GPL has never been designed to be a business friendly licence.
GPL is very business friendly.
(emphasis mine)
You didn't address the parent's point -- that GPL was made to protect the freedoms of users, not to help businesses make profits. It's a useful side effect that some businesses benefit from the same freedoms that users do, but that isn't the point. If there were an essential freedom (like lack of DRM, in the FSF's opinion) which would be bad for business then you can be sure that the FSF will protect that freedom in their new license.
But the vast majority of driver code lives in userspace; the size of the kernel interface is much smaller and therefore easier to debug.
Any bugs that exist in the kernel mode driver would yield the same problems in user mode. If a video driver incorrectly configures your graphics card, you're going to get a garbled display, period.
I don't think we're too worried about garbled displays here. If you have a kernel mode driver, it can do whatever the hell it likes with the entire kernel address space. Even if it isn't malicious, a badly written kernel driver can cause all sorts of corruption all over the place.
I'm pretty sure that's incorrect; how would the new ssh daemon know that you were authenticated?
When you log in via ssh, the ssh daemon forks itself and your connection is handled by the child. When sshd is restarted, only the parent daemon is restarted. The children hang around until their connections are closed. So the restart only has an effect on connections opened after sshd is restarted; your current connections stay open.
I agree strongly with this comment. And although sibling points out that it is possible to copy and paste with gpm, I still find X useful because I can see so much more stuff (in different windows) at the same time. And if you're one of those people that uses X as an Xterm container, a tiling window manager is essential.
PS: I find that wmii isn't very mature yet; I still prefer wmi-10.
But is that relevant in the context of this article? If the software they were selling was open, you could buy support from whoever you wanted. This destroys the incentive to produce buggy software because the writer of the software never knows whether they will be the one paid to fix it.
I bet Quake4 on windows uses DirectX for input (mouse/keyboard handling, etc. (although they say they're using SDL on Linux; I don't see why they can't use it on windows, too)). I'm pretty sure all the rendering is done in OpenGL.
There are 5 known species of egg-laying mammals: the platypus and 4 species of the echidna family. All egg-laying mammals are members of the monotreme order.
Marsupials are completely different; no marsupials lay eggs.
Umm... no it doesn't it's possible to recover from a crashed thread if you manage the threads resources properly
The following code crashes immediately with a SIGSEGV, even though the segmentation fault is in a child thread (and I've tried this without detaching the thread, too):
The only way I can possibly imagine how to solve this is to catch the SIGSEGV, but man (2) signal has this to say: "The effects of this call in a multi-threaded process are unspecified." Maybe you can enlighten me as to how one can recover from a crashed thread?
So a end user has to be savvy enough to know all the ins and outs of each distro...
No, an end user only has to know the ins and outs of one distro. The one they use. Which probably came pre-installed on their machine and undoubtably has a simple, easy-to-use, no-rpm-hell package manager GUI. They aren't as rare as some of the trolls here would have you believe.
I don't know about the parent, but I prefer hanging around with people who have the drive, desire and ability to have fun, to be friendly and to have exciting, interesting and fulfilling goals.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
Sadly, my two sibling responses seem to have missed the joke. And congratulations on fixing the > 1% thing, too...
My apologies; I misinterpreted your original post to mean that creating an orchestral recording can be a budget affair as a whole, not just from the recording point of view.
That sentence doesn't make much sense, but I think you know what I mean...
It isn't just a matter of paying to start an orchestra. You have to pay them to keep them. Just for a little example, I am a rank&file violinist in the canberra symphony orchestra, which is a fairly small orchestra that operates on a casual basis. Assuming everyone gets paid the same as me (they probably get paid rather more), a single rehearsal costs more than $15,000 just to pay the players. Add the conductor and maybe a soloist and multiply by 4 (for 4 rehearsals) and you're probably above $75,000. And this doesn't include the venue costs or the player payments for the recording time. I guess my point is that the costs of maintaining an orchestra are high enough that you can't make a cheap recording even if you use cheap recording gear.
So maybe a fairly small orchestra in a fairly small town isn't a good example, but I think you would have trouble finding many orchestras in the world that would survive without government grants and corporate sponsorship. Operas are even worse. Some of those singers get paid a lot.
Oops, I think we've been arguing semantics the whole time. I would define a loop to be a logical construction like a "while" or a "for" in C. If it were written as a recursive function, I would not consider it to be a loop even though it executes the same instructions multiple times.
There is a small difference, though between loops as we know them in imperative languages and recursive functions as we know them in functional languages: functions have no side effects, which opens up the possibility of optimisation at a high level. Since side effects in loops are the main obstacle to loop unrolling and other optimisation techniques, I don't think this difference is entirely insignificant.
