Judging by the eloquence with which you both write, it seems unfortunate that your conversation should regress into this sort of competition-to-see-who-can-be-the-most-condescendi ng thing.
Of course I'm just a nameless number on a message board so I won't deceive myself about the import of my opinion in all this. But as reasonably impartial third party, it seems to me, Leo, that for all your talk about Bruce being condescending, you're the one that is maligning your own position with your heavy hand.
Now, I won't deny that some of what you've said has been insightful, but consider: you've phrased virtually every response to Bruce in this thread as if you were a professor in public relations. Some of the points you've made -- regarding phrasing things in a way that makes them appealing to someone who would otherwise be hostile to your platform -- are true, from a PR perspective, and I believe I should know, as PR is my profession (though in semiconductor manufacturing, not software). But the way in which you attempt to lecture Bruce makes you seem like the intellectual blowhard, when it seems that you desperately want to make him seem that way.
Furthermore, while some of your comments on, for example, business hostility to RMS's platform are unarguably true, your attempt to marginalize Linux, of all things, is just laughable! I'm going to talk from a completely business-oriented perspective here, and say with absolute confidence: Linux is, in the minds of today's IT-savvy businesspeople, the next big thing. That's why adverts for Linux-based solutions are popping up everywhere; that's why companies like IBM and Novell are pumping more money than you or I will make in a lifetime into it. It is seen by many, many knowledgeable people as the future, and by many companies as a serious threat.
Its future is not certain -- Bruce, ironically, has been making posts exactly to that effect throughout this story -- but to think that you could seriously imply that in 10 years Linux will be relegated to anything as trivial as an "Anyone remember Linux?" one-liner on a future message board is just silly.
I'm not sure that GNU has been a PR success, and it's quite likely that this is exactly for the reasons you enumerated. But Linux? Come on, be serious. It's a tremendous success. Everyone is talking about it. It's gaining mindshare at a tremendous rate. Non-technical people know the word, even if they don't know what it means. It runs much of the internet we use everyday. It's a tremendous, phenomenal success, whether you agree with its idealogy or not.
Further, there's much more to a "company" than a group of people united with a common goal -- someone with as sophisticated a vocabulary as yourself must be aware of this. A company has the distinctive implication of a group of people united with a common goal, certainly -- a goal that involves making money. Otherwise, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, the Libertarian party -- all would be companies! Your definition is so wide as to be useless.
Community, movement, collective -- they have their good points and their bad points, all of them, because of the feelings they give the people that hear them. Company is like this as well -- ultra-capitalists especially are wary of companies, knowing full well that they (rightly) owe nothing to anyone but themselves.
Public relations is all about giving the public the impression you want them to have. In this game, audience is everything. Bruce is not talking to a bunch of suits looking to buy his product -- he's preaching to the choir. Most everyone here agrees with him (exceptions noted). Therefore, there is no reason for him to go around sounding like a PR flak.
Bruce, I've always been impressed with how tempered you manage to sound, but it seems to me that you let Leo push your buttons a little bit too much in this thread, and it did make you come off as
Um, no, because, AFAIK, "Linux" does not have any patents it can enforce on anyone. In fact, Linux is probably in violation of quite a large number of patents (it's unfortunately very easy to infringe, even without intending to, when things as obvious as one-click make it through the USPTO).
I think you pretty much missed the boat entirely here. It seems that what you wanted to say was that you can't arbitrarily copy GPL'd code and put it into other, non-GPL products. Unfortunately, the discussion here is about Sun's use of patents (read: NOT copyright license) to ensure that all the ideas of worth stay in OpenSolaris, and are not even reimplemented in other OSs.
Furthermore, to address the point I think you wanted to make: the CDDL is compatible with the CDDL, and essentially nothing else. In that sense, you are right that it resembles the GPL. However, a massive quantity of free software, written by hobbyists (read: not companies) is already available under the GPL, whereas only OpenSolaris-related code is available under the CDDL.
The result? Sun has provided its code under a "Free Software" license that stipulates, essentially, that no code it has written may be incorporated into any existing free software products. If the GPL did not yet exist, no one would be surprised by this -- but the GPL does exist, and whether BSD-ers like it or not, most free software is licensed under it.
But there's a loophole, you see. I could say, fuck it, I'm going to fork OpenSolaris, and sure, it'll be under the CDDL, but Sun no longer has control over it. So in that sense, it's free, they can't prevent me from forking it, or writing (CDDL-licensed) derivative works that they don't control. In order to keep me from doing this (or at least keep me from doing it in a way they don't agree with), enter patents. The real issue here.
Enough of OpenSolaris is patented that I would have to be very careful about what I used in there, even if I did CDDL my derivative works.
Because smart people everywhere were instantly aware of this problem, Sun did its whole "1600 patents FREE" thing. But as it turns out, this was just a marketing ploy, with no real meaning.
Until it gets worked out, I would be somewhat wary of contributing to OpenSolaris.
Unlike most GPL-zealots, RMS sees nothing wrong with the BSD license -- he considers it free. He just happened to author the GPL, and so he supports it.
Also, he (the OP) didn't call everyone who doesn't like the GPL a racist, but I expect you know that and are deliberately misrepresenting him. What he did say, though, is that attacking someone's person instead of his ideas suggests two related possibilities. One, the attacker finds the ideas of the protagonist repulsive, but cannot find firm logical ground on which to discredit them, and so defaults to the easier ad homniem attack; and two, the attacker finds the ideas of the protagonist repulsive, but fears attacking those ideas directly, as his criticisms are not shared by the majority.
I think that the MLK/RMS comparison is not a good one, but not because it isn't valid -- rather, because very few people see the freeing of software as being as noble a cause as freeing african americans from racial biggotry. This results in emotionally laden non-productive responses to the argument, rather than well thought out discourse (this is why Goodwin's Law still applies, for example, even if a comparison with Nazis is accurate).
For what it's worth, though, RMS at least does see Free Software as a struggle very much on par with Freedom from Biggotry. Very few people care about it as passionately as he does.
I think, though, that Slashdot has a lot of industry-geeks: people that appreciate Free Software on one hand, but, because they depend on software for their economic well-being, fear the future that Stallman envisions. Many of them know he is right, or at least, are frightened enough by what he says that they try their best to ignore his arguments, and instead criticize his facial hair or alleged lack of hygiene. These people are in the latter group I spoke of: they have misgivings, at some level, about the movement. They want free software for their personal use, but they also want a paycheck, and when push comes to shove, they won't quit their jobs to promote Free Software (as RMS has).
RMS is a tremendously consistant, logical guy. He very rarely contradicts himself, he very rarely comments passionately on anything other than this one issue, and his arguments are all very well thought out -- all of this is independant of whether or not people agree with him or not. But it makes his position a difficult one to criticize, especially by someone less skilled in rhetoric than he is -- which includes 98% of all of us. This invites use of the ad homniem attack -- RMS is hard to argue with, he leaves you feeling stupid.
Getting back to the BSD issue, RMS is concerned about BSD-licensed code being co-opted by organizations hostile to Software freedom. BSDers, for what its worth, are not concerned about this -- and that is their right, and RMS doesn't seem to bother with those that understand the choice they are making. What I think he does worry about it people that develop under the BSD license without a full understanding of the risks they are taking when they license that code.
In a way, BSD-zealots are even more rabidly-freedom loving than GPL-zealots are (as evidenced by the countless threads loudly advancing the notion that the BSD license is much more free than the GPL).
In this situation, though, it is time for BSDers and GPLers to put down their pitchforks and stop fighting with each other, because the issue RMS is talking about here is one that affects the BSDs as well -- the issue of software patents.
Right now, Microsoft can co-opt OpenBSD code, for example, and stick it into NT, and never pay anyone a dime. Theo de Raadt understands this and supports it, in the name of freedom -- a noble view. But in a world with Software Patents, Microsoft could co-opt OpenBSD code and use it -- and then turn around and prevent free uses of OpenBSD, by charging outrageous license fees on patents infringed by OpenBSD code.
You do realize that there are three distinct flavours of Debian -- well, four, actually -- with varying policies on updates?
