...well, not really, but that's what the Katz article about this will be called.;-)
In all seriousness, though, while I've never been a member of the "data wants to be free" crowd, it's not hard to see how most forms of intellectual property are going to be ruthlessly abused by the suits and that, in the end, the drawbacks of IP are going to outweigh its benefits. This hardly means IP rights are going to go away or be scaled back to reasonable levels, but they could, and they should.
In this particular case, these turkeys don't have a leg to stand on. Even if they did, who gives a rat's patootie? The market of end users these guys are trying to reach is so much larger than the smattering of hackers who need or want a barcode scanner. I have no use for one. I'm having trouble thinking of what I could possibly use it for beyond gee-whiz value. For most business applications I have at present, I'd use a different scanner along with shrinkwrapped software to interface with my shrinkwrapped POS and inventory control software. (At least until someone writes a real free retail system!)
Finally, I really wish that the suits would read their marketroids' press releases. Spelling and grammar are significant. It doesn't matter much to me if the comments in your source code are written in proper English (in fact, that would make me wonder!), but if your marketing people are semi-literate, that makes me wonder about your management. When I worked for [three-letter broadcaster omitted], I was constantly amazed by the sub-fourth-grade language skills demonstrated in corporate press releases. And believe me, it strongly influenced how I perceived and dealt with their reps. In most cases, I was obliged to assume they were idiots. In the case of Digital Convergence, the content alone would have been enough.
DNS was never designed to be a locator service. It was designed to attach names to hosts that are easier to memorize than dotted-decimal IP addresses.
To be frank, the only good reason for DNS is to make it easier to change IP addresses without having to notify everyone and his brother. People have been getting along with ten digit (xxx) xxx-xxxx phone numbers for years; Joe Sixpack can handle IP addresses just fine, and in fact might get along better with an arbitrary number than trying to remember whether Oxford University is www.oxford.edu, oxford-university.uk, or, as it happens, www.ox.ac.uk. (I think the Brits enjoy their Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic domain names, but I digress.)
Besides, most people click on a link to get to a site. Do tech support for awhile, and you'll be appalled to discover how many users don't know they can enter a literal domain name into their browsers.
Sure, DNS has been a nice mnemonic tool, but it has become a prime example of why private business interests cannot be trusted to act in the public interest. Even if businessmen could somehow be relied on to behave fairly and decently in the face of the profit motive, some disputes just can't be resolved fairly because there are only so many meaningful names for the same type of business. Take my father's company, The Art Store, located at www.artstoreplus.com because www.theartstore.com and www.artstore.com were both already taken, and there are several dozen other small art supply companies in the US called "The Art Store" who will no doubt eventually want domain names. I don't think a clunky domain name like www.theartstore.podunk.tx.com.us is any better than a phone number or a raw IP address.
Defendant Pavlovich is a leader in the so-called 'open source' movement, which is dedicated to the proposition that material, copyrighted or not, should be made available over the Internet for free."
Open Source/Free Software nitpicking aside, Open Source -- ahem -- Open Source(tm) is a trademark of the Open Source(tm) Initiative. To say that the Open Source(tm) movement actively encourages criminal activity is defamatory and actionable and demonstrably does harm to the Open Source(tm) trademark and the interests of the businesses that endorse it.
At least, I know if a bunch of Hollywood lawyers called a press conference to accuse freakin' IBM of actively encouraging criminal activity, seismographs on the other side of the planet would be able to detect the rumbling herd of bulk-cloned attorneys pouring from the sluice gates of the vast monolith that is Big Blue.
So maybe the OSI can get their lawyers -- uh, lawyer -- to get off his duff and act like a real corporate attorney.
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Criminy, what did you expect?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
Y'all expected what exactly from a platform advocacy magazine? C'mon, the average Mac advocate, whether they're a clueless fsck like this author or one of the more technically proficient Mac fans, is going to proclaim whatever Apple shovels out as the greatest thing since sliced bread even if it's one of Steve Jobs' turds encased in translucent green plastic.
Apple people love their Macs. Granted, it's in the way that a parent can be fiercely devoted to their severely retarded firstborn, but that's how it is. And a magazine that makes money by helping Apple sell more Macs isn't likely to print an article titled Doh! I Wish I Had a Commandline!
What's annoying here is that another clueless luser is appropriating a term with a long tradition and misusing it because, well, he's a boorish luser. If you got him alone, you'd have to start by explaining that the PC case is not a "CPU" or a "hard drive" long before you got around to defining an operating system. Ignore this crap.
That way, the egcs (now gcc) team could incorporate some code (mostly optimizations I guess) in gcc.
I rather doubt any code from Watcom would be immediately portable to gcc's rather different architecture. That will not, however, stop gcc's developers from studying the Watcom source code to extract algorithms that could be applied to gcc.
I agree that the GPL would be better, but let's not forget that there are applications of open source code that run beyond cut-and-paste.
Perl is the king of text processing languages (no contest)
Any language X is the best at Y thread ought to result in the spontaneous combustion of the poster's terminal. From a technical standpoint, you could make a pretty strong argument that Icon is a much better text processing language (and a better language in general) than Perl, and that Oberon's Juice JVM is structurally better-suited to delivering high-performance platform-independent binaries. Of course, you won't hear much about them -- or dozens of other great technologies -- because developers seize on the first thing they like and congeal and harden around it, forever after ignoring anything else that comes along. The popularity of programming languages and other technologies has next to nothing to do with technical considerations and everything to do with the same instinct that makes 13-year-old girls decide they all like Britney Spears simultaneously. Of course, software engineers can typically provide more compelling-sounding arguments for why they closed their minds as soon as they found Language X.
