The reason that MS won't run SQL Server 7 on comparable hardware is that they know the product isn't as scalable as Oracle7i. The implication is that if MS can run something reasonably close to Oracle's result on shitty hardware then they must be able top kick Oracle's ass on great hardware. The unfortunate fact is that Oracle would probably still beat MS on the $50,000 machine. The reason they ran a multi-million $ machine in the benchmark is because that is what the benchmark test called for, not because they "needed" it.
He wants to be "first among peers." He may be willing to acknowledge that the Linux kernel is what makes his software work, but, in his eyes, it is first and foremost a GNU system.
Get it right, troll. Ouch - he called me a troll. That hurts. Really.
The bottom line is that people are afraid of RMS, because he levels serious and true accusations against our materialistic and anti-community way of life. Yes, that's right. I said that I can't stand Stallman or anything he believes in. It's right in my post. Really. I'm substantially more socialist than your average American (which isn't really saying much) and RMS' beliefs aren't what bother me. His rhetoric and preachiness is. An earlier post compared him to a prophet - well, of course he seems like a prophet, that's how he's been grooming himself from the beginning. I could even put up with that if it weren't for the whole GNU/Linux thing. True, GNU comprises the *Unix* component of Linux, but that is not really what I like about Linux. I like the speed, the efficiency, etc. When people do benchmarks of OS' they don't measure the speed of the utilities ("Wow, that's one fast 'ls'!") they benchmark the kernel. That is why Linux is the benchmark-breaker. Not because of GNU.
I don't believe that RMS is "what Linux users are all about." RMS isn't anything like what I'm all about. You seem to be operating under the (RMS distributed) stereotypes of RMS as the only person who believes in free software and Linus as just some guy who's abusing RMS' system. Linus writes and maintains code and gives away the results for public consumption. RMS writes and maintains code and gives it away for whoever is willing to subscribe to his set of beliefs. I think the real issue at stake here is that the US (media and majority of/.ers) are unwilling to credit a "foreigner" (Linus) with a major contribution to the future. RMS may have started it all (he didn't - free software was the rule long before Stallman) but Linus' work set the ball rolling for the rest of the world.
The people who define the usage of a word are the "owners". Ok, what's a lift? For instance, if my mom and her friends started calling cheese graters "floppy drives" that doesn't make it right. But if everyone else started calling cheese graters floppy drives you would be the one who was an idiot for still calling them cheese graters, as you would not be speaking the same language. (is "flurb" a correct usage here just because I used it?) No, because no one else understands what you mean.
Thanks for taking everything I said out of context. Yes, I have read Hackers, you obsequious little sh*t. I wasn't trying to downplay RMS' contribution to the computing world and I am not trying to make "snap judgments" or to imply that he is in some way any more demented than a large number of other people. My point from the beginning has been that RMS has made a major contribution to the computing world but deserves no more recognition than any one of the thousands of other who have worked here. I then went on to speculate as to why it might be that RMS feels teh world owes him kudos. My theory runs basically along teh lines that there once was a lonely person named Rick Stallman who found a niche with some other people at MIT's AI lab. These friends went off to get jobs so they could raise families and seek self-fulfillment. Feeling abandoned, our protagonist sets out on a Quixotic journey to fell the windmill of propriety software. Others joined him, seeing that there was actually a certain amount of good in what he was doing. These people then set a somewhat different course for the movement and renamed it. Once again our hero feels abandoned and raises a stink.
It doesn't matter that RMS sacrificed a normal life for free software - he did it of his own free will and no one owes him a thing. I might once have called the OS in question GNU/Linux out of respect for him, but his public displays of ill humour have cost him any respect I may once have held for him.
I want them (if/when I have them) to be born into a world of opportunity Opportunity for what? To get a job so they can earn a living and then go off and procreate? To live like mindless automatons? I want my children to live in a better world where they can do what they want without having to worry about being compelled to "leave their mark."
