I download free service patches for Windows 98 whenever it becomes necessary.
Whenever it becomes necessary? Or sometime after they are available?
Yes, I know that you could get all the service packs and IE 5 free online to "upgrade" your Windows 98 to Windows 98 SE, it was possible.
Microsoft never provided a simple list of all those things that would make Windows 98 into Windows 98 SE. They never provided an inexpensive media upgrade that the Enterprise users could use to make sure they had the latest and they didn't point out on the Windows 98 SE box that pretty much everything you needed to make Windows 98 into Windows 98 SE was available free on the net.
I'm sure they sold plenty of copies of Windows 98 SE to people who didn't know any better.
Betcha they will still be giving them out like candy
Naaah... They learned their lesson long ago on that one. You can't continue to have record quarters if you give away Betas (Win2K betas cost quite a bit more than media cost), or give away patches/service releases (Win98 Special Edition).
They'll collect up the top 10 patches and put out Windows 2000 Special Edition and charge you full price.
Problems already reported with "tested patch". Oops, back to the drawing board.
In Microsoft's defense, it's probably not a big deal that the news server is broken. Who runs news servers on Windows anyway. It's certainly not being run in the MS test labs.
Imagine: I can type "rm -rf junkdir" or I can click and hit delete. One requires memorization of a command, its parameters, and typing. The other requires a click and a keystroke. A text interface is NOT THE BEST for _most_ user situations!
Sure, because by definiton "_most_ user situations" as those things that a power user would not want to do. If it's too complex, a user doesn't want to do it.
Of course, anyone who can handle High School algebra can readily understand and appreciate the power of a command line interface. With the 'rm' command you can do fun things like capture the command in an alias or command file to reduce typing and automate future tasks. You can put together longer commands that are just tedious with point and click interfaces (like "rm -rf junkdir/prod/tmp/work_queue/incoming/tmp/test_work_queue/outgoing/27Jan00/temp").
Unless you are a graphic artist or just a web surfer, you had better not be typing adverse and expect to have a pleasant experience while using a computer.
Talk to someone who doesn't like computers and you will see what I'm talking about.
Gee, perhaps if these people don't like computer then maybe they shouldn't be using computers.
I don't like to use surgical implements. Many of them are pointy and I could carelessly hurt myself, but somehow I wouldn't dream of asking for a point-and-click surgery system so that I could handle my daughter's appendectomy without those expensive health care professionals.
If what you are saying is that first time users are frightened away by first experiences, but might appreciate it more in the future, I can understand this sentiment. But, nothing worthwhile doesn't come with some pain. People shouldn't expect to get the full value of something as wonderful as a computer without also expecting to learn how to operate it effectively. Effectiveness sometimes requires more than just what your intuition provides when you first sit down in front of a computer.
I'm not really against point-and-click and easier to use interfaces. Really, I'm not. It's the ONLY way to be effective in certain applications, like drafting and graphic arts. File managers and web browsers certainly have their place, as long as I also can run the command line interface version when I want to do something more powerful. In web-browsing, this might mean that I user the "lynx -crawl" command to fetch a hierarchy of HTML files instead of some harder-to-use graphical equivalent.
What I am against is the mindset that everything has to have an interface that a 5 year old can immediately understand and be "productive" with right away. Some things are just more complicated that this.
I'm a big believer in the 80/20 rule. Learn when 80% there is good enough. For example, for a system that configures your RAID arrays, a character based menu system is just fine. Such character based menus require so few resources that they can easily be booted from floppies so that you can run them before you have ANY disks configured. Is it REALLY better to have to boot some CD and run the graphical interface for such tasks?
The trend today is to eliminate simple character based commands and menus for better looking interfaces from the start and it's wrong headed.
I may sound like a luddite, but really so much of what passes for easy to use, is just easy to grasp in the first 3 minutes. Somewhere I have a reference to some work done at AT&T years ago that showed that people were actually more productive with markup-language word processing (troff) than WYSIWYG word processing. With markup-languages, you can just set up a template and type away. With WYSIWYG, you spend a lot of time tweaking and playing with it and in the end the result is not consistent with other similar documents. I don't do much word processing myself, but I've heard a lot of good things about Lyx, which is a return to some extent to a simpler text-based word processing.
A desktop metaphor is fine. Go ahead, give me icons for my favorite apps, inluding Xterms, but don't dumb down everything so that scripting it is more difficult than it needs to be. This even includes graphics and drafting programs. I want to be able to easily run transformations against graphic file formats from a command line, for example.
Sendmail is a great example of a program that works well and really doesn't need much more in the way of user interface. I'll take SMTP-based email servers over MS Exchange Server any day.
My signature is pertinent here (now I have to not change it!). I've switched to the "Light" mostly character-based interface with Slashdot and I don't miss those images that just clutter things up at all. I can still find everything, it's faster, I assume it's lower overhead on the servers. It's just better.
oh that old chestnut again, what if someone called your mom a whore who gave it to sailors free, would you prevent your dad from punching the guy out, even resorting to beating your dad up instead?
