I don't think Stallman is pushing for GPL3 in Linux. I think he believes that GPL3 is a better license, unsurprisingly, but if Linus is against it, so what? the point of the free software movement is for there to be a free alternative to non-free software. GPL2 is certainly free, so the Linux kernel is going to remain free, and anyhow, won't Hurd go to GPL3 eventually?
The Tivo comment you make is surely a bit of a Troll? Sure, they're just trying to make a buck, and nothing wrong with that, but making a buck out of someone else's work is a less morally secure position.
The Free Software People want licenses that make the source available for social/political reasons, because they believe that the general purpose computer is too important a tool to allow anyone to control it.
The Open Source People want licenses that make the source available for practical reasons, because they believe that doing so makes for better software.
These are two seperate groups, and while their needs and aims often coincide, they don't always. Linus is an open source person, so he is leery of GPL3 because he suspects, rightly I think, that some of the changes will not make for better software. No surprises there.
But at our company we use Netsupport Manager, which amongst many useful features has an option to require the user sitting at the computer to click a button to allow the support engineer to connect. This allows us to reassure the user that we won't take over their computer without their knowledge.
Calling it hell is a bit strong, surely? Your e-mail works, doesn't it? And given that you didn't read the system requirements before upgrading, that's a lot more than you deserve!
So let me get this straight, your e-mail is critical, but you're storing it on a cheap disk, in a PC, and not backing it up via the corporate backup system, bypassing all their procedures and checks and safeguards, and yet we IT people are the friggin' idiots?
You're still not getting it, I'm afraid. IT professionals prefer for the place the data lives not to break in the first place. That's why we use SCSI, not SATA or IDE.
We use SCSI, and RAID-5 it with a hot spare, and have a cold server on standby. That solution: a) breaks less than your does b) when it breaks is just as recoverable as yours is. so it wins.
But you don't have to back up a 450Gb mail store every night. You don't have to try and restore it in a crisis. If everyone in your company was using a hammer to drive screws in, would it be wrong to try and change this behaviour?
They don't have the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA (although they have an Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement), the US Marshals, or BATF.
Hmm, did you notice above that USSS (i.e. Secret Service) is part of them? Which means that they do have federal juristiction over financial fraud. (The protecting POTUS thing is just something they do in their spare time)
They also, interestingly, have a department of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties: Daniel W. Sutherland is in charge. You'd think that being a Civil Rights lawyer who works for the Government would be difficult, but he's managed it for almost 20 years...
Ah, paranoic ravings then. The internet is great, isn't it.
Come to think of it, one I use a lot wouldn't switch - High Wycombe East, which you can only leave westbound and join eastbound, for some bizzare reason.
I once read somewhere - it may be fact, it may be the ravings of a paranoiac - that every motorway junction in the UK has been deliberately designed to still work if we changed to driving on the right...
The thing you must remember about the Sun is that it's staff are very skillful and clever people and do not print stuff because they are evil; they print it because that is what people buy.
No, it's because when a serious bank, warehouse, or whatever finds an application that works, they leave it the hell alone. Suppose they do an upgrade. One of two things will happen: 1) New version still works, and looks nicer. 2) New version no longer works.
"Others are skeptical saying that many new technologies, such as the printing press, bar-codes, and several others, have also created fears about the beginning of the end."
Actually, I'm not skeptical because of that very poor argument, I tend more to being skeptical because it's all a load of made up baloney.
Don't worry tooth, help is at hand. If you go into your Slashdot preferences (link to the top left, just under your name) you'll find an option to let you prevent his articles from ever appearing on the front page for you.
Dear Lord, I googled off to find out how long Daikatana took to make, and discovered there is a http://www.planetdaikatana.com/! There are user created levels and everything!
There wasn't any hype. "Come and see some fun new products" was all they said. How exactly could they have played it any less? "We've some new stuff, it's pretty crappy, but someone might want it I suppose."
And they could have hyped this. Look, they announced the switch to Intel last year and said they'd have Intel Macs in June this year. It's March, and already they have a mid-range desktop, high-end notebook, and two low-end desktop machines out.
I am thinking book style rather than rolling up, because you need the device to be easy to hold when open.
Next after this is a HUD built into a pair of glasses, with a BT link to the machine. That's a little further in the future, I think, but is the best solution. The display then become snot only larger, but can be more useful because it can overlay on your existing vision.
This is doable now, but not small enough yet, especially since you'd need earphones, a microphone, and a camera in the same unit. Power will also be a problem, a cable to the CPU will be clunky, although v1 will no doubt have this.
One nice feature of this is that it allows the processing unit to be bigger. I could clip e.g. three ipods to the back of my belt without discomfort.
Now, leaving hardware aside for the moment, let's address the next aspect of this device - it must run a "real" OS. To be more accurate, it must run real PC applications.
