Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug User -> Reports breakage Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it. User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox. Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not. Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue. Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue. Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.
Con wrote some fantastic code that benchmarks over years constantly showed to be a huge improvement. Linus refused to incorporate good code.
Con maintained his patches separately, Even better, he took criticism on his work and sought to improve it. Time after time he made changes to his work to try and make it more acceptable to Linus. Linus rebuked Con and said not nice things. Con kept working.
This continued for years. Eventually Linus realized that Con was right on scheduler philosophy. But Linus couldn't admit that he had been an overbearing ass for the past three years on a technical issue where he was clearly wrong. He asked someone else to write a new scheduler from scratch rather than use one that has been tested for three years. When the new scheduler was hastily written, and Con's was faster, Linus said he only cared about superior code and making the right decision for the kernel. But he made sure to make several personal attacks on Con for good measure.
Logically, Linus inserted untested code that was still being developed in as the new scheduler. It didn't matter if it was technically inferior and unstable. His justification was that he felt the new code would be supported, where as Con would never support his code. This assertion flies in the face of Con supporting and improving his patches for years. I've contacted Con on his mailing list. He was always cordial, and willing to support people who wanted to use his patches. Nobody made Con support those patches. But he had the mailing list none the less.
There is no logical justification for taking inferior, untested, unstable code over superior, stable, tested code. Even worse, there was no reason for Linus to repeatedly attack Con personally and lie about him.
It is one thing to suggest Hans Reiser would abandon reiser4 the way he did reiser3. It is another to make baseless accusations at good developers.
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
Faster than XP? I've seen benchmarks, but a clean install of Windows 7 was slower than my old install of XP x64. 7 may be faster than Vista, but not XP.
It should be noted though that the Windows 7 MS is hyping for netbooks has MANY services disabled, where as they are comparing it to an XP that hasn't be similarly optimized.
The main topic is iTunes. Someone joking said iTunes and all Apple products are a virus. I went on a tangent. Is it off the main topic? Yes. Is it completely off topic? Well, no.
People can feel free to mod it off topic if they so desire. But frankly, tangents are just a reality in Slashdot.
Actually the parent is wrong. Software that claims it needs administrator rights rarely if ever does need it.
Individual processes can be elevated, and usually the app just needs access to write to a folder. Setting those individual rights is far better than allowing all apps to run as administrator.
It is a weekly snapshot build. That doesn't mean that it is actually really unstable. I run weekly snapshots of KDE 4.3, OpenOffice, Firefox, wine, etc. from openSUSE repositories.
I really wanted an Android phone, but T-Mobile isn't in Omaha.
The Palm Pre was next on my list. I went to Best Buy last month, and they said they wouldn't get any more shipments until August. The initial shipment also had hardware problems apparently.
And while Web OS looks interesting, there aren't nearly as many apps available.
Tell that to Mac users back in the System 6 and 7 days, who had access to a free antivirus program which detected suspicious behavior.
This is different from an anti-virus scanner.
What do you mean? Link?
Are you incapable of using Google? Heck, many virus scans can be fooled simply by padding an executable so it doesn't match a hash.
Nah, nobody runs that shit.
AVG must be out of business if no one runs their commercial product.
Way to contradict your point #1.
I'm discussing two different types of apps. Please attempt to follow the discussion.
I have about reached my limit of frustration with Linux, because I use a laptop.
My wife uses Linux exclusively on her laptop. She has done so on her past couple of laptops over the years with ATI and Nvidia graphics.
I've never needed to reboot to activate a second display. I'm really not familiar with the problems you're describing.
Literally, I've found that tons of hardware "just works" better with Linux than Windows. I don't download or hunt down drivers. Most printers I plug in are just detected and work. Heck, in Vista you can't even get drivers for most older printers.
What distro were you running?
Try this LiveCD, and tell me if you run into any problems.
I really don't like Apple as a company, but I broke down and got an iPhone. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love the concept of the App Store, but browsing it is a pain. I can see popular apps at the top, but I can't do a power search, or browse by user ratings. I can't put contacts into groups. I can't edit my address book or calendar from iTunes. Syncing with Outlook is broken. Synching with Yahoo is broken. I had to create a new Gmail account, dump my contacts into that, edit them in Gmail, and sync them back, and then certain fields like birthdays wouldn't transfer over.
