flipflapflopflup is not insightful
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Um, Mr. flipflapflup, there is evidently something you do not know. For a high-visibility package
such as KDE, in order for everyone to get it, it
has to get to the mirror sites. That's why when
a release is made and put on a site, no announcement goes out: this is to allow at least a day for it
to get to all the mirrors. If some dork posts
an alert to Slashdot prematurely, the primary site
gets hammered and the mirror sites can't get in.
Everyone suffers from horrendously slow downloads
from the primary site.
What's scary is that CmdrTaco evidently still
does not realize this, and continues his irresponsible policy of announcing releases
prematurely.
The only way that Tarkin can hope to be patent-free
is either by doing something completely different
or by using approaches that were known 20 years ago; all
the standard approaches are covered by patents.
No, this isn't a small-town lawyer who wants to
make a name for himself. An actual lawyer would
not use small claims court and would not use Nolo
Press guides to find out what the law is. Wind_Walker needs to work on his reading comprehension skills.
I know of some cases where US bars refused to let
foreign tourists enter, even with a passport,
because the stupid bouncers don't know what passports are and insist on a US state driver's license.
Well, three of the four guys you mention are
married, and the fourth has a girlfriend
(yes, shocking as it may seem, there is a woman
who finds RMS very attractive),
so I guess they are sexy to someone.
Unfortunately, the number of free sofware hackers
who are women is very, very small, on the order
of 1%, and almost none of these women has any
leadership role. However, there is one woman
who would make an excellent interview subject,
and who does have a leadership role (at the Gnome
Foundation): Telsa
Gwynne.
She herself would probably deny
being a "free software hacker", though her testing
and documentation work is critical to making the
Gnome desktop a high-quality product.
Yes, Linus will be forgotten over time, just like
pretty much everyone else.
The reason is that the Linux kernel will eventually run out of gas and get replaced by something else,
and eventually it and its creator will just be a
historical footnote.
So here's a guy who's been to about a hundred
countries, lectures in French when he goes to
France, regularly talks in person with influential
people all over the world, and I'll bet that
there are a significant group of people who not
only have never been out of their own country
but don't even have a passport, but find this
joke funny.
Google's competitive advantage is their reputation.
At this stage, any attempt at sellout would backfire
badly: anyone willing to pay them money for a
better listing will want to stop paying when no
one visits Google any more.
The mantra of the Internet (often explicitly
stated by IETF people) has always been to be
conservative (that is, strictly standard-conformant)
in what you send, and be liberal (that is, try to
tolerate deviations and do the right thing) in what
you accept. By this principle
if a standards-incorrect practice is
widespread on the net, a decent, high-quality
application has to deal with it (be liberal in
what you accept), but professional web designers and tools that
produce HTML should produce strictly conformant
HTML (be conservative in what you send). The
Konqueror team is not doing as good a job as its
competition in living up to the first part of
this principle, and if it can't catch up people
are going to just stop using it. It won't suffice
to point out that other people are writing incorrect HTML. After all, Slashdot's HTML
is highly non-standard and CmdrTaco doesn't care.
IE took off by
putting in a lot of work to be bug-compatible
with Netscape.
Similarly, would you use a C or C++ compiler that
always aborts when seeing the first minor syntax
error? Such a compiler would greatly slow you down, because you'd only be able to find one error
at a time.
Given this, it is the Konqi team's fault
if it can't do a decent job of rendering web pages
that deviate from the standard. Cry all you want
about incompetent Web designers, but someone who
purports to provide a Web browser must deal with
the web as it is.
Consider that Slashdot itself does not follow the
standards (try to validate a Slashdot page).
Would you use a broswer that can't
The reason Eben Moglen has gotten dozens of companies to give up and to submit is because of section 4.
Without it, we'd have a lot less free software than
we do now. In the past, the threats of nuclear war
have been private, but very serious (if you're in the Linux business
and lose your right to distribute, say, glibc, you're dead meat).
It's important for everyone to understand that if
you violate the GPL, it's not sufficient to just
stop violating, you need to get the copyright
holder's explicit permission before you can ever
start copying, modifying, or distributing the
program whose copyright you violated ever again.