To write more than that, you need to issue repeated write instructions. This means a loop of some sort
No, it can be done as a recursive function. There will be no difference in terms of electric currents running across silicon because the logic involved is exactly the same. But if the processor presents a functional (ie. function-based) interface and uses a functional design, it will use recursion rather than looping to issue repeated instructions.
the hardware is implementing a loop
The hardware is implementing electric currents; the logic at that level is so simple that it doesn't deal with the concepts of loops or functions. It is only when you reach a higher level of abstraction that the difference between functional and imperative designs actually makes a difference. I would argue that the level at which the distinction becomes important is the processor ISA level; I also think the view that the distinction kicks in slightly lower is defensible but I don't agree that the logic at the gate level is important.
Only because the processor instruction set is designed in such a way that loops are necessary. I'm not at all sure about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lisp Machines, for example, didn't have hardware support for loops.
In order to see that loops are completely unnecessary, you only need to see that the lambda calculus is Turing complete.
Of course we can. Just have a look at your favourite functional programming language; it probably doesn't even have a loop construct. The question is whether this can be done efficiently. Of course, it also requires programmers to think in a different way, which they tend to be reluctant to do.
I thought I'd share some choice bits of this article with the slashdot readership:
in a troubling comment that largely escaped critical media scrutiny or even notice, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared on Black Entertainment Television that U.S. policy toward Chilean Marxist President Salvador Allende in the 1970s was "not a part of American history that we're proud of." Powell appears not to know that in toppling Allende the Chilean military saved Chile from suffering the same fate as South Vietnam with very little loss of life.
WTF!?! No other part of the article mentions Chile. It seems he just stuck in this paragraph to say "OMG! They democratically elected a Socialist! If we hadn't overthrown him, the region would have descended a into military quagmire."
A large chunk of the rest of the article is devoted to a discussion of Aaron Copland's political leanings. Maybe I'm just naive, but I find it astonishing that people consider someone's political opinions as justification for their persecution. The author of the article and the parent poster seem to feel that if McCarthy's targets believed in the Communist ideology then McCarthy must have been right to vilify them. In contrast, I have always believed that the free expression of ideas is to be encouraged.
In summary, this article failed to change my opinions about McCarthy. I still see him as a man who did his best to kill free political expression in the US and I absolutely cannot agree with that.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't address the parent's point -- that GPL was made to protect the freedoms of users, not to help businesses make profits. It's a useful side effect that some businesses benefit from the same freedoms that users do, but that isn't the point. If there were an essential freedom (like lack of DRM, in the FSF's opinion) which would be bad for business then you can be sure that the FSF will protect that freedom in their new license.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to fly with a Libertarian either...
What makes you think a terrorist won't have a perfectly valid ID card?
But the vast majority of driver code lives in userspace; the size of the kernel interface is much smaller and therefore easier to debug.
Any bugs that exist in the kernel mode driver would yield the same problems in user mode. If a video driver incorrectly configures your graphics card, you're going to get a garbled display, period.
I don't think we're too worried about garbled displays here. If you have a kernel mode driver, it can do whatever the hell it likes with the entire kernel address space. Even if it isn't malicious, a badly written kernel driver can cause all sorts of corruption all over the place.
I'm pretty sure that's incorrect; how would the new ssh daemon know that you were authenticated?
When you log in via ssh, the ssh daemon forks itself and your connection is handled by the child. When sshd is restarted, only the parent daemon is restarted. The children hang around until their connections are closed. So the restart only has an effect on connections opened after sshd is restarted; your current connections stay open.
If I'm reading the same graph you were when making that comment then the 92W figure is for the entire system, not just the processor.
I agree strongly with this comment. And although sibling points out that it is possible to copy and paste with gpm, I still find X useful because I can see so much more stuff (in different windows) at the same time. And if you're one of those people that uses X as an Xterm container, a tiling window manager is essential.
PS: I find that wmii isn't very mature yet; I still prefer wmi-10.
I think it disappeared when /. switched to CSS.
Everybody knows you can't use version number over 9.
You don't use emacs, do you?
But is that relevant in the context of this article? If the software they were selling was open, you could buy support from whoever you wanted. This destroys the incentive to produce buggy software because the writer of the software never knows whether they will be the one paid to fix it.
I bet Quake4 on windows uses DirectX for input (mouse/keyboard handling, etc. (although they say they're using SDL on Linux; I don't see why they can't use it on windows, too)). I'm pretty sure all the rendering is done in OpenGL.
There are 5 known species of egg-laying mammals: the platypus and 4 species of the echidna family. All egg-laying mammals are members of the monotreme order.
Marsupials are completely different; no marsupials lay eggs.
The following code crashes immediately with a SIGSEGV, even though the segmentation fault is in a child thread (and I've tried this without detaching the thread, too):
The only way I can possibly imagine how to solve this is to catch the SIGSEGV, but man (2) signal has this to say: "The effects of this call in a multi-threaded process are unspecified." Maybe you can enlighten me as to how one can recover from a crashed thread?