Debian stable is enterprise grade. Bugs and security fixes are backported, very slow upgrade cycle (typically 2 to 3 years), extensive testing. It is, in my experience, the only truly stable (in the tradition of Solaris and BSD) Linux distribution. It's great in an enterprise environment because you don't need to upgrade it frequently, and the Debian security team provides security patches that don't screw your system up -- you can configure apt to download and install security updates immediately in the background. Debian stable is the server you put in the corner and forget about. It'll run forever.
Then, there's Debian testing, which will eventually become the next stable. For most people who don't need the very latest software (especially GUI environments) but who do want more frequent updates, testing is ideal. It's not much less stable than Debian stable, much more up to date, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks constantly (like Gentoo).
Debian unstable, despite its name, is actually quite stable -- I rarely have any problems with it. It's good for a desktop machine when you want the latest and the greatest, and are willing to spend some time updating the machine (because you'll need to do it frequently).
Those are the big three that people run. There is a fourth: Debian experimental. This contains packages that haven't made it into unstable yet, usually because they have bugs or other problems. I don't know anyone (other than clueless noobs) that would try to run experimental -- what's much more typical is to run unstable and pick occasional experimental packages out by hand.
People that talk about how far behind Debian is usually only use stable, which is the default install -- but upgrading to testing or unstable is trivial (ie, one command). Understand that for enterprise servers, new is not the same as good. Take a look at Solaris and see how old a lot of the included software is -- that's because you're supposed to configure Solaris (and most servers) to do what you want and forget about them. Debian follows this model. Stable is amazingly stable.
The only real issue (as some other posters pointed out) is that many commercial vendors only support stuff like RHEL and SuSE, which ties your hands sometimes. But in other situations, Debian Stable beats the pants off of both of those offerings in terms of stability -- they never fail (well, almost -- x86 hardware is flaky, after all, but that's not Debian's fault).
This is the most ridiculous an overly complex CAPTCHA system I've ever seen. To make matters worse, it is actually very easy to crack, using current technology.
Let's look at his "LUCKY" example to see why. So he has a picture of the standing man, the flower, and the sitting man, and all over the picture, he has a series of glyphs. As these glyphs are not distorted, they are easily extracted -- the whole point of this system is that distortion based CAPTCHAs are relatively easy to defeat, so he doesn't bother. In his example, he has 26 glyphs, corresponding to A-Z, but in practice, it isn't important what the set is -- only that it is small and finite.
Once this set is extracted, we know that the "password" is some permutation of this set. Because the set of possible characters in an e-mail address is much smaller than the set of possible characters in an actual password (in particular, e-mail addresses are case insensitive), brute-force cracking of this password is much simpler than brute force cracking of a UNIX password, for example. But luckily for us, it's even easier than that.
In the e-mail, he includes this "decoder" list.
The Leaf of the Flower
The Body of the Sitting Man
The Head of the Walking Man
The Vase
The Left Arm of the Sitting Man
Of course, it should be clear at this point that this list would be relatively easy to extract from the e-mail, and further, that it tells you the exact length of the password, reducing the number of permutations to check to (in this case)
11,881,376.
Furthermore, a little bit of extra logic could reduce this number still further by noticing
repetitive patterns in the list. So if "The Leaf of the Flower" appears twice, we know that the letters in those two slots are the same. And if the glyph set is unique (ie, no glyph appears twice), then we can reduce the number of permutations to at most 7,893,600.
Now, that's still a fairly large number of permutations to check, and at one point, it probably would have been enough. However, computational power is free now, at least for spammers. And it doesn't take much. Here's a sample perl (!) program I ran on my Debian GNU/Linux laptop (1.2GHz Pentium M).
for $i (1.. 26) { for $j (1.. 26) { next if $i == $j; for $k (1.. 26) { next if $i == $k || $j == $k; for $l (1.. 26) { next if $l == $i || $l == $j || $l == $k; for $m (1.. 26) { next if $m == $i || $m == $j || $m == $k || $m == $l; print chr(97 + $i) . chr(97 + $j) . chr(97 + $k) . chr(97 + $l) . chr(97 + $m) . "\n"; } } } } }
This just prints out all the permutations; of course they still would need to be checked.
$ time perl -e '... program here... ' real 0m26.109s user 0m25.746s sys 0m0.020s
Not very long on a modern computer, eh? And written in perl, too, not exactly the fastest programming language in the world. Now consider that spammers have access to just about infinite CPU and bandwidth, thanks to their army of zombie bots, and that both CPU power and bandwidth are likely to increase at a rather rapid rate in the next decade. Furthermore, this is a worst case scenario -- success in a brute force attack tends to occur somewhere in the middle, not towards the end, reducing the necessity to actually go through all the permutations.
You don't think they'd try to crack it?
Plus, by his own admission, e-mail addresses can be shared. What does this mean in this context? I don't even need to get the e-mail address encoded in the CAPTCHA! If I can get any working e-mail address, even one, I get through! So the more active he is, e-mail wise, the more likely I can randomly strike a hit in the first hundred or so tries.
You know, I'm not sure that's the case as much anymore... or really that it ever has been, actually.
The reason is simple: Apple. Now, Apple has taken a second (third?) seat to MS-based PCs for a long time and I think they probably will continue to do so for the forseeable future (ie, I am not an Apple zealot). But Apple remains a name-brand that exists in the public, non-geek consciousness. While their current success is due almost entirely to their iPod, in most people's minds, they remain a computer company.
I believe that part of the reason that alternative browsers like Firefox are beginning to gain ground is because of MS's discontinued support of IE on the Mac. Despite the fact that not many people use Macs, many of the people that do are not geeks, and those "not-geeks" were forced to consider the browser question in a more realistic way when MS discontinued Mac support. Up until then, they likely considered (as most people do) that IE was the internet.
Now they know better, and as you've probably noticed on Slashdot, Mac-types are a loud bunch -- even the non-geeky ones. They use Firefox or Safari and they make a big fuss about it. They're convinced of a conspiratorial anti-Macintosh agenda on the part of, well, pretty much everyone and they complain loudly when things don't work well on their macs. Nowadays, this includes websites.
My point in all of this is that MS has been the big bully in the industry for a long time. Apple, Sun, IBM -- all would be exactly like MS if their roles were reversed (IBM in fact was, at one time) -- but as it stands, all would like nothing more than to see MS toppled.
Individually, each of these companies represents a feeble marketshare. Together, it still isn't much, but it's enough, I think. They have the users required and the lobbying power, too, to really make a difference. IBM and Sun have always had the problem of being companies only IT people really know much about, due to their lack of penetration on the desktop. Apple, on the other hand, is widely seen as a desktop system normal people actually use, and so Apple being on board hopefully will make more non-industry folks aware of what's going on. Unfortunately, these three companies haven't been keen on cooperating on things like formats precisely because of the lack of open standards -- none of them wants to allow a competitor to dictate the structure of any format.
Each of them produces its own office suite; each of these is MS Office's bitch. By making sure that their office suites all interoperate 100% with an open format, and by lobbying governments (especially non-American governments) with arguments about (American) vendor lock-in, I believe they can make in-roads into ODF adoption.
If governments use it, large companies and contractors will be forced to use it as well, even if infrequently. They will quickly find MS Office's inability to save into these formats annoying (which will not force them to switch to another office suite, but which will cause them to lobby MS to support the format).
Big companies = big clients = big money. Add this to the fact that any law requiring a government to adopt an open format that MS Office doesn't support will make the use of MS Office illegal in a de facto sort of way, because of its non-compliance.
If (and that's a big if) all of this happens, if the laws pass, and IBM/Apple/Sun manage to cooperate for a change, I expect that MS Office will include support for a usable subset of ODF. What they will not do -- what they will never do -- is make it the default format. Further, they will likely ensure that some features of their doc format cannot be saved in ODF, allowing them to pop-up the little box that warns the user that "some formatting information may be lost, proceed?"
This will make little difference to governments legally required to avoid doc, but this will be enough to prevent widespread adoption in the private sphere.
With respect, the man that gave the order to use force as necessary, Deng Xiao Ping, is dead.
Look, I'm not saying that Tiananmen square was a good thing, anymore than I would go ahead and say that Britain's massacre of Indians was a good thing, but to me, the circumstances are similar: both involved a grassroots movement to essentially overthrow (or at least, radically change the workings of) the people in power.
