they become more and more extentions of ourselves.
We entrust to external devices the tasks of memory. How do we enhance the various aspects of that trust? How do we protect ourselves from loss of the data or loss of access to the data? How do we protect that data from unauthorized access? The answers are obvious enough technologically. Backups, redundant components accessible on short notice, encryption. But how do we build those into the system, the expectation, the patterns of use?
What human activities and enterprises will this access render obsolete? If I had all the answers with any certainty, and knew which products would be the winners, I'd be rich.
The cost of eyeballs just went up--thanks, guys!
I have two comments on this. First, I have long insisted that any closed source product that is not at least as good than an open source alternative is defective. Second, you are right in your comment. Slashdot has set the standard. And since they are using the GPL, other sites that want to use the code will have to GPL modifications. It is just possible that this will lead to improvements. As much as I respect their work, the guys at Slashdot have to eat, sleep, and post articles. They can't be coding round the clock.
To the extent that they facilitate dissemination of the same information to a large body of people, communication technologies have been a homogenizing force. They have brought the same ideas, in the same language, to a larger audience than would have seen them otherwise.
To the extent that they facilitate one-on-one discussion, they have allowed varied interests to endure. What might have been the ideas or hobbies of isolated individuals or groups can be made more widely available.
And to the extent that they have protected communication from ourside observation or censorship, they have encouraged dissenting opinion to flourish. That protects us from tyrany from any source. I have never feared what people of good will would do with power over my communication. I have feared whose hands that power would eventually reside in.
Of course it was worth the time! The value of time spent on something is in what the person doing it gets out of it. It doesn't matter if it is useful to him or anybody else unless that was part of the goal.
If I gave up reading books that weren't useful, I'd have to throw out most of my fiction. Of course, I wouldn't miss some of the non-fiction that should be thrown out as useless.
As for getting paid for your time, as we become wealthier, time quickly becomes the most valuable commodity we have. An hour spent can never be reclaimed. I spent the last hour reading to my son. I had a good day today. I gave my employer good value for my salary. But that last hour, for which I wasn't paid a penny, is the one I will remember longest and treasure most.
Wouldn't it be a bit cooler to spend this time doing something remotely useful, and getting paid for it? Perhaps this is just my way of thinking...
What he did may not be valuable to you. Enjoy the diversity of the world. It is part of the reason that the world needs you as well as him. I could try to say something deep and profound here, but the point is too obvious.
Chorus of thousands of massed followers under a window: "We are all individuals!"
The text of the article mentioned that Linux provides the ability to use the standard Unix tools in scripts to automate tasks across a network. As far as getting consistent system administration done quickly across a large network, that is much more useful than running a GUI for each one.
They mentioned scalability, and one important factor with scalability is how administration scales with the number of servers. I don't expect to see many benchmarks that do it, but I would like to see a real scalability test with 1, 10, and 100 server configurations. The ability to learn the details once, and then automate them out of your way is a big plus with a rich, mature CLI environment.
I don't mean to say that there is no place for a set of GUI system administration tools. The single server in a small business will be easier to maintain that way. The file server at home serving my machine, my wife's and my kids' would be easier as well. It opens doors at the low end of the scale, which represents a larger number of sites. If you are a captive of the GUI for every configuration task, it slows you down significantly as the number of servers grows.
IBM is still embracing Linux, regardless of what Sun says. I think the real point is that Linux is portable across an amazing range of hardware. It is easy enough to leverage a known OS, with a good reputation, and an active community of open source developers. If you want it on your own hardware, you dedicate a team of programmers to writing device drivers and any other code you need specific to your iron.
... yet. Solaris can say the same. But the question is whether Sun can sustain Solaris development as a freebie. If it gives them a platform on which to sell other stuff, probably for a while. I don't know what their costs and margins look like. We'll all have to watch and see if it works for them.
Now I am well aware that AIX has some things going for it that Linux doesn't have
I for one am not going to criticize them for keeping Solaris closed source. It isn't my choice. It doesn't detract from the open source OSs that I have to choose from. Hmm. Linux CDs are still here. FreeBSD was still on the bookstore shelves at lunchtime.
In economics, there is a concept called price discrimination. Usually, it is discussed in terms of a monopoly which can charge different customers different prices, based on location or some other sorting criteria. But there is another situation where it can occur easily enough. Where the product can be diversified, giving different customers different packaging, there can be price discrimination.
This is precisely why in the end, there will be more than one Linux distribution. There is room for several with different goals. There is no reason why one can't specialize in merely bundling the latest stable versions of everything, while another goes for rock solid security, and a third concentrates on an easy install and good support for new users.
And that's what's great about open source. The barriers to entry are low. But as LinuxOne is demonstrating, they aren't zero. If you want to introduce a new distribution, you have to at least make an attempt. The Linux community will shread you if you don't. Now, will Joe Newbie read the reviews on Slashdot? No. Will J. Random Reporter for some magazine that Joe reads read us? Probably. Will Big Retail Software, Inc. read us or a source that does read us before they stock their shelves? Almost certainly. If you don't do a credible job of putting together a real distribution, you aren't going to be taken seriously.
Some things that are going to make Linux easier to attack:
One of the things that I notice about Linux is that there is some overlap between these lists. It seems to point to the idea of tamper-evident packaging.
The bottom line is that there will be people who will do destructive things. There will be security holes that they will take advantage of. There is a need for security conscious people willing to patch them. A virus is just one way of taking advantage of security holes.
Now, let's see how many ways this is a bad idea...
You forgot that the addresses will certainly be derived by some obvious algorithm (e.g., 123_main_st@9-digit-zip-code.usps.gov) or they will simply be a sequence of nonsense addresses that fit an obvious pattern (e.g., e-mail-box-74351a@usps.gov). Either way, building spam lists with hundreds of millions of addresses will be trivial. Those e-mail addresses will all be in a single domain. I can just imagine the volume of spam that will start hitting them days after this scheme starts.
Oh, and the mailbox will effectively carry the name Resident and will be passed on to the next occupant of the house. That raises the possibility of people subscribing other people to all sorts of exciting mailing lists.
Can you offer a shred of evidence to support that claim? AFAIK, Tom C. doesn't hesitate to apply an editor's perogative to any documentation in the Perl core.
Yeah, I couldn't remember exactly where I had read the comment when I originally posted, but I remembered that I had found it in the past couple of weeks through Slashdot. With a little searching I turned it up. It is in an article entitled The Sins of Perl Revisited. I'm not trying to complain about the great job that the authors of the Perl man pages have done. I keep a printed copy in my office, and just knowing where to look things up has branded me as the local Perl guru. I couldn't do that without good documentation.
The issue has been cited with the existing Perl man pages that they have grown to an unmanagable size. The problem is that anyone can contribute material to them, but there is a genuine reluctance to cut anything written by another author. They are clearly huge and it is obviously hard for some newbiews to find a starting point. This issue is discussed at the Open Content web site.
This problem could be solved by finding individuals willing to act as the editors for particular sections. Make it clear to your contributors that their contributions will be proofread. They may not be accepted, or they may be reworded to make them more concise. Such a move will probably discourage some contributors, but it is probably the necessary balance to maintain a good book over time.
By the way, the home of the Open Content License is here.