I can't transfer files or documents to my phone because the damned thing is so locked down for "security" reasons (ie, we're concerned you might pirate apps, even though jailbreaking is easy). The calendar app is a joke, as with the contacts portion. As a smart-phone platform, the iPhone is pretty shoddy.
As a music/gaming/internet device, the iPhone is pretty slick. Safari is fast and simple, though on a small screen, they should have a full-screen mode. They finally wised up and added a landscape keyboard (ages after Google was showing it in Android dev kits and phones), except most places in the OS, and most apps won't allow you to use it. You can't change the small smattering of SMS tones. They didn't add multimedia messaging until the 3.0 release of the software. They just finally added voice memos.
You can't place apps in categories, or theme the dashboard. Overall, I keep hearing how Apple's UI is the best in the world and they just do everything right. I enjoy my iPhone, don't get me wrong. But this UI leaves a lot to be desired.
Anti-virus programs have false positives all the time over stupid shit.
1 - Inherently, an anti-virus can only scan against a database of known problems. New problems won't be detected. 2 - It has been demonstrated that it is VERY easy to spoof detection. 3 - AVG did far worse recently when the firewall portion of their full internet security suite installed drivers for each network connection you had. Said drivers would cause Windows to BSOD. The only solution was to uninstall AVG. I assume that would be a bigger story than a false positive.
If you're really worried about security, don't run with admin rights, run with a resident program that detects possible changes and stops them before they happen, or better yet, run Linux.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but it certainly sounded like you intended that to mean "the only free software is public domain".
True freedom is a lack of restrictions. Immediately after that I said, however, there is a trade-off. You don't get protection for your work. I advocate that each creator make a decision that they are happy with, trading off restrictions that they feel are necessary to protect their work.
My point is that RMS speaks out against restrictions. He calls them inherently evil, and yet he employs them. He calls one specific set of restrictions freedom. This is an inherent contradiction. For a man who is adamant about semantics, he sure doesn't understand the definition of freedom.
I don't claim to know what the perfect license is, nor do I advocate one license exclusively. What little coding I've done on game projects, I've released under a CC license.
However, I take offense at RMS claiming his license is perfect and all others aren't truly free. I take offense at RMS blasting Mozilla, Google, Ubuntu, etc. for not being free by his definition. Mozilla, Google and Ubuntu are greatly furthering the causes of free software, and he treats them like villains.
The area where clarity is lacking is in how this takes away any choice from you personally.
I've never said he succeeded in removing choice from me. I said he is attempting to remove choice from me. That is enough to warrant my concern. If I hear Congress is going to throw the Constitution out the window (not that this would be any different from any other day) should I be concerned when they make the attempt, or should I wait until they succeed?
Honestly, how can you defend his statements that users should be deprived of choice simply by saying that he hasn't succeeded? What I'm objecting to are his statements.
...and none of which Richard is proposing be removed.
There are several posts on his site where he proposes exactly that. He asks distros to remove choice from the user, and he asks Mozilla to remove choice from the user.
Note, I'm not saying piracy should be advocated. My parent post in this thread was saying that I no longer support piracy. I believe in paying to support creators.
Which is why I point out the contradiction between your goal and your choices. Because universal adherence to the GPL is the only thing that can truly free you from others telling you what software you can use.
Do you understand what the word contradiction means? What about free?
If I limit myself, remove choice from myself, and bind myself, then I'm free?
I have stated with clarity repeatedly that he has railed against distros which include "non-free" software, and Mozilla for allowing "non-free" extensions. He has called for them to eliminate this choice. He has said any user that doesn't run 100% GPL software isn't free.
God forbid anyone listen to him, or take him seriously. What is Ubuntu listened to him and blocked all "non-free" software? For a while, they certainly made it harder to install what you want.