Both cases led to a brutal crackdown. A crackdown which, actually, was far more brutal in the British case. We conveniently ignore it, or justify it, in the case of the British, because they are our allies and they largely share our values, culture and way of life.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are culturally, linguistically, and economically dissimilar to us -- at least, we perceive them to be (in the case of economics, the differences aren't actually so great). So it's easy for us to find reasons to despise them.
Your comment about students being afraid to stand up for what they believe in being the reason that we haven't seen another uprising against the government couldn't be further from the truth.
The students that congregated on the square faced a much sterner, less forgiving government than students now would face. They were, in their own words, "ready to die" -- many painted those characters on their foreheads and persons. But those were much more desperate times. The USSR was undergoing glastnost, and Gorbachev was in Beijing to talk about that. The Chinese government's flirtations with the free market were still largely just that, flirtations, and much of China's population lived in poverty. The nation was not stable. These desperate times led people to take desperate measures.
Nowadays, most people still empathise with the students -- but they no longer see as pressing a need. In their minds, the government was right not to pursue the glastnost-style reforms that the students wanted at the time, because they don't want China to end up like the USSR (ie, gone). The government's position -- economic reform and growth before political reform -- is one they agree with. They are skeptical about whether the government will actually go through with democratic reforms, but the need is less pressing -- China is increasingly an affluent, stable place. Not many people are starving anymore, and most people see opportunity where there wasn't any 20 years ago.
Criticisms that locals here have of the government are typically things like the "peasant problem" (the ever widening affluence gap between urban and peasant populations), and censorship.
The former is the stated "big issue" for the Hu Jin Tao government. The latter is an on-going problem, but one that is decreasing: China has money on its mind and direct censorship is bad for business, so increasingly, the Chinese government is adopting more subtle propaganda via education and manipulation of the media. People are still aware of it and annoyed by it, but what with the way Jiang Zi Min got bitten in the ass over the whole SARS cover up, the Chinese are mostly optimistic that this is getting better.
Much better than Singapore, where the government taps all phone lines. Of course, we don't ever talk about Singapore, but then, they're capitalist, right?
I guess the British ought to be described, to this day, as a nation ruled by a gestapo-like military, eh?
Oh but wait you say, that tragedy happened a long time ago.
So, believe it or not, did Tiananmen. Politically, 1989 was an eternity ago. But it's difficult to make this clear to someone who hasn't bothered to go to China and witness how much the nation has changed, politically and socially, since those years.
Which is not to say that it's perfect, but the days of the lone student standing in front of a tank are well behind us.
No offense, but your ex-girlfriend is either a peasant, retarded, or lying. I live in China and that picture, while censored, is famous.
Tiananmen happened relatively recently. Most people our age (well, my age, late twenties) remember it. It was a huge deal.
However, the Chinese are not generally happy talking to westerners about problems their country has, just as Americans get their panties in a bunch everytime someone who isn't American dares to point out that they might have a slightly flawed foreign policy.
AFAIK, you also need to build mplayer from source on debian. It has something to do with its use of non-free codecs, or something... not to mention that the mplayer guys think that, for performance reasons, you should always compile your own copy.
Process could (should?) be automated, though.
(I haven't installed mplayer on my debian system in a long time, though, so I might be totally wrong.)
I wish, but thanks for giving me face:) Much of what you've said about DDT is news to me, in fact, so I guess I was just ignorant. Thanks to you though, I'm not (as) ignorant anymore, though.
Don't you think you're oversimplifying things a little there, AC?
The atom bomb was not created by physicists who thought they "knew everything". Rather, it was an application of known science to a specific problem, undertaken by the government of the United States. Certainly, the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project were the best and the brightest the US had to offer, and certainly they could have declined to participate (some did, IIRC). But it was not arrogance that motivated the physicists to build an atom bomb -- it was the very real fear at the time that Germany might build one first; they were certainly researching it. Imagine, if you will, how the world would be different if the Nazis had beaten us to nuclear arms.
DDT is a mixed blessing. Extremely bad for you, yes -- but DDT is also responsible for the almost complete eradication of malaria in the first world. Nothing kills mosquitoes so efficiently. There are those who feel that the world-wide ban on DDT (due to its harmful effects) is what allows malaria to remain a serious problem throughout South Asia. Sure, DDT kills people, but malaria kills more. It's like chemotherapy -- you poison your own body in hopes that it kills the cancer before it kills you. Not ideal, of course, but don't pretend that it was all bad.
Genetic engineering, like everything else we've ever done, will have productive uses and less than productive ones, and probably a few lamentable applications. I for one am prepared to accept that we probably won't know what we've done wrong until after we've already done it.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I was under the impression that the Chinese and the Vietnamese came to blows over the new Vietnamese government's abuse of their sizeable ethnic Chinese population. This, at least, is the reason given in China (which says nothing about its veracity).
It is true that the Vietnamese were abusive of their Chinese population, though, to the point where most eventually fled Vietnam. What isn't clear is whether that was the real reason that China engaged them.
What you should consider though, is that because of the so-called Sino-Soviet split, China entered into ideological conflict with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Essentially, while Stalin was alive, he was considered the undisputed leader of the world communist movement by everyone who mattered (I don't consider Trotsky to matter in this case). When he died, Mao believed that he should have ideological seniority over Nikita Krushchev, Stalin's successor. The USSR disagreed and as a result, China began to drift away from the USSR -- in fact, they were convinced that there would eventually be war. As a result, China began to court the United States, which culminated in Nixon's voyage to China.
Around this time, China stopped supporting the North Vietnamese in their war against the US. They did this not only because of warming relations with the US, but also (in fact mostly) because the North Vietnamese sided idealistically with the Soviet Union.
Some historians (western, mostly) seem to think that China's brief skirmish with Vietnam was in fact to test the Soviet Union's mettle -- they had pledged to support the Viet Cong against any aggressor. Supporters of this theory point out that the Chinese entered Vietnam, and then withdrew quickly -- the whole thing was over in less than a month.
There's also the Cambodia theory. Historically, the Khmer Rouge and China had enjoyed good relations, largely because that regime followed the doctrines of Maoism (a form of communism concentrating on a rural peasant revolution instead of an urban worker's revolt). A problem here is that once Pol Pot emerged as Cambodia's dictator, their relations apparently deteriorated somewhat. At any rate, the Cambodians began killing ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia wholesale (it was a pretty bloody regime in general), and also engaging in guerilla tactics on the Vietnamese border. Finally, in 1978, the Vietnamese had enough, and invaded Cambodia, ending the Khmer Rouge regime. The Chinese entered Vietname in Februrary 1979 so the timing might not be coincidental -- it's possible that the Chinese were retaliating in lieu of the Khmer Rouge, who had previously been their allies.
Who knows.
As for your mention of "Chinese propaganda", the truth is that the conflict is rarely spoken of. Nowadays, Vietnam and China have mostly gotten over the conflict (it took until the 1990s). Because it's such a recent thing, I think neither nation wants to talk about it too much -- trade is too beneficial to both nations. Both maintain that they won the conflict, and no one in the west really knows what the truth is, because no one is really clear on what China's motivation was.
One thing is for certain, though, the truth is much more complex than you're making out.
I agree that a war game set during this battle -- in fact, a war game from the perspective of any of the communist countries -- would be quite interesting, as long as it attempted to remain reasonably true to history, and not indulge in western propaganda, which is, believe it or not, just as bad and twisted its communist counterpart (although arguably more subtle).
Re:This will be great fo the BSDs and gor Solaris
on
Sun Opens OpenSolaris.Org
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're mistaken, AC. OpenSolaris can co-opt BSD code, because the BSD license specifically allows anyone to use their code for any purpose -- simply put, the BSD license is compatible with any license, as long as credit is given. It's as free, in that respect, as you can get (without going public domain).
The BSDs, however, cannot use any of OpenSolaris' code, because you cannot relicense CDDL code as BSD (if you could, it would be trivial to put it into Linux -- after all, BSD licensed code may be added to the Linux kernel, and in fact has been on several occasions.)
The BSDs will benefit no more from OpenSolaris using their code than they do from NT using their code.
This is essentially how BSD works -- everyone benefits from BSD, but no one is required to give back. The BSD people don't see any issues with this, so more power to them.
Linux can't benefit from OpenSolaris either -- but because of the GPL, this means that OpenSolaris also can't benefit from Linux. So it's a symmetric relationship in that respect.
