Sorry, you got it wrong there. Take away IBM and all it does, all of a sudden no more datacenter. This means no government, no police, no utility, no big business (bank, insurance, etc). Ouch.
Take away Microsoft and all it does, it can be replaced overnight, on the same hardware. Maybe you would need to replace your mouse.
Not to mention that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars. So you could be handed down a sentence of slow death by illness for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Great.
Seriously, if death was the sentence for rape, you wouldn't see such a big decline in sexual assault, but you would see a spike in murders.
If the punishment for murder and rape is the same, then most likely the victims of rape would get killed as well. This would give the offender a better chance not to get caught.
Tired old argument. Stealing a car and making a copy of photoshop (copyrigth infrigement) are not the same level of crime. In the first instance you deprive someone of their car and they can't get around much anymore. In the latter case Adobe doesn't see a sale that they wouldn't see anyway. If you are the bootlegger that's a different story.
I'm not condoning it, but buying a $2 bootleg copy of photoshop is easy, risk free, is pretty much a victimless crime and still doesn't carry much social stigma.
One of the reaons I've gone to Linux is I don't even need to be tempted to commit copyright infrigenemt. Maybe the tools are slightly inferior sometimes, but I can help improve them if I really feel strongly about it.
I'm very much in favour of copyright holder using the fullest extent of the law to uphold their right and making life hard for "pirates". It makes the alternatives look so much better.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes Nvidia is being selfish and so are the millions of users of Linux who are installing it on their machine because it costs nothing and works well enough for them, yet contribute exactly nothing in return.
Except that's not quite true. The millions of users contribute usage. That means recognition, bug reports, significant market share, complaints about usability which are eventually taken into account, articles in the mainstream press, visibility, even minor celebrity for a few, etc. This means there exists a market for Linux journals, for Linux distributions at your newsagent, for interest raised in big industry (IBM, HP, etc), concern at Microsoft, competition in the marketplace.
Nvidia contributes to that positive swell. They provide a high-quality, free-as-in-beer, same conditions as under Windows, driver for their hardware. ATI doesn't, just to name one (at least their drivers are not high-quality). This means joe random user can start playing some games under Linux (thanks J. Carmak) *which are not free either, not even as-in-beer*, people can start rendering movie quality stuff, 3D rendering works well etc. Linux gain yet more users. If Nvidia hadn't made that effort the acceptance of Linux would be even less than what it is now.
All of this benefits you as a user because the general quality of Linux improves as a result of all this. It's hard for a company like Nvidia to understand the new values in particular those of Free Software. You've got to give them time.
In the mean time I respect your position and I applaud you for sticking to it. Kudos.
> less and less devices will bother to have any rom > and firmware on them in the future as a flash rom > takes space and costs money and is not needed when > the OS can load it for you. tackle this now!
ROM (not flash) is the cheapest kind of memory. RAM requires its own controller, and you can't boot from the device, obviously.
> If al Qaeda doesn't fit that description, who does?
Where does the Al Qaeda thing fit with the Iraq war? Afghanistan, yes. Iraq, no. At the moment the US Army is busy bringing up the next generation of terrorist who will not remember the US fondly.
Both the Soviets and the US were more than willing to use Europe as a battleground if push come to shove. Ever heard of the Pershing vs. SS20 debate in the 80s? Both were nuclear tipped missiles with short range posted on either side of the iron curtain, with too short a range to fall anywhere but in Europe.
As a kid growing in Europe at that time I felt extremely disinfranchised from both sides. It was pretty clear the US was not going to help Europe in any way should the shit hit the fan.
I don't think the US was unhappy to see Europe spend so "little" on their military. Indeed when France ceceded from NATO in the 50s and started to spend a great deal more for its own defence they didn't like it one little bit. Neither did they like the competition on the lucrative weapons market. When both the UK and France decided to play a bit of world politics with Israel as ally around the Suez canal both superpowers told them to go back home or get nuked.
