Spamming is theft by conversion - unless your contract with your provider allows it of course, in which case that provider can simply be blackholed by the rest of the world.
Privatise the FDA and companies will rely on people dieing from lethal drugs and the class action lawsuits in order to get themselves together.
Who's being naïve here? Do you really think those companies are more afraid of the FDA than they are of ruinous lawsuits? The FDA is a captive agency, it shields them from liability and leaves them far less afraid to screw up and kill people. On top of that, take away the ridiculous immunities vested in corporations qua corporations, as Badnarik discusses above, and you're talking about a situation where the consequences would be far more deterrence than anything the FDA could ever provide.
Don't start drooling, even if the rest of the bomb were still usable (it won't be) the fissionable material inside deteriorates quite rapidly. Nuclear warheads must be 'refurbished' every couple years or so, otherwise they deteriorate too much to explode. This one's been sitting there for how long? Forget about making it go off, without a lot of fresh material at least - and if you had that, you wouldn't need this antique.
Well my Win98 box wouldn't have drug their stats down at all. Of course, the key to that is a clean install where IE and all of it's many components have never touched the HDD. And, of course, rebooting it between once and twice a week. If the uptime gets too long, it definately gets buggy, but it's quite rare for it to actually crash on me - by windows standards of rare at least. I have plenty of exposure to XP, and it doesn't seem any more stable. The figure from this study is congruent with my experience.
Of course the only time I've seen Linux crash was when I had motherboard components failing, and my Mac only locks up about once a year (and almost never gets shut down or rebooted - logging out and back in always seems to be sufficient to fix it when it gets wierd.)
But I have to agree with another posters suggestion - I think that the instability in Windows is primarily from IE, and all the other little things that tie into it. Without that, even Win98 can be reasonably stable (meaning at least as stable as XP, which most people seem to consider 'stable enough' for a desktop or game machine - not stable enough for critical server tasks of course.)
Moderation is about as close to completely borked as it could be, without actually being useless.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to only give modpoints to people that are currently browsing at -1, that would be a small help.
Which brings up an interesting point - does this organisation have any ties to the IOC goons? If they do, then I want nothing to do with them, if they don't, I hope they've got good lawyers...
Not true. States first appeared ca. 6k BC. Humans were around for well over a hundred thousand years before that - and the majority of humans lived outside of state structures until much more recently.
There are other, better ways to control library versions. I don't know in particular for example mplayers situation, and it may be necessary as a stopgap, but it's certainly not best practice - rather an indication something needs to be fixed. At any rate, now we don't seem to be talking about anything related to the LSB at all, are we?
Does anyone actually do that? I don't think so. Typically the developers distribute their source, and at most binaries for distros they actively use. Other people then package it for other distros. No one should be packaging libraries like you suggest, regardless. If you're talking about packaging a library in the application tarball/.deb/.rpm that's nonsense - it should clearly be in a separate package. You start packing libraries inside application packages and pretty soon you've got different applications installing duplicate copies of libraries - and that's a best case scenario. If you're talking about static linking that's just as bad.
How does "the distro maintainers can produce a package for your distro" help software developers who don't wish to distribute source code?
How about you actually read the thread before you reply?
This was exactly my point. I said this was for binary-only developers, the other poster argued that it made it easier on everyone, I pointed out that it didn't and you pointed out that... I was right to begin with.
I left it up to the reader to determine if that was a bad thing or not, actually. It's simply a relevant fact that a great number of posters show themselves to be completely ignorant of every time the LSB comes up.
I write binary only commercial software, and we do have users requesting Linux and FreeBSD versions. Harp on about our efforts to rape and pillage as much as you like, but what we're really interested in is allowing our Linux users to use our software on their platform of choice.
Rape? Pillage?? Is that a guilty conscience talking? Or are you just trying to bait me, or make me look unreliable by putting words in my mouth? I certainly never likened what you are doing to such heinous crimes.
You have every right to do what you're doing, we agree on that. That doesn't mean it's a good thing for the community, and it doesn't mean that anyone else has any obligation to make it easier for you to do - but it certainly is a far cry from 'rape and pillage.'
As long as the source is available, any software (and it doesn't really deserve to be called software if the source is not available, but that's another article) can easily be packaged for your distro, either by the maintainer or any number of other users with very modest technical skills. So I'm not at all sure this part of your argument makes any sense. LSB solves a problem that isn't really a problem for anyone but that group. Sure, someone else could use it, theoretically, but no one else seems to have any need to.