Maybe this is unavoidable in the relatively conservative, unimaginative corporate world -- the help wanted section in twenty years may still consist of a set of twenty or so acronyms repeated over and over -- but there's no excuse for it in the (let's face it) largely unpaid world of free software. Get out more.
C'mon folks -- MS Office and all its proprietary ilk are a short term threat for three reasons:
For any sufficiently popular class of application, free alternatives will be developed.
At least one free alternative will eventually be "good enough" for the majority of users.
As application classes mature, it becomes harder and harder for proprietary software developers to find meaningful new features to add; ergo, the free alternatives will always achieve parity with their commercial equivalents.
In the end, proprietary software ceases to have any advantage over free software. While this will probably seldom apply to more specialized software, it will be the rule for general purpose apps. In many cases, we already have parity except for the interface. Lout's typesetting engine is vastly superior to MS Word's engine, but no one has yet written a WYSIWYG front end for it. PostgreSQL and MySQL can outperform flippin' Access, but no one has yet written a RAD tool for them. And Gnumeric is within a hair's breadth of kicking Excel's hairy arse, and can arguably be said to have reached the "good enough" stage. And Evolution will almost certainly blow past Outlook, if you're into that sort of thing.
We have a way to go, but MS would have to purchase enough congressmen to outlaw free software to prevent what is otherwise inevitable.
I can only imagine what a mess deciding the proper mode of address for imperative languages would be like if you modeled it after a European language. Take German, for example, where a simple (however deprecated) construct like GO TO requires you to choose between:
The informal and formal forms of "you" (du and Sie). Perhaps you would use du with your PC, but I don't know I'd feel comfortable being so informal with an AS/400...:)
German doesn't quite have a generic "go" verb like English; one chooses a verb based on mode of transportation, which might be gehen, fahren or even fliegen or reiten, though perhaps springen would be more appropriate here...
Most languages' distribution of default verb/preposition pairings is pretty arbitrary and not likely to make much sense to non-native speakers. The English preposition "to" gets translated to zu or nach (among others) in German depending on the verb and how it's used. Not that English is any less arbitrary, but it tends to rely on a smaller number of core prepositions.
I'm only being half-serious here, of course, but I think English, which has a less rigid word order than some other languages, is in some ways better suited as a source for the strange constructs of programming languages than a more rigid, highly inflected language. That being said, initial familiarity with the natural language on which a programming language is based probably only gains you the most minute and temporary of advantages. I'd probably be just as comfortable with C's smattering of reserved words if they were all in another language, or even just nonsense words. Where the language barrier really gets you are variable names and comments.
Don't be silly. Amiga bashing was cool ten years ago, too, but we had to wait until the third or fourth time someone threatened to revive the machine as a point-and-drool set-top box before we could really score some yuks.;)
Hmm... I may have to take another look at Postgres. I've been using MySql in the name of speed and because, for what I'm doing these days, I don't really need Postgres' more advanced features. I had heard that Postgres was slow as hell and a serious resource hog, but I'll have to do some testing of my own. Is there a Postgres admin here who'd like to tell us what kind of resources Postgres demands? After all, the horror stories I've heard might have been coming from people trying to run it on a 386 with 6 megs of RAM.
What are you, high? We here at AmigaRut Industries have been working for friggin' years to bring a hardware MOD player to market! The advantages are obvious -- with such a small file size, you can fit tens of thousands of derivative, unimaginative techno dance tracks on a single CD at a sound quality that approaches a rusty gramophone being played through a walkie-talkie sealed inside of a ziplock bag and submerged in a toilet!
I guess the lack of press coverage for AmigaRut's products is just another lamentable sign of the media conspiracy against forward-thinking Amiga-friendly companies striving to keep the hype alive for the latest, most bleeding-edge 80's technology.
Unfortunately, our MOD player has been delayed because we have been working to incorporate not only S3M files, but also the old Apple II faux-stereo PCM files, complete with a codec that faithfully reproduces the wonderful warm, buzzy sound of the Apple II system speaker.
You're not going to find value like that in any johnny-come-lately MP3 player, bucko!
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Re:Programmers who enjoy coding so much...
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A Praise To Unix
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· Score: 2
It's a pity that so much of the Linux/Free Software/Open Source community is so absorbed in this fin de siecle rush for the friggin' almighty dollar that you don't often hear much from the crowd that kept the personal computer going back in the days when it wasn't good for much: the hobbyist hacker. It sure wasn't the Unix crowd, who dripped contempt on our "toy" machines back then.
I feel confident that I can speak for at least a few of my ilk when I say that the wonder of Linux is that it has given us something we can tinker with -- for free -- and learn down to the most minute detail if you feel so inclined. It's possible to play with Linux in ways that are terrifically difficult with Windows and which have always been impossible with Mac OS. When Apple deep-sixed their CLI-driven Apple II series in favor of the Macintosh, a lot of us swore never to get vendor-locked again if we could help it. After nearly more than a decade of waiting for an opportunity to play and explore again, Linus Torvalds and company gave us that chance.
I know the dot-com-wannabe crowd will probably sneer at that, but hell, money isn't much good if you aren't having fun. I'm having fun again. Thanks, free-software-programmers!
I've been asked to do similar things for the school district I work for, but thus far I have been able to stall and put it off; fortunately, it's not presently a big issue where I am.
When it gets to be, then I'll quit. Yeah, it'll suck, but it's not like I'm being asked to pick up an M-16 and go to the front lines. If your ideals are so weak that they'll fold in the face of financial hardship, why bother having ideals at all? You have to ask yourself, "If I'm willing to sell out freedom of expression in exchange for a consulting fee, what will else will I sell out, and how cheaply?"