Let me explain. Who makes the perfect PDA? Well, no-one, but there is a company that makes a PDA that is almost perfect - just one feature missing. That company is Apple, and the product is the 12" ibook, and the missing feature is that you can't put it in your pocket. If you are the sort of person who carrys a shoulder bag with you all the time, the powerbook is the perfect PDA, as otehr slashdot users will attest. The key here, is that it runs all the software a real PC does. Now, on my smartphone there is a web browser, and a spreadsheet, and a word processor, and a PIM, and they're all OK, but I already have the browser and PIM and so on I want, and they're on my PC. I want those same programs on my PDA.
Heres my last observation, we will see these things very soon. There's an interview with Warren Ellis (http://www.warrenellis.com/) I read a while back about when he was making the Global Frequency TV pilot.
At this point you should really go away and get copies of the Global Frequency books,but in case you don't, I'll explain that in the books the main characters use highly sophisticated smartphones to communicate.
A year or two later they make the TV show, and they had to rethink the capabilites of these smartphones because you could buy something about as powerful as the book version in any high street.
The technology is nearly there... Consider a device the size of a first generation ipod. OK, not as tiny as a nano but still a tiny device you can carry about without problems. Now imagine that you can open it like a book and have a flexible screen that covers the hinge. You'd easily get around a 5.5" diagonal screen, which would easily do 800x600 resolution. I can remember when my laptop did that resolution - heck, I have users today who still run their screens in that res, even on a 17" flat panel!
Well, the smartphone is in many cases more than a PDA with a phone in it. There are indeed such devices - regular PDAs with phone capability built in. And many people like them. Problem is, they aen't the shape or size of a cellphone.
Queue huge ammounts of effort to make a PDA the size of a cellphone, with fair sucess I think. My Sony P910 is the size and shape of a large cellphone, and I can live with that. The screen is smaller than a Palm, but it's big enough for what I need it for.
If I needed smaller still, then I could give up the touchscreen and use a Symbian Series 60 device, which is the size of a regular cellphone. These devices are surprisingly capable - Steve Lichfield, for example, just moved the Nokia 6630 to the top of his Symbian PDA A-List - http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/alistcurrent.htm
Slashdot Mirror
He's not really even a programmer, he's more a product manager. One of the best product managers in the world, of course.
I don't think Stallman is pushing for GPL3 in Linux. I think he believes that GPL3 is a better license, unsurprisingly, but if Linus is against it, so what? the point of the free software movement is for there to be a free alternative to non-free software. GPL2 is certainly free, so the Linux kernel is going to remain free, and anyhow, won't Hurd go to GPL3 eventually?
The Tivo comment you make is surely a bit of a Troll? Sure, they're just trying to make a buck, and nothing wrong with that, but making a buck out of someone else's work is a less morally secure position.
Well, these are the two camps.
The Free Software People want licenses that make the source available for social/political reasons, because they believe that the general purpose computer is too important a tool to allow anyone to control it.
The Open Source People want licenses that make the source available for practical reasons, because they believe that doing so makes for better software.
These are two seperate groups, and while their needs and aims often coincide, they don't always. Linus is an open source person, so he is leery of GPL3 because he suspects, rightly I think, that some of the changes will not make for better software. No surprises there.
But at our company we use Netsupport Manager, which amongst many useful features has an option to require the user sitting at the computer to click a button to allow the support engineer to connect. This allows us to reassure the user that we won't take over their computer without their knowledge.
Calling it hell is a bit strong, surely? Your e-mail works, doesn't it? And given that you didn't read the system requirements before upgrading, that's a lot more than you deserve!
This thread is going to give me nightmares...
So let me get this straight, your e-mail is critical, but you're storing it on a cheap disk, in a PC, and not backing it up via the corporate backup system, bypassing all their procedures and checks and safeguards, and yet we IT people are the friggin' idiots?
You're still not getting it, I'm afraid. IT professionals prefer for the place the data lives not to break in the first place. That's why we use SCSI, not SATA or IDE.
We use SCSI, and RAID-5 it with a hot spare, and have a cold server on standby. That solution:
a) breaks less than your does
b) when it breaks is just as recoverable as yours is.
so it wins.
But you don't have to back up a 450Gb mail store every night. You don't have to try and restore it in a crisis. If everyone in your company was using a hammer to drive screws in, would it be wrong to try and change this behaviour?
Integration is another factor. I like being able to drag an e-mail onto my calendar to make an appointment, etc.
You can look at http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/ed itorial_0644.xml to see a sort of org chart for Homeland Security. They own Customs, Immigration, TSA, FEMA, USSS, Air Marshals, Coast Guard, and various other things.
They don't have the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA (although they have an Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement), the US Marshals, or BATF.
Hmm, did you notice above that USSS (i.e. Secret Service) is part of them? Which means that they do have federal juristiction over financial fraud. (The protecting POTUS thing is just something they do in their spare time)
They also, interestingly, have a department of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties: Daniel W. Sutherland is in charge. You'd think that being a Civil Rights lawyer who works for the Government would be difficult, but he's managed it for almost 20 years...
Ah, paranoic ravings then. The internet is great, isn't it.