It is true that nowadays the European military union doesn't exist and that the Kosovo was a disgrace, but I don't remember the US intervening in Rwanda. The UN eventually did.
The UN is weak because it was designed that way. This was the only compromise that superpowers could agree on when it was created. The whole thing is designed to be bogged down in bureaucracy and to be unresponsive to world events. It's a miracle that it does accomplish something from time to time, especially in education, drug control, and even peacekeeping. If you want a world body to be responsive to conflicts then it means that superpowers, and today this means mostly the US, must give up some degree of control on what it does. It will never happen if the US can have a say.
Myself I don't trust the US do to anything more than what benefits its immediate interests. If they match with what can roughly be construed as peacekeeping or conflict resolution, great. But it is not always the case. Sometimes the US will go to war for its own private reasons.
You have to ask yourself the question of why does Al Qaida want to strike at the US. I don't think it's because of the American standards of living in spite of what GWB said at some point.
Moreover I'm not sure expeditions like those in Iraq help in that regard. I would be of the opinion that the current Iraq situation is a breeding ground for terrorism, more so than when SH was still in power, althought that is debatable.
There are those in the US who think that the US army should be used to defend the US and not to attack other countries over spurious allegations, however it is convenient for the military-industrial complex to keep making up ennemies so as to maintain their level of funding, keep developing new weapons, etc. This is a real issue.
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 1
This is getting slightly pedantic. You mean that one should write either 'new' or 'operator new()'. Fine, I concede defeat on that point.
That's not quite true. Nvidia users benefit by being able to use their video hardware fully under Linux. That's not something to sneeze at. Most users don't care if the driver is closed-source, as long as it's still free.
ATI (to name but one) doesn't make the same level of effort towards Linux users and as a result ATI users are in for a world of pain and wasted hours trying to make their video card work correctly under Linux. I know, I've been there.
Everyone rails about Nvidia's level of support in Linux but in reality it's not that bad. The newer drivers support RandR, and works better with SMP. The level of functionality for the run-of-the-mill PC has always been exemplary. One just need to report bugs and be patient, exactly as in the open-source case (again from the perspective of a mere user, not a developer).
If on the other hand ATI realized that Linux users constitute a worthy user base and decided to open-source and support their drivers fully, then they would get a competitive advantage with Linux users. We can assume that their drivers would quickly become high-quality and their hardware would be the preferred solution for Linux users.
Nvidia would have to reciprocate and open their driver assuming they still value the Linux customers. Until then they are making the right decision (as a resource-conscious company) that costs them the least amount of money in the short term while not jeopardising the bottom line, given that their hardware is still the best supported under Linux, and that's all most users care about. Presumably open-sourcing the Nvidia drivers would not be trivial, might expose trade secrets and other unpatented techniques (or even unlicensed used of techniques used by others), and would generally require a higher level of commitment to Linux users.
Seeing however that ATI hasn't made that decision yet and that their driver is decidedly inferior to that of Nvidia, Nvidia doesn't have to make the expensive decision to support the Linux users in a different way that they support Windows users.
Nvidia doesn't owe Linux users or developers anything that I'm aware of. The fact is that if Linux didn't exist they would sell just as many video cards. Those users would still be running some other kind of supported O/S, probably Windows.
Conversely if Nvidia withdrew binary-only driver support for Linux then users would be temporarily inconvenienced but in the long term independed developers would reverse-engineer enough of the driver to make their hardware (at least the older versions of it) work well enough with Linux again. In effect their binary-only support is really not indispensable, so Linux users don't owe Nvidia a great deal either.
developer).
So what? No one is under any obligation, and that's fine.
Yes dot clocks can be a pain, XFree86 will not ask your monitor for the resolutions that it supports and the Radeon VE is not particularly well supported outside very basic 2D. That stuff is hard and not well documented by the manufacturers. What can we do?
