Does this mean you are allowed to only have a peeled apple, or that you are allowed to have a peeled apple, in addition to other kinds of apples that are not mentioned in the agreement?
I think it is simply ambiguous wording and that no one should get upset until the wording has been clarified.
However, here is a pet theory: If Borland really is trying to limit the distribution of source, then it is probably because they feel that if you have the source and the binary of a program that was compiled with their compiler, then you can figure out some of the optimization algorithms that they might use. So they might want to try to prevent that by disallowing the distribution of the original source with binaries that their compiler has produced.
If this is the case, then it is completely lame.
But, it's all speculation on my part since I have no idea what they actually meant when they used the word "may" in their license...
I don't think you should let your fondness of Jon Postel blind you to the incredible lameness that is NSI. They suck. And it's not worth my time to point out all the reasons why they suck. Do a search on Slashdot for "Network Solutions" and you will find plenty of articles and comments detailing why this is so.
When I first started at CMU, in 1990, WM and X were both in use. When you logged on, the default.cshrc would ask you if you wanted to start X, or WM. It recommended that if you were on a workstation with more than 8 megabytes of RAM, you should run X, otherwise, WM.
In those days Unix was completely mystical to me and I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. At first I used WM because I was afraid there might not be more than 8 megs in the workstations I was using (old Sun 3_35 systems I believe) but eventually I graduated to X.
X and WM looked and behaved similarly, especially given that the majority of applications available were Andrew applications (clocks, email clients, the EZ (crappy) word processor, etc), and they looked and worked the same in both systems.
But here was the thing about WM: it had NO OVERLAPPING WINDOWS! Meaning that you could have multiple windows open, but they would all take up their own area of the screen. WM gave the illusion of a desktop since there was a small gap between windows through which you could see the desktop background (which was generally just black), but if you opened a new window, the others would shrink down to get out of its way. So you ended up with a sort of grid of non-overlapping windows on your display.
I remember that most of the CS geeks laughed at WM for that reason, and that it did not last long. By the time I was a junior, I think it had been retired.
I am a hardcore Linux guy but I think this is definitely true.
I am the only full-on Linux user where I work. We have had several new employees start who were enthusiastic about trying Linux; each time they tried it for a while and gave up on it, and I can't blame them. I gave them all the help I could but the Linux graphical "shells" (KDE, Gnome) are sooooo buggy it is ridiculous.
Seems to me that the people who make these graphical shells should focus on reducing the bugs rather than coming up with even more bells and whistles and eye candy. Also someone really needs to sit down and organize the released desktop; the default RedHat desktop install is so disorganized and impossible to find anything in, it's ridiculous. And did I mention that it's incredibly buggy?
I think that the very first thing that a Linux desktop needs to be able to do and able to do absolutely flawlessly is, download a RPM or similar package, install it with a few simple clicks, create a "shortcut" to run it on the desktop or in some program menu somewhere, and then run the program. This is what 90% of computer users do 90% of the time (with the running of software happening much more often than the installing, of course), and right now the graphical shells just plain SUCK at this.
I place the blame pretty much squarely with RedHat these days. They've got the money to make it right, but instead they are just going further and further off on a Linux fragmentation path. RedHat seems to think nothing of introducing more and more non-standard system configurations with each release. Surely they must realize that this will fragment Linux just as badly as Unix has traditionally have been fragmented, if not worse.
I love Linux but to be honest I don't see a very bright future for it unless those with the money and power to pull it all together start doing so.
Either way, I will stick with Linux, because even if its popularity faded and we ended up with just as many users as we had back in '94 when I started using Linux, I will still enjoy working on Linux and developing on Linux.
Of course, I'll probably still be using my ancient twm with my 8-year-old.twmrc, and doing everything from an xterm instead of Gnome or KDE or whatever. I would like to see Linux succeed in a desktop sense, simpy because as a software developer I'd rather work in an option, Unixish environment than a closed Windows environment. But since Linux is all open source it can never be taken away from me so I'm not too worried either...
1) A PR-200 in July of 1997 for my sister as a wedding present. It is still running strong and they use it almost every day. When I ask them if they want to upgrade, they ask why. Seems that the Cyrix 200 is still fast enough for them. Even Tomb Raider III runs well on it (with the original VooDoo card that I put in it).
2) An MII-300 last year for my neighbor, in a system that I gave them as a gift. They think it's plenty fast also.
Neither have had any problems whatsoever, except for the MII-300 which started crashing a few months after I foolishly overclocked it to 333. I clocked it back down to 300 and it was fine.
Also, my friend built a system with a PR-166 years ago that still works great (although it seems slow as molasses now).