People got pissed off when RMS talked about
"forgiving" the KDE project, but too many people
don't realize that from a legal standpoint this
forgiveness was required (though evidently
only a couple of less-important KDE applications
ever had any FSF-owned GPL code in them).
Certainly RMS could have been more diplomatic
(though maybe not, it isn't one of his talents).
Here is the only language in
the treaty concerning
anti-circumvention measures:
Obligations concerning Technological Measures
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by performers or producers of phonograms in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty and that restrict acts, in respect of their performances or phonograms, which are not authorized by the performers or the producers of phonograms concerned or permitted by law.
A Contracting Party is a country that has signed
the treaty.
Note that the above language only requires
countries to punish people who used a technological measure to violate a performer's
rights, that is, to punish people who use
technological measures to do piracy. A signer
is not obliged to implement something like the
DMCA; a far narrower law would suffice to comply
with the treaty.
You write as though Mono were the only software
component that could be threatened by patent problems. Any piece of Gnome, or KDE,
or whatever, can be so threatened, forcing you
to stop distributing code.
If Microsoft asserts a patent covering part of.Net, that may or may not affect Mono. Mono might
have to rip out a piece of functionality, but it
would not kill the project as a whole, because there is nothing patentable about the basic concept .
... it seems to me that every point that Lumpish
Scholar makes is also made, at least as effectively,
either by Dan Kegel's comment or Eben Moglen's
comment, both of which are in the 47.
See
this story in the San Jose Mercury.
Even now, Microsoft is still treating security as
a public relations problem. Their response to
the discovery of security holes in their products
is still, in too many cases, to deny it.
IPFreely appears to be reading-impaired. I did
not say that CmdrTaco should not express his opinion.
I only objected to putting that opinion in the body
of a news story, instead of in a separate comment
or editorial. And why do you think "rights" are
involved? Certainly CmdrTaco has the right to
tarnish his own reputation if he wishes, but in
case he wants to avoid this, I provided some
suggestions.
Yes, it's CmdrTaco's site, but it looks bad when
a VA employee uses his position to put his opinion
that a controversy involving his employer is a
non-story in the article rather than in a comment.
It would be better form to use a just-the-facts
approach in the story itself and then post opinions
as comments like every other user. Another possibility would be to have a separate "Editorials" section for staff members to give
their opinions, and to have a separate news item
and editorial in cases like this.
Well, the economic model for open source is doubtful, under current conditions at least.
I was a very early customer of Cygnus. We needed
to pay them in part because g++ was so horrendously buggy in those days: it's easier to have a support business to support code that badly needs it.
Source code isn't useless, but it is useless to
many people (those without the skill to change it
or the funds to hire someone to do so). It is
very useful to folks like me. But most
computers are embedded systems programmed in
assembly language. How useful would the source
code to your microwave oven be to you?
The motivation for open source works very well for tools that the programmer himself/herself needs,
for producing tools with rough edges that can be
handled successfully by other programmers. It
gets harder with applications; in this cases
the only successful open source projects clone
some proprietary design (the Gimp, Gnumeric, etc).
The truly original open source creations, like
Perl, Python, and Emacs, are environments built
by nerds for nerds.
The nerd culture can be counterproductive.
Nerds focus on minutia and often don't see the
big picture. In many cases, nerds find themselves
working for someone who has the opposite limitation. This should be no surprise.
Also, many programmers are the wrong kinds of nerds. Civil and mechanical engineers obsess on
getting everything correct, because they are well aware that if they don't, people may die and careers may end. Too many programmers lack rigor and think of themselves as artists, not engineers, even if they use the term "software engineer" in
their title.
A key issue, that software is brittle and downright dangerous, is not addressed by either proprietary or open source software today.
If we fix this by requiring proprietary software to have a warranty against
severe defects, what happens with open source software, where the distributor cannot possibly
provide a warranty?
I'm afraid that Microsoft may start to get it
about security before the open source movement
does. If you think that the open source movement
gets it, then why did the Debian project need
to issue 81 security updates in 2001? Both
Microsoft and Linux are putting out software that is too buggy, and the BSD world isn't as
much better as they claim, despite better practices
(code auditing is great, but a lot of work: move most of what
Linux distributions call the system into "ports"
and then the bugs don't count against you).