Normally however your VE should boot in TV-compatible VGA mode. This means that if you boot with your TV connected (restarting X is not enough, cold boot needed), the picture of your boot screen should show up on TV. At least it does with me. If you then start X with the VGA driver with a 60Hz refresh rate (not the radeon one) you should be able to continue watching your desktop on the TV. Again this works for me, and you won't get any kind of acceleration beyond Xshm.
ATI doesn't want to reveal how TV out works to XFree86 developers because of the stupid anti-piracy features that can easily be turned off.
Myself I got sick of it and bought an el-cheapo Nvidia. The drivers are not open but it all works.
You can't use rotor to build a true kernel. How would you boot it, as it requires a runtime environment to JIT-compile and then run?
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately I don't have access to the original article anymore. I seem to remember that the point was that sure it simplifies things a great deal in the context of the QT object, but that later the same developers are likely to forget to delete what they've allocated in a different context.
From memory the author advocates a syntax that makes it clear that the pointer is managed (à la smart pointer) or to provide a method that clearly deletes something (as in widget.deleteAllChildren() maybe?).
And yes new() and delete() do exist, sorry.
Like everything in C++, operator new is implemented as a series of methods, in ISO C++ it is defined in the header
There is a series of historically good reasons why Objective-C is recommended, but now you can at least use Java or Python if you want.
The design decision dates back from 1990 or something like that (NeXTStep toolkit) and they've decided to keep the basic design intact which is probably a good idea, certainly with the big corporate developers.
Anyway Objective-C is very much object-oriented. If you know Java or even Smalltalk you should have no problem. It is quite elegant.
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Honest question, not flame.
I read a comment in Doctor Dobbs' Journal more than a year ago to the effect that Qt doesn't teach good C++ practices because most, but not all, objects are managed by the toolkit, in such a way that they must be allocated but never released. People do lots of new() but never any delete().
No question there that $100 is a good investment for a parent. Most likely a kid will pirate it anyway.
However a kid interested in computers might like to try different languages, different toolkits, etc. The Microsoft tools are very industrial looking. Great for doing big jobs, somewhat tedious to learn for a school project. The fact remains that under Linux, if you are not frightened by the GUI (and a kid interested in computers wouldn't be) the developers' environment is superb, and free.
As far as I understand, the shape of the universe in 4D at any point is like a horn, and the pointy end of the horn is not the beginning of time/space. You can travel towards the pointy end in particular.
In what you describe the universe is like a ball in 4D at any point. At the beginning of time it was smaller but you can't travel to that point anymore.
What if you are a kid using your parent's computer? Mum, I'd like to buy this compiler, it costs, oh, $100. That's rather a lot of money if you are 12.
I don't see what politics have to do with what you say.
Of course for your argument you are going to use a reference provided by the military, which will show no toxicity whatsoever. Perhaps the military has a vested interest in showing those results, same as they've denied for years the gulf war syndrome in veterans.
In fact there is research in the toxicity in DU and there exist guidelines for exposure.
DU is at least as toxic as lead (that much is obvious), with the added problem that unlike lead, Uranium oxidizes very easily upon impact and becomes a fine dust which is breathable. So DU is not very toxic in unexploded ammo, because it is not in dust form. However after use it turns into dust which is quite toxic. Also it can pass into drinking water and become toxic there. As a heavy metal it can concentrate in the body (it is not excreted) and the chemical and radioactive components do have a cumulative effect.
So it somewhat safe to handle but not good for you to visit a battlefield where DU has been used and much less to drink the water there.
Reading the article, the author is complaining about the very features that make Free Software and Open-source software what it is now.
Yes it is developer-centric, and therefore will exhibit the `flaws' that the author talks about, such as the lack of documentation or the poor interface design.
It seems to me that the terms of reference have changed. In the past it was cool enough for someone to give away (under a proper license of course) the fruit of their labour to anybody interested. But now unless it has all the features of commercial software as well then not so many people will use it and this is not so cool.