Cyrix have great integer performance and a phenomenal price/performance ratio. Sure their floating point is lousy (or at least was), but who cares? So what if my Quake III can't draw frames faster than my monitor refresh? Even a Cyrix 200 is a decent gaming platform for most people.
BTW I am an AMD guy myself, have a K6-233, K6-2 300, and K6-III 400. Next upgrade will be an Athlon, of course.
"Awful" is too kind. He was a sophomore, so that can be excused. I guess it wasn't below average by sophomore standards.
But it's certainly not something to idolize.
It's called "being in the right place at the right time". Not talent, not skill. Just being in the right place at the right time.
And yes, I am bitter, because at that same time I was writing sophomore-quality code on other net projects (back before there was no web) and I never became a millionnaire.
Of course, one could say that I had my chance because I worked for the guy who wrote the original Lycos search engine, and founded the company; I could have been the first employee of Lycos. Then I would have made my millions and someone would be idolizing *me* for the crappy code I wrote way back then.
Keep in mind that writing a full-blown IP stack that works well in many, many, *many* situations, on many pieces of hardware, for many wildly different programs, is very different from writing one set of I/O routines (or video routines, or whatever) for one single program that you have complete control over.
I for one have never had any complaints about Linux's network performance, except that I've looked at the code before and it sure is ugly (alot of Linux code is horribly ugly though...).
Hey man, don't put yourself down. All of the people you mention are mere mortals also, and although their accomplishments may be great, there is nothing to say that, given a different situation (say, your own), they might not have accomplished what they did, or that if your situation were different (say, you had the same opportunities and experiences they did), you wouldn't have accomplished what they did.
Not to put anyone on your list down, but I don't think idolization of anybody is particularly healthy, beneficial, or even justified.
Just remember -
If you compare yourself with others, you will become vain or bitter, for there will always be those greater and lesser than yourself.
Not always true. I discovered a very specific and very blatant violation of the GPL - a guy was selling a library that was released under the GPL in binary-only form, with some "enhancements" (which were trivial it turned out), with a specific license forbidding all of the things that the GPL requires (such as decompilation), and without source code.
I wrote him to let him know that he was violating the GPL, and what steps he might take to correct this (i.e. what clauses of his license would need to be removed and how he would have to make source code available) and he responded with a very rude "who gives you the right to tell me what to do" type email.
So I wrote the FSF about it, and they didn't really do anything. They looked into it a little bit but said that unless the original author of the code wanted to sue (and he didn't - he had since written a new version of the lib and was basing a commercial, non-GPL'ed product on it, and couldn't care less about his old code and the GPL violation), they couldn't do anything.
I met RMS at a Linux User's Group meeting in NYC two years ago or so.
He is nice in person, but like other have said, he is focused. I went up to him to thank him for making emacs, which has done more to make me a productive programmer than just about anything (which I told him). He said thank you and told me that projects like that will not happen unless people like me program them.
Then he had dinner at a Chinese place nearby with a bunch of geeks (me included) and this is where it got kind of out of hand. RMS is nice but the cronies that flock to him can be a little much. The kind of boisterous geekiness that I thought I left behind in the computer clusters of CMU. At one point someone mentioned how he refused to have passwords on his computer at MIT and I was honestly intruiged to hear his reasoning behind this. But I didn't have a chance to ask the question because as soon as I tried the others started jumping down my throat for trying to bring up that "old, tired debate." I wasn't trying for that at all. I respect RMS and I just wanted to hear what he had to say about it, with possibly a little devil's-advocate prompting...
So RMS is nice, the people that congregate around him can be a little much if you ask me...
Also because those who were registered received no notification about the event until about a week beforehand.
Consider my case. I registered for the Bazaar in November of 1998 (!!!). I received a note at that time letting me know that they would fill me in when all of the details for the show were finalized.
I heard *nothing* about it (and in fact forgot about it completely) until one week before the show. Then I got a message on my answering machine from someone letting me know that I needed to go back to their site to confirm my registration.
By that time it was too late to make the appropriate plans to attend.
I think that the Bazaar would have been much better attended if anyone had actually been informed about it within a reasonable time frame... say a month or two before the event, so that people could make plans.
I already have. I asked my wife not to shop there, and although she has no clue (nor wants one) about software patents, she agreed...
It's very important that we take a stand against software patents.
BTW, there is also an effort going around to get anyone who is an administrator for any DNS server to add etoy.com in... another great effort to be a part of... if you are a DNS admin and want to know more please write me...
As far as I am aware, it was impossible for the average investor (i.e. most people) to get the stock at sub $250 prices.
