Fine. If they prefer Windows or the Mac over Linux, they why try to convert them to Linux?
All OSes have tradeoffs. If you want to use Windows software on the Mac, you can't unless you run them in a cumbersome virtual machine. That's the price you pay for buying. The value the Mac gives you isn't worth the price you pay, then you *shouldn't* be using a Mac. The same can be said for Windows or Linux.
As much as you may want to have it all, you can't. That's life.
For me, the price of Windows became intollerable after Microsoft moved away from Windows 2000 and started making Windows a flashy appliance that's obscured by artificial restrictions and wizards "to help me".
For the most part, Linux just works for everything I need to do, so I made the switch and would never go back. Linux requires you to be a bit more tech savy than Windows. That's a given, but less so each year. IMO, it's gotten to the point that if you can do without a few codecs and a few devices and most games, it's a lot better than Windows.
But you value what's missing more than what you gain, then by all means, stay on Windows or the Mac. After all, true Linux users value freedom, and that includes the freedom to use something else.
I don't know Klingon. Heck, I don't like most Sci-Fi or Fantasy.and I haven't played games since Pac-man and space invaders were popular and I couldn't tell you the difference between a gnome, troll, or hobbit, so I'm clearly not the group ESR is criticising. Yet, I'm very critical of ESR for a few reasons:
1) iPods work perfectly well with Linux, actually better than on Windows since you can bypass the GUI and directly manage your files if you want to, or pick the GUI you want to manipulate your iPod files (there are several to choose from.
2) Yes, iTunes doesn't work with Linux, but neither does any Creative or iRiver player work with iTunes. Put the blame where it belongs, Apple. If you want iTunes on Linux, there's only three ways to have that happen: 1) Petition Apple to create a Linux port, 2) Use the CD-burning loophole to convert your file to a Linux-friendly format, 3) Write an alternate interface to iTunes. Personally, I wouldn't bother. There are plenty of Linux-friendly alternatives out there. If Apple doesn't want my money, that's their choice to make.
3) It's true that devices that don't work with Linux that work with Windows, but there are far more devices that don't work for Windows that work well for Linux. As always, you need to check your hardware compatibility before installing you OS on a machine. If non-Linux friendly devices don't want your money, then that's their choice to make.
4) It's already possible to legally play MP3s on Linux using the Fluendo codecs, and it's dead simple to set up most Windows codecs by either adding the appropriate repositories and installing them through a user friendly GUI like Synaptic or GnomeAppInstall or using something like EasyUbuntu. ESR needs to get off his Windows machine or Red Hat 6 machine and actually realize that Linux is not the same media-isolated server OS that it was in 1995.
5) ESR is a free marketer, so he believes in supply and demand. If Linux users really wanted the spyware and DRM-encumbered formats and ruthless unnecessary restrictions, someone would have stepped in to fill the need. So why are there so few successful suppliers of S&M technologies for Linux? Simply because people who are happy with spyware and DRM and ruthless unnecessary restrictions have little need to migrate from Windows. Stop pestering them to change if they don't want to. People who have moved from Windows or the Mac to Linux have done so precisely because they they want freedom from these oppressive forces. So why is he surprised that Linux users balk at such "features"? Personally, if Linux became like Windows and there was no way to undo the damage, I'd likely move to some other OS that actually worked properly like FreeBSD (assuming it's not also corrupted).
True, but nearly all of those things had to do with the treatment, education, and health of children, not the materialistic stuff they had.
I challenge you to find one materialistic thing that it was okay for a child not to have 90 years ago but is considered child abuse if they don't have it 10 years ago?
Personally, I'd consider it child abuse if you *didn't* ween your child off the phone if your child is so addicted to the phone that being away from it for even a moment causes panic attacks or other emotional trauma.
> That said, it's unlikely the Linux kernel will ever move to GPLv3 regardless of what Linus thinks > simply because of the infeasability of contacting every copyright holder.
Actually, it is feasable, just not right away. Linux currently allows BSD licensed files to exist in Linux that allow code to be shared with *BSD. If Linus allowed GPLv2 (or above) files, then any new author could add GPL v2 (or above) code any any existing author could relicense under GPL v2 (or above). Note, that very little of the original Linux 1.x code (that is not also in *BSD) is still around anymore, so if most of the Linux developers were interested in moving to GPL v2 (or above), then most of the Linux kernel would be relicensed within a few years. Once that happens, if people decided to jump to GPL v3, the remaining parts could be rewritten.
Science only inherently threatens any form of ill-founded *literal interpretation* of a religion's holy book. Most faiths of the world outside the US don't have such literal belief. They take their books as a mix of history, allegory, and moral rules and most assume that it's the inspired word of God and many assume infallibility of the books (if reality don't match the books, then your interpretation of the allegories are wrong). But those infallibility assumptions have more to do with morality than literal historical fact or literal scientific fact (which only have transitory value). To quote the bible (since that's what most americans believe in) "Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, and to God what is God's." (Translation, the world has demands, God has demands. Respect both and don't mix up the two.)