The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2 only. Linus removed the bit about "or at your option, any later version." Because he does not own the copyrights to any code that he hasn't written, he cannot relicense Linux -- at this point, it isn't clear anyone can. In order to do this, you'd need to get everyone who's written any code that is in the current Linux distribution to agree, and that amounts to thousands -- perhaps even tens of thousands -- of contributors.
Even assuming that none of them would have a problem with it, they would all have to agree, in writing, for the transfer to be legally kosher.
As RMS has said on several occasions, one of the issues with some of these problems -- patents, network use, etc -- is that the GPL cannot govern anything other than the right to copy. In particular, it cannot govern use. That's one of the reasons the GPLv3 hasn't been finalized yet.
Even when it is, though, the Linux kernel will not likely ever be released under said license, for the reasons outlined above. So it's no use dreaming about it.
My emacs is pretty heavily customized, but I've held off on remapping the navigation keys -- why? Because lots and lots of software (readline, for example) uses emacs navigation keys. I can rebind these in emacs, and even in readline... but what about Mozilla? Or gtk apps? Or any of the countless other apps that have those keys hardcoded? Even if I could rebind them all, it would be a ton of work.
Not to mention that when I'm stuck without my.emacs, I can still be reasonably productive. The defaults really aren't all that bad, I think.
Most of the keys I do bind are extended C-c commands that call my own defuns. Not having those is a bit of a pain, but I can still use the editor in other situations. Which is good (although to be honest, I still usually use ed on other people's computers).
No, not really. Not unless you want a local salary (which to be fair, in the local economy, could afford you a reasonable lifestyle -- but forget about going home). Plus, you should consider that while your IT skills may be the bees knees, to operate in a Chinese work environment you need to speak Mandarin. Unless you do, and I mean very fluently, I wouldn't even think about it.
I don't actually work in IT -- I work in public relations. Due to management conflicts and petty company politics, though, we run our own server -- everything the IT department gets its hands on, they assert control over to a degree that would make our work impossible. When management discovered that I'd worked previously as an IT whore, they co-opted me into this. It means I get to run Linux at the office, which is a plus. But I'd really rather not work in IT at all anymore. It's a dead end, unless you want to work in the third world for the rest of your life (which I don't). For the record, I wouldn't consider China anything resembling the third world.
I mean, I guess there are a lot of IT jobs in the US still, but the competition is fierce and frankly, as I speak English, Mandarin, French and German fluently, I see a much more lucrative future in international business (read: management).
Very cool, and let me just say, I wasn't aware of the map feature. I'll stick that into my ever-increasingly large bag of vim tricks. Of course, this won't work here, because the Chinese input method is not part of vim -- it's a normal XIM (in this case SCIM, but I use XCIN as well sometimes). Therefore, even with a yummy feature like map, I can't tell vi to switch on my input method. Or switch it off. They're two different apps.
I mean, while my criticism of vim in this respect is valid, let's not blow it out of proportion -- it's a pretty specific complaint, and it doesn't detract from the utility of vi as an editor. It's just one place where the modal paradigm can be something of a pain. But to quote a documentary on male models I saw recently, "Come on! The guy had to magically pull his underwear out of his butt just to beat you!"
Emacs would work better in this particular instance, but the emacs guys fail it, because they can't get unicode to work properly. So vi still gets a point. I wouldn't sweat it too much:)
I use both vi and emacs extensively. I originally coded entirely in ed (I'm actually not kidding), and I still enjoy it. Then I started using vi (I was already using emacs at this time for most development work) for lots of short edits -- it was more convenient for remote sessions and sus and loaded faster, making it ideal for mutt.
I always hated vim, because it took what I perceived to be vi's primary selling point -- its light weight -- and perverted it beyong recognition. Check this out:
vim is a full fourth of the size of emacs! Keep in mind that emacs includes X11 support, and my vim doesn't have X11 support compiled in. I don't actually have nvi or better, Bill Joy's original vi installed on this system, but compared to how light-weight vi used to be, I always considered vim to be an evil editor, installing nvi on all of my machines instead.
Recently, though, I've been using vim much more, because it has good unicode support (nvi doesn't, at all) and I currently operate in a completely unicode environment. In the past, emacs kicked the crap out of vi in terms of internationalization -- it could do unicode-style editing before unicode existed. But emacs 21 has some random wackiness where utf-8 isn't considered a valid encoding for CJK, and since I work in China, that's a bit of a deal breaker. Emacs 22 is a unicode-based rewrite that aims to fix this, but you know how GNU is... release Real Soon Now[tm].
So I installed vim. Now here's the point I'm getting around to: the mode key.
A lot of emacs users think the mode key in vi sucks donkey nuts. Similarly, every vi user makes jokes about the cryptic control character sequences used by emacs users. Personally, I'd never found either to be at all annoying. Until I started having to type Chinese in vi.
Up until then, I'd only ever used emacs for internationalized editing. Emacs rules in this respect. It has very nice input methods built into the editor -- by which I mean of course that they're written in elisp -- meaning that I don't have to rely on XIM or anything similar and can be sure that inputing stuff won't interfere with emacs' default user interface paradigm.
In vi, here's an example session:
:10 $ a Alt-Space (enter XIM) Chinese characters go here Alt-Space (exit XIM) ESC ...
Now, if I forget to exit the XIM, ESC typically does nothing (or sometimes, depending on the input method in question, will transparently be passed to the application) and then my vi editing keys go to the input method and not to vi! ARGH!
See, one mode is no problem -- but two, nested modes definitely are. I have to enter insert mode, then enter chinese input mode, then type, then exit chinese input mode, then exit insert mode, then type commands. Do you see how these two levels suck penis?
This is where the non-extensibility of an editor like vi really bites it in the butt. It would be cool if I could have one key that puts me into insert mode, and turns on the Chinese input method. Not possible to do, not the least because vi already uses pretty much every key.
In emacs, for comparison, I put myself in Chinese mode at the beginning, and because the characters I type that get inserted into the buffer (or in this case, fed to the input method system) are never interpreted as commands, I don't ever have the problem of emacs thinking that some characters I want to type are actually commands. When you don't need an IME, this isn't a problem -- but when you do, it's a pain in the butt.
That having been said, I'm quite fond of the modal system, most of the time. And I do use vi a lot (more than any other editor, nowadays, because it allows me to edit CJK-having utf-8 files). But this one thing about it is just infuriating.
And unfortunately, I don't see any way to really fix this, without completely destroying vi's input paradigm.
The truth is, most Dvorak typists did not learn to type with a Dvorak keyboard. I myself originally typed on a QWERTY keyboard, and like most geeks, I typed very fast (> 90 wpm). I switched to Dvorak very much for the geek factor: a hacker whom I respected had made the switch, and I sought to emulate him.
It did not take long to regain my previous typing speed... perhaps 2 months. But that previous typing speed was pretty fast; within two weeks I was typing a very acceptable 40wpm. YMMV -- I'm a geek and I type a lot, so perhaps that forced practice decreased the time to switch for me. FWIW, I did use a typing tutor, but it was designed for QWERTY, and so I'm not actually sure it was all that good for my typing form -- even now, I notice that my hands don't exactly hover over the home row like they're supposed to. I feel this is more a result of the keyboard I use at work not being ergonometric and my hands being rather large.
Nowadays, I can type as fast as 110 wpm, though I don't usually push myself too much. But there are a few things I can tell you. While my speed hasn't increased substantially, my level of comfort has. Further, I am much, much more accurate than I used to be -- I don't really typo frequently at all.
Learning Dvorak was very easy for me, a seasoned QWERTY touch typist. I didn't forget my QWERTY skills either, although admittedly I did slow down substantially -- I don't think I type more than 40wpm on QWERTY now, although if I'm forced to use it for very long I speed up quite a bit.
Emacs and vi were a little bit of a pain, but actually not much of a pain, to be honest. I'm very fast in both now, to the point where I can't operate either easily with a QWERTY keyboard. But then I've been using Dvorak exclusively for nearly a decade now.
Give it a go. Your arthritic joints (you'll have em when you're older, we all will) will thank you.
You know, I'm glad you said that. All these posts about how they need to cut their eyes out and such, and I'm thinking, "He actually didn't look half bad, back then."