I can't imagine a worse way to decide broad and important issues of public policy than to ask "what would one do when in an extreme emotional state".
defend racist talk huh? even though it encourages the attacks and discrimination against people?
Yes, defend racist talk. Because:
Freedom means the freedom to be our best as well as our worst.
There is no fair arbiter of what talk is to be allowed and what talk is to be forbidden. It's a road we'd better not go down. First, we "reasonably" go after the worst White Supremicists. Next, we abridge the rights of the rich to express their opinion (after all, it's only fair because the rich have so much more access to the media). Next, we limit people's rights to complain about the restrictions (what good is that? It's already decided.) Finally, we enslave and murder those who insist upon their incorrect views (why not? They add nothing to society as they aren't allowed to dissent. Their only use is either as slaves or dead.)
In the US the principle of Free Speech is enshrined as the First Article in our Bill of Rights:
"Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
As others have pointed out, there are similar provisions supported by the UN and the EU.
Free speech, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
In my opinion, the kiss of death of XML is the "support" for XML file formats in Office 2000, which I've heard are just the bastardized incompatible embrace-and-extend jobs we'd come to expect from Redmond. The promise of XML was that anyone could read an XML word document and reconstruct Word's intentions from it - obviously this is not happening.
No, I don't think that's true at all. XML formats for all Office 2000 documents does show that Microsoft is finally serious about Open Document Formats. You will be able to reconstruct documents from their XML.
The tension among the various XML supporting organizations (MS vs. the Rest Of The World) arises due to the fact that MS poured massive resources into developing their own set of DTDs and then implementing them into their products while everybody else pretty much talked about XML.
The IBMs and Suns are concerned that while XML provides an Open Document format, MS will be the the first and best to implement their formats. They are concerned that it will appear that only MS has their act together wrt XML. You see, at the same time MS was defining DTDs for a bunch of Office 2000 documents, they were also defining DTDs and schemas for a huge set of other documents, like those used for EDI. These other vendors don't want to be in the position of having to support "standards" created by MS. I'm not sure if this is embrace-and-extend, it seems like embrace-and-outcompete to me. I feel that if the other vendors really are serious about XML, they should define their own documents and start using them in products like MS. Working code beats standards body wrangling any day.
Now, a disclaimer. I am far from an expert in these areas, and I've not been privy to any XML standards bodies discussions or anything, this is my interpretation of what I've seen in the news.
Sun is a frequent detractor of MS's XML strategy, waving their hands around saying that really you don't want to be doing XML at all unless it's in Java. To hear Sun talk about it you'd think that Java was designed to work with XML. It seems to be more of the standard Sun line. They support standards only insofar as those standards are seen by the industry as being best run on Sun Hardware and Operating Systems. That's what the SCSL and Java is all about, Open Standards for the community! Especially those Open Standards that Sun controls completely.
If the programmers think they could manage the company better, there's nothing stopping them moving into management themselves.
Except for perhaps the bias against promoting technical people into real management positions? Why should those technical people be promoted? They've never been able to meet our expectations before...
If you don't believe me, just check out the ranks of board rooms. Few people with any kind of technical background there.
I notice you ignored the parts of the comment that dealt with how management rarely bothers to become educated in the issues surrounding Software Engineering and Software Project Management. I think you'll find that management does not ignore principles of accounting or marketing.
Hmmm... Microsoft just had a record quarter. Hasn't caught up with them yet.
There are warnings, including Microsoft's own announcements, that there are storm clouds on the horizon for Microsoft. I doubt that Bill Gates moved over to let Ballmer bask in the glory of every increasing profits.
By all accounts, Windows 2000 will be their most stable OS since DOS 6. A pretty amazing feat considering the umpteen millions of lines of code.
Now, what message will THAT send. Big software company puts out buggy, unstable Operating Systems, year after year to ever increasing profits. Finally, they put out an OS with greatly improved quality and profits turn down.
Software quality problems are not essentially problems of the "professionalism" of the practitioners. Management sets the tone. If they ask for bad products to meet arbitrary "market windows", they get bad products. Note that Microsoft Management made a priority of quality with Windows 2000 and things seem to have improved. It's just that simple.
Ultimately, it's not really management's fault either. The market windows are REAL. Businesses that put out good products too late, after other products have staked out the market, do suffer. The problem is customers who are willing to put up with low quality software.
So what you have to be logged in as Root for a Trojan to do much damage, do you think all the newbies who try Linux aren't going to be running as Root?
You misunderstand how infection spreads. A few newbies running as root as they install unknown software from the net will infect only those few newbies at which time the source will be easily discovered, made publicly known and eradicated.
In the Windows world, viruses spread so quickly because nearly everyone is running with elevated privs such that they can quickly infect their own computer and spread it to others so quickly that it spreads like wildfire and is difficult to track to the source.
The penalties for spreading viruses being severe, and the relative ease with which sources can be backtracked in an environment without rapid contagion insures that viruses will be rather less of a problem in the Linux world as compared with the Windows world.