The previous poster who suggested that refusal to compromise would lead to a miserable existence is mistaken in this instance. There are plenty of jobs available that don't involve censorship. Pick one, and sleep well.
The real flaw of Freenet, IMHO, isn't the potential for revisionism, it's the idea that only popular information is valuable. That might make sense in a market context, but it doesn't really have any place in an intellectual context if by "intellectual" you mean to imply a search for truth instead just popularity. Moreover, it is often the most revolutionary, cutting-edge, ahead-of-their-time ideas that are the most unpopular.
At one time, the ideas of democracy and freedom of speech were extremely unpopular ideas. In some places, they still are. Freenet-like systems would not have helped the rise of democracy very much. Mind you, it's great to see that popular ideas will be more resistant to government/corporate suppression, but they already were. It is ideas held by small minorities that are the most vulnerable.
For one, it means that instead of researching an area that will do little but stimulate the mind of the professor and his little grad students, they are more likely to put out a product that will have impact far outside of academia.
Except that it is not always possible to determine the impact of research when it is first performed. This is why large corporations like IBM, Lucent, and AT&T have their own laboratories performing primary research on topics whose profit potential is uncertain at best. Having the profit imperative drive research is to limit scientific discovery only to the obvious. It is worth noting that as late as fifty years ago, computers were considered -- by top IBM management, no less -- to be special-purpose devices that would never be sold in significant numbers.
In order to find the gems, you have to sift through a lot of gravel. Short-sighted greed is almost always self-defeating.
This does not mean, however, that the source code will be made public - but it's a step in the right direction.
Yes, but in what sense do we really know what the damn thing does without the source code? Even if the FBI was totally honest -- a dubious proposition at best -- specifications are not programs. Short of building your specification in some sort of formal language and having it translated into code, there's no way to guarantee compliance with the spec. Everyone who's ever worked on a large project knows how hard it is to make sure the code matches the specs, and how hard it is, for that matter, to design unambiguous specs. That's a cornerstone of computer science, friends.
Publishing the source is the only way we can be sure of what Carnivore does. And yeah, it's probably just a run-of-the-mill packet sniffer with a few specialized extensions, but we don't know that without the code.
"I dunno if data wants to be free, but I sure as hell do!"
If bad press appears about Micro$oft, an M$ marketroid will respond to it, and generally speaking, the trade press will cover it. If bad press appears about Linux, we all sit around and gripe on Slashdot, and the press couldn't care less because, no matter how numerous we may be, we're not individually big corporations.
So where are our big commercial allies now? IBM purports to be basing a big chunk of its strategy on Linux, so why isn't an IBM marketroid out there in front to deflate MS (and MS-shill) FUD? I'm sure we'll hear from the various distros on this point, but what about the big guns?
It would be one thing if a major like Big Blue just talked and spent no money, but they're spending millions yet remaining strangely silent. What gives?
Re:A real review of the book
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 2
Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians elebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective.
Except that it's not really a paradox. Open Source(tm), at least from the quasi-official position taken by Eric Raymond, is purely (and perhaps excessively) individualistic. The Open Source programmer programs for the adulation of his peers or to "scratch an itch", both essentially individual and arguably selfish motivations.
(Oh, and dear God, BTW, this isn't an Open Source vs. Free Software flame, just an observation, so put the lighter back in your pocket.)
Free Software, on the other hand, is built on collectivism. From Richard Stallman's quasi-official position, the Free Software programmer programs to share and eschews the notion of intellectual property, which is an essentially collectivist position.
Open Source ideology is basically a rehash of Reagan's "trickle down economics", whereby the unapologetically selfish pursuit of personal advancement generates fringe benefits for other people, in this case software. In fairness to the OSS community, unlike Reaganomics, the OSS version of trickle-down sometimes works (Perl, Apache) and sometimes not (Mozilla).
The real question, which is unlikely to be answered thanks to the political smoke surrounding it, is what the real strengths and weaknesses of the three models (Open Source, Free, Closed Source) are. Each has produced predominately different kinds of software and each has failed spectacularly at other kinds.
Double-clicking in a properly-designed GUI is done when activating one or more elements from a list. Single-clicking selects, double-clicking "does more".
Whoa there, Tex. Let's take a moment for a reality check. A user interface is a mode of communication, and in the case of GUI's, it's a largely gestural mode of communication.
Germans (and I presume other Europeans) seem to like counting beginning with the thumb; Americans begin with the index finger. Some tribes in Papua-New Guinea indicate tens by placing their fingers on the opposite forearm. Schoolchildren trained in finger math reckon ones on the right hand and tens on the left. Some Chinese speak Mandarin, but many people in Borneo speak Malay, while the bulk of Peru's rural population speaks Quechua in utter disregard to the peculiar dialect of Spanish spoken in the urban centers.
It may be that endless flamewars are fought over which of these modes is "better", but those people are just as silly as those who debate about the correct number of buttons on a friggin' mouse and how many times you have to click to select a paragraph.
The simple fact is that it's all arbitrarily learned behavior and, within reasonable limits, any initial learning curve is irrelevant in the face of the bizarrely crotchety resistance to any deviation that develops in people once they've learned one convention. It's the same instinct that has spawned wars over languages and custom since the dawn of time, but reduced to the level of infinitesimal trivia.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's patootie for the [1|2|3] button mouse debate; I want an affordable version of one of those twenty-button pucks that comes on high-end digitizer tablets so I can do some real work with my mouse, but I'm not suggesting anyone else do likewise 'less you feel like it. If, for some reason, you feel compelled to let other people dictate the details of your life for you, forget mice and 1) take public transportation, 2) recycle more, and 3) refrain from buying products with excess packaging, or 4) anything else that actually matters.