The Greeks and Vikings didn't believe in literalism. Buddists don't. Hindu's don't. Muslims (outside of the Wahabbists) don't. Jews don't. Catholics didn't originally, then slipped into literalism around the time of Galileo and the dark ages, and then came back to sanity around the time of the 2nd Vatican Council.
Science and non-literal faith aren't incompatible. They're complementary.
This restriction in particular distorts it: "The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed. This is Asimov's first law of Robotics."
Suppose you write a calculator application using this license.
What exactly does "executed to harm any human being" mean in thie context? If your program has a bug that miscalculates someone's medical dosage (i.e. it was run on an old Pentium that had the floating point error and you provided no work around), does it mean that mean that you are violating the license? Are they talking about physical harm or emotional harm? If your program correctly determins that you only have 1 month to live, that would be traumatic to say the least. Are you violating the license?
What exactly does "inaction" and "permit" mean in thie context? According to the license: 1) to determine the "inaction" part, your program must actively determine if if a human being may possibly be harmed by the general operating system, even if it means using illegal cracking techniques 2) as far as the "permit" part, if there's even the remote possibility that a human being can be harmed by the OS or any other program on the OS, your program must take effective action to prevent such harm (i.e. bring down the operating system or the other program)
I've always been amused when someone has been asked to xerox something on a Minolta photocopier or google something on MSN, but that's humanity for you.
So basically things should be assumed to be stable unless proven otherwise? That's generally not the way it works in the Debian world or the security world.
The key problem with Xen at this moment is that it's not in the mainline kernel and it's a nontrivial patch. Because of this, it's possible for Xen to break between kernel upgrades unless you put a lot of your own resources into QAing it and undoing any changes in the mainline kernel that damage Xen.
If you've been following the Ubuntu Edgy release, you'd see that originally Xen was planned to be supported out of the box in Edgy, but that changed when the Ubuntu-Xen team realized that Xen has problem in the kernel Ubuntu wants to ship (which has the most device drivers), so they'll scaled back the goal and support Xen as a "use at your own risk" less featureful but maintained Xen kernel. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenEdgy for details.
Also keep in mind that different people have different stability needs. Novell may be shipping Xen, but they're also shipping XGL which is usable (like Xen) and a very important feature (like Xen) but not entirely problem free (like Xen). The problems of Xen and XGL aren't unresolvable. XGL just needs a little burn in time to work out the kinks, and Xen needs to just get into the kernel. The paravirt_ops spec looks quite promising (http://lwn.net/Articles/191923/) and seems to be making a lot of progress.
Fedora and Ubuntu aren't currently shipping them (except as use at your own risk add-ons) and prefer to wait until the problems have been worked out. But that's okay, they just want to make different tradeoffs than Novell has.
Of course, if the Trojans had actually bothered to open up the horse (or even poke the horse with a few dozen spears or even burn the horse to sacrifice it to the gods), they might have gotten several *fantastic* free gifts including Odysseus and several of Greek's best soldiers.
That just goes to show that often it's possible to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 2, Informative
> It's almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops. > All that was done with Flash 7. Flash 8 and especially 9 add fantastic video-speicific features that weren't in 6 or 7.
This may be true if you're talking about Flash 7, but Flash 8 and 9 are not available on Linux (I think they're going to release Flash 10), so if you want real cross-platform support, you'll either have to stick to Flash 7 (which doesn't have the video-specific features you like) or move to OGG, QT, or even WMV (without DRM) since those codecs are available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
> He is not being practical, he is being very short sighted in a way that could come back and bite all of us in the hat someday.
While I agree that it is short sighted, I think it's short sighted for different reasons.
I don't think that GPL3 proponents in the Linux development community have any problem with the Linux kernel being licensed under GPL 2. The problem is that it's GPL 2 only, so it can never be changed in the future by future maintainers of Linux without a complete rewrite. If there's a serious problem with the GPL 2 or the rest of the world moves to GPL 3 and the Linux kernel can no longer share code with the rest of the world, Linux is SOL. Like it or not, Linux is now bigger than Linus.
There is a simple solution that would immediately silence the debate. If individual files in the Linux kernel could be tagged as "GPL 2 or later" and have that license maintained (the same way the license of BSD files in the kernel are maintained), the Linux kernel would be GPL2, however, it would be possible to gradually move Linux completely to the "GPL 2 or later" as various portions of the Linux kernel get rewritten. People who currently want their modules to remain "GPL 2 only" could do so. People who wanted their modules to be "GPL 2 or later" could do so.
If after 10 years, Linux is still 99% "GPL 2 only", the issue is pretty much dead. Developers want the GPL 2 only license and Linus is currently just defending the obvious. If however, 99% of the kernel is "GPL 2 or later" then Linus's current decision to have the kernel be "GPL2 only" is not with the Linux community.