I think that open source can work, but not in the
current economic climate (native to the US, being
forced on other countries through the GATT and the
like), which elevates "intellectual property" to a
universal value. A funding mechanism is needed.
One possibility is that governments fund it.
This would actually save taxpayers a lot of money,
since governments are currenty paying Microsoft
and the like hundreds of millions just for Office,
and paying again every few years for upgrades.
That would pay for a lot of full-time programmers.
Notice that the Washington Post did not print
a single comment giving the perspective of the
open source/free software community. Unfortunately, Washington tends to think in terms of "stakeholders"
(opinion-makers suitable to be invited on Nightline
or McNeil-Lehrer). To qualify you need to be a
spokescritter for a big corporation, holder of some
significant elective office, or work for a big
think tank. If you have a large lobbying budget
and make lots of campaign contributions, that helps.
Owning an expensive suit helps. J. Random Programmer need not apply;
same goes for groups considered oddball from the
DC perspective, like the Free Software Foundation.
The Slashdot discussion encouraged people to
send form letters: cut and paste text from various
sources and mail it. Evidently all such mailings
were discarded.
Forunately, it appears that more serious feedback
from folks like
Eben Moglen and
Dan
Kegel will be taken seriously, but much of
the Slashdot-generated discussion will not be.
VA Software still is supporting Debian
on
LWCE Reports Continue
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
VA is still supplying network connectivity to
Debian, not a cheap proposition given their
bandwidth needs.
Try a traceroute to www.debian.org:
...
13 s6-0.border1-7206.valinux.com (209.81.23.54) 102.552 ms 86.615 ms 86.868 ms
14 fe0-0.dist5-3662.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.86) 95.753 ms 134.836 ms 95.819 ms
15 e2-2.community8-bi8000.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.102) 124.682 ms 88.352 ms 114.626 ms
16 klecker.debian.org (198.186.203.20) 91.755 ms 96.514 ms 93.637 ms
If it doesn't take off? It takes years to develop that kind of new architecture. By then AMD will have it swept.
Intel is simply cloning AMD's 64-bit extensions
to the ia32 architecture. They've already got it
working in-house, evidently, so there's no architecture development needed. The advantage
to the users is that "x86-64" code will be
portable across both.
But it would be really humiliating for them to
be in the business of selling a clone of AMD's
design; it would mark them as a follower rather
than a leader. On the other hand, their
process technology is better than what's available
to AMD, so they could still win with such an approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, Mr. flipflapflup, there is evidently something you do not know. For a high-visibility package such as KDE, in order for everyone to get it, it has to get to the mirror sites. That's why when a release is made and put on a site, no announcement goes out: this is to allow at least a day for it to get to all the mirrors. If some dork posts an alert to Slashdot prematurely, the primary site gets hammered and the mirror sites can't get in. Everyone suffers from horrendously slow downloads from the primary site.
What's scary is that CmdrTaco evidently still does not realize this, and continues his irresponsible policy of announcing releases prematurely.
The only way that Tarkin can hope to be patent-free is either by doing something completely different or by using approaches that were known 20 years ago; all the standard approaches are covered by patents.
No, this isn't a small-town lawyer who wants to make a name for himself. An actual lawyer would not use small claims court and would not use Nolo Press guides to find out what the law is. Wind_Walker needs to work on his reading comprehension skills.
In many cases, spam coming from a Chinese ISP really originates in the US, and is being bounced off of an open email relay.
I know of some cases where US bars refused to let foreign tourists enter, even with a passport, because the stupid bouncers don't know what passports are and insist on a US state driver's license.
Well, three of the four guys you mention are married, and the fourth has a girlfriend (yes, shocking as it may seem, there is a woman who finds RMS very attractive), so I guess they are sexy to someone.
Unfortunately, the number of free sofware hackers who are women is very, very small, on the order of 1%, and almost none of these women has any leadership role. However, there is one woman who would make an excellent interview subject, and who does have a leadership role (at the Gnome Foundation): Telsa Gwynne.
She herself would probably deny being a "free software hacker", though her testing and documentation work is critical to making the Gnome desktop a high-quality product.