No, I have seen Mac's and I love them, because you really get the feeling that it is a work of true love to the user
Hm. When I use an open source application that one or more people put thousands of hours into and then gave away for the benefit of the world at large, that's love. When I have to pay some smarmy vendor in Cupertino for a pretty-but-vacuous operating system running on overpriced, underpowered, closed-standard hardware, that's soliciting prostitution.
They'll all say they love you if you pay 'em enough. But it's only the ones that don't require money who mean it.
In the last century, the democracies of the world fought innumerable wars, with tens of millions of casualties, to prevent the loss of our freedoms at the hands of fascism and communism. No one suggested that we surrender our freedoms to Hitler or Stalin in order to avoid battlefield casualties. But today, the governments of the English-speaking countries and more than a few of our European allies are suggesting that we surrender our freedoms to avoid a few dozen deaths a year from terrorism. What a crock!
Freedom comes at the price of bloodshed, folks. And these days, it's surprising little bloodshed. Terrorism exists precisely because the enemies of freedom lack the power to do significant damage, so they concentrate on some high-profile but not especially great carnage. Terrorism should be suppressed to the best of our ability, of course, but please bear in mind that more people die in domestic disputes every night in America than die in terrorist attacks in a decade. Terrorism is only an issue because we allow ourselves to be panicked by a few crazies.
In the one case that could have been a major terrorist disaster -- the World Trade Center bombing -- the disaster was averted by the ignorance of the terrorists, not Carnivore. The intelligence agencies like to make mysterious noises about all the attacks they've averted, but we never see any evidence to back up those claims.
State security is a dangerous thing. The very apparatus necessary to ensure total security is the same apparatus necessary to ensure totalitarian rule.
I can't speak for other countries, but we have much more pressing problems in America. Tens of thousands die every year on the highways due to drunk drivers; somewhere between one-sixth and one-third of all women will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lives; child abuse and neglect is rampant; the two leading causes of death for minors are murder and suicide. When we make progress on those fronts, then let's pour our resources into chasing a handful of terrorist acts. Until then, don't tread on me.
As legal counsel for the Pythagoras estate, I am obliged to advise all of the Slashdotters participating in this discussion that the use of the word Cube(tm) is a violation of Pythagorean intellectual property rights, along with the the use of Tetrahedron(tm), Octahedron(tm), Dodecahedron(tm), and Icosahedron(tm), all of which are inseparable components of the Platonic Solids(tm) suite. Moreover, the use of two- or three-dimensional derivatives of our intellectual property (commonly known as "square", "rectangle", and the general class of "rectilinear solids") without payment of royalties is an actionable offense.
To avoid the expense of a prolonged legal battle (such as that endured by the RPG community, which had been making unauthorized use of the Platonic Solids(tm) suite in the form of "dice"), please remit US$2.50 for each HTML table cell you have used, and US$1.00 per pixel in applicable video modes (we will be happy to advise you which VGA modes have square pixels).
Jeeze, you have no idea how much of a burden Napster has been for the school district I work for. One high school alone completely saturated a gigabit pipe for the better part of a week until we got it under control -- I'll spare you the tale of the clandestine Linux servers stuffed up above the acoustic ceiling tiles(!).
That being said, I'm basically sympathetic with the cause of those who want access to free MP3s. You've got to have either crappy speakers or partial hearing loss to think that MP3 is a substitute for buying the CD, and I've bought quite a bit of stuff this year I first heard on one of the MP3 binary newsgroups.
What's really cool, IMHO, is what mp3.com does for unknown artists, combining MP3's with the DAM CDs that the artists actually get a substantial cut from. (And no, I'm not affiliated with MP3.com). I've gotten a big kick out of being able to listen exclusively to unsigned local bands, and I've bought a lot of CDs so far.
Napster's a little hard to feel sorry for. You can bitch all you want about the avarice of the major labels -- and you'd be right on -- but Napster's doing the same thing as the members of the RIAA: trying to make money by ripping off artists. Or worse, actually, since artists can choose to reject a record contract if they want; participation in Napster is involuntary. Maybe it helps sales, maybe not, but it's still a crappy way to act. Unlike MP3.com, Napster doesn't even make a serious attempt to help the artists hawk their wares.
And hey, I'm glad you discovered Elton John. But Neil Diamond? Can Napster be that good if you now have Neil Diamond CDs on your shelf next to Black Flag?
The Newton's handwriging recognition is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's excellent.
It couldn't recognize my handwriting for squat. And for a programmer, I have pretty neat handwriting. But YMMV, if the praise some people give the Newton is any indication. My Southern accent confuses the hell out of speech recognition programs, but they seem to work okay for the Californians who designed them.:)
Personally, I type at 78 wpm, so HWR is pretty well useless for me. OTOH, it would be nice if there were a good, general purpose tablet machine with long battery life and a high-resolution display. I'd use it in lieu of a Rocket eBook, and maybe play MAME games with it. Of course, if it comes from Apple, it'll be too expensive and incompatible with, well, just about everything else. But perhaps some PC maker will rip off the design.
Just dont code the bitch. Your neighborhood harassed admin will thank you.
Amen to that. Script kiddies are just that -- ethically impaired children who might know just enough to install RedHat and launch a script from the commandline after having it explained to them ten or twelve times on some IRC channel. Very, very few of them have the knowledge necessary to build their own tools.