Let's get real for a minute. I don't know very many software engineers who will willingly and for free consult interface guideline documents, take a course in tech writing, write a test harness and be objective and detached about the pet project that they work on in their spare time. They'd much rather add features to their software project instead, precisely what is happening in practice.
I'm pretty sure that if you asked the F/OSS developers if their mission in life was to produce a completely free/libre environment akin to MacOS/X in order to bring down Microsoft they'd tell you to get real as well. To get there will require more than volunteer's work.
The amazing thing is that a great deal of F/OSS is in fact valuable, at least enough so that companies like RedHat or SuSE have taken it and made it into a usable product, suitable for enterprise and developer's desktops and are now threatening pure commercial companies in some markets such as low-end servers. This means someone has to test all that software, someone has to write the documentation, someone has to put nice GUIs on top, and so on.
If success for F/OSS is now being redefined as `becoming a real threat to Microsoft's bottom line on the desktop' then it has a long way to go and may never get there unless somehow Microsoft commits suicide. In this context the article makes perfect sense.
If success is carving a sustainable niche for itself, fostering creativity, capturing developer mindshare, provinding leadership in some areas, providing Microsoft and others with some competition (such as helping Microsoft's competitors along, as with Apple) then it has already been succeeding for many years.
For the vast majority of people who sit in front of a computer out of necessity and are not particularly technically oriented, then pure F/OSS is not a viable alternative right now. MacOS/X, which is partly OSS (not Free) certainly is, but is not really threatening Microsoft's monopoly for various reasons, not all technical.
For the rest F/OSS is great and has been for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, others would say that *you* are what's wrong with the Linux community nowadays, full of people who think proprietary software is acceptable.
I don't really think you are wrong in any way, but I think you are a bit quick with the finger pointing.
The issue is not paying for software, it's whether the product we are paying for is Free (libre) or not.
About your sig, you are right:
name: Stallman, Richard M
email: rms@AI.MIT.EDU
phone: (617) 253-8830
address: 32-381
department: Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
name: Chomsky, Noam A
email: chomsky@MIT.EDU
phone: (617) 253-7819
address: 32-D840
department: Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
But what is your point? sorry if I'm thick.
Sorry, you got it wrong there. Take away IBM and all it does, all of a sudden no more datacenter. This means no government, no police, no utility, no big business (bank, insurance, etc). Ouch.
Take away Microsoft and all it does, it can be replaced overnight, on the same hardware. Maybe you would need to replace your mouse.
Not to mention that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars. So you could be handed down a sentence of slow death by illness for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Great.
It could happen to you.
Seriously, if death was the sentence for rape, you wouldn't see such a big decline in sexual assault, but you would see a spike in murders.
If the punishment for murder and rape is the same, then most likely the victims of rape would get killed as well. This would give the offender a better chance not to get caught.
I don't think it would be much of an improvement.
It sucks now, but I think you'll get your day in court. There is no way any family judge will condone this sort of behaviour. Get a lawyer ASAP.
Tired old argument. Stealing a car and making a copy of photoshop (copyrigth infrigement) are not the same level of crime. In the first instance you deprive someone of their car and they can't get around much anymore. In the latter case Adobe doesn't see a sale that they wouldn't see anyway. If you are the bootlegger that's a different story.
I'm not condoning it, but buying a $2 bootleg copy of photoshop is easy, risk free, is pretty much a victimless crime and still doesn't carry much social stigma.
One of the reaons I've gone to Linux is I don't even need to be tempted to commit copyright infrigenemt. Maybe the tools are slightly inferior sometimes, but I can help improve them if I really feel strongly about it.
I'm very much in favour of copyright holder using the fullest extent of the law to uphold their right and making life hard for "pirates". It makes the alternatives look so much better.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes Nvidia is being selfish and so are the millions of users of Linux who are installing it on their machine because it costs nothing and works well enough for them, yet contribute exactly nothing in return.