The one time I tried Kubuntu on my wife's laptop, we need madwifi, which wasn't included because it was non-free. It wasn't in a repository to install automatically. I wanted to compile my own kernel, but then it wouldn't load synaptics, mad-wifi or the ATI driver without a restricted-drivers-module package. Ubuntu didn't provide a source package for me to make my own, nor did they obviously provide one for the kernel I made on my own. So I couldn't load my proprietary packages. When I asked on the Ubuntu forums, I was flamed for even considering to run non-free drivers. I said this is my wife's laptop. It had the hardware it has, and I need it to work. There was no working OSS solution for accelerated graphics, nor wifi. A moderator on the Ubuntu forums literally told me I should divorce my wife for having hardware without OSS drivers. That my friend, is zealotry.
I advocated allowing each developer the freedom to choose the license that suits them, and allowing each user the freedom to decide what software they want to install. That is precisely the exact opposite of zealotry. I don't want to advocate my opinions onto others. Let them make their own decisions.
When Stallman decries other OSS licenses as not being free, because they provide fewer restrictions and more choice, it is abundantly clear that he does not understand the definition of the word free.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reading the thread. This is my take.
Cox -> submits code which apparently caused a bug
User -> Reports breakage
Cox -> Can't replicate breakage and asks user for debug info so he can fix it.
User -> Says they don't know what to debug for, but is willing to work with Cox.
Linus -> Jumps in and calls Cox's code a buggy piece of shit before any debugging took place, and before it is established if the code is buggy or not.
Cox -> Continues to troubleshoot the issue.
Linus -> Flames Cox personally and says Cox is unwilling to work on the issue.
Cox -> Takes his ball and goes home, except in this case, it is OSS so he doesn't really take any ball with him. He just leaves.
If you refuse to use software developed by a person who flamed someone else, then I assume you're not familiar with Theo de Raadt?
And frankly if you prefer BSD, more power to you. Use what you want.
Which is why I suggested that perhaps this is simply human nature and unavoidable. Personality conflicts are going to happen. People aren't perfect.
Con wrote some fantastic code that benchmarks over years constantly showed to be a huge improvement. Linus refused to incorporate good code.
Con maintained his patches separately, Even better, he took criticism on his work and sought to improve it. Time after time he made changes to his work to try and make it more acceptable to Linus. Linus rebuked Con and said not nice things. Con kept working.
This continued for years. Eventually Linus realized that Con was right on scheduler philosophy. But Linus couldn't admit that he had been an overbearing ass for the past three years on a technical issue where he was clearly wrong. He asked someone else to write a new scheduler from scratch rather than use one that has been tested for three years. When the new scheduler was hastily written, and Con's was faster, Linus said he only cared about superior code and making the right decision for the kernel. But he made sure to make several personal attacks on Con for good measure.
Logically, Linus inserted untested code that was still being developed in as the new scheduler. It didn't matter if it was technically inferior and unstable. His justification was that he felt the new code would be supported, where as Con would never support his code. This assertion flies in the face of Con supporting and improving his patches for years. I've contacted Con on his mailing list. He was always cordial, and willing to support people who wanted to use his patches. Nobody made Con support those patches. But he had the mailing list none the less.
There is no logical justification for taking inferior, untested, unstable code over superior, stable, tested code. Even worse, there was no reason for Linus to repeatedly attack Con personally and lie about him.
It is one thing to suggest Hans Reiser would abandon reiser4 the way he did reiser3. It is another to make baseless accusations at good developers.
There are other sites that mirror the LKML, right? Can someone please post other links?
Please mod parent up
http://xkcd.com/323/
Linus is brilliant. He is funny. Most days I really agree with anything he has to say.
However, he has butted heads with people in the past. Perhaps this is just human nature and unavoidable from time to time. Linus isn't perfect, nor always right. I thought he was really unfair to Con Kolivas when he drove Con away.
Um, I just went through the article and XP was faster in basically every bench mark.
What feature does 7 provide you that is a huge benefit over XP, especially on a netbook?
Faster than XP? I've seen benchmarks, but a clean install of Windows 7 was slower than my old install of XP x64. 7 may be faster than Vista, but not XP.