Like you said, look at him now. Time is kind to no one, apparently. Except maybe Sean Connery and Sofia Loren.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by the eloquence with which you both write, it seems unfortunate that your conversation should regress into this sort of competition-to-see-who-can-be-the-most-condescendi ng thing.
Of course I'm just a nameless number on a message board so I won't deceive myself about the import of my opinion in all this. But as reasonably impartial third party, it seems to me, Leo, that for all your talk about Bruce being condescending, you're the one that is maligning your own position with your heavy hand.
Now, I won't deny that some of what you've said has been insightful, but consider: you've phrased virtually every response to Bruce in this thread as if you were a professor in public relations. Some of the points you've made -- regarding phrasing things in a way that makes them appealing to someone who would otherwise be hostile to your platform -- are true, from a PR perspective, and I believe I should know, as PR is my profession (though in semiconductor manufacturing, not software). But the way in which you attempt to lecture Bruce makes you seem like the intellectual blowhard, when it seems that you desperately want to make him seem that way.
Furthermore, while some of your comments on, for example, business hostility to RMS's platform are unarguably true, your attempt to marginalize Linux, of all things, is just laughable! I'm going to talk from a completely business-oriented perspective here, and say with absolute confidence: Linux is, in the minds of today's IT-savvy businesspeople, the next big thing. That's why adverts for Linux-based solutions are popping up everywhere; that's why companies like IBM and Novell are pumping more money than you or I will make in a lifetime into it. It is seen by many, many knowledgeable people as the future, and by many companies as a serious threat.
Its future is not certain -- Bruce, ironically, has been making posts exactly to that effect throughout this story -- but to think that you could seriously imply that in 10 years Linux will be relegated to anything as trivial as an "Anyone remember Linux?" one-liner on a future message board is just silly.
I'm not sure that GNU has been a PR success, and it's quite likely that this is exactly for the reasons you enumerated. But Linux? Come on, be serious. It's a tremendous success. Everyone is talking about it. It's gaining mindshare at a tremendous rate. Non-technical people know the word, even if they don't know what it means. It runs much of the internet we use everyday. It's a tremendous, phenomenal success, whether you agree with its idealogy or not.
Further, there's much more to a "company" than a group of people united with a common goal -- someone with as sophisticated a vocabulary as yourself must be aware of this. A company has the distinctive implication of a group of people united with a common goal, certainly -- a goal that involves making money. Otherwise, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, the Libertarian party -- all would be companies! Your definition is so wide as to be useless.
Community, movement, collective -- they have their good points and their bad points, all of them, because of the feelings they give the people that hear them. Company is like this as well -- ultra-capitalists especially are wary of companies, knowing full well that they (rightly) owe nothing to anyone but themselves.
Public relations is all about giving the public the impression you want them to have. In this game, audience is everything. Bruce is not talking to a bunch of suits looking to buy his product -- he's preaching to the choir. Most everyone here agrees with him (exceptions noted). Therefore, there is no reason for him to go around sounding like a PR flak.
Bruce, I've always been impressed with how tempered you manage to sound, but it seems to me that you let Leo push your buttons a little bit too much in this thread, and it did make you come off as
Um, no, because, AFAIK, "Linux" does not have any patents it can enforce on anyone. In fact, Linux is probably in violation of quite a large number of patents (it's unfortunately very easy to infringe, even without intending to, when things as obvious as one-click make it through the USPTO).
I think you pretty much missed the boat entirely here. It seems that what you wanted to say was that you can't arbitrarily copy GPL'd code and put it into other, non-GPL products. Unfortunately, the discussion here is about Sun's use of patents (read: NOT copyright license) to ensure that all the ideas of worth stay in OpenSolaris, and are not even reimplemented in other OSs.
Furthermore, to address the point I think you wanted to make: the CDDL is compatible with the CDDL, and essentially nothing else. In that sense, you are right that it resembles the GPL. However, a massive quantity of free software, written by hobbyists (read: not companies) is already available under the GPL, whereas only OpenSolaris-related code is available under the CDDL.
The result? Sun has provided its code under a "Free Software" license that stipulates, essentially, that no code it has written may be incorporated into any existing free software products. If the GPL did not yet exist, no one would be surprised by this -- but the GPL does exist, and whether BSD-ers like it or not, most free software is licensed under it.
But there's a loophole, you see. I could say, fuck it, I'm going to fork OpenSolaris, and sure, it'll be under the CDDL, but Sun no longer has control over it. So in that sense, it's free, they can't prevent me from forking it, or writing (CDDL-licensed) derivative works that they don't control. In order to keep me from doing this (or at least keep me from doing it in a way they don't agree with), enter patents. The real issue here.
Enough of OpenSolaris is patented that I would have to be very careful about what I used in there, even if I did CDDL my derivative works.
Because smart people everywhere were instantly aware of this problem, Sun did its whole "1600 patents FREE" thing. But as it turns out, this was just a marketing ploy, with no real meaning.
Until it gets worked out, I would be somewhat wary of contributing to OpenSolaris.
Unlike most GPL-zealots, RMS sees nothing wrong with the BSD license -- he considers it free. He just happened to author the GPL, and so he supports it.
Also, he (the OP) didn't call everyone who doesn't like the GPL a racist, but I expect you know that and are deliberately misrepresenting him. What he did say, though, is that attacking someone's person instead of his ideas suggests two related possibilities. One, the attacker finds the ideas of the protagonist repulsive, but cannot find firm logical ground on which to discredit them, and so defaults to the easier ad homniem attack; and two, the attacker finds the ideas of the protagonist repulsive, but fears attacking those ideas directly, as his criticisms are not shared by the majority.
I think that the MLK/RMS comparison is not a good one, but not because it isn't valid -- rather, because very few people see the freeing of software as being as noble a cause as freeing african americans from racial biggotry. This results in emotionally laden non-productive responses to the argument, rather than well thought out discourse (this is why Goodwin's Law still applies, for example, even if a comparison with Nazis is accurate).
For what it's worth, though, RMS at least does see Free Software as a struggle very much on par with Freedom from Biggotry. Very few people care about it as passionately as he does.
I think, though, that Slashdot has a lot of industry-geeks: people that appreciate Free Software on one hand, but, because they depend on software for their economic well-being, fear the future that Stallman envisions. Many of them know he is right, or at least, are frightened enough by what he says that they try their best to ignore his arguments, and instead criticize his facial hair or alleged lack of hygiene. These people are in the latter group I spoke of: they have misgivings, at some level, about the movement. They want free software for their personal use, but they also want a paycheck, and when push comes to shove, they won't quit their jobs to promote Free Software (as RMS has).
RMS is a tremendously consistant, logical guy. He very rarely contradicts himself, he very rarely comments passionately on anything other than this one issue, and his arguments are all very well thought out -- all of this is independant of whether or not people agree with him or not. But it makes his position a difficult one to criticize, especially by someone less skilled in rhetoric than he is -- which includes 98% of all of us. This invites use of the ad homniem attack -- RMS is hard to argue with, he leaves you feeling stupid.
Getting back to the BSD issue, RMS is concerned about BSD-licensed code being co-opted by organizations hostile to Software freedom. BSDers, for what its worth, are not concerned about this -- and that is their right, and RMS doesn't seem to bother with those that understand the choice they are making. What I think he does worry about it people that develop under the BSD license without a full understanding of the risks they are taking when they license that code.
In a way, BSD-zealots are even more rabidly-freedom loving than GPL-zealots are (as evidenced by the countless threads loudly advancing the notion that the BSD license is much more free than the GPL).
In this situation, though, it is time for BSDers and GPLers to put down their pitchforks and stop fighting with each other, because the issue RMS is talking about here is one that affects the BSDs as well -- the issue of software patents.
Right now, Microsoft can co-opt OpenBSD code, for example, and stick it into NT, and never pay anyone a dime. Theo de Raadt understands this and supports it, in the name of freedom -- a noble view. But in a world with Software Patents, Microsoft could co-opt OpenBSD code and use it -- and then turn around and prevent free uses of OpenBSD, by charging outrageous license fees on patents infringed by OpenBSD code.
The standard view on the BSD side: sure,
You do realize that there are three distinct flavours of Debian -- well, four, actually -- with varying policies on updates?