I'm all for full disclosure in much the same way that I am all for well-regulated gun ownership. Keeping the info flowing is one thing, but it's quite another to mass-distribute cracking software to script kiddies, just as there is a difference between licensing adults to own guns and just leaving a case of handguns in a high school locker room.
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, though, while I've never been a member of the "data wants to be free" crowd, it's not hard to see how most forms of intellectual property are going to be ruthlessly abused by the suits and that, in the end, the drawbacks of IP are going to outweigh its benefits. This hardly means IP rights are going to go away or be scaled back to reasonable levels, but they could, and they should.
In this particular case, these turkeys don't have a leg to stand on. Even if they did, who gives a rat's patootie? The market of end users these guys are trying to reach is so much larger than the smattering of hackers who need or want a barcode scanner. I have no use for one. I'm having trouble thinking of what I could possibly use it for beyond gee-whiz value. For most business applications I have at present, I'd use a different scanner along with shrinkwrapped software to interface with my shrinkwrapped POS and inventory control software. (At least until someone writes a real free retail system!)
Finally, I really wish that the suits would read their marketroids' press releases. Spelling and grammar are significant. It doesn't matter much to me if the comments in your source code are written in proper English (in fact, that would make me wonder!), but if your marketing people are semi-literate, that makes me wonder about your management. When I worked for [three-letter broadcaster omitted], I was constantly amazed by the sub-fourth-grade language skills demonstrated in corporate press releases. And believe me, it strongly influenced how I perceived and dealt with their reps. In most cases, I was obliged to assume they were idiots. In the case of Digital Convergence, the content alone would have been enough.
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DNS was never designed to be a locator service. It was designed to attach names to hosts that are easier to memorize than dotted-decimal IP addresses.
To be frank, the only good reason for DNS is to make it easier to change IP addresses without having to notify everyone and his brother. People have been getting along with ten digit (xxx) xxx-xxxx phone numbers for years; Joe Sixpack can handle IP addresses just fine, and in fact might get along better with an arbitrary number than trying to remember whether Oxford University is www.oxford.edu, oxford-university.uk, or, as it happens, www.ox.ac.uk. (I think the Brits enjoy their Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic domain names, but I digress.)
Besides, most people click on a link to get to a site. Do tech support for awhile, and you'll be appalled to discover how many users don't know they can enter a literal domain name into their browsers.
Sure, DNS has been a nice mnemonic tool, but it has become a prime example of why private business interests cannot be trusted to act in the public interest. Even if businessmen could somehow be relied on to behave fairly and decently in the face of the profit motive, some disputes just can't be resolved fairly because there are only so many meaningful names for the same type of business. Take my father's company, The Art Store, located at www.artstoreplus.com because www.theartstore.com and www.artstore.com were both already taken, and there are several dozen other small art supply companies in the US called "The Art Store" who will no doubt eventually want domain names. I don't think a clunky domain name like www.theartstore.podunk.tx.com.us is any better than a phone number or a raw IP address.
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Defendant Pavlovich is a leader in the so-called 'open source' movement, which is dedicated to the proposition that material, copyrighted or not, should be made available over the Internet for free."
Open Source/Free Software nitpicking aside, Open Source -- ahem -- Open Source(tm) is a trademark of the Open Source(tm) Initiative. To say that the Open Source(tm) movement actively encourages criminal activity is defamatory and actionable and demonstrably does harm to the Open Source(tm) trademark and the interests of the businesses that endorse it.
At least, I know if a bunch of Hollywood lawyers called a press conference to accuse freakin' IBM of actively encouraging criminal activity, seismographs on the other side of the planet would be able to detect the rumbling herd of bulk-cloned attorneys pouring from the sluice gates of the vast monolith that is Big Blue.
So maybe the OSI can get their lawyers -- uh, lawyer -- to get off his duff and act like a real corporate attorney.
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Y'all expected what exactly from a platform advocacy magazine? C'mon, the average Mac advocate, whether they're a clueless fsck like this author or one of the more technically proficient Mac fans, is going to proclaim whatever Apple shovels out as the greatest thing since sliced bread even if it's one of Steve Jobs' turds encased in translucent green plastic.
Apple people love their Macs. Granted, it's in the way that a parent can be fiercely devoted to their severely retarded firstborn, but that's how it is. And a magazine that makes money by helping Apple sell more Macs isn't likely to print an article titled Doh! I Wish I Had a Commandline!
What's annoying here is that another clueless luser is appropriating a term with a long tradition and misusing it because, well, he's a boorish luser. If you got him alone, you'd have to start by explaining that the PC case is not a "CPU" or a "hard drive" long before you got around to defining an operating system. Ignore this crap.
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That way, the egcs (now gcc) team could incorporate some code (mostly optimizations I guess) in gcc.
I rather doubt any code from Watcom would be immediately portable to gcc's rather different architecture. That will not, however, stop gcc's developers from studying the Watcom source code to extract algorithms that could be applied to gcc.
I agree that the GPL would be better, but let's not forget that there are applications of open source code that run beyond cut-and-paste.
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Perl is the king of text processing languages (no contest)
Any language X is the best at Y thread ought to result in the spontaneous combustion of the poster's terminal. From a technical standpoint, you could make a pretty strong argument that Icon is a much better text processing language (and a better language in general) than Perl, and that Oberon's Juice JVM is structurally better-suited to delivering high-performance platform-independent binaries. Of course, you won't hear much about them -- or dozens of other great technologies -- because developers seize on the first thing they like and congeal and harden around it, forever after ignoring anything else that comes along. The popularity of programming languages and other technologies has next to nothing to do with technical considerations and everything to do with the same instinct that makes 13-year-old girls decide they all like Britney Spears simultaneously. Of course, software engineers can typically provide more compelling-sounding arguments for why they closed their minds as soon as they found Language X.