It's dead obvious that they will. This is the attitude that troubles me the most:
> Specifically, it would shift to a 'first to file' method of awarding patents, > which is already used in most foreign countries, instead of the existing 'first > to invent' standard, which has been criticized as complicated to prove.
Basically, they're saying that since the useful solution that is easy to justify (if you believe in patent theory) is too hard to implement (and causes too many problems), then the obvious thing to do is to pick a useless solution that is impossible to justify (through patent theory) because it's easier and will allow the patent office to process new patents quicker (and cause even more problems).
This reminds me of the old joke. It was midnight at the parking lot and a policeman saw a drunk looking for something near a lamp post. The policeman asked what what the drunk was looking for. The drunk said "I lost my car keys in the dark alley a half a block away, so I'm searching for them here." The police said it didn't make sense. The drunk replied, "It makes perfect sense. It's too hard to find my car keys in the dark, so I'm looking for them where there's some light".
The key difference between the drunk and Congress is that the drunk didn't make the problem worse through his useless solution.
Okay, so except for Nigeria, most people in these countries seem to have a decent (though not necessarily high tech) education.
WRT general human development, here are some stats: Argentina:.863 (High Human Development) Thailand:.778 (Medium Human Development) Brazil:.792 (Medium Human Development) Nigeria:.453 (Low Human Development) (Source: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05_ HDI.pdf )
Okay, so except for Nigeria, most of these countries seem to be decent places to live (even though life is likely much harder than what north americans and europeans are used to)
> Apparently we may also have a 4th (or 5th, depending on pt 2) receptor in the ultraviolet range. > However, most of the light in this range is blocked by the alchohol in our eye fluids
Does this mean that if the alcohol is replaced with some other fluid, we might be able to see in the ultraviolet too?
If so, it'll only be a matter of time before the special forces of some army will make this procedure manditory, particularly since camalflouge would be a lot less effective and since there's a lot more ultraviolet than visible light at twilight.
Exactly and it goes *much* further than OS clients. Imagine if some of the big ISPs made alliances with Microsoft to slow down any traffic from Linux or Mac *servers* or non-IiS *web hosts* to a tenth of their bandwidth speeds?
The impact on the net would be dramatic and immediate.
Companies would migrate away from Linux/Apache or Mac/Apache or Microsoft/Apache to Microsoft/IIS, not because Microsoft/IIS was better, but simply because Microsoft were able to pay to exclude their competing web OSes and web servers work poorly. I'm picking on Microsoft here, but the argument could easily be applied to other server related products such as CISCO routes or J2EE applications.
When established financial empires can exclude competition snd increase their market share simply by flexing their financial muscles, that's as far from a free market as possible (i.e. a crucial element of the free markets is that there is perfect competition with low entry and exit barriers). That's an oligopoly.
But that's beside the point. Oxygenation of the blood is essential to life. Buying new things is not. One defines who you are. The other defines who you can decide to be if you just follow your instincts. If your instincts enrich your life or are neutral, their's little need to change them. If they impact your life negatively, then change them. It's a simple and as difficult as that.
Yes, fighting your instincts is *hard* and it's important to be sensitive and encouraging to people who try, but it's a fact of life that all of us have our battles in life. It is possible to be more than a bundle of instincts, as anyone who has battled stage fright or shyness or the cigarette habit or trained themselves to get into a fitness routine can tell you.
Looking at yourself as a victim is simply counter productive. It tells you what you're not and tries to justify it instead of telling you what you are and how you can leverage your strengths in other areas of your life to become greater than you've previously been.
The basic idea is that it looks at the registers, the stack(s), and the static data region(s), and heap for any sequence of bytes that *looks* like a pointer and assumes that it is. Once it's done the memory scan, it reclaims all memory that hasn't been pointed to by these alleged pointers. I know it sounds crazy and it's easy to think of various scenarios that will cause memory to never be reclaimed, but it works surprisingly well and is extremely portable.
I ran Linux in a much more constrained environment back in 1993 (4MB RAM with ample swap, 40MB Disk, 386, laptop) and it ran at a decent speed with a decent set of applications (yes, even back then).
I'd be *really* surprised if Linux today couldn't fit in your environment. But you'll likely have to forget KDE/GNOME. They're *nice* but not necessary. My old system used FVWM which is still perfectly capable (I was used it last year on Solaris -- there's even a Win95-like config), although now there are slicker alternatives like XFCE and IceWM which are also available and better supported by default on many distros.
As someone else pointed out, if you know you could prove it yourself but have not, it's really a type of faith.
I'd distinguish it this way.