Note that there are a few Linux viruses already in existence and they have not spread quickly at all.
Given the quality of GUI tools we have now, that day appears to still be a long ways away. If it is the case that XML is what will make the GUI tools work, where they are failing to work now, then maybe XML is worth considering (but I see no XML porponent suggesting that XML is what will fix all the GUI tools).
I don't know anyone who suggests that the adoption of XML will fix all the problems. It might, finally, solve the problem of everyone developing parsers for their own unique configuration file format. It's a place to start in fixing the rest of the problems.
XML does have its advantages. It sells bigger disk drives. It sells more bandwidth.
While this might be a more interesting criticism of certain XML applications (B2B EDI comes to mind), the disk space and network bandwidth used by configuration files hardly seems to be worth consideration.
What XML already does seem to be great in is tagging extractable data from document oriented storage.
This attribute of XML alone would seem to be a big win for configuration files. Configuration files are, after all, documents from which tagged data are extracted.
I think it's envisioned that we'll eventually have display/edit tools for XML data and not deal with the XML directly. This might lead to the problems that people in this discussion are talking about having with GUI vs. configuration file editing.
I can see some potential advantages to XML (or some standardized meta-data language) for configuration files. It's possible that version control/update of formats will be easier if configurations are kept in a standard tag-based format.
The discipline of having to develop schemas for the XML documents might help make sure all the configuration files are well documented. Maybe not.
One potential big win is that XML structured data could be more easily gatewayed into databases. It may or may not be handy to maintain configuration data in databases, I dunno...
I don't pretend for a minute to be an expert in XML and it's uses. I do think that there's a lot of hype about XML and I think we'll have to have a lot more experience before we'll know if it's really going to be the general meta-data language.
-Jordan Henderson
[OT] Re:[OT] Re:It's my birthday. Coincidence?
on
Total Lunar Eclipse
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· Score: 1
You know, it's not my birthday. I was, however, thinking of posting a message similar to this and I did.
Is Katz trying to teach some bizaare object lesson or invent some new form of Internet Performance Art here?
Yes! We get the message already. Free Speech CAN get out of hand. Katz is demonstrating how damaging it is to fill up an on-line forum with mind-numbing and inconsequential messages. This is certainly a danger to allowing someone like Katz the power of the free speech.
Can we please get back to News? You know, stuff that matters?
I know, I know, I should just set my preferences to not show articles by Katz. I'll go do that right away...
The contendor for my biggest beef with the GPL is the restriction against dynamically linking to non-GPL code.
And, the LGPL doesn't have this problem. The LGPL also allows you to distribute modified source. So, if you find the GPL too restrictive for your libraries, how about the LGPL?
It is at this point that the GPL escapes the bounds of polite society and starts sticking its nose where it doesn't belong, namely, other people's code.
I never hear this complaint about commercial licenses that generally completely disallow any modifications to the distributed (often binary) product whatsoever, even when such changes are for your use only. Aren't they saying what you can do with your code?
If you feel the GPL "sticks its nose where it doesn't belong" there is an easy solution, Use no GPL code. You are no worse off than if the GPLd code had not been provided for your use.
Heck, use the GPLd code to test against as you develop your own workalike code. I'm sure the FSF, unlike a lot of commercial licensors, would not involve itself in a look-and-feel lawsuit against you.
And this isn't just some petty gripe. The very desktop that I am using has been declared *illegal* by Redhat.
So, it upsets you that you've run afoul of some licensing restriction. Seems like a petty gripe to me.
I've often wanted to do things with commercial software that's not allowed by the license. For example, I often want to install it on more than one machine even if it's absolutely guaranteed that it will only be in use on one at a time, like a laptop that only I use and a desktop that only I use. The license prevents me from doing it. It's frustrating, but I knew it when I bought it that what the license allowed. Petty of me to complain about something to which I implicitly agreed by buying and then using the product.
In fact, it flunks the tests for every category of 501(c)(3) organization, as laid out by IRS examiners.
What's more, it is organized specifically to engage in an activity normally carried out by for-profit businesses. Ask any IRS examiner: this is not allowed.
Well, I guess we'd have to defer to the IRS examiners who review the FSF's submissions every year and qualify them as a 501(c)(3).
Developing a large body of software to help the citizen's of the US (and the world) through software reuse is a scientific and an educational endeavor. Certainly, the FSF software has greatly aided education by providing high quality free software for education and research.
As to CTC being a FFRDC, CTC takes a number of commercial clients so I'm not sure they qualify.
Certain corporations which perform specific activities for the government, as specified by Congress, may also be classified as tax-exempt under 501(c)(3).
You're making this up as you go along, right?
The examples I gave were all 501(c)(3)s. As I said, it's not by my definition, each of these organizations applied and were granted this status by the IRS. As you say, see Publication 557 for details.
While the functions of 501(c)(3) organizations may not seem to be "charitable" in function, they are generally referred to as "a 501(c)(3) charity". Donations can generally be made to these organizations on a tax-exempt basis. As I said, charity is broadly defined. Both Mitre and CTC refer to themselves as 501(c)(3) charities. As this IRS page states:
The organizations described in 501(c)(3) are commonly referred to under the general heading of "charitable organizations."