Maybe this is unavoidable in the relatively conservative, unimaginative corporate world -- the help wanted section in twenty years may still consist of a set of twenty or so acronyms repeated over and over -- but there's no excuse for it in the (let's face it) largely unpaid world of free software. Get out more.
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- For any sufficiently popular class of application, free alternatives will be developed.
- At least one free alternative will eventually be "good enough" for the majority of users.
- As application classes mature, it becomes harder and harder for proprietary software developers to find meaningful new features to add; ergo, the free alternatives will always achieve parity with their commercial equivalents.
In the end, proprietary software ceases to have any advantage over free software. While this will probably seldom apply to more specialized software, it will be the rule for general purpose apps. In many cases, we already have parity except for the interface. Lout's typesetting engine is vastly superior to MS Word's engine, but no one has yet written a WYSIWYG front end for it. PostgreSQL and MySQL can outperform flippin' Access, but no one has yet written a RAD tool for them. And Gnumeric is within a hair's breadth of kicking Excel's hairy arse, and can arguably be said to have reached the "good enough" stage. And Evolution will almost certainly blow past Outlook, if you're into that sort of thing.We have a way to go, but MS would have to purchase enough congressmen to outlaw free software to prevent what is otherwise inevitable.
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- The informal and formal forms of "you" (du and Sie). Perhaps you would use du with your PC, but I don't know I'd feel comfortable being so informal with an AS/400...
:)
- German doesn't quite have a generic "go" verb like English; one chooses a verb based on mode of transportation, which might be gehen, fahren or even fliegen or reiten, though perhaps springen would be more appropriate here...
- Most languages' distribution of default verb/preposition pairings is pretty arbitrary and not likely to make much sense to non-native speakers. The English preposition "to" gets translated to zu or nach (among others) in German depending on the verb and how it's used. Not that English is any less arbitrary, but it tends to rely on a smaller number of core prepositions.
I'm only being half-serious here, of course, but I think English, which has a less rigid word order than some other languages, is in some ways better suited as a source for the strange constructs of programming languages than a more rigid, highly inflected language. That being said, initial familiarity with the natural language on which a programming language is based probably only gains you the most minute and temporary of advantages. I'd probably be just as comfortable with C's smattering of reserved words if they were all in another language, or even just nonsense words. Where the language barrier really gets you are variable names and comments.--
Damn. Amiga bashing is cool nowadays,
;)
Don't be silly. Amiga bashing was cool ten years ago, too, but we had to wait until the third or fourth time someone threatened to revive the machine as a point-and-drool set-top box before we could really score some yuks.
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Hmm... I may have to take another look at Postgres. I've been using MySql in the name of speed and because, for what I'm doing these days, I don't really need Postgres' more advanced features. I had heard that Postgres was slow as hell and a serious resource hog, but I'll have to do some testing of my own. Is there a Postgres admin here who'd like to tell us what kind of resources Postgres demands? After all, the horror stories I've heard might have been coming from people trying to run it on a 386 with 6 megs of RAM.
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What are you, high? We here at AmigaRut Industries have been working for friggin' years to bring a hardware MOD player to market! The advantages are obvious -- with such a small file size, you can fit tens of thousands of derivative, unimaginative techno dance tracks on a single CD at a sound quality that approaches a rusty gramophone being played through a walkie-talkie sealed inside of a ziplock bag and submerged in a toilet!
I guess the lack of press coverage for AmigaRut's products is just another lamentable sign of the media conspiracy against forward-thinking Amiga-friendly companies striving to keep the hype alive for the latest, most bleeding-edge 80's technology.
Unfortunately, our MOD player has been delayed because we have been working to incorporate not only S3M files, but also the old Apple II faux-stereo PCM files, complete with a codec that faithfully reproduces the wonderful warm, buzzy sound of the Apple II system speaker.
You're not going to find value like that in any johnny-come-lately MP3 player, bucko!
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It's a pity that so much of the Linux/Free Software/Open Source community is so absorbed in this fin de siecle rush for the friggin' almighty dollar that you don't often hear much from the crowd that kept the personal computer going back in the days when it wasn't good for much: the hobbyist hacker. It sure wasn't the Unix crowd, who dripped contempt on our "toy" machines back then.
I feel confident that I can speak for at least a few of my ilk when I say that the wonder of Linux is that it has given us something we can tinker with -- for free -- and learn down to the most minute detail if you feel so inclined. It's possible to play with Linux in ways that are terrifically difficult with Windows and which have always been impossible with Mac OS. When Apple deep-sixed their CLI-driven Apple II series in favor of the Macintosh, a lot of us swore never to get vendor-locked again if we could help it. After nearly more than a decade of waiting for an opportunity to play and explore again, Linus Torvalds and company gave us that chance.
I know the dot-com-wannabe crowd will probably sneer at that, but hell, money isn't much good if you aren't having fun. I'm having fun again. Thanks, free-software-programmers!
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Amen to that, brother!
I've been asked to do similar things for the school district I work for, but thus far I have been able to stall and put it off; fortunately, it's not presently a big issue where I am.
When it gets to be, then I'll quit. Yeah, it'll suck, but it's not like I'm being asked to pick up an M-16 and go to the front lines. If your ideals are so weak that they'll fold in the face of financial hardship, why bother having ideals at all? You have to ask yourself, "If I'm willing to sell out freedom of expression in exchange for a consulting fee, what will else will I sell out, and how cheaply?"
The previous poster who suggested that refusal to compromise would lead to a miserable existence is mistaken in this instance. There are plenty of jobs available that don't involve censorship. Pick one, and sleep well.