It should be noted though that the Windows 7 MS is hyping for netbooks has MANY services disabled, where as they are comparing it to an XP that hasn't be similarly optimized.
The main topic is iTunes. Someone joking said iTunes and all Apple products are a virus. I went on a tangent. Is it off the main topic? Yes. Is it completely off topic? Well, no.
People can feel free to mod it off topic if they so desire. But frankly, tangents are just a reality in Slashdot.
Actually the parent is wrong. Software that claims it needs administrator rights rarely if ever does need it.
Individual processes can be elevated, and usually the app just needs access to write to a folder. Setting those individual rights is far better than allowing all apps to run as administrator.
It is a weekly snapshot build. That doesn't mean that it is actually really unstable. I run weekly snapshots of KDE 4.3, OpenOffice, Firefox, wine, etc. from openSUSE repositories.
I really wanted an Android phone, but T-Mobile isn't in Omaha.
The Palm Pre was next on my list. I went to Best Buy last month, and they said they wouldn't get any more shipments until August. The initial shipment also had hardware problems apparently.
And while Web OS looks interesting, there aren't nearly as many apps available.
That's why I ended up with the iPhone.
Tell that to Mac users back in the System 6 and 7 days, who had access to a free antivirus program which detected suspicious behavior.
This is different from an anti-virus scanner.
What do you mean? Link?
Are you incapable of using Google? Heck, many virus scans can be fooled simply by padding an executable so it doesn't match a hash.
Nah, nobody runs that shit.
AVG must be out of business if no one runs their commercial product.
Way to contradict your point #1.
I'm discussing two different types of apps. Please attempt to follow the discussion.
I have about reached my limit of frustration with Linux, because I use a laptop.
My wife uses Linux exclusively on her laptop. She has done so on her past couple of laptops over the years with ATI and Nvidia graphics.
I've never needed to reboot to activate a second display. I'm really not familiar with the problems you're describing.
Literally, I've found that tons of hardware "just works" better with Linux than Windows. I don't download or hunt down drivers. Most printers I plug in are just detected and work. Heck, in Vista you can't even get drivers for most older printers.
What distro were you running?
Try this LiveCD, and tell me if you run into any problems.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/KDE4-UNSTABLE-Live.x86_64-1.2.98-Build1.1.iso
Fair enough, but rating should be weighted in a meaningful way.
A new app with 1 person rating it 1 or 5 stars shouldn't count as much as 1,000 ratings of 4 stars.
I really don't like Apple as a company, but I broke down and got an iPhone. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love the concept of the App Store, but browsing it is a pain. I can see popular apps at the top, but I can't do a power search, or browse by user ratings. I can't put contacts into groups. I can't edit my address book or calendar from iTunes. Syncing with Outlook is broken. Synching with Yahoo is broken. I had to create a new Gmail account, dump my contacts into that, edit them in Gmail, and sync them back, and then certain fields like birthdays wouldn't transfer over.
I can't transfer files or documents to my phone because the damned thing is so locked down for "security" reasons (ie, we're concerned you might pirate apps, even though jailbreaking is easy). The calendar app is a joke, as with the contacts portion. As a smart-phone platform, the iPhone is pretty shoddy.
As a music/gaming/internet device, the iPhone is pretty slick. Safari is fast and simple, though on a small screen, they should have a full-screen mode. They finally wised up and added a landscape keyboard (ages after Google was showing it in Android dev kits and phones), except most places in the OS, and most apps won't allow you to use it. You can't change the small smattering of SMS tones. They didn't add multimedia messaging until the 3.0 release of the software. They just finally added voice memos.
You can't place apps in categories, or theme the dashboard. Overall, I keep hearing how Apple's UI is the best in the world and they just do everything right. I enjoy my iPhone, don't get me wrong. But this UI leaves a lot to be desired.
My wife has New Kids on the Block CDs still. I'm terrified I'll catch something from her.
Anti-virus programs have false positives all the time over stupid shit.
1 - Inherently, an anti-virus can only scan against a database of known problems. New problems won't be detected.
2 - It has been demonstrated that it is VERY easy to spoof detection.