The exempt purposes set forth in 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erection or maintenance of public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening of neighborhood tensions; elimination of prejudice and discrimination; defense of human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.
Note also that as long as the corporation involves itself in it's original chartered function, it can keep it's tax exempt status:
The articles of organization must limit the organization's purposes to one or more of the exempt purposes set forth in 501(c)(3) and must not expressly empower it to engage, other than as an insubstantial part of its activities, in activities that are not in furtherance of one or more of those purposes. This requirement may be met if the purposes stated in the articles of organization are limited in some way by reference to 501(c)(3). In addition, assets of an organization must be permanently dedicated to an exempt purpose.
You can contribute, tax-deductibly to Mitre, CTC or the FSF because of their "charitable" status.
The real issue is that you accused RMS of perpetrating a fraud by invalidly constituting a 501(c)(3) corporation. You went on to claim that such corporations were not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations. Both claims are bunk and any examination of the relevant tax code sections demonstrates this pretty clearly.
It's clear that you are labeling entities as "charitable" that do not perform any charitable function whatsoever.
It's not me who is labeling these organizations as charities. It's the IRS. You have to apply for and receive 501(c)(3) status. Mitretek, one of the 501(c)(3) corporations that spawned from Mitre does considerable consulting for the IRS. It would think that they would understand very clearly their roles and responsibilities under the tax codes.
What's more, the Internal Revenue Code explicitly states that a tax-exempt charity may only derive a small percentage of its income from activities unrelated to its charitable purpose, and that all of this income must support activities which are charitable. The FSF does not meet either of these qualifications.
Chapter and verse, please. I've produced a number of examples to refute your claim that a 501(c)(3) must only engage in non-competitive "charitable" purposes. I'd like to see some substantiation of your claims.
I believe that a non-profit only has to engage in the work that it was chartered to perform. "Charitable" is broadly defined by the IRS as being non-profit work that meets their charter. The FSF meets these qualifications.
If this is not the case, how does Mitre qualify for it's 501(c)(3) status performing C3I for the military?
Dead wrong. The GPL prevents the reuse of code by those who could most benefit (and benefit others!) by reusing it. The GPL's game of "keep-away" from commercial programmers is more than nasty and spiteful; it's destructive.
Those same programmers will just lock up their own modifications and prevent further reuse.
The accretive nature of the GPL is evident. GCC, Linux and a number of other sources indicates that the GPL has caused considerable reuse, and end users have benefitted. Whether it's the OS vendors that build OSs using GCC or it's the many many businesses using Linux productively today, the proof is there to be seen.
The focus of the software industry is all wrong when people consider that those who should benefit the most in the industry are the programmers and not the end users. This is how we've gotten to into the pitiable position where we spend more and more on IT and have less to show for it in terms of real productivity. All of our money is wasted rewarding people for reinventing wheels while the building of good carts is being ignored.
I can write an MFC application and license it under **ANY** license I choose...
Are you allowed to modify the MFC and redistribute it under ANY license?
If not, it seems like the license you receive with the MFC is more restrictive, in a very important way, than the GPL.
There is still the LGPL, whose use is discouraged by RMS, but is prefered by RMS to any other license, save the GPL, for libraries. The LGPL grants you, if I understand it correctly, the same freedom from restrictions that you enjoy with the license that comes with MFC.
I don't think you've substantiated your claim with that one passage from the GNU Manifesto.
Your claim was that the GPL was designed to lower programmer's salaries.
The section that you quoted is in response to the anticipated question "Won't everyone stop programming without a monetary incentive."
In the answer, RMS says that won't happen (and in fact he's been proven correct by Linux) and then goes on to posit how the existence of this large body of software will reduce the incentive for people to produce non-free software, with which they could probably make more money.
This is just a recognition that you can make more money from producing something that is scarce versus producing something that is freely available. People who object to the GPL often seem to enjoy promoting an artificial scarcity to forward themselves.
The Holy Grail of Software Engineering for 40 years has been reuse, reuse, reuse. These artificial scarcities have served to make software reuse very spotty and poorly practiced. The GPL is the only license that enforces a discipline of software reuse. This is a good thing.
As I said, RMS saw that as an effect of the GPL, not as a guiding principle. If it had been, it would have been up front in the Manifesto per se, and not in the anticipated objections section.
Look, I don't agree with RMS on everything. His redefinition of the term "free" is not really completely reasonable. He has an unjustified utopian view about a post-scarcity world. I also don't agree that the wide adoption of GPL'd software will mean less pay for programmers. Most of the remuneration for programming I've received is for maintenance work or pay for specific modification that would typically not be available in public sources. The GPL only serves to increase the opportunities for pay for this type of work.
But, I find RMS's opinions reasoned. I find his detractors hysterical. For example, you said that it's not far off the mark to call RMS a communist. A communist wouldn't say:
"
There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive."