Axioms: a fact simply because we say it's so. (i.e. set theory)
Proven Fact: what you know that you have proven to yourself
Accepted Fact: what you've been taught (i.e. most of what you've learnt in school that you didn't derive yourself, i.e. most people haven't derived the real numbers from set theory)
Belief: what you have a high degree of confidence that you could prove or you have a high degree of confidence will happen based on experience (e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it's surrounded by clouds or covered by an eclipse)
Provable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but you know a mechanism where it can be proved. For now, you've adopted a belief in the most likely outcome. (E.g. is there intelligent life in outer space, because there sure isn't on earth;-])
Unprovable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but because of this lovely thing called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel%27s_Incomplete ness_Theorem) there's no way of knowing what the real answer is, but for one reason or another you have to believe *something* in order to survive, so you've made a decision to believe something anyway. Questions of existence fall squarely in this area. (For fun, try out this game: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/identity.htm )
* It take an a lot of time and effort to make your own distro. Unless you have a lean stripped down distro that is only useful enough to run your app (i.e. basically like an embedded device), it's probably not worth it.
* If you base your product off of RedHat or SUSE, you can provide support, but ultimately your fate is in the hands of RedHat or Novell. Not immediately, mind you, but when your customer tries to add a package with dependencies that conflict with your updates or when your customer tries to upgrade to the latest and greatest RedHat or SUSE, they may find than your fixes break the upgrade and go back to the ones controlling the distro.
IMO, if you're going to start your own distro for your own apps, you really only have one viable choice -- base it off of an an existing successful distro with a completely open process (so you can slide in easily) that is not dominated by anyone one company (so they can't mess you up). Of these, there seem to be only three viable choices: Debian (if you like long release cycles and stability), Gentoo (if you like infinite configurability), and Ubuntu (if you need the latest and greatest Debian and don't mind your customers doing more frequent upgrades). In Oracle's case, Debian seems the best choice to support.
In the first case, my company tried to break into the professional market (we were big in the education market) so we announced a major overhaul and several new new features. It was a fantastic vision but unfortunately the president made the mistake of announcing the full feature set and that we would start accepting purchase orders that summer. By the time spring rolled around it was clear that were were going to miss the deadline by several months (very bad when most of your sales are in September), but since the feature set was set in stone, we couldn't cut features. The writing was on the wall but we accepted it and started working 13 hour days nonstop for 6 months. Customer complaints over late orders flooded our phone lines and prevented our previous customers from calling tech support, so our old customers felt neglected and our new ones started cancelling orders. We gave up in christmas and released the complete but buggy product and got more complaints.
The president was replaced, and under his leadership we were able to finish the product we wanted to finish within a reasonable schedule. Depite all the doom and gloom earlier, we survived. Unfortunately, we lost the senior software engineer and another developer in the process.
Then, president hired a vice president which wanted to revamp the whole product and move it to an even higher market. I gave a detailed estimate that said it would take 2 years. The VP said we'd go bankrupt if we didn't release in 9 months. I repartitioned the estimate and said that we could do it in two stages, each 13 months long or three releases each 9.5 months long. No go. It had to all be done in one release, and that release could take no longer than 9 months or we might as well close up shop. I came close to losing my job over the issue, but since I was the most senior programmer there with the most experience about the product, the new senior software engineer told the VP if I went he'd have to give up too. 2 years later, after a complete turn over of the team twice (including the new senior programmer), the product was finally release It had more bugs than we'd like, but it was recieved well by the market so it was "good enough". At release time, I was the last person standing from the original team, but I had enough and left soon after. The product was well received but since the team was new, a new version of the product wasn't released into three years later.
All the VP's threats didn't change an impossible schedule. You can't squeeze 2 years of work in 9 months, not matter how you try to force it. If you try, the most you can do is destroy your team and lose sales in the process. Most of those doom and gloom professies don't pan out. If they *are* true, someone is running the company wrong and development schedules are the least of your problems.
In the later case, had the VP chosen either a more reasonable schedule (like any of the 3 I laid out above), we would have had most if not all of our original team at the end and been able to do subsequent releases at the same measured pace. We would have had regular sales and the company would have prospers much more.
Being a software architect or project manager is hard, but ultimately, the best ones just lay out out all the credible options on the line and stick to their guns, even if it means risking your job. My experience in that job showed me that you can do it even in a hostile environment. If you lay things out properly and tell the truth, you may be resented, but you will be respected, even by those who chose to ignore your advice.
What's funny is that Mohammed is automatically called Arabs. Mohammed Ali ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ali ) certainly wasn't an Arab any more than Pat Robertson can be called a citizen of the Vatican.
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Fine. If they prefer Windows or the Mac over Linux, they why try to convert them to Linux?
All OSes have tradeoffs. If you want to use Windows software on the Mac, you can't unless you run them in a cumbersome virtual machine. That's the price you pay for buying. The value the Mac gives you isn't worth the price you pay, then you *shouldn't* be using a Mac. The same can be said for Windows or Linux.
As much as you may want to have it all, you can't. That's life.
For me, the price of Windows became intollerable after Microsoft moved away from Windows 2000 and started making Windows a flashy appliance that's obscured by artificial restrictions and wizards "to help me".
For the most part, Linux just works for everything I need to do, so I made the switch and would never go back. Linux requires you to be a bit more tech savy than Windows. That's a given, but less so each year. IMO, it's gotten to the point that if you can do without a few codecs and a few devices and most games, it's a lot better than Windows.