3 - AVG did far worse recently when the firewall portion of their full internet security suite installed drivers for each network connection you had. Said drivers would cause Windows to BSOD. The only solution was to uninstall AVG. I assume that would be a bigger story than a false positive.
If you're really worried about security, don't run with admin rights, run with a resident program that detects possible changes and stops them before they happen, or better yet, run Linux.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but it certainly sounded like you intended that to mean "the only free software is public domain".
True freedom is a lack of restrictions. Immediately after that I said, however, there is a trade-off. You don't get protection for your work. I advocate that each creator make a decision that they are happy with, trading off restrictions that they feel are necessary to protect their work.
My point is that RMS speaks out against restrictions. He calls them inherently evil, and yet he employs them. He calls one specific set of restrictions freedom. This is an inherent contradiction. For a man who is adamant about semantics, he sure doesn't understand the definition of freedom.
I don't claim to know what the perfect license is, nor do I advocate one license exclusively. What little coding I've done on game projects, I've released under a CC license.
However, I take offense at RMS claiming his license is perfect and all others aren't truly free. I take offense at RMS blasting Mozilla, Google, Ubuntu, etc. for not being free by his definition. Mozilla, Google and Ubuntu are greatly furthering the causes of free software, and he treats them like villains.
The area where clarity is lacking is in how this takes away any choice from you personally.
I've never said he succeeded in removing choice from me. I said he is attempting to remove choice from me. That is enough to warrant my concern. If I hear Congress is going to throw the Constitution out the window (not that this would be any different from any other day) should I be concerned when they make the attempt, or should I wait until they succeed?
Honestly, how can you defend his statements that users should be deprived of choice simply by saying that he hasn't succeeded? What I'm objecting to are his statements.
...and none of which Richard is proposing be removed.
There are several posts on his site where he proposes exactly that. He asks distros to remove choice from the user, and he asks Mozilla to remove choice from the user.
Note, I'm not saying piracy should be advocated. My parent post in this thread was saying that I no longer support piracy. I believe in paying to support creators.
Which is why I point out the contradiction between your goal and your choices. Because universal adherence to the GPL is the only thing that can truly free you from others telling you what software you can use.
Do you understand what the word contradiction means? What about free?
If I limit myself, remove choice from myself, and bind myself, then I'm free?
That my friend is a contradiction.
I never once advocated public domain.
I have stated with clarity repeatedly that he has railed against distros which include "non-free" software, and Mozilla for allowing "non-free" extensions. He has called for them to eliminate this choice. He has said any user that doesn't run 100% GPL software isn't free.
God forbid anyone listen to him, or take him seriously. What is Ubuntu listened to him and blocked all "non-free" software? For a while, they certainly made it harder to install what you want.
The one time I tried Kubuntu on my wife's laptop, we need madwifi, which wasn't included because it was non-free. It wasn't in a repository to install automatically. I wanted to compile my own kernel, but then it wouldn't load synaptics, mad-wifi or the ATI driver without a restricted-drivers-module package. Ubuntu didn't provide a source package for me to make my own, nor did they obviously provide one for the kernel I made on my own. So I couldn't load my proprietary packages. When I asked on the Ubuntu forums, I was flamed for even considering to run non-free drivers. I said this is my wife's laptop. It had the hardware it has, and I need it to work. There was no working OSS solution for accelerated graphics, nor wifi. A moderator on the Ubuntu forums literally told me I should divorce my wife for having hardware without OSS drivers. That my friend, is zealotry.
I advocated allowing each developer the freedom to choose the license that suits them, and allowing each user the freedom to decide what software they want to install. That is precisely the exact opposite of zealotry. I don't want to advocate my opinions onto others. Let them make their own decisions.
When Stallman decries other OSS licenses as not being free, because they provide fewer restrictions and more choice, it is abundantly clear that he does not understand the definition of the word free.
So because he has made positive contributions, he is entitled to take away my freedom of choice?
And we shouldn't be concerned?
Keep drinking the Kool-Aid.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't pirate a lot of software in my youth, and I'm not a liar.