Why don't you recognize others?
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Do you know Dennis Ritchie? Jim Gettys? Knuth? Any one of a dozen other people who have contributed to the computer system you now use? Why don't they get recognized?
And you talk about being selfish and egotistical? No, I'm talking about being foolish enough to believe that the world "owes" you something and childish enough to throw temper tantrums if it doesn't give you what you feel you've earned. A lot of people have made lasting contributions to the world over the course of the last few thousand years, and only a very few of them have done it for the sake of self-agrandizement. RMS is one of them - why else would he be so insistent on teh GNu recognition.
I'd rather die knowing that I'd made a tenth of the contribution that someone like RMS has, than simply knowing I'd had a good time... I once felt that way, but I grew up. I would rather die surrounded by those I know and love.
Read the whole thread
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If you had done so you would certainly have found that we are arguing on the same side. RMS should get no more recognition than Jim Gettys and a thousand other selfless academics.
That's Geoffrey "S." Hamilton, to you
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No, I didn't say that. Working together as a team to change the world for everyone is pretty damn cool. What isn't cool is the eventual disintegration of society and the environment because of an overpopulated world of generation after generation of complacent do-nothing family-havers.
I think the rest of the world is quite capable of taking care of itself - I don't care about overpopulation in 200 years. Maybe that's selfish but aren't we here to enjoy ourselves? What's the point of life if all you do is spin around working, working, working and trying to change things. So what if there are no humans to greet the year 3000? Would the Universe be any worse off?
You mean besides the fact that he's living proof that if you put idealism before nature, one person can defeat even the largest problems?
And why is that so great? Anyone can change the world if they put their mind to it, but if they expect it to make them happy they may be disappointed. Hence our belltower rifleman. He's certainly changed the world for some people, hasn't he?
If everyone did as much with their life as RMS has, there would be no problems on earth. We would be living in a perfect society.
No we wouldn't. We would all be bitter old men so determined to leave our mark that we couldn't stop to smell the roses. It's because of complacency and fear that we live in the world we do now.
No, we live in our world because of the few people who need to change the world, often by enslaving others. To make reference to the bible in a purely allegorical sense, had it not been for an excess of ambition we would never have left the garden.
Don't sell Bill shorter than he already is
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He certainly has a talent for dirty tricks and publicity though.
That's not a certain kind of genius? It may not be nice, but his business savvy is brilliant. It's unfortunate he can get his company to produce anything approaching good software, though.
And I mentioned as much in my post. Thank you for reiterating me so clearly. So why not Ritchie/Linux or von Neumann/Linux or Babbage/Linux? Why not AlanCox/Linux? Why not The Regents of The University of California/Linux?
Because he is not just content to not have children - he feels the need to belittle those who do have children and express a series of arguments of why having children is so bad. Like the whole "Free Software" thing he can't understand why anyone would think differently than him.
"better things to do than have kids"
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Interesting juxta-position. This is horribly off-topic, but does intimacy require having children?(!)
Not at all. I was also referring to the fact that RMS is and always has been single which is likely why he sees no need to have children.
And what does this really have to do with free/open-source software?
It certainly wouldn't be getting recognized there, either. And can you name a single "other" system that runs entirely GNU utilities? Certainly none that are sold under non-GPL licenses (ie, all of them). Most admins do add gcc to new systems, but that's about it.
Thanks for the diagnosis, Doc
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So you propose that we should all be mavericks and world-beaters because that's just so much cooler, right? You're most certainly a slave to capitalist consumerism. Why do you feel so pushed into changing the world? Possibly because it is so much easier than making your life better.
It's quite easy to sit in the belltower picking people off with your rifle, isn't it? Certainly not as hard as finding someone who understands you and who you understand.
As far as the relevance of this thread, I would say it is quite minimal. I was only trying to illustrate a possible alternate and less noble explanation of RMS' insistence on being recognized as a prophet.