So a end user has to be savvy enough to know all the ins and outs of each distro...
No, an end user only has to know the ins and outs of one distro. The one they use. Which probably came pre-installed on their machine and undoubtably has a simple, easy-to-use, no-rpm-hell package manager GUI. They aren't as rare as some of the trolls here would have you believe.
I don't know about the parent, but I prefer hanging around with people who have the drive, desire and ability to have fun, to be friendly and to have exciting, interesting and fulfilling goals.
Sadly, my two sibling responses seem to have missed the joke. And congratulations on fixing the > 1% thing, too...
Given that this has been posted about 500 times in the last month, you'd think someone would get around to fixing that ">1%" thing...
My apologies; I misinterpreted your original post to mean that creating an orchestral recording can be a budget affair as a whole, not just from the recording point of view.
That sentence doesn't make much sense, but I think you know what I mean...
It isn't just a matter of paying to start an orchestra. You have to pay them to keep them. Just for a little example, I am a rank&file violinist in the canberra symphony orchestra, which is a fairly small orchestra that operates on a casual basis. Assuming everyone gets paid the same as me (they probably get paid rather more), a single rehearsal costs more than $15,000 just to pay the players. Add the conductor and maybe a soloist and multiply by 4 (for 4 rehearsals) and you're probably above $75,000. And this doesn't include the venue costs or the player payments for the recording time. I guess my point is that the costs of maintaining an orchestra are high enough that you can't make a cheap recording even if you use cheap recording gear.
So maybe a fairly small orchestra in a fairly small town isn't a good example, but I think you would have trouble finding many orchestras in the world that would survive without government grants and corporate sponsorship. Operas are even worse. Some of those singers get paid a lot.
It's OK, they use linux. It does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
A couple mics, a mixer
... and an orchestra.
Oops, I think we've been arguing semantics the whole time. I would define a loop to be a logical construction like a "while" or a "for" in C. If it were written as a recursive function, I would not consider it to be a loop even though it executes the same instructions multiple times.
There is a small difference, though between loops as we know them in imperative languages and recursive functions as we know them in functional languages: functions have no side effects, which opens up the possibility of optimisation at a high level. Since side effects in loops are the main obstacle to loop unrolling and other optimisation techniques, I don't think this difference is entirely insignificant.
To write more than that, you need to issue repeated write instructions. This means a loop of some sort
No, it can be done as a recursive function. There will be no difference in terms of electric currents running across silicon because the logic involved is exactly the same. But if the processor presents a functional (ie. function-based) interface and uses a functional design, it will use recursion rather than looping to issue repeated instructions.
the hardware is implementing a loop
The hardware is implementing electric currents; the logic at that level is so simple that it doesn't deal with the concepts of loops or functions. It is only when you reach a higher level of abstraction that the difference between functional and imperative designs actually makes a difference. I would argue that the level at which the distinction becomes important is the processor ISA level; I also think the view that the distinction kicks in slightly lower is defensible but I don't agree that the logic at the gate level is important.
Only because the processor instruction set is designed in such a way that loops are necessary. I'm not at all sure about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lisp Machines, for example, didn't have hardware support for loops.
In order to see that loops are completely unnecessary, you only need to see that the lambda calculus is Turing complete.
Can we really optimize our way to 1-step loops?
Of course we can. Just have a look at your favourite functional programming language; it probably doesn't even have a loop construct. The question is whether this can be done efficiently. Of course, it also requires programmers to think in a different way, which they tend to be reluctant to do.
I thought I'd share some choice bits of this article with the slashdot readership:
in a troubling comment that largely escaped critical media scrutiny or even notice, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared on Black Entertainment Television that U.S. policy toward Chilean Marxist President Salvador Allende in the 1970s was "not a part of American history that we're proud of." Powell appears not to know that in toppling Allende the Chilean military saved Chile from suffering the same fate as South Vietnam with very little loss of life.
WTF!?! No other part of the article mentions Chile. It seems he just stuck in this paragraph to say "OMG! They democratically elected a Socialist! If we hadn't overthrown him, the region would have descended a into military quagmire."
A large chunk of the rest of the article is devoted to a discussion of Aaron Copland's political leanings. Maybe I'm just naive, but I find it astonishing that people consider someone's political opinions as justification for their persecution. The author of the article and the parent poster seem to feel that if McCarthy's targets believed in the Communist ideology then McCarthy must have been right to vilify them. In contrast, I have always believed that the free expression of ideas is to be encouraged.
In summary, this article failed to change my opinions about McCarthy. I still see him as a man who did his best to kill free political expression in the US and I absolutely cannot agree with that.