Come to think of it, one I use a lot wouldn't switch - High Wycombe East, which you can only leave westbound and join eastbound, for some bizzare reason.
Heh, got me! One of the many perils of posting to Slashdot when in bed. (My gf can provide a lis tof the others if you like)
You know, for years I used to genuinely think that the word "outage" was actually spelt/pronounced "outrage".
I once read somewhere - it may be fact, it may be the ravings of a paranoiac - that every motorway junction in the UK has been deliberately designed to still work if we changed to driving on the right...
The thing you must remember about the Sun is that it's staff are very skillful and clever people and do not print stuff because they are evil; they print it because that is what people buy.
No, it's because when a serious bank, warehouse, or whatever finds an application that works, they leave it the hell alone. Suppose they do an upgrade. One of two things will happen:
1) New version still works, and looks nicer.
2) New version no longer works.
The benfits on 1 do not outway the disaster of 2.
They're so up themselves, they've started overhyping things in secret! I mean, diabolical.
But the rack is *far* more important than the toaster. Burnt toast I can live with, in fact I like it now and again, but soggy toast - yeuch!
"Others are skeptical saying that many new technologies, such as the printing press, bar-codes, and several others, have also created fears about the beginning of the end."
Actually, I'm not skeptical because of that very poor argument, I tend more to being skeptical because it's all a load of made up baloney.
Don't worry tooth, help is at hand.
If you go into your Slashdot preferences (link to the top left, just under your name) you'll find an option to let you prevent his articles from ever appearing on the front page for you.
Dear Lord, I googled off to find out how long Daikatana took to make, and discovered there is a http://www.planetdaikatana.com/! There are user created levels and everything!
There wasn't any hype. "Come and see some fun new products" was all they said. How exactly could they have played it any less? "We've some new stuff, it's pretty crappy, but someone might want it I suppose."
And they could have hyped this. Look, they announced the switch to Intel last year and said they'd have Intel Macs in June this year. It's March, and already they have a mid-range desktop, high-end notebook, and two low-end desktop machines out.
I am thinking book style rather than rolling up, because you need the device to be easy to hold when open.
Next after this is a HUD built into a pair of glasses, with a BT link to the machine. That's a little further in the future, I think, but is the best solution. The display then become snot only larger, but can be more useful because it can overlay on your existing vision.
This is doable now, but not small enough yet, especially since you'd need earphones, a microphone, and a camera in the same unit. Power will also be a problem, a cable to the CPU will be clunky, although v1 will no doubt have this.
One nice feature of this is that it allows the processing unit to be bigger. I could clip e.g. three ipods to the back of my belt without discomfort.
Now, leaving hardware aside for the moment, let's address the next aspect of this device - it must run a "real" OS. To be more accurate, it must run real PC applications.
Let me explain. Who makes the perfect PDA? Well, no-one, but there is a company that makes a PDA that is almost perfect - just one feature missing. That company is Apple, and the product is the 12" ibook, and the missing feature is that you can't put it in your pocket. If you are the sort of person who carrys a shoulder bag with you all the time, the powerbook is the perfect PDA, as otehr slashdot users will attest. The key here, is that it runs all the software a real PC does. Now, on my smartphone there is a web browser, and a spreadsheet, and a word processor, and a PIM, and they're all OK, but I already have the browser and PIM and so on I want, and they're on my PC. I want those same programs on my PDA.
Heres my last observation, we will see these things very soon. There's an interview with Warren Ellis (http://www.warrenellis.com/) I read a while back about when he was making the Global Frequency TV pilot.
At this point you should really go away and get copies of the Global Frequency books,but in case you don't, I'll explain that in the books the main characters use highly sophisticated smartphones to communicate.
A year or two later they make the TV show, and they had to rethink the capabilites of these smartphones because you could buy something about as powerful as the book version in any high street.
Flexible LCD screens.
The technology is nearly there... Consider a device the size of a first generation ipod. OK, not as tiny as a nano but still a tiny device you can carry about without problems. Now imagine that you can open it like a book and have a flexible screen that covers the hinge. You'd easily get around a 5.5" diagonal screen, which would easily do 800x600 resolution. I can remember when my laptop did that resolution - heck, I have users today who still run their screens in that res, even on a 17" flat panel!
Well, the smartphone is in many cases more than a PDA with a phone in it. There are indeed such devices - regular PDAs with phone capability built in. And many people like them. Problem is, they aen't the shape or size of a cellphone.
Queue huge ammounts of effort to make a PDA the size of a cellphone, with fair sucess I think. My Sony P910 is the size and shape of a large cellphone, and I can live with that. The screen is smaller than a Palm, but it's big enough for what I need it for.
If I needed smaller still, then I could give up the touchscreen and use a Symbian Series 60 device, which is the size of a regular cellphone. These devices are surprisingly capable - Steve Lichfield, for example, just moved the Nokia 6630 to the top of his Symbian PDA A-List - http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/alistcurrent.htm
Siemens SP65. It's a Siemens S65 handset with the camera removed for people just like you. (It also has Bluetooth.)