But you value what's missing more than what you gain, then by all means, stay on Windows or the Mac. After all, true Linux users value freedom, and that includes the freedom to use something else.
I don't know Klingon. Heck, I don't like most Sci-Fi or Fantasy.and I haven't played games since Pac-man and space invaders were popular and I couldn't tell you the difference between a gnome, troll, or hobbit, so I'm clearly not the group ESR is criticising. Yet, I'm very critical of ESR for a few reasons:
1) iPods work perfectly well with Linux, actually better than on Windows since you can bypass the GUI and directly manage your files if you want to, or pick the GUI you want to manipulate your iPod files (there are several to choose from.
2) Yes, iTunes doesn't work with Linux, but neither does any Creative or iRiver player work with iTunes. Put the blame where it belongs, Apple. If you want iTunes on Linux, there's only three ways to have that happen: 1) Petition Apple to create a Linux port, 2) Use the CD-burning loophole to convert your file to a Linux-friendly format, 3) Write an alternate interface to iTunes. Personally, I wouldn't bother. There are plenty of Linux-friendly alternatives out there. If Apple doesn't want my money, that's their choice to make.
3) It's true that devices that don't work with Linux that work with Windows, but there are far more devices that don't work for Windows that work well for Linux. As always, you need to check your hardware compatibility before installing you OS on a machine. If non-Linux friendly devices don't want your money, then that's their choice to make.
4) It's already possible to legally play MP3s on Linux using the Fluendo codecs, and it's dead simple to set up most Windows codecs by either adding the appropriate repositories and installing them through a user friendly GUI like Synaptic or GnomeAppInstall or using something like EasyUbuntu. ESR needs to get off his Windows machine or Red Hat 6 machine and actually realize that Linux is not the same media-isolated server OS that it was in 1995.
5) ESR is a free marketer, so he believes in supply and demand. If Linux users really wanted the spyware and DRM-encumbered formats and ruthless unnecessary restrictions, someone would have stepped in to fill the need. So why are there so few successful suppliers of S&M technologies for Linux? Simply because people who are happy with spyware and DRM and ruthless unnecessary restrictions have little need to migrate from Windows. Stop pestering them to change if they don't want to. People who have moved from Windows or the Mac to Linux have done so precisely because they they want freedom from these oppressive forces. So why is he surprised that Linux users balk at such "features"? Personally, if Linux became like Windows and there was no way to undo the damage, I'd likely move to some other OS that actually worked properly like FreeBSD (assuming it's not also corrupted).
Six other words:
Vendor lock-in, Vendor lock-in, Vendor lock-in
As bad as DOC is, at least it's been reverse engineered to death and is compatible with the bulk of most modern word processors.
True, but nearly all of those things had to do with the treatment, education, and health of children, not the materialistic stuff they had.
I challenge you to find one materialistic thing that it was okay for a child not to have 90 years ago but is considered child abuse if they don't have it 10 years ago?
Personally, I'd consider it child abuse if you *didn't* ween your child off the phone if your child is so addicted to the phone that being away from it for even a moment causes panic attacks or other emotional trauma.
> That said, it's unlikely the Linux kernel will ever move to GPLv3 regardless of what Linus thinks
> simply because of the infeasability of contacting every copyright holder.
Actually, it is feasable, just not right away. Linux currently allows BSD licensed files to exist in Linux that allow code to be shared with *BSD. If Linus allowed GPLv2 (or above) files, then any new author could add GPL v2 (or above) code any any existing author could relicense under GPL v2 (or above). Note, that very little of the original Linux 1.x code (that is not also in *BSD) is still around anymore, so if most of the Linux developers were interested in moving to GPL v2 (or above), then most of the Linux kernel would be relicensed within a few years. Once that happens, if people decided to jump to GPL v3, the remaining parts could be rewritten.
Nonsense.
Science only inherently threatens any form of ill-founded *literal interpretation* of a religion's holy book. Most faiths of the world outside the US don't have such literal belief. They take their books as a mix of history, allegory, and moral rules and most assume that it's the inspired word of God and many assume infallibility of the books (if reality don't match the books, then your interpretation of the allegories are wrong). But those infallibility assumptions have more to do with morality than literal historical fact or literal scientific fact (which only have transitory value). To quote the bible (since that's what most americans believe in) "Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, and to God what is God's." (Translation, the world has demands, God has demands. Respect both and don't mix up the two.)
The Greeks and Vikings didn't believe in literalism. Buddists don't. Hindu's don't. Muslims (outside of the Wahabbists) don't. Jews don't. Catholics didn't originally, then slipped into literalism around the time of Galileo and the dark ages, and then came back to sanity around the time of the 2nd Vatican Council.
Science and non-literal faith aren't incompatible. They're complementary.
This restriction in particular distorts it:
"The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed. This is Asimov's first law of Robotics."
Suppose you write a calculator application using this license.