I was watching my DLJ Direct account *very* closely in the minutes leading up to the opening of LNUX, and the very first price I saw for it was $248.
Needless to say, I didn't buy, and the limit order of $31 that I had put in earlier in the day didn't go through either:).
Alot of people *must* have gotten screwed, because AFAIK anyone who put in a market order on it before it opened got it at $250+, and it has pretty much dropped like a rock since then.
This is the way that Internet stocks are though. They are a way for a few lucky people to cash in without producing anything of value for the economy, while lots of other people who try to jump on the get-rich-quick bandwagon lose their shirts.
These types of stocks are basically swindles, as the only people who really make money are the VC firms who put out the inital outlay of cash and take the company public. They end up selling their share at a *highly* inflated value to a bunch of people who, due to greed or stupidity, or both, think that by giving VCs lots of money they themselves might make some too.
AltaVista used to be good, back when you could do a single search over the entire usenet space.
Now a usenet search simply returns the list of usenet groups which match your search.
I used to feel that altavista was one of the single most useful information sources on the planet. It went from being number one in my book to the bottom of the heap.
Anyone know of a good place (deja.com excluded, I don't like their searches) to do usenet-wide searches?
We have 15 inch LCDs at work which, when displaying non-native resolutions, do some kind of anti-aliasing (it must be the LCD doing it because the video card has no idea it's displaying to an LCD) which looks pretty good. Certainly not as bad as those monitors that just stretch every nth line to sum up to the required resolution.
Do IBM actually make the displays? If so that would be one thing "up" with IBM, as I am pretty sure Apple doesn't make any LCDs. They may put a different shell on the display and call it an Apple LCD, but I highly doubt they make LCDs. That 1600x1024 display sounds suspiciously like the SGI LCD display, which is also the same as a Radius display that we have at work. These are probably all manufactured by the same company, which is almost certainly not Apple or SGI.
Besides, LCDs are nice for their flatness, but they suck in just about every other area when compared to CRTs. LCDs have extremely limited viewing angle and generally poor refresh rates (no flicker per se, but if you drag an opaque window around on an LCD you will typically see a blur because the LCD cannot update its display nearly as fast as a CRT).
LCDs may seem cool but I would take a high quality CRT over an LCD any day of the week. For the $5000 or whatever these LCDs cost you could get an *incredible* CRT. Personally I don't see the point of these LCDs, except to look cool and impress non-technical types. Oh yeah, and because maybe current LCDs are just stepping stones to improved models which correct all of the LCD problems I mentioned.
I have to say I have my misgivings about Swing and about Sun's approach to the GUI aspects of Java altogether.
Swing is *big*, and *complicated*. Looking into its guts give one a strong feeling of "hack upon hack". AWT was bad, complex where complexity wasn't needed in many cases, but Swing is an order of magnitude worse in that arena.
I often get the feeling, when I look through the Swing JavaDocs, that the architects at Sun are trying to solve every possible problem in one framework. I think they would be much better off to focus on getting what they do *right*, as they do it. If you try to solve every possible problem at once, you will inevitably end up doing everything at a lower quality level than if you just focused on the most important problems at hand, and once they are nailed down, go on to bigger things.
One could say that that's what they did with AWT - they got the low level done and then the moved on to a more complicated, complete GUI framework. I would argue that they never got AWT right; instead they threw up their hands and said, "oh well", and then proceeded to build a huge monsterous framework on top of the weak foundation that they had built with AWT.
Consider this: setting a breakpoint in just about any GUI method of your Java Swing program will show a call stack at least a dozen calls, often two dozen calls, deep. To me, that's a very pointed indication of a framework that is too complex for its own good.
The last thing that Java needs is more bloat, because Java is already very sensitive when it comes to getting performance - you can get good performance in Java (nearly comparable to traditional compiled languages) but ONLY if you optimize the hell out of your Java code and keep those call stacks small. It seems that Sun would rather try to solve every single possible GUI problem in one framework than concentrate on making Java small, tight, solid, and fast, which I believe is what they should be doing, because as every Java developer knows, you have to fight tooth and nail to get Java in the same ballpark performance-wise as other languages (but it can be done - Sun is just making it harder and harder by throwing stuff like Swing at us).
The dictionary definition is wrong. It is impossible to be exempt from the power and control of another, unless you are the only person in the world who is free by this definition. No two people can be free by this definition since each one would simultaneously have to be free from the other's control while being free to control the other.
This is a useless definition. Freedom is really being exempt from the control of others, except where that control is excercised to prevent the interference with the freedom of another.
So there have to be some controls on what people can do, in order for everyone to be equally free. Stallman simply proposes one minimal set of rules for guaranteeing everyone's freedom (by the definition I put forth, not the dictionary definition) in the realm of software distribution.