It depends where you expect to find the most satisfaction. Some (like our mutual friend, here) might look for it through works that they hope will bring them the respect and acclaim of the world. This will undoubtly bring on a certain amount of bitterness when the thankless world doesn't give you what you feel you've earned. I would tend to look for contentment by sharing my life with one other person and possibly having children. That seems a fairly guaranteed way of feeling appreciated. I'm no Marco Polo but hey...
On one hand I appreciate his humour and conviction. On the other hand I can only feel pity for someone so dissatisfied with his life that he needs to belittle people who have everything he lacks.
Plausible deniability
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How would you like to write a set of utilities and have some large corporation come along and mask what you wrote with a different brand?
Of course I would be bitter about that. However, if I wrote it and gave it away for free and called it Free Software and put it under a free license I could expect any less to happen and I would be willing to live with the anonymity, content in teh knowledge that I had createx something that people around the world enjoy using. Ever heard of Jim Gettys? Use X?
I'm not talking so much about RMS' reluctance to have children as his complete lack of ineterest in having any form of personal relationship with anyone. My "narrow view" of the world takes into account that humans are, by nature, social creatures and anyone who would be perfectly content with locking themselves away and spending their life doing one thing is surely a person who feels extremely alienated.
And yes, I am a computer hobbiest and have been for quite a while. However, I also realize that there is much more to life.
All of this is quite secondary to the issue at hand, however. RMS feels he (personally) should be recognized for his contribution to Linux and free UniX in general. He is not the only (or even the largest) contributer to Unix. Ritchie is the man that it all comes back to, but Linux is caled Linux, not Unix/Linux (for reasons other than the copyright issues).
Thank you for reading my post so carefully
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Because you must have noticed the paraenthetical statement "note I'm talking about love here, not sex." The fact that he is too busy to have kids and that he's never been in a relationship with another human being in his life seems to illustrate a lack of neccesity on his part to share his life with anyone else. I think he will likely find himself very lonely, some day.
I'm sure RMS is a coding genius...
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... Bill Gates is a business genius. I don't like him either.
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The reason that MS won't run SQL Server 7 on comparable hardware is that they know the product isn't as scalable as Oracle7i. The implication is that if MS can run something reasonably close to Oracle's result on shitty hardware then they must be able top kick Oracle's ass on great hardware.
The unfortunate fact is that Oracle would probably still beat MS on the $50,000 machine. The reason they ran a multi-million $ machine in the benchmark is because that is what the benchmark test called for, not because they "needed" it.
He wants to be "first among peers." He may be willing to acknowledge that the Linux kernel is what makes his software work, but, in his eyes, it is first and foremost a GNU system.
Ouch - he called me a troll. That hurts. Really.
The bottom line is that people are afraid of RMS, because he levels serious and true accusations against our materialistic and anti-community way of life.
Yes, that's right. I said that I can't stand Stallman or anything he believes in. It's right in my post. Really.
I'm substantially more socialist than your average American (which isn't really saying much) and RMS' beliefs aren't what bother me. His rhetoric and preachiness is. An earlier post compared him to a prophet - well, of course he seems like a prophet, that's how he's been grooming himself from the beginning.
I could even put up with that if it weren't for the whole GNU/Linux thing. True, GNU comprises the *Unix* component of Linux, but that is not really what I like about Linux. I like the speed, the efficiency, etc. When people do benchmarks of OS' they don't measure the speed of the utilities ("Wow, that's one fast 'ls'!") they benchmark the kernel. That is why Linux is the benchmark-breaker. Not because of GNU.
I don't believe that RMS is "what Linux users are all about." RMS isn't anything like what I'm all about. You seem to be operating under the (RMS distributed) stereotypes of RMS as the only person who believes in free software and Linus as just some guy who's abusing RMS' system. /.ers) are unwilling to credit a "foreigner" (Linus) with a major contribution to the future. RMS may have started it all (he didn't - free software was the rule long before Stallman) but Linus' work set the ball rolling for the rest of the world.