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Unpopular information is dropped from the system.
The real flaw of Freenet, IMHO, isn't the potential for revisionism, it's the idea that only popular information is valuable. That might make sense in a market context, but it doesn't really have any place in an intellectual context if by "intellectual" you mean to imply a search for truth instead just popularity. Moreover, it is often the most revolutionary, cutting-edge, ahead-of-their-time ideas that are the most unpopular.
At one time, the ideas of democracy and freedom of speech were extremely unpopular ideas. In some places, they still are. Freenet-like systems would not have helped the rise of democracy very much. Mind you, it's great to see that popular ideas will be more resistant to government/corporate suppression, but they already were. It is ideas held by small minorities that are the most vulnerable.
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For one, it means that instead of researching an area that will do little but stimulate the mind of the professor and his little grad students, they are more likely to put out a product that will have impact far outside of academia.
Except that it is not always possible to determine the impact of research when it is first performed. This is why large corporations like IBM, Lucent, and AT&T have their own laboratories performing primary research on topics whose profit potential is uncertain at best. Having the profit imperative drive research is to limit scientific discovery only to the obvious. It is worth noting that as late as fifty years ago, computers were considered -- by top IBM management, no less -- to be special-purpose devices that would never be sold in significant numbers.
In order to find the gems, you have to sift through a lot of gravel. Short-sighted greed is almost always self-defeating.
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This does not mean, however, that the source code will be made public - but it's a step in the right direction.
Yes, but in what sense do we really know what the damn thing does without the source code? Even if the FBI was totally honest -- a dubious proposition at best -- specifications are not programs. Short of building your specification in some sort of formal language and having it translated into code, there's no way to guarantee compliance with the spec. Everyone who's ever worked on a large project knows how hard it is to make sure the code matches the specs, and how hard it is, for that matter, to design unambiguous specs. That's a cornerstone of computer science, friends.
Publishing the source is the only way we can be sure of what Carnivore does. And yeah, it's probably just a run-of-the-mill packet sniffer with a few specialized extensions, but we don't know that without the code.
"I dunno if data wants to be free, but I sure as hell do!"
If bad press appears about Micro$oft, an M$ marketroid will respond to it, and generally speaking, the trade press will cover it. If bad press appears about Linux, we all sit around and gripe on Slashdot, and the press couldn't care less because, no matter how numerous we may be, we're not individually big corporations.
So where are our big commercial allies now? IBM purports to be basing a big chunk of its strategy on Linux, so why isn't an IBM marketroid out there in front to deflate MS (and MS-shill) FUD? I'm sure we'll hear from the various distros on this point, but what about the big guns?
It would be one thing if a major like Big Blue just talked and spent no money, but they're spending millions yet remaining strangely silent. What gives?
Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians elebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective.
Except that it's not really a paradox. Open Source(tm), at least from the quasi-official position taken by Eric Raymond, is purely (and perhaps excessively) individualistic. The Open Source programmer programs for the adulation of his peers or to "scratch an itch", both essentially individual and arguably selfish motivations.
(Oh, and dear God, BTW, this isn't an Open Source vs. Free Software flame, just an observation, so put the lighter back in your pocket.)
Free Software, on the other hand, is built on collectivism. From Richard Stallman's quasi-official position, the Free Software programmer programs to share and eschews the notion of intellectual property, which is an essentially collectivist position.
Open Source ideology is basically a rehash of Reagan's "trickle down economics", whereby the unapologetically selfish pursuit of personal advancement generates fringe benefits for other people, in this case software. In fairness to the OSS community, unlike Reaganomics, the OSS version of trickle-down sometimes works (Perl, Apache) and sometimes not (Mozilla).
The real question, which is unlikely to be answered thanks to the political smoke surrounding it, is what the real strengths and weaknesses of the three models (Open Source, Free, Closed Source) are. Each has produced predominately different kinds of software and each has failed spectacularly at other kinds.
Double-clicking in a properly-designed GUI is done when activating one or more elements from a list. Single-clicking selects, double-clicking "does more".
Whoa there, Tex. Let's take a moment for a reality check. A user interface is a mode of communication, and in the case of GUI's, it's a largely gestural mode of communication.
Germans (and I presume other Europeans) seem to like counting beginning with the thumb; Americans begin with the index finger. Some tribes in Papua-New Guinea indicate tens by placing their fingers on the opposite forearm. Schoolchildren trained in finger math reckon ones on the right hand and tens on the left. Some Chinese speak Mandarin, but many people in Borneo speak Malay, while the bulk of Peru's rural population speaks Quechua in utter disregard to the peculiar dialect of Spanish spoken in the urban centers.
It may be that endless flamewars are fought over which of these modes is "better", but those people are just as silly as those who debate about the correct number of buttons on a friggin' mouse and how many times you have to click to select a paragraph.
The simple fact is that it's all arbitrarily learned behavior and, within reasonable limits, any initial learning curve is irrelevant in the face of the bizarrely crotchety resistance to any deviation that develops in people once they've learned one convention. It's the same instinct that has spawned wars over languages and custom since the dawn of time, but reduced to the level of infinitesimal trivia.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's patootie for the [1|2|3] button mouse debate; I want an affordable version of one of those twenty-button pucks that comes on high-end digitizer tablets so I can do some real work with my mouse, but I'm not suggesting anyone else do likewise 'less you feel like it. If, for some reason, you feel compelled to let other people dictate the details of your life for you, forget mice and 1) take public transportation, 2) recycle more, and 3) refrain from buying products with excess packaging, or 4) anything else that actually matters.