What exactly does "executed to harm any human being" mean in thie context?
If your program has a bug that miscalculates someone's medical dosage (i.e. it was run on an old Pentium that had the floating point error and you provided no work around), does it mean that mean that you are violating the license?
Are they talking about physical harm or emotional harm? If your program correctly determins that you only have 1 month to live, that would be traumatic to say the least. Are you violating the license?
What exactly does "inaction" and "permit" mean in thie context?
According to the license:
1) to determine the "inaction" part, your program must actively determine if if a human being may possibly be harmed by the general operating system, even if it means using illegal cracking techniques
2) as far as the "permit" part, if there's even the remote possibility that a human being can be harmed by the OS or any other program on the OS, your program must take effective action to prevent such harm (i.e. bring down the operating system or the other program)
That's what happens when you get too popular. Xerox faced the same fate:d =Mozilla-search&va=xerox
http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourcei
I've always been amused when someone has been asked to xerox something on a Minolta photocopier or google something on MSN, but that's humanity for you.
So basically things should be assumed to be stable unless proven otherwise? That's generally not the way it works in the Debian world or the security world.
The key problem with Xen at this moment is that it's not in the mainline kernel and it's a nontrivial patch. Because of this, it's possible for Xen to break between kernel upgrades unless you put a lot of your own resources into QAing it and undoing any changes in the mainline kernel that damage Xen.
If you've been following the Ubuntu Edgy release, you'd see that originally Xen was planned to be supported out of the box in Edgy, but that changed when the Ubuntu-Xen team realized that Xen has problem in the kernel Ubuntu wants to ship (which has the most device drivers), so they'll scaled back the goal and support Xen as a "use at your own risk" less featureful but maintained Xen kernel. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenEdgy for details.
Also keep in mind that different people have different stability needs. Novell may be shipping Xen, but they're also shipping XGL which is usable (like Xen) and a very important feature (like Xen) but not entirely problem free (like Xen). The problems of Xen and XGL aren't unresolvable. XGL just needs a little burn in time to work out the kinks, and Xen needs to just get into the kernel. The paravirt_ops spec looks quite promising (http://lwn.net/Articles/191923/) and seems to be making a lot of progress.
Fedora and Ubuntu aren't currently shipping them (except as use at your own risk add-ons) and prefer to wait until the problems have been worked out.
But that's okay, they just want to make different tradeoffs than Novell has.
Linux is about choice, isn't it?
> Enough with the 2.0 already.
Absolutely, Web 2.0 is so yesterday. We need to start Web 3.0
*ducks*
Of course, if the Trojans had actually bothered to open up the horse (or even poke the horse with a few dozen spears or even burn the horse to sacrifice it to the gods), they might have gotten several *fantastic* free gifts including Odysseus and several of Greek's best soldiers.
That just goes to show that often it's possible to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
> It's almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.
> All that was done with Flash 7. Flash 8 and especially 9 add fantastic video-speicific features that weren't in 6 or 7.
This may be true if you're talking about Flash 7, but Flash 8 and 9 are not available on Linux (I think they're going to release Flash 10), so if you want real cross-platform support, you'll either have to stick to Flash 7 (which doesn't have the video-specific features you like) or move to OGG, QT, or even WMV (without DRM) since those codecs are available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
> He is not being practical, he is being very short sighted in a way that could come back and bite all of us in the hat someday.
While I agree that it is short sighted, I think it's short sighted for different reasons.
I don't think that GPL3 proponents in the Linux development community have any problem with the Linux kernel being licensed under GPL 2. The problem is that it's GPL 2 only, so it can never be changed in the future by future maintainers of Linux without a complete rewrite. If there's a serious problem with the GPL 2 or the rest of the world moves to GPL 3 and the Linux kernel can no longer share code with the rest of the world, Linux is SOL. Like it or not, Linux is now bigger than Linus.
There is a simple solution that would immediately silence the debate. If individual files in the Linux kernel could be tagged as "GPL 2 or later" and have that license maintained (the same way the license of BSD files in the kernel are maintained), the Linux kernel would be GPL2, however, it would be possible to gradually move Linux completely to the "GPL 2 or later" as various portions of the Linux kernel get rewritten. People who currently want their modules to remain "GPL 2 only" could do so. People who wanted their modules to be "GPL 2 or later" could do so.
If after 10 years, Linux is still 99% "GPL 2 only", the issue is pretty much dead. Developers want the GPL 2 only license and Linus is currently just defending the obvious. If however, 99% of the kernel is "GPL 2 or later" then Linus's current decision to have the kernel be "GPL2 only" is not with the Linux community.
In either case, the conflict is artificial.
It's dead obvious that they will. This is the attitude that troubles me the most:
> Specifically, it would shift to a 'first to file' method of awarding patents,
> which is already used in most foreign countries, instead of the existing 'first
> to invent' standard, which has been criticized as complicated to prove.