You can take whatever pot shots you want to at Stallman, he has been preaching his ideals and practicing what he preaches for 15+ years now. The result has been lots of great free software (in the GPL definition of the word), including Linux, which is the best chance that we have to break away from the monopolistic world of Microsoft and Intel. And your contribution has been?
This license of yours (which sounds just like the BSD license to me) does not allow free action by your definitions either, because your definition of freedom is "zero restrictions on a person's actions" - but you are restricting a person's ability to distribute your code without putting your name in it.
The confusion about this whole freedom issue seems to center around a difference in definition of the word "free". Some people think freedom means no restrictions on actions whatsoever, meaning that anyone can do anything to anyone else, even impede their freedom (by in some way restricting their actions). Others think freedom means the fewest restrictions on your behavior possible which still guarantee that you don't restrict anyone else's actions either.
Your definition of freedom doesn't even make sense, as there is no way for two people to exist, both in such a state of freedom, at the same time. This is because the first's definition of freedom must allow him to impede the ability of the other to be free. You can only have 1 truly free person in the world by your definition of freedom.
Now that we know that the only meaninful definition of freedom must include some restrictions on every person's behavior (equally), the only interesting question is, what should those restrictions be?
Stallman thinks that as far as software licenses go, the GPL is exactly the minimum set of restrictions on behavior necessary to guarantee practical freedom.
Sendmail may not be as hard to configure as most people think, but it IS riddled with security holes. Or at least, has been in the past, and most likely is now and will be in the future.
Qmail is simple and elegant. I think that there are three basic problems with Qmail, however:
1. Because there is no one right way to do things in qmail, trying to set up anything nonstandard can be confusing, if only because the qmail site lists many, many different sources of documentation for qmail, each of which says to do something different. That means that you have to understand alot about qmail (and the 15 other daemons that people have written to monitor, start, log, stop, police, etc qmail) to know which parts of a particular piece of qmail documentation applies to your site (are you running splogger? Are you using watch? fastforward? daemontools? countless other bits and pieces which your installation of qmail may or may not have?).
2. The qmail author seems to want to rewrite everything rather than use anyone else's code. libc is not used in qmail (or if it is, only a teeny little bit), in preference to the author's very cryptic, bizarre, and almost completely undocumented "replacement". So hacking the qmail code means puzzling over very strange, nonobvious, and undocumented C functions.
3. qmail spawns a separate process for just about everything. Kinda reminds me of the early days of web servers which spawned a separate process for every connection. I can't see qmail scaling to very large sites with a multiple-processes-per-email model.
On the other hand, qmail is *very*, *very* secure, and is, like I said, simple to install (especially with the RPM). It is also very good about logging what it is doing and a single person can understand, without too much difficulty, what is going on in the qmail system. And its performance is certainly adequate for small to medium sized sites.
If you go to CMU, I have one word of advice for you:
PLAY RUGBY!
There's nothing like beating the pants off of PA/WV hicks who don't have anything to do at their hick schools except play rugby, and then coming back home after the game for a late night hack session...
Seriously, I don't know how anyone can doubt the credentials of CMU as a CS school. Forget the fact that I got one hell of a CS education there - the simple fact is that of all of the people I have worked with since college, the very best software developers by far have all been from CMU (ok there was one pretty good Stanford guy too).
I have never worked with anyone who went to MIT -- where do MIT CS grads end up? Not in software companies if my experience is anything to go by...
OK, before I get flamed here, let me say that I've gone back and looked at the last several stories that Roblimo posted and there hasn't been that much commentary in most of them.
That being said, I certainly have read news postings by him in the past few weeks that have been a bit too long-winded.
I have to say, being a long time Slashdot reader, I really don't like Roblimo's style. Whereas most other Slashdot news announcements identify the link with a little bit of commentary thrown in, Roblimo tends to write an entire paragraph with his opinion on almost every story in the announcement.
I find that kind of lame, when all of those who post Slashdot stories thus far have seen fit to simply announce the story with a little bit of Slashdot spin, Roblimo thinks everyone needs to hear every last detail of his opinion on the news item on the stories he posts (maybe not all the time, but much more than other posters).
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is wrong. The correct analogy is:
...
"You may have an apple, in peeled form only".
Does this mean you are allowed to only have a peeled apple, or that you are allowed to have a peeled apple, in addition to other kinds of apples that are not mentioned in the agreement?
I think it is simply ambiguous wording and that no one should get upset until the wording has been clarified.