Linus writes and maintains code and gives away the results for public consumption. RMS writes and maintains code and gives it away for whoever is willing to subscribe to his set of beliefs.
I think the real issue at stake here is that the US (media and majority of
The people who define the usage of a word are the "owners". Ok, what's a lift?
For instance, if my mom and her friends started calling cheese graters "floppy drives" that doesn't make it right. But if everyone else started calling cheese graters floppy drives you would be the one who was an idiot for still calling them cheese graters, as you would not be speaking the same language.
(is "flurb" a correct usage here just because I used it?) No, because no one else understands what you mean.
Thanks for taking everything I said out of context. Yes, I have read Hackers, you obsequious little sh*t. I wasn't trying to downplay RMS' contribution to the computing world and I am not trying to make "snap judgments" or to imply that he is in some way any more demented than a large number of other people.
My point from the beginning has been that RMS has made a major contribution to the computing world but deserves no more recognition than any one of the thousands of other who have worked here. I then went on to speculate as to why it might be that RMS feels teh world owes him kudos. My theory runs basically along teh lines that there once was a lonely person named Rick Stallman who found a niche with some other people at MIT's AI lab. These friends went off to get jobs so they could raise families and seek self-fulfillment.
Feeling abandoned, our protagonist sets out on a Quixotic journey to fell the windmill of propriety software. Others joined him, seeing that there was actually a certain amount of good in what he was doing. These people then set a somewhat different course for the movement and renamed it. Once again our hero feels abandoned and raises a stink.
It doesn't matter that RMS sacrificed a normal life for free software - he did it of his own free will and no one owes him a thing. I might once have called the OS in question GNU/Linux out of respect for him, but his public displays of ill humour have cost him any respect I may once have held for him.
I want them (if/when I have them) to be born into a world of opportunity
Opportunity for what? To get a job so they can earn a living and then go off and procreate? To live like mindless automatons?
I want my children to live in a better world where they can do what they want without having to worry about being compelled to "leave their mark."
Do you know Dennis Ritchie? Jim Gettys? Knuth? Any one of a dozen other people who have contributed to the computer system you now use? Why don't they get recognized?
And you talk about being selfish and egotistical?
No, I'm talking about being foolish enough to believe that the world "owes" you something and childish enough to throw temper tantrums if it doesn't give you what you feel you've earned.
A lot of people have made lasting contributions to the world over the course of the last few thousand years, and only a very few of them have done it for the sake of self-agrandizement. RMS is one of them - why else would he be so insistent on teh GNu recognition.
I'd rather die knowing that I'd made a tenth of the contribution that someone like RMS has, than simply knowing I'd had a good time...
I once felt that way, but I grew up. I would rather die surrounded by those I know and love.
If you had done so you would certainly have found that we are arguing on the same side. RMS should get no more recognition than Jim Gettys and a thousand other selfless academics.
No, I didn't say that. Working together as a team to change the world for everyone is pretty damn cool. What isn't cool is the eventual disintegration of society and the environment because of an overpopulated world of generation after generation of complacent do-nothing family-havers.
I think the rest of the world is quite capable of taking care of itself - I don't care about overpopulation in 200 years. Maybe that's selfish but aren't we here to enjoy ourselves? What's the point of life if all you do is spin around working, working, working and trying to change things. So what if there are no humans to greet the year 3000? Would the Universe be any worse off?
You mean besides the fact that he's living proof that if you put idealism before nature, one person can defeat even the largest problems?
And why is that so great? Anyone can change the world if they put their mind to it, but if they expect it to make them happy they may be disappointed. Hence our belltower rifleman. He's certainly changed the world for some people, hasn't he?
If everyone did as much with their life as RMS has, there would be no problems on earth. We would be living in a perfect society.
No we wouldn't. We would all be bitter old men so determined to leave our mark that we couldn't stop to smell the roses.
It's because of complacency and fear that we live in the world we do now.