Debian stable is enterprise grade. Bugs and security fixes are backported, very slow upgrade cycle (typically 2 to 3 years), extensive testing. It is, in my experience, the only truly stable (in the tradition of Solaris and BSD) Linux distribution. It's great in an enterprise environment because you don't need to upgrade it frequently, and the Debian security team provides security patches that don't screw your system up -- you can configure apt to download and install security updates immediately in the background. Debian stable is the server you put in the corner and forget about. It'll run forever.
Then, there's Debian testing, which will eventually become the next stable. For most people who don't need the very latest software (especially GUI environments) but who do want more frequent updates, testing is ideal. It's not much less stable than Debian stable, much more up to date, but not so bleeding edge that it breaks constantly (like Gentoo).
Debian unstable, despite its name, is actually quite stable -- I rarely have any problems with it. It's good for a desktop machine when you want the latest and the greatest, and are willing to spend some time updating the machine (because you'll need to do it frequently).
Those are the big three that people run. There is a fourth: Debian experimental. This contains packages that haven't made it into unstable yet, usually because they have bugs or other problems. I don't know anyone (other than clueless noobs) that would try to run experimental -- what's much more typical is to run unstable and pick occasional experimental packages out by hand.
People that talk about how far behind Debian is usually only use stable, which is the default install -- but upgrading to testing or unstable is trivial (ie, one command). Understand that for enterprise servers, new is not the same as good. Take a look at Solaris and see how old a lot of the included software is -- that's because you're supposed to configure Solaris (and most servers) to do what you want and forget about them. Debian follows this model. Stable is amazingly stable.
The only real issue (as some other posters pointed out) is that many commercial vendors only support stuff like RHEL and SuSE, which ties your hands sometimes. But in other situations, Debian Stable beats the pants off of both of those offerings in terms of stability -- they never fail (well, almost -- x86 hardware is flaky, after all, but that's not Debian's fault).
Let's look at his "LUCKY" example to see why. So he has a picture of the standing man, the flower, and the sitting man, and all over the picture, he has a series of glyphs. As these glyphs are not distorted, they are easily extracted -- the whole point of this system is that distortion based CAPTCHAs are relatively easy to defeat, so he doesn't bother. In his example, he has 26 glyphs, corresponding to A-Z, but in practice, it isn't important what the set is -- only that it is small and finite.
Once this set is extracted, we know that the "password" is some permutation of this set. Because the set of possible characters in an e-mail address is much smaller than the set of possible characters in an actual password (in particular, e-mail addresses are case insensitive), brute-force cracking of this password is much simpler than brute force cracking of a UNIX password, for example. But luckily for us, it's even easier than that.
In the e-mail, he includes this "decoder" list.
Of course, it should be clear at this point that this list would be relatively easy to extract from the e-mail, and further, that it tells you the exact length of the password, reducing the number of permutations to check to (in this case) 11,881,376.
Furthermore, a little bit of extra logic could reduce this number still further by noticing repetitive patterns in the list. So if "The Leaf of the Flower" appears twice, we know that the letters in those two slots are the same. And if the glyph set is unique (ie, no glyph appears twice), then we can reduce the number of permutations to at most 7,893,600.
Now, that's still a fairly large number of permutations to check, and at one point, it probably would have been enough. However, computational power is free now, at least for spammers. And it doesn't take much. Here's a sample perl (!) program I ran on my Debian GNU/Linux laptop (1.2GHz Pentium M).
This just prints out all the permutations; of course they still would need to be checked.
Not very long on a modern computer, eh? And written in perl, too, not exactly the fastest programming language in the world. Now consider that spammers have access to just about infinite CPU and bandwidth, thanks to their army of zombie bots, and that both CPU power and bandwidth are likely to increase at a rather rapid rate in the next decade. Furthermore, this is a worst case scenario -- success in a brute force attack tends to occur somewhere in the middle, not towards the end, reducing the necessity to actually go through all the permutations.
You don't think they'd try to crack it?
Plus, by his own admission, e-mail addresses can be shared. What does this mean in this context? I don't even need to get the e-mail address encoded in the CAPTCHA! If I can get any working e-mail address, even one, I get through! So the more active he is, e-mail wise, the more likely I can randomly strike a hit in the first hundred or so tries.
On top of
You know, I'm not sure that's the case as much anymore... or really that it ever has been, actually.
The reason is simple: Apple. Now, Apple has taken a second (third?) seat to MS-based PCs for a long time and I think they probably will continue to do so for the forseeable future (ie, I am not an Apple zealot). But Apple remains a name-brand that exists in the public, non-geek consciousness. While their current success is due almost entirely to their iPod, in most people's minds, they remain a computer company.
I believe that part of the reason that alternative browsers like Firefox are beginning to gain ground is because of MS's discontinued support of IE on the Mac. Despite the fact that not many people use Macs, many of the people that do are not geeks, and those "not-geeks" were forced to consider the browser question in a more realistic way when MS discontinued Mac support. Up until then, they likely considered (as most people do) that IE was the internet.
Now they know better, and as you've probably noticed on Slashdot, Mac-types are a loud bunch -- even the non-geeky ones. They use Firefox or Safari and they make a big fuss about it. They're convinced of a conspiratorial anti-Macintosh agenda on the part of, well, pretty much everyone and they complain loudly when things don't work well on their macs. Nowadays, this includes websites.
My point in all of this is that MS has been the big bully in the industry for a long time. Apple, Sun, IBM -- all would be exactly like MS if their roles were reversed (IBM in fact was, at one time) -- but as it stands, all would like nothing more than to see MS toppled.
Individually, each of these companies represents a feeble marketshare. Together, it still isn't much, but it's enough, I think. They have the users required and the lobbying power, too, to really make a difference. IBM and Sun have always had the problem of being companies only IT people really know much about, due to their lack of penetration on the desktop. Apple, on the other hand, is widely seen as a desktop system normal people actually use, and so Apple being on board hopefully will make more non-industry folks aware of what's going on. Unfortunately, these three companies haven't been keen on cooperating on things like formats precisely because of the lack of open standards -- none of them wants to allow a competitor to dictate the structure of any format.
Each of them produces its own office suite; each of these is MS Office's bitch. By making sure that their office suites all interoperate 100% with an open format, and by lobbying governments (especially non-American governments) with arguments about (American) vendor lock-in, I believe they can make in-roads into ODF adoption.
If governments use it, large companies and contractors will be forced to use it as well, even if infrequently. They will quickly find MS Office's inability to save into these formats annoying (which will not force them to switch to another office suite, but which will cause them to lobby MS to support the format).
Big companies = big clients = big money. Add this to the fact that any law requiring a government to adopt an open format that MS Office doesn't support will make the use of MS Office illegal in a de facto sort of way, because of its non-compliance.
If (and that's a big if) all of this happens, if the laws pass, and IBM/Apple/Sun manage to cooperate for a change, I expect that MS Office will include support for a usable subset of ODF. What they will not do -- what they will never do -- is make it the default format. Further, they will likely ensure that some features of their doc format cannot be saved in ODF, allowing them to pop-up the little box that warns the user that "some formatting information may be lost, proceed?"
This will make little difference to governments legally required to avoid doc, but this will be enough to prevent widespread adoption in the private sphere.
With respect, the man that gave the order to use force as necessary, Deng Xiao Ping, is dead.
Look, I'm not saying that Tiananmen square was a good thing, anymore than I would go ahead and say that Britain's massacre of Indians was a good thing, but to me, the circumstances are similar: both involved a grassroots movement to essentially overthrow (or at least, radically change the workings of) the people in power.
Both cases led to a brutal crackdown. A crackdown which, actually, was far more brutal in the British case. We conveniently ignore it, or justify it, in the case of the British, because they are our allies and they largely share our values, culture and way of life.
The Chinese, on the other hand, are culturally, linguistically, and economically dissimilar to us -- at least, we perceive them to be (in the case of economics, the differences aren't actually so great). So it's easy for us to find reasons to despise them.
Your comment about students being afraid to stand up for what they believe in being the reason that we haven't seen another uprising against the government couldn't be further from the truth.
The students that congregated on the square faced a much sterner, less forgiving government than students now would face. They were, in their own words, "ready to die" -- many painted those characters on their foreheads and persons. But those were much more desperate times. The USSR was undergoing glastnost, and Gorbachev was in Beijing to talk about that. The Chinese government's flirtations with the free market were still largely just that, flirtations, and much of China's population lived in poverty. The nation was not stable. These desperate times led people to take desperate measures.