As RMS states in his GNU Manifesto. Somehow, RMS protestations and plain statements that show he is not a "Communist" are always ignored.
Mitre is not a 501(c)(3) non-profit nor does it claim to be a charity.
I direct your attention to this page, where it is stated:
"Both companies will be not-for-profit charities, under the provisions of IRS Section 501(c)(3)."
Mitre was a 501(c)(3) that broke up recently into two 501(c)(3) companies, Mitre and Mitretek.
Being a 501(c)(3) doesn't mean you are a traditional "charity", although you could indeed give tax deductible contributions to Mitre.
Although I can't provide a web reference for CTC, I recently attended a briefing at CTCs headquarters where it was stated plainly that CTC is indeed a 501(c)(3) corporation. In fact, the briefing materials did mention that you can make tax deductible contributions to CTC!
So, perhaps I was right initially. People do routinely libel RMS. You accused him of committing criminal fraud in his incorporation of the FSF as a 501(c)(3) entity.
Gosh, do you need more examples of 501(c)(3) corporations that compete with for-profit corporations? Many Hospitals and some HMOs are 501(c)(3) corporations. There are both 501(c)(3) and for-profit consumer counseling services. I could go on. Your assertion that 501(c)(3) corporations are not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations is absurd.
I suppose the rest of your unfounded conjectures and suppositions are about as reliable.
It's no surprise that RMS, the FSF and the GPL are so negatively represented in the Computer Industry Press when columnists routinely bluster authoritatively on subjects about which they know nothing.
And as for the lack of chaffing under commercial licenses, re-read my post. No commercial license dictates what license you may or may not use.
You are wrong. Typically, when you have a commercial license that includes source (ala SAP) you are only allowed to use that source under the original license. That's dictating what license you may or may not use. You are not allowed to redistribute it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever it becomes necessary? Or sometime after they are available?
Yes, I know that you could get all the service packs and IE 5 free online to "upgrade" your Windows 98 to Windows 98 SE, it was possible.
Microsoft never provided a simple list of all those things that would make Windows 98 into Windows 98 SE. They never provided an inexpensive media upgrade that the Enterprise users could use to make sure they had the latest and they didn't point out on the Windows 98 SE box that pretty much everything you needed to make Windows 98 into Windows 98 SE was available free on the net.
I'm sure they sold plenty of copies of Windows 98 SE to people who didn't know any better.
-Jordan Henderson
Naaah... They learned their lesson long ago on that one. You can't continue to have record quarters if you give away Betas (Win2K betas cost quite a bit more than media cost), or give away patches/service releases (Win98 Special Edition).
They'll collect up the top 10 patches and put out Windows 2000 Special Edition and charge you full price.
-Jordan Henderson
Problems already reported with "tested patch". Oops, back to the drawing board.
In Microsoft's defense, it's probably not a big deal that the news server is broken. Who runs news servers on Windows anyway. It's certainly not being run in the MS test labs.
-Jordan Henderson
Sure, because by definiton "_most_ user situations" as those things that a power user would not want to do. If it's too complex, a user doesn't want to do it.
Of course, anyone who can handle High School algebra can readily understand and appreciate the power of a command line interface. With the 'rm' command you can do fun things like capture the command in an alias or command file to reduce typing and automate future tasks. You can put together longer commands that are just tedious with point and click interfaces (like "rm -rf junkdir /prod/tmp /work_queue/incoming/tmp /test_work_queue/outgoing/27Jan00/temp").
Unless you are a graphic artist or just a web surfer, you had better not be typing adverse and expect to have a pleasant experience while using a computer.
Gee, perhaps if these people don't like computer then maybe they shouldn't be using computers.
I don't like to use surgical implements. Many of them are pointy and I could carelessly hurt myself, but somehow I wouldn't dream of asking for a point-and-click surgery system so that I could handle my daughter's appendectomy without those expensive health care professionals.
If what you are saying is that first time users are frightened away by first experiences, but might appreciate it more in the future, I can understand this sentiment. But, nothing worthwhile doesn't come with some pain. People shouldn't expect to get the full value of something as wonderful as a computer without also expecting to learn how to operate it effectively. Effectiveness sometimes requires more than just what your intuition provides when you first sit down in front of a computer.
I'm not really against point-and-click and easier to use interfaces. Really, I'm not. It's the ONLY way to be effective in certain applications, like drafting and graphic arts. File managers and web browsers certainly have their place, as long as I also can run the command line interface version when I want to do something more powerful. In web-browsing, this might mean that I user the "lynx -crawl" command to fetch a hierarchy of HTML files instead of some harder-to-use graphical equivalent.
What I am against is the mindset that everything has to have an interface that a 5 year old can immediately understand and be "productive" with right away. Some things are just more complicated that this.
I'm a big believer in the 80/20 rule. Learn when 80% there is good enough. For example, for a system that configures your RAID arrays, a character based menu system is just fine. Such character based menus require so few resources that they can easily be booted from floppies so that you can run them before you have ANY disks configured. Is it REALLY better to have to boot some CD and run the graphical interface for such tasks?