However, here is a pet theory: If Borland really is trying to limit the distribution of source, then it is probably because they feel that if you have the source and the binary of a program that was compiled with their compiler, then you can figure out some of the optimization algorithms that they might use. So they might want to try to prevent that by disallowing the distribution of the original source with binaries that their compiler has produced.
If this is the case, then it is completely lame.
But, it's all speculation on my part since I have no idea what they actually meant when they used the word "may" in their license
I don't think you should let your fondness of Jon Postel blind you to the incredible lameness that is NSI. They suck. And it's not worth my time to point out all the reasons why they suck. Do a search on Slashdot for "Network Solutions" and you will find plenty of articles and comments detailing why this is so.
When I first started at CMU, in 1990, WM and X were both in use. When you logged on, the default .cshrc would ask you if you wanted to start X, or WM. It recommended that if you were on a workstation with more than 8 megabytes of RAM, you should run X, otherwise, WM.
In those days Unix was completely mystical to me and I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. At first I used WM because I was afraid there might not be more than 8 megs in the workstations I was using (old Sun 3_35 systems I believe) but eventually I graduated to X.
X and WM looked and behaved similarly, especially given that the majority of applications available were Andrew applications (clocks, email clients, the EZ (crappy) word processor, etc), and they looked and worked the same in both systems.
But here was the thing about WM: it had NO OVERLAPPING WINDOWS! Meaning that you could have multiple windows open, but they would all take up their own area of the screen. WM gave the illusion of a desktop since there was a small gap between windows through which you could see the desktop background (which was generally just black), but if you opened a new window, the others would shrink down to get out of its way. So you ended up with a sort of grid of non-overlapping windows on your display.
I remember that most of the CS geeks laughed at WM for that reason, and that it did not last long. By the time I was a junior, I think it had been retired.
I am a hardcore Linux guy but I think this is definitely true.
.twmrc, and doing everything from an xterm instead of Gnome or KDE or whatever. I would like to see Linux succeed in a desktop sense, simpy because as a software developer I'd rather work in an option, Unixish environment than a closed Windows environment. But since Linux is all open source it can never be taken away from me so I'm not too worried either ...
I am the only full-on Linux user where I work. We have had several new employees start who were enthusiastic about trying Linux; each time they tried it for a while and gave up on it, and I can't blame them. I gave them all the help I could but the Linux graphical "shells" (KDE, Gnome) are sooooo buggy it is ridiculous.
Seems to me that the people who make these graphical shells should focus on reducing the bugs rather than coming up with even more bells and whistles and eye candy. Also someone really needs to sit down and organize the released desktop; the default RedHat desktop install is so disorganized and impossible to find anything in, it's ridiculous. And did I mention that it's incredibly buggy?
I think that the very first thing that a Linux desktop needs to be able to do and able to do absolutely flawlessly is, download a RPM or similar package, install it with a few simple clicks, create a "shortcut" to run it on the desktop or in some program menu somewhere, and then run the program. This is what 90% of computer users do 90% of the time (with the running of software happening much more often than the installing, of course), and right now the graphical shells just plain SUCK at this.
I place the blame pretty much squarely with RedHat these days. They've got the money to make it right, but instead they are just going further and further off on a Linux fragmentation path. RedHat seems to think nothing of introducing more and more non-standard system configurations with each release. Surely they must realize that this will fragment Linux just as badly as Unix has traditionally have been fragmented, if not worse.
I love Linux but to be honest I don't see a very bright future for it unless those with the money and power to pull it all together start doing so.
Either way, I will stick with Linux, because even if its popularity faded and we ended up with just as many users as we had back in '94 when I started using Linux, I will still enjoy working on Linux and developing on Linux.
Of course, I'll probably still be using my ancient twm with my 8-year-old
I have built two systems with Cyrix chips:
1) A PR-200 in July of 1997 for my sister as a wedding present. It is still running strong and they use it almost every day. When I ask them if they want to upgrade, they ask why. Seems that the Cyrix 200 is still fast enough for them. Even Tomb Raider III runs well on it (with the original VooDoo card that I put in it).
2) An MII-300 last year for my neighbor, in a system that I gave them as a gift. They think it's plenty fast also.
Neither have had any problems whatsoever, except for the MII-300 which started crashing a few months after I foolishly overclocked it to 333. I clocked it back down to 300 and it was fine.
Also, my friend built a system with a PR-166 years ago that still works great (although it seems slow as molasses now).
Cyrix have great integer performance and a phenomenal price/performance ratio. Sure their floating point is lousy (or at least was), but who cares? So what if my Quake III can't draw frames faster than my monitor refresh? Even a Cyrix 200 is a decent gaming platform for most people.
BTW I am an AMD guy myself, have a K6-233, K6-2 300, and K6-III 400. Next upgrade will be an Athlon, of course.