Nowadays, most people still empathise with the students -- but they no longer see as pressing a need. In their minds, the government was right not to pursue the glastnost-style reforms that the students wanted at the time, because they don't want China to end up like the USSR (ie, gone). The government's position -- economic reform and growth before political reform -- is one they agree with. They are skeptical about whether the government will actually go through with democratic reforms, but the need is less pressing -- China is increasingly an affluent, stable place. Not many people are starving anymore, and most people see opportunity where there wasn't any 20 years ago.
Criticisms that locals here have of the government are typically things like the "peasant problem" (the ever widening affluence gap between urban and peasant populations), and censorship.
The former is the stated "big issue" for the Hu Jin Tao government. The latter is an on-going problem, but one that is decreasing: China has money on its mind and direct censorship is bad for business, so increasingly, the Chinese government is adopting more subtle propaganda via education and manipulation of the media. People are still aware of it and annoyed by it, but what with the way Jiang Zi Min got bitten in the ass over the whole SARS cover up, the Chinese are mostly optimistic that this is getting better.
Much better than Singapore, where the government taps all phone lines. Of course, we don't ever talk about Singapore, but then, they're capitalist, right?
Nor do I. Right now. (I'm in Shanghai).
How about opening fire on 10,000 men, women and children, peacefully gathered to celebrate a religious festival?
Oh wait, that wasn't China! That was Britain!
I guess the British ought to be described, to this day, as a nation ruled by a gestapo-like military, eh?
Oh but wait you say, that tragedy happened a long time ago.
So, believe it or not, did Tiananmen. Politically, 1989 was an eternity ago. But it's difficult to make this clear to someone who hasn't bothered to go to China and witness how much the nation has changed, politically and socially, since those years.
Which is not to say that it's perfect, but the days of the lone student standing in front of a tank are well behind us.
No offense, but your ex-girlfriend is either a peasant, retarded, or lying. I live in China and that picture, while censored, is famous.
Tiananmen happened relatively recently. Most people our age (well, my age, late twenties) remember it. It was a huge deal.
However, the Chinese are not generally happy talking to westerners about problems their country has, just as Americans get their panties in a bunch everytime someone who isn't American dares to point out that they might have a slightly flawed foreign policy.
Patriotism, it's a bitch.
Don't listen to much Nine Inch Nails, eh?
Or play Quake I, apparently...
AFAIK, you also need to build mplayer from source on debian. It has something to do with its use of non-free codecs, or something... not to mention that the mplayer guys think that, for performance reasons, you should always compile your own copy.
Process could (should?) be automated, though.
(I haven't installed mplayer on my debian system in a long time, though, so I might be totally wrong.)
I wish, but thanks for giving me face :) Much of what you've said about DDT is news to me, in fact, so I guess I was just ignorant. Thanks to you though, I'm not (as) ignorant anymore, though.
Cheers.
In all likelyhood, we're much more interested in the functioning of a human brain than any other kind of brain.
At least, I know I am. It's the most complex structure we're aware of, and unlocking its secrets could explain a lot about ourselves.
Don't you think you're oversimplifying things a little there, AC?
The atom bomb was not created by physicists who thought they "knew everything". Rather, it was an application of known science to a specific problem, undertaken by the government of the United States. Certainly, the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project were the best and the brightest the US had to offer, and certainly they could have declined to participate (some did, IIRC). But it was not arrogance that motivated the physicists to build an atom bomb -- it was the very real fear at the time that Germany might build one first; they were certainly researching it. Imagine, if you will, how the world would be different if the Nazis had beaten us to nuclear arms.
DDT is a mixed blessing. Extremely bad for you, yes -- but DDT is also responsible for the almost complete eradication of malaria in the first world. Nothing kills mosquitoes so efficiently. There are those who feel that the world-wide ban on DDT (due to its harmful effects) is what allows malaria to remain a serious problem throughout South Asia. Sure, DDT kills people, but malaria kills more. It's like chemotherapy -- you poison your own body in hopes that it kills the cancer before it kills you. Not ideal, of course, but don't pretend that it was all bad.
Genetic engineering, like everything else we've ever done, will have productive uses and less than productive ones, and probably a few lamentable applications. I for one am prepared to accept that we probably won't know what we've done wrong until after we've already done it.
Which of course doesn't rule out being cautious.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I was under the impression that the Chinese and the Vietnamese came to blows over the new Vietnamese government's abuse of their sizeable ethnic Chinese population. This, at least, is the reason given in China (which says nothing about its veracity).
It is true that the Vietnamese were abusive of their Chinese population, though, to the point where most eventually fled Vietnam. What isn't clear is whether that was the real reason that China engaged them.
What you should consider though, is that because of the so-called Sino-Soviet split, China entered into ideological conflict with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Essentially, while Stalin was alive, he was considered the undisputed leader of the world communist movement by everyone who mattered (I don't consider Trotsky to matter in this case). When he died, Mao believed that he should have ideological seniority over Nikita Krushchev, Stalin's successor. The USSR disagreed and as a result, China began to drift away from the USSR -- in fact, they were convinced that there would eventually be war. As a result, China began to court the United States, which culminated in Nixon's voyage to China.
Around this time, China stopped supporting the North Vietnamese in their war against the US. They did this not only because of warming relations with the US, but also (in fact mostly) because the North Vietnamese sided idealistically with the Soviet Union.
Some historians (western, mostly) seem to think that China's brief skirmish with Vietnam was in fact to test the Soviet Union's mettle -- they had pledged to support the Viet Cong against any aggressor. Supporters of this theory point out that the Chinese entered Vietnam, and then withdrew quickly -- the whole thing was over in less than a month.
There's also the Cambodia theory. Historically, the Khmer Rouge and China had enjoyed good relations, largely because that regime followed the doctrines of Maoism (a form of communism concentrating on a rural peasant revolution instead of an urban worker's revolt). A problem here is that once Pol Pot emerged as Cambodia's dictator, their relations apparently deteriorated somewhat. At any rate, the Cambodians began killing ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia wholesale (it was a pretty bloody regime in general), and also engaging in guerilla tactics on the Vietnamese border. Finally, in 1978, the Vietnamese had enough, and invaded Cambodia, ending the Khmer Rouge regime. The Chinese entered Vietname in Februrary 1979 so the timing might not be coincidental -- it's possible that the Chinese were retaliating in lieu of the Khmer Rouge, who had previously been their allies.
Who knows.
As for your mention of "Chinese propaganda", the truth is that the conflict is rarely spoken of. Nowadays, Vietnam and China have mostly gotten over the conflict (it took until the 1990s). Because it's such a recent thing, I think neither nation wants to talk about it too much -- trade is too beneficial to both nations. Both maintain that they won the conflict, and no one in the west really knows what the truth is, because no one is really clear on what China's motivation was.
One thing is for certain, though, the truth is much more complex than you're making out.
I agree that a war game set during this battle -- in fact, a war game from the perspective of any of the communist countries -- would be quite interesting, as long as it attempted to remain reasonably true to history, and not indulge in western propaganda, which is, believe it or not, just as bad and twisted its communist counterpart (although arguably more subtle).
You're mistaken, AC. OpenSolaris can co-opt BSD code, because the BSD license specifically allows anyone to use their code for any purpose -- simply put, the BSD license is compatible with any license, as long as credit is given. It's as free, in that respect, as you can get (without going public domain).
The BSDs, however, cannot use any of OpenSolaris' code, because you cannot relicense CDDL code as BSD (if you could, it would be trivial to put it into Linux -- after all, BSD licensed code may be added to the Linux kernel, and in fact has been on several occasions.)
The BSDs will benefit no more from OpenSolaris using their code than they do from NT using their code.
This is essentially how BSD works -- everyone benefits from BSD, but no one is required to give back. The BSD people don't see any issues with this, so more power to them.
Linux can't benefit from OpenSolaris either -- but because of the GPL, this means that OpenSolaris also can't benefit from Linux. So it's a symmetric relationship in that respect.