No, we live in our world because of the few people who need to change the world, often by enslaving others. To make reference to the bible in a purely allegorical sense, had it not been for an excess of ambition we would never have left the garden.
He certainly has a talent for dirty tricks and publicity though.
That's not a certain kind of genius? It may not be nice, but his business savvy is brilliant. It's unfortunate he can get his company to produce anything approaching good software, though.
You do use X, though - right?
And I mentioned as much in my post. Thank you for reiterating me so clearly. So why not Ritchie/Linux or von Neumann/Linux or Babbage/Linux? Why not AlanCox/Linux? Why not The Regents of The University of California/Linux?
Why do you think he dissatisfied with his life?
Because he is not just content to not have children - he feels the need to belittle those who do have children and express a series of arguments of why having children is so bad. Like the whole "Free Software" thing he can't understand why anyone would think differently than him.
Interesting juxta-position. This is horribly off-topic, but does intimacy require having children?(!)
Not at all. I was also referring to the fact that RMS is and always has been single which is likely why he sees no need to have children.
And what does this really have to do with free/open-source software?
Not a thing. I just like having the last word.
It certainly wouldn't be getting recognized there, either. And can you name a single "other" system that runs entirely GNU utilities? Certainly none that are sold under non-GPL licenses (ie, all of them). Most admins do add gcc to new systems, but that's about it.
So you propose that we should all be mavericks and world-beaters because that's just so much cooler, right? You're most certainly a slave to capitalist consumerism. Why do you feel so pushed into changing the world? Possibly because it is so much easier than making your life better.
It's quite easy to sit in the belltower picking people off with your rifle, isn't it? Certainly not as hard as finding someone who understands you and who you understand.
As far as the relevance of this thread, I would say it is quite minimal. I was only trying to illustrate a possible alternate and less noble explanation of RMS' insistence on being recognized as a prophet.
It depends where you expect to find the most satisfaction. Some (like our mutual friend, here) might look for it through works that they hope will bring them the respect and acclaim of the world. This will undoubtly bring on a certain amount of bitterness when the thankless world doesn't give you what you feel you've earned. I would tend to look for contentment by sharing my life with one other person and possibly having children. That seems a fairly guaranteed way of feeling appreciated. I'm no Marco Polo but hey...
On one hand I appreciate his humour and conviction. On the other hand I can only feel pity for someone so dissatisfied with his life that he needs to belittle people who have everything he lacks.
How would you like to write a set of utilities and have some large corporation come along and mask what you wrote with a different brand?
Of course I would be bitter about that. However, if I wrote it and gave it away for free and called it Free Software and put it under a free license I could expect any less to happen and I would be willing to live with the anonymity, content in teh knowledge that I had createx something that people around the world enjoy using. Ever heard of Jim Gettys? Use X?
I'm not talking so much about RMS' reluctance to have children as his complete lack of ineterest in having any form of personal relationship with anyone. My "narrow view" of the world takes into account that humans are, by nature, social creatures and anyone who would be perfectly content with locking themselves away and spending their life doing one thing is surely a person who feels extremely alienated.
And yes, I am a computer hobbiest and have been for quite a while. However, I also realize that there is much more to life.
All of this is quite secondary to the issue at hand, however. RMS feels he (personally) should be recognized for his contribution to Linux and free UniX in general. He is not the only (or even the largest) contributer to Unix. Ritchie is the man that it all comes back to, but Linux is caled Linux, not Unix/Linux (for reasons other than the copyright issues).
Because you must have noticed the paraenthetical statement "note I'm talking about love here, not sex." The fact that he is too busy to have kids and that he's never been in a relationship with another human being in his life seems to illustrate a lack of neccesity on his part to share his life with anyone else. I think he will likely find himself very lonely, some day.
... Bill Gates is a business genius. I don't like him either.
... I code in C/B/BCPL/CPL/von Neumann/Assembly/early work by Babbage