Basically, they're saying that since the useful solution that is easy to justify (if you believe in patent theory) is too hard to implement (and causes too many problems), then the obvious thing to do is to pick a useless solution that is impossible to justify (through patent theory) because it's easier and will allow the patent office to process new patents quicker (and cause even more problems).
This reminds me of the old joke. It was midnight at the parking lot and a policeman saw a drunk looking for something near a lamp post. The policeman asked what what the drunk was looking for. The drunk said "I lost my car keys in the dark alley a half a block away, so I'm searching for them here." The police said it didn't make sense. The drunk replied, "It makes perfect sense. It's too hard to find my car keys in the dark, so I'm looking for them where there's some light".
The key difference between the drunk and Congress is that the drunk didn't make the problem worse through his useless solution.
Since people are arguing over subjective impressions on both sides, I decided to pull in some harder numbers.
_ literacy_rate )
.863 (High Human Development) .778 (Medium Human Development) .792 (Medium Human Development) .453 (Low Human Development)_ HDI.pdf )
WRT education hear are some stats on the literacy rate:
Argentina: 97.2%
Thailand: 92.6%
Brazil: 88.4%
Nigeria: 66.8%
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
Okay, so except for Nigeria, most people in these countries seem to have a decent (though not necessarily high tech) education.
WRT general human development, here are some stats:
Argentina:
Thailand:
Brazil:
Nigeria:
(Source: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05
Okay, so except for Nigeria, most of these countries seem to be decent places to live (even though life is likely much harder than what north americans and europeans are used to)
Actually, the picture provided in the article is a bit out of focus and lacks some details:7 /subaru-large.jpg
t i_Monster.jpg
http://images.usatoday.com/tech/_photos/2006/07/2
Here's a higher resolution picture that includes the missing pieces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flying_Spaghet
> Apparently we may also have a 4th (or 5th, depending on pt 2) receptor in the ultraviolet range.
> However, most of the light in this range is blocked by the alchohol in our eye fluids
Does this mean that if the alcohol is replaced with some other fluid, we might be able to see in the ultraviolet too?
If so, it'll only be a matter of time before the special forces of some army will make this procedure manditory, particularly since camalflouge would be a lot less effective and since there's a lot more ultraviolet than visible light at twilight.
Exactly and it goes *much* further than OS clients. Imagine if some of the big ISPs made alliances with Microsoft to slow down any traffic from Linux or Mac *servers* or non-IiS *web hosts* to a tenth of their bandwidth speeds?
The impact on the net would be dramatic and immediate.
Companies would migrate away from Linux/Apache or Mac/Apache or Microsoft/Apache to Microsoft/IIS, not because Microsoft/IIS was better, but simply because Microsoft were able to pay to exclude their competing web OSes and web servers work poorly. I'm picking on Microsoft here, but the argument could easily be applied to other server related products such as CISCO routes or J2EE applications.
When established financial empires can exclude competition snd increase their market share simply by flexing their financial muscles, that's as far from a free market as possible (i.e. a crucial element of the free markets is that there is perfect competition with low entry and exit barriers). That's an oligopoly.
Actually, genetics *doesn't* predispose you to breathing air. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
But that's beside the point. Oxygenation of the blood is essential to life. Buying new things is not. One defines who you are. The other defines who you can decide to be if you just follow your instincts. If your instincts enrich your life or are neutral, their's little need to change them. If they impact your life negatively, then change them. It's a simple and as difficult as that.
Yes, fighting your instincts is *hard* and it's important to be sensitive and encouraging to people who try, but it's a fact of life that all of us have our battles in life. It is possible to be more than a bundle of instincts, as anyone who has battled stage fright or shyness or the cigarette habit or trained themselves to get into a fitness routine can tell you.
Looking at yourself as a victim is simply counter productive. It tells you what you're not and tries to justify it instead of telling you what you are and how you can leverage your strengths in other areas of your life to become greater than you've previously been.
> Please enlighten me as to how you can garbage collect an object when you can't tell if it's still in use?
s cr.html
Actually, you *can* to some extent. Check out the Boehm Garbage Collector:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcde
The basic idea is that it looks at the registers, the stack(s), and the static data region(s), and heap for any sequence of bytes that *looks* like a pointer and assumes that it is. Once it's done the memory scan, it reclaims all memory that hasn't been pointed to by these alleged pointers. I know it sounds crazy and it's easy to think of various scenarios that will cause memory to never be reclaimed, but it works surprisingly well and is extremely portable.
I ran Linux in a much more constrained environment back in 1993 (4MB RAM with ample swap, 40MB Disk, 386, laptop) and it ran at a decent speed with a decent set of applications (yes, even back then).
i d=1
I'd be *really* surprised if Linux today couldn't fit in your environment. But you'll likely have to forget KDE/GNOME. They're *nice* but not necessary. My old system used FVWM which is still perfectly capable (I was used it last year on Solaris -- there's even a Win95-like config), although now there are slicker alternatives like XFCE and IceWM which are also available and better supported by default on many distros.