Yes, Linus will be forgotten over time, just like pretty much everyone else. The reason is that the Linux kernel will eventually run out of gas and get replaced by something else, and eventually it and its creator will just be a historical footnote.
So here's a guy who's been to about a hundred countries, lectures in French when he goes to France, regularly talks in person with influential people all over the world, and I'll bet that there are a significant group of people who not only have never been out of their own country but don't even have a passport, but find this joke funny.
Google's competitive advantage is their reputation. At this stage, any attempt at sellout would backfire badly: anyone willing to pay them money for a better listing will want to stop paying when no one visits Google any more.
The mantra of the Internet (often explicitly stated by IETF people) has always been to be conservative (that is, strictly standard-conformant) in what you send, and be liberal (that is, try to tolerate deviations and do the right thing) in what you accept. By this principle if a standards-incorrect practice is widespread on the net, a decent, high-quality application has to deal with it (be liberal in what you accept), but professional web designers and tools that produce HTML should produce strictly conformant HTML (be conservative in what you send). The Konqueror team is not doing as good a job as its competition in living up to the first part of this principle, and if it can't catch up people are going to just stop using it. It won't suffice to point out that other people are writing incorrect HTML. After all, Slashdot's HTML is highly non-standard and CmdrTaco doesn't care. IE took off by putting in a lot of work to be bug-compatible with Netscape.
Similarly, would you use a C or C++ compiler that always aborts when seeing the first minor syntax error? Such a compiler would greatly slow you down, because you'd only be able to find one error at a time.
Given this, it is the Konqi team's fault if it can't do a decent job of rendering web pages that deviate from the standard. Cry all you want about incompetent Web designers, but someone who purports to provide a Web browser must deal with the web as it is.
Consider that Slashdot itself does not follow the standards (try to validate a Slashdot page). Would you use a broswer that can't
The reason Eben Moglen has gotten dozens of companies to give up and to submit is because of section 4. Without it, we'd have a lot less free software than we do now. In the past, the threats of nuclear war have been private, but very serious (if you're in the Linux business and lose your right to distribute, say, glibc, you're dead meat).
It's important for everyone to understand that if you violate the GPL, it's not sufficient to just stop violating, you need to get the copyright holder's explicit permission before you can ever start copying, modifying, or distributing the program whose copyright you violated ever again. People got pissed off when RMS talked about "forgiving" the KDE project, but too many people don't realize that from a legal standpoint this forgiveness was required (though evidently only a couple of less-important KDE applications ever had any FSF-owned GPL code in them). Certainly RMS could have been more diplomatic (though maybe not, it isn't one of his talents).
Here is the only language in the treaty concerning anti-circumvention measures:
A Contracting Party is a country that has signed the treaty. Note that the above language only requires countries to punish people who used a technological measure to violate a performer's rights, that is, to punish people who use technological measures to do piracy. A signer is not obliged to implement something like the DMCA; a far narrower law would suffice to comply with the treaty.
You write as though Mono were the only software component that could be threatened by patent problems. Any piece of Gnome, or KDE, or whatever, can be so threatened, forcing you to stop distributing code.
If Microsoft asserts a patent covering part of .Net, that may or may not affect Mono. Mono might
have to rip out a piece of functionality, but it
would not kill the project as a whole, because there is nothing patentable about the basic concept .
Eben Moglen is the FSF's lawyer, and his comment (which made the cut: it's one of the 47) is the official FSF proposal.
Yes, Counterpane just came out, but this article previously appeared in SecurityFocus.
See this story in the San Jose Mercury. Even now, Microsoft is still treating security as a public relations problem. Their response to the discovery of security holes in their products is still, in too many cases, to deny it.
IPFreely appears to be reading-impaired. I did not say that CmdrTaco should not express his opinion. I only objected to putting that opinion in the body of a news story, instead of in a separate comment or editorial. And why do you think "rights" are involved? Certainly CmdrTaco has the right to tarnish his own reputation if he wishes, but in case he wants to avoid this, I provided some suggestions.
Yes, it's CmdrTaco's site, but it looks bad when a VA employee uses his position to put his opinion that a controversy involving his employer is a non-story in the article rather than in a comment.