The trend today is to eliminate simple character based commands and menus for better looking interfaces from the start and it's wrong headed.
I may sound like a luddite, but really so much of what passes for easy to use, is just easy to grasp in the first 3 minutes. Somewhere I have a reference to some work done at AT&T years ago that showed that people were actually more productive with markup-language word processing (troff) than WYSIWYG word processing. With markup-languages, you can just set up a template and type away. With WYSIWYG, you spend a lot of time tweaking and playing with it and in the end the result is not consistent with other similar documents. I don't do much word processing myself, but I've heard a lot of good things about Lyx, which is a return to some extent to a simpler text-based word processing.
A desktop metaphor is fine. Go ahead, give me icons for my favorite apps, inluding Xterms, but don't dumb down everything so that scripting it is more difficult than it needs to be. This even includes graphics and drafting programs. I want to be able to easily run transformations against graphic file formats from a command line, for example.
Sendmail is a great example of a program that works well and really doesn't need much more in the way of user interface. I'll take SMTP-based email servers over MS Exchange Server any day.
My signature is pertinent here (now I have to not change it!). I've switched to the "Light" mostly character-based interface with Slashdot and I don't miss those images that just clutter things up at all. I can still find everything, it's faster, I assume it's lower overhead on the servers. It's just better.
-Jordan Henderson
I can't imagine a worse way to decide broad and important issues of public policy than to ask "what would one do when in an extreme emotional state".
Yes, defend racist talk. Because:
In the US the principle of Free Speech is enshrined as the First Article in our Bill of Rights:
As others have pointed out, there are similar provisions supported by the UN and the EU.
Free speech, it's not just a good idea, it's the law.
-Jordan Henderson
Seeing as the distribution is in three dimensions, shouldn't that be R^3 in the above equation?
-Jordan Henderson
No, I don't think that's true at all. XML formats for all Office 2000 documents does show that Microsoft is finally serious about Open Document Formats. You will be able to reconstruct documents from their XML.
The tension among the various XML supporting organizations (MS vs. the Rest Of The World) arises due to the fact that MS poured massive resources into developing their own set of DTDs and then implementing them into their products while everybody else pretty much talked about XML.
The IBMs and Suns are concerned that while XML provides an Open Document format, MS will be the the first and best to implement their formats. They are concerned that it will appear that only MS has their act together wrt XML. You see, at the same time MS was defining DTDs for a bunch of Office 2000 documents, they were also defining DTDs and schemas for a huge set of other documents, like those used for EDI. These other vendors don't want to be in the position of having to support "standards" created by MS. I'm not sure if this is embrace-and-extend, it seems like embrace-and-outcompete to me. I feel that if the other vendors really are serious about XML, they should define their own documents and start using them in products like MS. Working code beats standards body wrangling any day.
Now, a disclaimer. I am far from an expert in these areas, and I've not been privy to any XML standards bodies discussions or anything, this is my interpretation of what I've seen in the news.
Sun is a frequent detractor of MS's XML strategy, waving their hands around saying that really you don't want to be doing XML at all unless it's in Java. To hear Sun talk about it you'd think that Java was designed to work with XML. It seems to be more of the standard Sun line. They support standards only insofar as those standards are seen by the industry as being best run on Sun Hardware and Operating Systems. That's what the SCSL and Java is all about, Open Standards for the community! Especially those Open Standards that Sun controls completely.
-Jordan Henderson
-Jordan Henderson
Except for perhaps the bias against promoting technical people into real management positions? Why should those technical people be promoted? They've never been able to meet our expectations before...
If you don't believe me, just check out the ranks of board rooms. Few people with any kind of technical background there.
I notice you ignored the parts of the comment that dealt with how management rarely bothers to become educated in the issues surrounding Software Engineering and Software Project Management. I think you'll find that management does not ignore principles of accounting or marketing.
-Jordan Henderson
There are warnings, including Microsoft's own announcements, that there are storm clouds on the horizon for Microsoft. I doubt that Bill Gates moved over to let Ballmer bask in the glory of every increasing profits.
By all accounts, Windows 2000 will be their most stable OS since DOS 6. A pretty amazing feat considering the umpteen millions of lines of code.
Now, what message will THAT send. Big software company puts out buggy, unstable Operating Systems, year after year to ever increasing profits. Finally, they put out an OS with greatly improved quality and profits turn down.
Software quality problems are not essentially problems of the "professionalism" of the practitioners. Management sets the tone. If they ask for bad products to meet arbitrary "market windows", they get bad products. Note that Microsoft Management made a priority of quality with Windows 2000 and things seem to have improved. It's just that simple.
Ultimately, it's not really management's fault either. The market windows are REAL. Businesses that put out good products too late, after other products have staked out the market, do suffer. The problem is customers who are willing to put up with low quality software.
-Jordan Henderson
You misunderstand how infection spreads. A few newbies running as root as they install unknown software from the net will infect only those few newbies at which time the source will be easily discovered, made publicly known and eradicated.