Except that's not quite true. The millions of users contribute usage. That means recognition, bug reports, significant market share, complaints about usability which are eventually taken into account, articles in the mainstream press, visibility, even minor celebrity for a few, etc. This means there exists a market for Linux journals, for Linux distributions at your newsagent, for interest raised in big industry (IBM, HP, etc), concern at Microsoft, competition in the marketplace.
Nvidia contributes to that positive swell. They provide a high-quality, free-as-in-beer, same conditions as under Windows, driver for their hardware. ATI doesn't, just to name one (at least their drivers are not high-quality). This means joe random user can start playing some games under Linux (thanks J. Carmak) *which are not free either, not even as-in-beer*, people can start rendering movie quality stuff, 3D rendering works well etc. Linux gain yet more users. If Nvidia hadn't made that effort the acceptance of Linux would be even less than what it is now.
All of this benefits you as a user because the general quality of Linux improves as a result of all this. It's hard for a company like Nvidia to understand the new values in particular those of Free Software. You've got to give them time.
In the mean time I respect your position and I applaud you for sticking to it. Kudos.
I don't understand your last point:
> less and less devices will bother to have any rom
> and firmware on them in the future as a flash rom
> takes space and costs money and is not needed when
> the OS can load it for you. tackle this now!
ROM (not flash) is the cheapest kind of memory. RAM requires its own controller, and you can't boot from the device, obviously.
OK,
> If al Qaeda doesn't fit that description, who does?
Where does the Al Qaeda thing fit with the Iraq war? Afghanistan, yes. Iraq, no. At the moment the US Army is busy bringing up the next generation of terrorist who will not remember the US fondly.
Both the Soviets and the US were more than willing to use Europe as a battleground if push come to shove. Ever heard of the Pershing vs. SS20 debate in the 80s? Both were nuclear tipped missiles with short range posted on either side of the iron curtain, with too short a range to fall anywhere but in Europe.
As a kid growing in Europe at that time I felt extremely disinfranchised from both sides. It was pretty clear the US was not going to help Europe in any way should the shit hit the fan.
I don't think the US was unhappy to see Europe spend so "little" on their military. Indeed when France ceceded from NATO in the 50s and started to spend a great deal more for its own defence they didn't like it one little bit. Neither did they like the competition on the lucrative weapons market. When both the UK and France decided to play a bit of world politics with Israel as ally around the Suez canal both superpowers told them to go back home or get nuked.
It is true that nowadays the European military union doesn't exist and that the Kosovo was a disgrace, but I don't remember the US intervening in Rwanda. The UN eventually did.
The UN is weak because it was designed that way. This was the only compromise that superpowers could agree on when it was created. The whole thing is designed to be bogged down in bureaucracy and to be unresponsive to world events. It's a miracle that it does accomplish something from time to time, especially in education, drug control, and even peacekeeping. If you want a world body to be responsive to conflicts then it means that superpowers, and today this means mostly the US, must give up some degree of control on what it does. It will never happen if the US can have a say.
Myself I don't trust the US do to anything more than what benefits its immediate interests. If they match with what can roughly be construed as peacekeeping or conflict resolution, great. But it is not always the case. Sometimes the US will go to war for its own private reasons.
You have to ask yourself the question of why does Al Qaida want to strike at the US. I don't think it's because of the American standards of living in spite of what GWB said at some point.
Moreover I'm not sure expeditions like those in Iraq help in that regard. I would be of the opinion that the current Iraq situation is a breeding ground for terrorism, more so than when SH was still in power, althought that is debatable.
There are those in the US who think that the US army should be used to defend the US and not to attack other countries over spurious allegations, however it is convenient for the military-industrial complex to keep making up ennemies so as to maintain their level of funding, keep developing new weapons, etc. This is a real issue.
This is getting slightly pedantic. You mean that one should write either 'new' or 'operator new()'. Fine, I concede defeat on that point.
That's not quite true. Nvidia users benefit by being able to use their video hardware fully under Linux. That's not something to sneeze at. Most users don't care if the driver is closed-source, as long as it's still free.