Have you ever seen the httpd code?
"Awful" is too kind. He was a sophomore, so that can be excused. I guess it wasn't below average by sophomore standards.
But it's certainly not something to idolize.
It's called "being in the right place at the right time". Not talent, not skill. Just being in the right place at the right time.
And yes, I am bitter, because at that same time I was writing sophomore-quality code on other net projects (back before there was no web) and I never became a millionnaire.
Of course, one could say that I had my chance because I worked for the guy who wrote the original Lycos search engine, and founded the company; I could have been the first employee of Lycos. Then I would have made my millions and someone would be idolizing *me* for the crappy code I wrote way back then.
Keep in mind that writing a full-blown IP stack that works well in many, many, *many* situations, on many pieces of hardware, for many wildly different programs, is very different from writing one set of I/O routines (or video routines, or whatever) for one single program that you have complete control over.
...).
I for one have never had any complaints about Linux's network performance, except that I've looked at the code before and it sure is ugly (alot of Linux code is horribly ugly though
Hey man, don't put yourself down. All of the people you mention are mere mortals also, and although their accomplishments may be great, there is nothing to say that, given a different situation (say, your own), they might not have accomplished what they did, or that if your situation were different (say, you had the same opportunities and experiences they did), you wouldn't have accomplished what they did.
Not to put anyone on your list down, but I don't think idolization of anybody is particularly healthy, beneficial, or even justified.
Just remember -
If you compare yourself with others, you will become vain or bitter, for there will always be those greater and lesser than yourself.
Not always true. I discovered a very specific and very blatant violation of the GPL - a guy was selling a library that was released under the GPL in binary-only form, with some "enhancements" (which were trivial it turned out), with a specific license forbidding all of the things that the GPL requires (such as decompilation), and without source code.
t /ObfuscatePage
I wrote him to let him know that he was violating the GPL, and what steps he might take to correct this (i.e. what clauses of his license would need to be removed and how he would have to make source code available) and he responded with a very rude "who gives you the right to tell me what to do" type email.
So I wrote the FSF about it, and they didn't really do anything. They looked into it a little bit but said that unless the original author of the code wanted to sue (and he didn't - he had since written a new version of the lib and was basing a commercial, non-GPL'ed product on it, and couldn't care less about his old code and the GPL violation), they couldn't do anything.
And that was that.
BTW, in case you are wondering, the library was Hashjava, the guilty party is Neil Aggarwal, the URL for the guilty product (Obfuscate & Obfuscate Pro) is
http://www.JAMMConsulting.com/servlets/JAMMServle
If you've got the time and the inclination, write Neil and give him hell.
I met RMS at a Linux User's Group meeting in NYC two years ago or so.
...
...
He is nice in person, but like other have said, he is focused. I went up to him to thank him for making emacs, which has done more to make me a productive programmer than just about anything (which I told him). He said thank you and told me that projects like that will not happen unless people like me program them.
Then he had dinner at a Chinese place nearby with a bunch of geeks (me included) and this is where it got kind of out of hand. RMS is nice but the cronies that flock to him can be a little much. The kind of boisterous geekiness that I thought I left behind in the computer clusters of CMU. At one point someone mentioned how he refused to have passwords on his computer at MIT and I was honestly intruiged to hear his reasoning behind this. But I didn't have a chance to ask the question because as soon as I tried the others started jumping down my throat for trying to bring up that "old, tired debate." I wasn't trying for that at all. I respect RMS and I just wanted to hear what he had to say about it, with possibly a little devil's-advocate prompting
So RMS is nice, the people that congregate around him can be a little much if you ask me
Also because those who were registered received no notification about the event until about a week beforehand.
... say a month or two before the event, so that people could make plans.
Consider my case. I registered for the Bazaar in November of 1998 (!!!). I received a note at that time letting me know that they would fill me in when all of the details for the show were finalized.
I heard *nothing* about it (and in fact forgot about it completely) until one week before the show. Then I got a message on my answering machine from someone letting me know that I needed to go back to their site to confirm my registration.
By that time it was too late to make the appropriate plans to attend.
I think that the Bazaar would have been much better attended if anyone had actually been informed about it within a reasonable time frame
I already have. I asked my wife not to shop there, and although she has no clue (nor wants one) about software patents, she agreed ...
... another great effort to be a part of ... if you are a DNS admin and want to know more please write me ...
It's very important that we take a stand against software patents.
BTW, there is also an effort going around to get anyone who is an administrator for any DNS server to add etoy.com in
As far as I am aware, it was impossible for the average investor (i.e. most people) to get the stock at sub $250 prices.