In the Windows world, viruses spread so quickly because nearly everyone is running with elevated privs such that they can quickly infect their own computer and spread it to others so quickly that it spreads like wildfire and is difficult to track to the source.
The penalties for spreading viruses being severe, and the relative ease with which sources can be backtracked in an environment without rapid contagion insures that viruses will be rather less of a problem in the Linux world as compared with the Windows world.
Note that there are a few Linux viruses already in existence and they have not spread quickly at all.
-Jordan Henderson
I don't know anyone who suggests that the adoption of XML will fix all the problems. It might, finally, solve the problem of everyone developing parsers for their own unique configuration file format. It's a place to start in fixing the rest of the problems.
While this might be a more interesting criticism of certain XML applications (B2B EDI comes to mind), the disk space and network bandwidth used by configuration files hardly seems to be worth consideration.
This attribute of XML alone would seem to be a big win for configuration files. Configuration files are, after all, documents from which tagged data are extracted.
-Jordan Henderson
I can see some potential advantages to XML (or some standardized meta-data language) for configuration files. It's possible that version control/update of formats will be easier if configurations are kept in a standard tag-based format.
The discipline of having to develop schemas for the XML documents might help make sure all the configuration files are well documented. Maybe not.
One potential big win is that XML structured data could be more easily gatewayed into databases. It may or may not be handy to maintain configuration data in databases, I dunno...
I don't pretend for a minute to be an expert in XML and it's uses. I do think that there's a lot of hype about XML and I think we'll have to have a lot more experience before we'll know if it's really going to be the general meta-data language.
-Jordan Henderson
Go figure.
-Jordan Henderson
Yes! We get the message already. Free Speech CAN get out of hand. Katz is demonstrating how damaging it is to fill up an on-line forum with mind-numbing and inconsequential messages. This is certainly a danger to allowing someone like Katz the power of the free speech.
Can we please get back to News? You know, stuff that matters?
I know, I know, I should just set my preferences to not show articles by Katz. I'll go do that right away...
-Jordan Henderson
And, the LGPL doesn't have this problem. The LGPL also allows you to distribute modified source. So, if you find the GPL too restrictive for your libraries, how about the LGPL?
I never hear this complaint about commercial licenses that generally completely disallow any modifications to the distributed (often binary) product whatsoever, even when such changes are for your use only. Aren't they saying what you can do with your code?
If you feel the GPL "sticks its nose where it doesn't belong" there is an easy solution, Use no GPL code. You are no worse off than if the GPLd code had not been provided for your use.
Heck, use the GPLd code to test against as you develop your own workalike code. I'm sure the FSF, unlike a lot of commercial licensors, would not involve itself in a look-and-feel lawsuit against you.
So, it upsets you that you've run afoul of some licensing restriction. Seems like a petty gripe to me.
I've often wanted to do things with commercial software that's not allowed by the license. For example, I often want to install it on more than one machine even if it's absolutely guaranteed that it will only be in use on one at a time, like a laptop that only I use and a desktop that only I use. The license prevents me from doing it. It's frustrating, but I knew it when I bought it that what the license allowed. Petty of me to complain about something to which I implicitly agreed by buying and then using the product.
-Jordan Henderson
What's more, it is organized specifically to engage in an activity normally carried out by for-profit businesses. Ask any IRS examiner: this is not allowed.
Well, I guess we'd have to defer to the IRS examiners who review the FSF's submissions every year and qualify them as a 501(c)(3).
Developing a large body of software to help the citizen's of the US (and the world) through software reuse is a scientific and an educational endeavor. Certainly, the FSF software has greatly aided education by providing high quality free software for education and research.
As to CTC being a FFRDC, CTC takes a number of commercial clients so I'm not sure they qualify.
-Jordan Henderson
You're making this up as you go along, right?
The examples I gave were all 501(c)(3)s. As I said, it's not by my definition, each of these organizations applied and were granted this status by the IRS. As you say, see Publication 557 for details.
While the functions of 501(c)(3) organizations may not seem to be "charitable" in function, they are generally referred to as "a 501(c)(3) charity". Donations can generally be made to these organizations on a tax-exempt basis. As I said, charity is broadly defined. Both Mitre and CTC refer to themselves as 501(c)(3) charities. As this IRS page states:
The exempt purposes set forth in 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and the prevention of cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erection or maintenance of public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening of neighborhood tensions; elimination of prejudice and discrimination; defense of human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.
Note also that as long as the corporation involves itself in it's original chartered function, it can keep it's tax exempt status:
You can contribute, tax-deductibly to Mitre, CTC or the FSF because of their "charitable" status.
The real issue is that you accused RMS of perpetrating a fraud by invalidly constituting a 501(c)(3) corporation. You went on to claim that such corporations were not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations. Both claims are bunk and any examination of the relevant tax code sections demonstrates this pretty clearly.