The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2 only. Linus removed the bit about "or at your option, any later version." Because he does not own the copyrights to any code that he hasn't written, he cannot relicense Linux -- at this point, it isn't clear anyone can. In order to do this, you'd need to get everyone who's written any code that is in the current Linux distribution to agree, and that amounts to thousands -- perhaps even tens of thousands -- of contributors.
Even assuming that none of them would have a problem with it, they would all have to agree, in writing, for the transfer to be legally kosher.
As RMS has said on several occasions, one of the issues with some of these problems -- patents, network use, etc -- is that the GPL cannot govern anything other than the right to copy. In particular, it cannot govern use. That's one of the reasons the GPLv3 hasn't been finalized yet.
Even when it is, though, the Linux kernel will not likely ever be released under said license, for the reasons outlined above. So it's no use dreaming about it.
Would be cool, though.
My emacs is pretty heavily customized, but I've held off on remapping the navigation keys -- why? Because lots and lots of software (readline, for example) uses emacs navigation keys. I can rebind these in emacs, and even in readline... but what about Mozilla? Or gtk apps? Or any of the countless other apps that have those keys hardcoded? Even if I could rebind them all, it would be a ton of work.
.emacs, I can still be reasonably productive. The defaults really aren't all that bad, I think.
Not to mention that when I'm stuck without my
Most of the keys I do bind are extended C-c commands that call my own defuns. Not having those is a bit of a pain, but I can still use the editor in other situations. Which is good (although to be honest, I still usually use ed on other people's computers).
No, not really. Not unless you want a local salary (which to be fair, in the local economy, could afford you a reasonable lifestyle -- but forget about going home). Plus, you should consider that while your IT skills may be the bees knees, to operate in a Chinese work environment you need to speak Mandarin. Unless you do, and I mean very fluently, I wouldn't even think about it.
I don't actually work in IT -- I work in public relations. Due to management conflicts and petty company politics, though, we run our own server -- everything the IT department gets its hands on, they assert control over to a degree that would make our work impossible. When management discovered that I'd worked previously as an IT whore, they co-opted me into this. It means I get to run Linux at the office, which is a plus. But I'd really rather not work in IT at all anymore. It's a dead end, unless you want to work in the third world for the rest of your life (which I don't). For the record, I wouldn't consider China anything resembling the third world.
I mean, I guess there are a lot of IT jobs in the US still, but the competition is fierce and frankly, as I speak English, Mandarin, French and German fluently, I see a much more lucrative future in international business (read: management).
Very cool, and let me just say, I wasn't aware of the map feature. I'll stick that into my ever-increasingly large bag of vim tricks. Of course, this won't work here, because the Chinese input method is not part of vim -- it's a normal XIM (in this case SCIM, but I use XCIN as well sometimes). Therefore, even with a yummy feature like map, I can't tell vi to switch on my input method. Or switch it off. They're two different apps.
:)
I mean, while my criticism of vim in this respect is valid, let's not blow it out of proportion -- it's a pretty specific complaint, and it doesn't detract from the utility of vi as an editor. It's just one place where the modal paradigm can be something of a pain. But to quote a documentary on male models I saw recently, "Come on! The guy had to magically pull his underwear out of his butt just to beat you!"
Emacs would work better in this particular instance, but the emacs guys fail it, because they can't get unicode to work properly. So vi still gets a point. I wouldn't sweat it too much
I'll just use vim until emacs 22 comes out.
I use both vi and emacs extensively. I originally coded entirely in ed (I'm actually not kidding), and I still enjoy it. Then I started using vi (I was already using emacs at this time for most development work) for lots of short edits -- it was more convenient for remote sessions and sus and loaded faster, making it ideal for mutt.
I always hated vim, because it took what I perceived to be vi's primary selling point -- its light weight -- and perverted it beyong recognition. Check this out:
vim is a full fourth of the size of emacs! Keep in mind that emacs includes X11 support, and my vim doesn't have X11 support compiled in. I don't actually have nvi or better, Bill Joy's original vi installed on this system, but compared to how light-weight vi used to be, I always considered vim to be an evil editor, installing nvi on all of my machines instead.
Recently, though, I've been using vim much more, because it has good unicode support (nvi doesn't, at all) and I currently operate in a completely unicode environment. In the past, emacs kicked the crap out of vi in terms of internationalization -- it could do unicode-style editing before unicode existed. But emacs 21 has some random wackiness where utf-8 isn't considered a valid encoding for CJK, and since I work in China, that's a bit of a deal breaker. Emacs 22 is a unicode-based rewrite that aims to fix this, but you know how GNU is ... release Real Soon Now[tm].
So I installed vim. Now here's the point I'm getting around to: the mode key.
A lot of emacs users think the mode key in vi sucks donkey nuts. Similarly, every vi user makes jokes about the cryptic control character sequences used by emacs users. Personally, I'd never found either to be at all annoying. Until I started having to type Chinese in vi.
Up until then, I'd only ever used emacs for internationalized editing. Emacs rules in this respect. It has very nice input methods built into the editor -- by which I mean of course that they're written in elisp -- meaning that I don't have to rely on XIM or anything similar and can be sure that inputing stuff won't interfere with emacs' default user interface paradigm.
In vi, here's an example session:
Now, if I forget to exit the XIM, ESC typically does nothing (or sometimes, depending on the input method in question, will transparently be passed to the application) and then my vi editing keys go to the input method and not to vi! ARGH!
See, one mode is no problem -- but two, nested modes definitely are. I have to enter insert mode, then enter chinese input mode, then type, then exit chinese input mode, then exit insert mode, then type commands. Do you see how these two levels suck penis?
This is where the non-extensibility of an editor like vi really bites it in the butt. It would be cool if I could have one key that puts me into insert mode, and turns on the Chinese input method. Not possible to do, not the least because vi already uses pretty much every key.
In emacs, for comparison, I put myself in Chinese mode at the beginning, and because the characters I type that get inserted into the buffer (or in this case, fed to the input method system) are never interpreted as commands, I don't ever have the problem of emacs thinking that some characters I want to type are actually commands. When you don't need an IME, this isn't a problem -- but when you do, it's a pain in the butt.
That having been said, I'm quite fond of the modal system, most of the time. And I do use vi a lot (more than any other editor, nowadays, because it allows me to edit CJK-having utf-8 files). But this one thing about it is just infuriating.
And unfortunately, I don't see any way to really fix this, without completely destroying vi's input paradigm.
The truth is, most Dvorak typists did not learn to type with a Dvorak keyboard. I myself originally typed on a QWERTY keyboard, and like most geeks, I typed very fast (> 90 wpm). I switched to Dvorak very much for the geek factor: a hacker whom I respected had made the switch, and I sought to emulate him.
It did not take long to regain my previous typing speed... perhaps 2 months. But that previous typing speed was pretty fast; within two weeks I was typing a very acceptable 40wpm. YMMV -- I'm a geek and I type a lot, so perhaps that forced practice decreased the time to switch for me. FWIW, I did use a typing tutor, but it was designed for QWERTY, and so I'm not actually sure it was all that good for my typing form -- even now, I notice that my hands don't exactly hover over the home row like they're supposed to. I feel this is more a result of the keyboard I use at work not being ergonometric and my hands being rather large.
Nowadays, I can type as fast as 110 wpm, though I don't usually push myself too much. But there are a few things I can tell you. While my speed hasn't increased substantially, my level of comfort has. Further, I am much, much more accurate than I used to be -- I don't really typo frequently at all.
Learning Dvorak was very easy for me, a seasoned QWERTY touch typist. I didn't forget my QWERTY skills either, although admittedly I did slow down substantially -- I don't think I type more than 40wpm on QWERTY now, although if I'm forced to use it for very long I speed up quite a bit.
Emacs and vi were a little bit of a pain, but actually not much of a pain, to be honest. I'm very fast in both now, to the point where I can't operate either easily with a QWERTY keyboard. But then I've been using Dvorak exclusively for nearly a decade now.
Give it a go. Your arthritic joints (you'll have em when you're older, we all will) will thank you.
I feel your pain, brother. What a dumbass.
You know, I'm glad you said that. All these posts about how they need to cut their eyes out and such, and I'm thinking, "He actually didn't look half bad, back then."
Like you said, look at him now. Time is kind to no one, apparently. Except maybe Sean Connery and Sofia Loren.
Post anonymously? Nah, what the hell.