ATI (to name but one) doesn't make the same level of effort towards Linux users and as a result ATI users are in for a world of pain and wasted hours trying to make their video card work correctly under Linux. I know, I've been there.
Everyone rails about Nvidia's level of support in Linux but in reality it's not that bad. The newer drivers support RandR, and works better with SMP. The level of functionality for the run-of-the-mill PC has always been exemplary. One just need to report bugs and be patient, exactly as in the open-source case (again from the perspective of a mere user, not a developer).
If on the other hand ATI realized that Linux users constitute a worthy user base and decided to open-source and support their drivers fully, then they would get a competitive advantage with Linux users. We can assume that their drivers would quickly become high-quality and their hardware would be the preferred solution for Linux users.
Nvidia would have to reciprocate and open their driver assuming they still value the Linux customers. Until then they are making the right decision (as a resource-conscious company) that costs them the least amount of money in the short term while not jeopardising the bottom line, given that their hardware is still the best supported under Linux, and that's all most users care about. Presumably open-sourcing the Nvidia drivers would not be trivial, might expose trade secrets and other unpatented techniques (or even unlicensed used of techniques used by others), and would generally require a higher level of commitment to Linux users.
Seeing however that ATI hasn't made that decision yet and that their driver is decidedly inferior to that of Nvidia, Nvidia doesn't have to make the expensive decision to support the Linux users in a different way that they support Windows users.
Nvidia doesn't owe Linux users or developers anything that I'm aware of. The fact is that if Linux didn't exist they would sell just as many video cards. Those users would still be running some other kind of supported O/S, probably Windows.
Conversely if Nvidia withdrew binary-only driver support for Linux then users would be temporarily inconvenienced but in the long term independed developers would reverse-engineer enough of the driver to make their hardware (at least the older versions of it) work well enough with Linux again. In effect their binary-only support is really not indispensable, so Linux users don't owe Nvidia a great deal either.
developer).
So what? No one is under any obligation, and that's fine.
Yes dot clocks can be a pain, XFree86 will not ask your monitor for the resolutions that it supports and the Radeon VE is not particularly well supported outside very basic 2D. That stuff is hard and not well documented by the manufacturers. What can we do?
Normally however your VE should boot in TV-compatible VGA mode. This means that if you boot with your TV connected (restarting X is not enough, cold boot needed), the picture of your boot screen should show up on TV. At least it does with me. If you then start X with the VGA driver with a 60Hz refresh rate (not the radeon one) you should be able to continue watching your desktop on the TV. Again this works for me, and you won't get any kind of acceleration beyond Xshm.
ATI doesn't want to reveal how TV out works to XFree86 developers because of the stupid anti-piracy features that can easily be turned off.
Myself I got sick of it and bought an el-cheapo Nvidia. The drivers are not open but it all works.
You can't use rotor to build a true kernel. How would you boot it, as it requires a runtime environment to JIT-compile and then run?
From memory the author advocates a syntax that makes it clear that the pointer is managed (à la smart pointer) or to provide a method that clearly deletes something (as in widget.deleteAllChildren() maybe?).
And yes new() and delete() do exist, sorry.
Like everything in C++, operator new is implemented as a series of methods, in ISO C++ it is defined in the header and has a series of prototypes, e.g:See Stroustrup, 3rd Ed., p 576.
There is a series of historically good reasons why Objective-C is recommended, but now you can at least use Java or Python if you want.
The design decision dates back from 1990 or something like that (NeXTStep toolkit) and they've decided to keep the basic design intact which is probably a good idea, certainly with the big corporate developers.
Anyway Objective-C is very much object-oriented. If you know Java or even Smalltalk you should have no problem. It is quite elegant.
Honest question, not flame.
I read a comment in Doctor Dobbs' Journal more than a year ago to the effect that Qt doesn't teach good C++ practices because most, but not all, objects are managed by the toolkit, in such a way that they must be allocated but never released. People do lots of new() but never any delete().