Here are a few alternatives to consider which are more targetted to your needs. You might want to them all out and see which one you like best:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_
http://www.vectorlinux.com/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
As someone else pointed out, if you know you could prove it yourself but have not, it's really a type of faith.
e ness_Theorem) there's no way of knowing what the real answer is, but for one reason or another you have to believe *something* in order to survive, so you've made a decision to believe something anyway. Questions of existence fall squarely in this area. (For fun, try out this game: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/identity.htm )
I'd distinguish it this way.
Axioms: a fact simply because we say it's so. (i.e. set theory)
Proven Fact: what you know that you have proven to yourself
Accepted Fact: what you've been taught (i.e. most of what you've learnt in school that you didn't derive yourself, i.e. most people haven't derived the real numbers from set theory)
Belief: what you have a high degree of confidence that you could prove or you have a high degree of confidence will happen based on experience (e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it's surrounded by clouds or covered by an eclipse)
Provable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but you know a mechanism where it can be proved. For now, you've adopted a belief in the most likely outcome. (E.g. is there intelligent life in outer space, because there sure isn't on earth;-])
Unprovable Faith: You don't know that something is true, but because of this lovely thing called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel%27s_Incomplet
Two things to consider:
* It take an a lot of time and effort to make your own distro. Unless you have a lean stripped down distro that is only useful enough to run your app (i.e. basically like an embedded device), it's probably not worth it.
* If you base your product off of RedHat or SUSE, you can provide support, but ultimately your fate is in the hands of RedHat or Novell. Not immediately, mind you, but when your customer tries to add a package with dependencies that conflict with your updates or when your customer tries to upgrade to the latest and greatest RedHat or SUSE, they may find than your fixes break the upgrade and go back to the ones controlling the distro.
IMO, if you're going to start your own distro for your own apps, you really only have one viable choice -- base it off of an an existing successful distro with a completely open process (so you can slide in easily) that is not dominated by anyone one company (so they can't mess you up). Of these, there seem to be only three viable choices: Debian (if you like long release cycles and stability), Gentoo (if you like infinite configurability), and Ubuntu (if you need the latest and greatest Debian and don't mind your customers doing more frequent upgrades). In Oracle's case, Debian seems the best choice to support.
I was in this position twice, in succession.
In the first case, my company tried to break into the professional market (we were big in the education market) so we announced a major overhaul and several new new features. It was a fantastic vision but unfortunately the president made the mistake of announcing the full feature set and that we would start accepting purchase orders that summer. By the time spring rolled around it was clear that were were going to miss the deadline by several months (very bad when most of your sales are in September), but since the feature set was set in stone, we couldn't cut features. The writing was on the wall but we accepted it and started working 13 hour days nonstop for 6 months. Customer complaints over late orders flooded our phone lines and prevented our previous customers from calling tech support, so our old customers felt neglected and our new ones started cancelling orders. We gave up in christmas and released the complete but buggy product and got more complaints.
The president was replaced, and under his leadership we were able to finish the product we wanted to finish within a reasonable schedule. Depite all the doom and gloom earlier, we survived. Unfortunately, we lost the senior software engineer and another developer in the process.
Then, president hired a vice president which wanted to revamp the whole product and move it to an even higher market. I gave a detailed estimate that said it would take 2 years. The VP said we'd go bankrupt if we didn't release in 9 months. I repartitioned the estimate and said that we could do it in two stages, each 13 months long or three releases each 9.5 months long. No go. It had to all be done in one release, and that release could take no longer than 9 months or we might as well close up shop. I came close to losing my job over the issue, but since I was the most senior programmer there with the most experience about the product, the new senior software engineer told the VP if I went he'd have to give up too. 2 years later, after a complete turn over of the team twice (including the new senior programmer), the product was finally release It had more bugs than we'd like, but it was recieved well by the market so it was "good enough". At release time, I was the last person standing from the original team, but I had enough and left soon after. The product was well received but since the team was new, a new version of the product wasn't released into three years later.
All the VP's threats didn't change an impossible schedule. You can't squeeze 2 years of work in 9 months, not matter how you try to force it. If you try, the most you can do is destroy your team and lose sales in the process. Most of those doom and gloom professies don't pan out. If they *are* true, someone is running the company wrong and development schedules are the least of your problems.
In the later case, had the VP chosen either a more reasonable schedule (like any of the 3 I laid out above), we would have had most if not all of our original team at the end and been able to do subsequent releases at the same measured pace. We would have had regular sales and the company would have prospers much more.
Being a software architect or project manager is hard, but ultimately, the best ones just lay out out all the credible options on the line and stick to their guns, even if it means risking your job. My experience in that job showed me that you can do it even in a hostile environment. If you lay things out properly and tell the truth, you may be resented, but you will be respected, even by those who chose to ignore your advice.
What's funny is that Mohammed is automatically called Arabs.
Mohammed Ali ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ali ) certainly wasn't an Arab any more than Pat Robertson can be called a citizen of the Vatican.