No, I have seen Mac's and I love them, because you really get the feeling that it is a work of true love to the user
Hm. When I use an open source application that one or more people put thousands of hours into and then gave away for the benefit of the world at large, that's love. When I have to pay some smarmy vendor in Cupertino for a pretty-but-vacuous operating system running on overpriced, underpowered, closed-standard hardware, that's soliciting prostitution.
They'll all say they love you if you pay 'em enough. But it's only the ones that don't require money who mean it.
In the last century, the democracies of the world fought innumerable wars, with tens of millions of casualties, to prevent the loss of our freedoms at the hands of fascism and communism. No one suggested that we surrender our freedoms to Hitler or Stalin in order to avoid battlefield casualties. But today, the governments of the English-speaking countries and more than a few of our European allies are suggesting that we surrender our freedoms to avoid a few dozen deaths a year from terrorism. What a crock!
Freedom comes at the price of bloodshed, folks. And these days, it's surprising little bloodshed. Terrorism exists precisely because the enemies of freedom lack the power to do significant damage, so they concentrate on some high-profile but not especially great carnage. Terrorism should be suppressed to the best of our ability, of course, but please bear in mind that more people die in domestic disputes every night in America than die in terrorist attacks in a decade. Terrorism is only an issue because we allow ourselves to be panicked by a few crazies.
In the one case that could have been a major terrorist disaster -- the World Trade Center bombing -- the disaster was averted by the ignorance of the terrorists, not Carnivore. The intelligence agencies like to make mysterious noises about all the attacks they've averted, but we never see any evidence to back up those claims.
State security is a dangerous thing. The very apparatus necessary to ensure total security is the same apparatus necessary to ensure totalitarian rule.
I can't speak for other countries, but we have much more pressing problems in America. Tens of thousands die every year on the highways due to drunk drivers; somewhere between one-sixth and one-third of all women will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lives; child abuse and neglect is rampant; the two leading causes of death for minors are murder and suicide. When we make progress on those fronts, then let's pour our resources into chasing a handful of terrorist acts. Until then, don't tread on me.
As legal counsel for the Pythagoras estate, I am obliged to advise all of the Slashdotters participating in this discussion that the use of the word Cube(tm) is a violation of Pythagorean intellectual property rights, along with the the use of Tetrahedron(tm), Octahedron(tm), Dodecahedron(tm), and Icosahedron(tm), all of which are inseparable components of the Platonic Solids(tm) suite. Moreover, the use of two- or three-dimensional derivatives of our intellectual property (commonly known as "square", "rectangle", and the general class of "rectilinear solids") without payment of royalties is an actionable offense.
To avoid the expense of a prolonged legal battle (such as that endured by the RPG community, which had been making unauthorized use of the Platonic Solids(tm) suite in the form of "dice"), please remit US$2.50 for each HTML table cell you have used, and US$1.00 per pixel in applicable video modes (we will be happy to advise you which VGA modes have square pixels).
Jeeze, you have no idea how much of a burden Napster has been for the school district I work for. One high school alone completely saturated a gigabit pipe for the better part of a week until we got it under control -- I'll spare you the tale of the clandestine Linux servers stuffed up above the acoustic ceiling tiles(!).
That being said, I'm basically sympathetic with the cause of those who want access to free MP3s. You've got to have either crappy speakers or partial hearing loss to think that MP3 is a substitute for buying the CD, and I've bought quite a bit of stuff this year I first heard on one of the MP3 binary newsgroups.
What's really cool, IMHO, is what mp3.com does for unknown artists, combining MP3's with the DAM CDs that the artists actually get a substantial cut from. (And no, I'm not affiliated with MP3.com). I've gotten a big kick out of being able to listen exclusively to unsigned local bands, and I've bought a lot of CDs so far.
Napster's a little hard to feel sorry for. You can bitch all you want about the avarice of the major labels -- and you'd be right on -- but Napster's doing the same thing as the members of the RIAA: trying to make money by ripping off artists. Or worse, actually, since artists can choose to reject a record contract if they want; participation in Napster is involuntary. Maybe it helps sales, maybe not, but it's still a crappy way to act. Unlike MP3.com, Napster doesn't even make a serious attempt to help the artists hawk their wares.
And hey, I'm glad you discovered Elton John. But Neil Diamond? Can Napster be that good if you now have Neil Diamond CDs on your shelf next to Black Flag?
The Newton's handwriging recognition is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's excellent.
:)
It couldn't recognize my handwriting for squat. And for a programmer, I have pretty neat handwriting. But YMMV, if the praise some people give the Newton is any indication. My Southern accent confuses the hell out of speech recognition programs, but they seem to work okay for the Californians who designed them.
Personally, I type at 78 wpm, so HWR is pretty well useless for me. OTOH, it would be nice if there were a good, general purpose tablet machine with long battery life and a high-resolution display. I'd use it in lieu of a Rocket eBook, and maybe play MAME games with it. Of course, if it comes from Apple, it'll be too expensive and incompatible with, well, just about everything else. But perhaps some PC maker will rip off the design.
Just dont code the bitch. Your neighborhood harassed admin will thank you.
Amen to that. Script kiddies are just that -- ethically impaired children who might know just enough to install RedHat and launch a script from the commandline after having it explained to them ten or twelve times on some IRC channel. Very, very few of them have the knowledge necessary to build their own tools.
I'm all for full disclosure in much the same way that I am all for well-regulated gun ownership. Keeping the info flowing is one thing, but it's quite another to mass-distribute cracking software to script kiddies, just as there is a difference between licensing adults to own guns and just leaving a case of handguns in a high school locker room.