It would be better form to use a just-the-facts approach in the story itself and then post opinions as comments like every other user. Another possibility would be to have a separate "Editorials" section for staff members to give their opinions, and to have a separate news item and editorial in cases like this.
Well, the economic model for open source is doubtful, under current conditions at least. I was a very early customer of Cygnus. We needed to pay them in part because g++ was so horrendously buggy in those days: it's easier to have a support business to support code that badly needs it.
Source code isn't useless, but it is useless to many people (those without the skill to change it or the funds to hire someone to do so). It is very useful to folks like me. But most computers are embedded systems programmed in assembly language. How useful would the source code to your microwave oven be to you?
The motivation for open source works very well for tools that the programmer himself/herself needs, for producing tools with rough edges that can be handled successfully by other programmers. It gets harder with applications; in this cases the only successful open source projects clone some proprietary design (the Gimp, Gnumeric, etc). The truly original open source creations, like Perl, Python, and Emacs, are environments built by nerds for nerds.
The nerd culture can be counterproductive. Nerds focus on minutia and often don't see the big picture. In many cases, nerds find themselves working for someone who has the opposite limitation. This should be no surprise. Also, many programmers are the wrong kinds of nerds. Civil and mechanical engineers obsess on getting everything correct, because they are well aware that if they don't, people may die and careers may end. Too many programmers lack rigor and think of themselves as artists, not engineers, even if they use the term "software engineer" in their title.
A key issue, that software is brittle and downright dangerous, is not addressed by either proprietary or open source software today. If we fix this by requiring proprietary software to have a warranty against severe defects, what happens with open source software, where the distributor cannot possibly provide a warranty?
I'm afraid that Microsoft may start to get it about security before the open source movement does. If you think that the open source movement gets it, then why did the Debian project need to issue 81 security updates in 2001? Both Microsoft and Linux are putting out software that is too buggy, and the BSD world isn't as much better as they claim, despite better practices (code auditing is great, but a lot of work: move most of what Linux distributions call the system into "ports" and then the bugs don't count against you).
I think that open source can work, but not in the current economic climate (native to the US, being forced on other countries through the GATT and the like), which elevates "intellectual property" to a universal value. A funding mechanism is needed. One possibility is that governments fund it. This would actually save taxpayers a lot of money, since governments are currenty paying Microsoft and the like hundreds of millions just for Office, and paying again every few years for upgrades. That would pay for a lot of full-time programmers.
Notice that the Washington Post did not print a single comment giving the perspective of the open source/free software community. Unfortunately, Washington tends to think in terms of "stakeholders" (opinion-makers suitable to be invited on Nightline or McNeil-Lehrer). To qualify you need to be a spokescritter for a big corporation, holder of some significant elective office, or work for a big think tank. If you have a large lobbying budget and make lots of campaign contributions, that helps. Owning an expensive suit helps. J. Random Programmer need not apply; same goes for groups considered oddball from the DC perspective, like the Free Software Foundation.
The Slashdot discussion encouraged people to send form letters: cut and paste text from various sources and mail it. Evidently all such mailings were discarded.
Forunately, it appears that more serious feedback from folks like Eben Moglen and Dan Kegel will be taken seriously, but much of the Slashdot-generated discussion will not be.
VA is still supplying network connectivity to Debian, not a cheap proposition given their bandwidth needs. Try a traceroute to www.debian.org:
13 s6-0.border1-7206.valinux.com (209.81.23.54) 102.552 ms 86.615 ms 86.868 ms
14 fe0-0.dist5-3662.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.86) 95.753 ms 134.836 ms 95.819 ms
15 e2-2.community8-bi8000.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.102) 124.682 ms 88.352 ms 114.626 ms
16 klecker.debian.org (198.186.203.20) 91.755 ms 96.514 ms 93.637 ms
Intel is simply cloning AMD's 64-bit extensions to the ia32 architecture. They've already got it working in-house, evidently, so there's no architecture development needed. The advantage to the users is that "x86-64" code will be portable across both.
But it would be really humiliating for them to be in the business of selling a clone of AMD's design; it would mark them as a follower rather than a leader. On the other hand, their process technology is better than what's available to AMD, so they could still win with such an approach.