:).
I was watching my DLJ Direct account *very* closely in the minutes leading up to the opening of LNUX, and the very first price I saw for it was $248.
Needless to say, I didn't buy, and the limit order of $31 that I had put in earlier in the day didn't go through either
Alot of people *must* have gotten screwed, because AFAIK anyone who put in a market order on it before it opened got it at $250+, and it has pretty much dropped like a rock since then.
This is the way that Internet stocks are though. They are a way for a few lucky people to cash in without producing anything of value for the economy, while lots of other people who try to jump on the get-rich-quick bandwagon lose their shirts.
These types of stocks are basically swindles, as the only people who really make money are the VC firms who put out the inital outlay of cash and take the company public. They end up selling their share at a *highly* inflated value to a bunch of people who, due to greed or stupidity, or both, think that by giving VCs lots of money they themselves might make some too.
AltaVista used to be good, back when you could do a single search over the entire usenet space.
Now a usenet search simply returns the list of usenet groups which match your search.
I used to feel that altavista was one of the single most useful information sources on the planet. It went from being number one in my book to the bottom of the heap.
Anyone know of a good place (deja.com excluded, I don't like their searches) to do usenet-wide searches?
We have 15 inch LCDs at work which, when displaying non-native resolutions, do some kind of anti-aliasing (it must be the LCD doing it because the video card has no idea it's displaying to an LCD) which looks pretty good. Certainly not as bad as those monitors that just stretch every nth line to sum up to the required resolution.
Do IBM actually make the displays? If so that would be one thing "up" with IBM, as I am pretty sure Apple doesn't make any LCDs. They may put a different shell on the display and call it an Apple LCD, but I highly doubt they make LCDs. That 1600x1024 display sounds suspiciously like the SGI LCD display, which is also the same as a Radius display that we have at work. These are probably all manufactured by the same company, which is almost certainly not Apple or SGI.
Besides, LCDs are nice for their flatness, but they suck in just about every other area when compared to CRTs. LCDs have extremely limited viewing angle and generally poor refresh rates (no flicker per se, but if you drag an opaque window around on an LCD you will typically see a blur because the LCD cannot update its display nearly as fast as a CRT).
LCDs may seem cool but I would take a high quality CRT over an LCD any day of the week. For the $5000 or whatever these LCDs cost you could get an *incredible* CRT. Personally I don't see the point of these LCDs, except to look cool and impress non-technical types. Oh yeah, and because maybe current LCDs are just stepping stones to improved models which correct all of the LCD problems I mentioned.
I have to say I have my misgivings about Swing and about Sun's approach to the GUI aspects of Java altogether.
Swing is *big*, and *complicated*. Looking into its guts give one a strong feeling of "hack upon hack". AWT was bad, complex where complexity wasn't needed in many cases, but Swing is an order of magnitude worse in that arena.
I often get the feeling, when I look through the Swing JavaDocs, that the architects at Sun are trying to solve every possible problem in one framework. I think they would be much better off to focus on getting what they do *right*, as they do it. If you try to solve every possible problem at once, you will inevitably end up doing everything at a lower quality level than if you just focused on the most important problems at hand, and once they are nailed down, go on to bigger things.
One could say that that's what they did with AWT - they got the low level done and then the moved on to a more complicated, complete GUI framework. I would argue that they never got AWT right; instead they threw up their hands and said, "oh well", and then proceeded to build a huge monsterous framework on top of the weak foundation that they had built with AWT.
Consider this: setting a breakpoint in just about any GUI method of your Java Swing program will show a call stack at least a dozen calls, often two dozen calls, deep. To me, that's a very pointed indication of a framework that is too complex for its own good.
The last thing that Java needs is more bloat, because Java is already very sensitive when it comes to getting performance - you can get good performance in Java (nearly comparable to traditional compiled languages) but ONLY if you optimize the hell out of your Java code and keep those call stacks small. It seems that Sun would rather try to solve every single possible GUI problem in one framework than concentrate on making Java small, tight, solid, and fast, which I believe is what they should be doing, because as every Java developer knows, you have to fight tooth and nail to get Java in the same ballpark performance-wise as other languages (but it can be done - Sun is just making it harder and harder by throwing stuff like Swing at us).
That's what the LGPL is for. You can make a library available under LGPL and then anyone who links against it is not under the LGPL or GPL.
The dictionary definition is wrong. It is impossible to be exempt from the power and control of another, unless you are the only person in the world who is free by this definition. No two people can be free by this definition since each one would simultaneously have to be free from the other's control while being free to control the other.
This is a useless definition. Freedom is really being exempt from the control of others, except where that control is excercised to prevent the interference with the freedom of another.