Is that true?
No question there that $100 is a good investment for a parent. Most likely a kid will pirate it anyway.
However a kid interested in computers might like to try different languages, different toolkits, etc. The Microsoft tools are very industrial looking. Great for doing big jobs, somewhat tedious to learn for a school project. The fact remains that under Linux, if you are not frightened by the GUI (and a kid interested in computers wouldn't be) the developers' environment is superb, and free.
Even with infinitely small molecules, they would take an infinite amount of time to reach the pointy end, so you can't paint the shape no matter what.
As far as I understand, the shape of the universe in 4D at any point is like a horn, and the pointy end of the horn is not the beginning of time/space. You can travel towards the pointy end in particular.
In what you describe the universe is like a ball in 4D at any point. At the beginning of time it was smaller but you can't travel to that point anymore.
I'm probably wrong however.
What if you are a kid using your parent's computer? Mum, I'd like to buy this compiler, it costs, oh, $100. That's rather a lot of money if you are 12.
I don't see what politics have to do with what you say.
Of course for your argument you are going to use a reference provided by the military, which will show no toxicity whatsoever. Perhaps the military has a vested interest in showing those results, same as they've denied for years the gulf war syndrome in veterans.
In fact there is research in the toxicity in DU and there exist guidelines for exposure.
DU is at least as toxic as lead (that much is obvious), with the added problem that unlike lead, Uranium oxidizes very easily upon impact and becomes a fine dust which is breathable. So DU is not very toxic in unexploded ammo, because it is not in dust form. However after use it turns into dust which is quite toxic. Also it can pass into drinking water and become toxic there. As a heavy metal it can concentrate in the body (it is not excreted) and the chemical and radioactive components do have a cumulative effect.
So it somewhat safe to handle but not good for you to visit a battlefield where DU has been used and much less to drink the water there.
Other references: here, here, or here .
Reading the article, the author is complaining about the very features that make Free Software and Open-source software what it is now.
Yes it is developer-centric, and therefore will exhibit the `flaws' that the author talks about, such as the lack of documentation or the poor interface design.
It seems to me that the terms of reference have changed. In the past it was cool enough for someone to give away (under a proper license of course) the fruit of their labour to anybody interested. But now unless it has all the features of commercial software as well then not so many people will use it and this is not so cool.
Let's get real for a minute. I don't know very many software engineers who will willingly and for free consult interface guideline documents, take a course in tech writing, write a test harness and be objective and detached about the pet project that they work on in their spare time. They'd much rather add features to their software project instead, precisely what is happening in practice.
I'm pretty sure that if you asked the F/OSS developers if their mission in life was to produce a completely free/libre environment akin to MacOS/X in order to bring down Microsoft they'd tell you to get real as well. To get there will require more than volunteer's work.
The amazing thing is that a great deal of F/OSS is in fact valuable, at least enough so that companies like RedHat or SuSE have taken it and made it into a usable product, suitable for enterprise and developer's desktops and are now threatening pure commercial companies in some markets such as low-end servers. This means someone has to test all that software, someone has to write the documentation, someone has to put nice GUIs on top, and so on.
If success for F/OSS is now being redefined as `becoming a real threat to Microsoft's bottom line on the desktop' then it has a long way to go and may never get there unless somehow Microsoft commits suicide. In this context the article makes perfect sense.
If success is carving a sustainable niche for itself, fostering creativity, capturing developer mindshare, provinding leadership in some areas, providing Microsoft and others with some competition (such as helping Microsoft's competitors along, as with Apple) then it has already been succeeding for many years.
For the vast majority of people who sit in front of a computer out of necessity and are not particularly technically oriented, then pure F/OSS is not a viable alternative right now. MacOS/X, which is partly OSS (not Free) certainly is, but is not really threatening Microsoft's monopoly for various reasons, not all technical.
For the rest F/OSS is great and has been for a long time.