-Jordan Henderson
It's not me who is labeling these organizations as charities. It's the IRS. You have to apply for and receive 501(c)(3) status. Mitretek, one of the 501(c)(3) corporations that spawned from Mitre does considerable consulting for the IRS. It would think that they would understand very clearly their roles and responsibilities under the tax codes.
Chapter and verse, please. I've produced a number of examples to refute your claim that a 501(c)(3) must only engage in non-competitive "charitable" purposes. I'd like to see some substantiation of your claims.
I believe that a non-profit only has to engage in the work that it was chartered to perform. "Charitable" is broadly defined by the IRS as being non-profit work that meets their charter. The FSF meets these qualifications.
If this is not the case, how does Mitre qualify for it's 501(c)(3) status performing C3I for the military?
-Jordan Henderson
Those same programmers will just lock up their own modifications and prevent further reuse.
The accretive nature of the GPL is evident. GCC, Linux and a number of other sources indicates that the GPL has caused considerable reuse, and end users have benefitted. Whether it's the OS vendors that build OSs using GCC or it's the many many businesses using Linux productively today, the proof is there to be seen.
The focus of the software industry is all wrong when people consider that those who should benefit the most in the industry are the programmers and not the end users. This is how we've gotten to into the pitiable position where we spend more and more on IT and have less to show for it in terms of real productivity. All of our money is wasted rewarding people for reinventing wheels while the building of good carts is being ignored.
-Jordan Henderson
Are you allowed to modify the MFC and redistribute it under ANY license?
If not, it seems like the license you receive with the MFC is more restrictive, in a very important way, than the GPL.
There is still the LGPL, whose use is discouraged by RMS, but is prefered by RMS to any other license, save the GPL, for libraries. The LGPL grants you, if I understand it correctly, the same freedom from restrictions that you enjoy with the license that comes with MFC.
-Jordan Henderson
Your claim was that the GPL was designed to lower programmer's salaries.
The section that you quoted is in response to the anticipated question "Won't everyone stop programming without a monetary incentive."
In the answer, RMS says that won't happen (and in fact he's been proven correct by Linux) and then goes on to posit how the existence of this large body of software will reduce the incentive for people to produce non-free software, with which they could probably make more money.
This is just a recognition that you can make more money from producing something that is scarce versus producing something that is freely available. People who object to the GPL often seem to enjoy promoting an artificial scarcity to forward themselves.
The Holy Grail of Software Engineering for 40 years has been reuse, reuse, reuse. These artificial scarcities have served to make software reuse very spotty and poorly practiced. The GPL is the only license that enforces a discipline of software reuse. This is a good thing.
As I said, RMS saw that as an effect of the GPL, not as a guiding principle. If it had been, it would have been up front in the Manifesto per se, and not in the anticipated objections section.
Look, I don't agree with RMS on everything. His redefinition of the term "free" is not really completely reasonable. He has an unjustified utopian view about a post-scarcity world. I also don't agree that the wide adoption of GPL'd software will mean less pay for programmers. Most of the remuneration for programming I've received is for maintenance work or pay for specific modification that would typically not be available in public sources. The GPL only serves to increase the opportunities for pay for this type of work.
But, I find RMS's opinions reasoned. I find his detractors hysterical. For example, you said that it's not far off the mark to call RMS a communist. A communist wouldn't say:
As RMS states in his GNU Manifesto. Somehow, RMS protestations and plain statements that show he is not a "Communist" are always ignored.
-Jordan Henderson
Arrogance and ignorance are a bad combination.
I direct your attention to this page, where it is stated:
Mitre was a 501(c)(3) that broke up recently into two 501(c)(3) companies, Mitre and Mitretek.
Being a 501(c)(3) doesn't mean you are a traditional "charity", although you could indeed give tax deductible contributions to Mitre.
Although I can't provide a web reference for CTC, I recently attended a briefing at CTCs headquarters where it was stated plainly that CTC is indeed a 501(c)(3) corporation. In fact, the briefing materials did mention that you can make tax deductible contributions to CTC!
So, perhaps I was right initially. People do routinely libel RMS. You accused him of committing criminal fraud in his incorporation of the FSF as a 501(c)(3) entity.
Gosh, do you need more examples of 501(c)(3) corporations that compete with for-profit corporations? Many Hospitals and some HMOs are 501(c)(3) corporations. There are both 501(c)(3) and for-profit consumer counseling services. I could go on. Your assertion that 501(c)(3) corporations are not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations is absurd.
I suppose the rest of your unfounded conjectures and suppositions are about as reliable.
It's no surprise that RMS, the FSF and the GPL are so negatively represented in the Computer Industry Press when columnists routinely bluster authoritatively on subjects about which they know nothing.
-Jordan Henderson
You are wrong. Typically, when you have a commercial license that includes source (ala SAP) you are only allowed to use that source under the original license. That's dictating what license you may or may not use. You are not allowed to redistribute it at all.
-Jordan Henderson
I won't comment on most of your post, but:
What's stupid about using DBI with Oracle? A lot of people find this to be a great way to easily do database enabled web apps.
What do you suggest as an alternative?
-Jordan Henderson