So there have to be some controls on what people can do, in order for everyone to be equally free. Stallman simply proposes one minimal set of rules for guaranteeing everyone's freedom (by the definition I put forth, not the dictionary definition) in the realm of software distribution.
You can take whatever pot shots you want to at Stallman, he has been preaching his ideals and practicing what he preaches for 15+ years now. The result has been lots of great free software (in the GPL definition of the word), including Linux, which is the best chance that we have to break away from the monopolistic world of Microsoft and Intel. And your contribution has been?
This license of yours (which sounds just like the BSD license to me) does not allow free action by your definitions either, because your definition of freedom is "zero restrictions on a person's actions" - but you are restricting a person's ability to distribute your code without putting your name in it.
The confusion about this whole freedom issue seems to center around a difference in definition of the word "free". Some people think freedom means no restrictions on actions whatsoever, meaning that anyone can do anything to anyone else, even impede their freedom (by in some way restricting their actions). Others think freedom means the fewest restrictions on your behavior possible which still guarantee that you don't restrict anyone else's actions either.
Your definition of freedom doesn't even make sense, as there is no way for two people to exist, both in such a state of freedom, at the same time. This is because the first's definition of freedom must allow him to impede the ability of the other to be free. You can only have 1 truly free person in the world by your definition of freedom.
Now that we know that the only meaninful definition of freedom must include some restrictions on every person's behavior (equally), the only interesting question is, what should those restrictions be?
Stallman thinks that as far as software licenses go, the GPL is exactly the minimum set of restrictions on behavior necessary to guarantee practical freedom.
I agree.
No, it does NOT.
...
No more usenet-wide searches, which was the most useful feature of AltaVista, or of any search site, hands down.
DejaNews doesn't cut it for usenet searches because they just don't seem to index everything
Sendmail may not be as hard to configure as most people think, but it IS riddled with security holes. Or at least, has been in the past, and most likely is now and will be in the future.
Qmail is simple and elegant. I think that there are three basic problems with Qmail, however:
1. Because there is no one right way to do things in qmail, trying to set up anything nonstandard can be confusing, if only because the qmail site lists many, many different sources of documentation for qmail, each of which says to do something different. That means that you have to understand alot about qmail (and the 15 other daemons that people have written to monitor, start, log, stop, police, etc qmail) to know which parts of a particular piece of qmail documentation applies to your site (are you running splogger? Are you using watch? fastforward? daemontools? countless other bits and pieces which your installation of qmail may or may not have?).
2. The qmail author seems to want to rewrite everything rather than use anyone else's code. libc is not used in qmail (or if it is, only a teeny little bit), in preference to the author's very cryptic, bizarre, and almost completely undocumented "replacement". So hacking the qmail code means puzzling over very strange, nonobvious, and undocumented C functions.
3. qmail spawns a separate process for just about everything. Kinda reminds me of the early days of web servers which spawned a separate process for every connection. I can't see qmail scaling to very large sites with a multiple-processes-per-email model.
On the other hand, qmail is *very*, *very* secure, and is, like I said, simple to install (especially with the RPM). It is also very good about logging what it is doing and a single person can understand, without too much difficulty, what is going on in the qmail system. And its performance is certainly adequate for small to medium sized sites.
If you go to CMU, I have one word of advice for you:
...
...
PLAY RUGBY!
There's nothing like beating the pants off of PA/WV hicks who don't have anything to do at their hick schools except play rugby, and then coming back home after the game for a late night hack session
Seriously, I don't know how anyone can doubt the credentials of CMU as a CS school. Forget the fact that I got one hell of a CS education there - the simple fact is that of all of the people I have worked with since college, the very best software developers by far have all been from CMU (ok there was one pretty good Stanford guy too).
I have never worked with anyone who went to MIT -- where do MIT CS grads end up? Not in software companies if my experience is anything to go by
OK, before I get flamed here, let me say that I've gone back and looked at the last several stories that Roblimo posted and there hasn't been that much commentary in most of them.
That being said, I certainly have read news postings by him in the past few weeks that have been a bit too long-winded.
I have to say, being a long time Slashdot reader, I really don't like Roblimo's style. Whereas most other Slashdot news announcements identify the link with a little bit of commentary thrown in, Roblimo tends to write an entire paragraph with his opinion on almost every story in the announcement.
I find that kind of lame, when all of those who post Slashdot stories thus far have seen fit to simply announce the story with a little bit of Slashdot spin, Roblimo thinks everyone needs to hear every last detail of his opinion on the news item on the stories he posts (maybe not all the time, but much more than other posters).
Keep the noise down, Roblimo!