The rest of your argument I don't follow either. It's no harder to install packages designed for your distro than it is to install LSB compliant packages instead - in many cases it's probably easier.
Having software work consistently anywhere is a good thing.
Except that this really has nothing to do with software. Software == source. This is about binary-only stuff, which is not 'soft' or changeable to the customer.
Read the date on your link. Terpstra worked for Caldera in 2001, when they were a Linux company. As far as I can tell, he never worked for SCO, new or old.
Caldera == The SCO Group aka 'new SCO.' Therefore obviously he did work for them.
Now this doesn't mean he's an evil person, and that's not what I said, although several of you seem to have taken it that way.
A lot of great folks have worked for Caldera over the years. But the fact is, Caldera was about leveraging Free Software to sell unfree software from day one. And that's what the LSB is about as well. That's the obvious link here.
This has nothing to do with the LSB. The LSB is simply about making linux-on-intel friendly to people that want to put out binary-only commercial programs.
Debian, god only knows why, is attempting to support this stuff. Doesn't seem to fit their social contract at all, and the LSB folks have thumbed their nose at Debian repeatedly, but for some reason they keep trying.
Slackware doesn't and has no interest in it. Another case, I think, where Volkerding gets it.
Given the background and goals of the LSB, I'll be using their certified list as a list of distros to avoid at all costs.
Terpstra himself summed it up pretty well on a debian list:
The objective we have is to
allow commercial software houses to build portable binary only packages of
their software for Intel systems running Linux.
Let me repeat the operative words here: commercial software, binary only, Intel.
This has nothing to do with Free and/or Open software, except in that it's an attempt to get Free and Open Software developers to be more helpful to commercial software houses that want to use their work for free (as in beer, not speech.)
Do you think it's only a coincidence that Terpstra works for Caldera/SCO?
The same MS that got caught lying over and over again in court, lost their case badly, and then still managed to get out of it without any consequences whatsoever?
GCC support hasn't been, and still isn't, as good on PPC as x86. That's improved a lot, so it isn't as big an issue as it once was, but it's still there.
Economy of scale. A PPC chip costs more just because fewer of them are made. Since we usually compare by price, this makes them look bad. Again, this has been getting better, but it's still there.
If PPC production was at the same volume as AMD or Intel production, it would be the x86 chips that would be underperformers for their price, by a large margin. This new product line by IBM may herald a real push to increase their production volume and lower their prices. It would make sense for them to sell at a loss for a year or two, if necessary, just to increase the marketshare. PPC production wouldn't need to match x86, just get closer to the same ballpark, for them to become the price/performance leaders. And put IBM back in the drivers seat in the PC world.
Of course, in the past, they seem to have shown no interest in taking that place back. Something about antitrust prosecution, bad reputations, bad experiences long past but still alive in the corporate culture. That could be changing though.
This 'problem' was solved in *nix decades ago. Contrary to the parent post, you CAN keep multiple libraries, it's very easy. Whatstitlib3.4.2.so and Whatstitlib4.8.2.so and dozens of other versions can be installed simultaneously, this is no problem whatsoever.
You make some good points. But remember a few other things.
NT is (or at least was) a microkernel. That's been compromised considerably with poor decisions later on, but you can't consider it a monolithic kernel - it's really a hybrid kernel that started as a microkernel and then adopted some monolithic practices.
On the other hand, Linux started as a monolithic kernel, and clearly still is, but it's incorporated an awful lot of that 'modular design' logic when it made sense to Linus, and in some ways could be considered closer to a microkernel. You don't see the UI running in kernel space, obviously, while NT, the ostensible microkernel of the pair, does exactly that. Linus started with a monolithic kernel and adopted microkernel-ish logic wherever it made sense to him, whereas MS started with a microkernel and imported monolithic logic where it made sense to them.
So the labels can be a bit confusing when applied to the real world. There isn't just A and B, but all sorts of possible variations and permutations with some features of each.
L4-Hurd, I agree, will be something very sweet, when it's finally ready, but it does seem to be a dish that needs a very long simmering time.
Lastly, I'm not sure who you're listening to, but obviously not people worth listening to, if they're saying that binary-only drivers are a good thing. They aren't. Linus doesn't support them, the Linux development model doesn't support them, they are strictly not to be encouraged. Anything that discourages them is probably a good thing.
Poorly programmed applications do break, yes.
However, many programs are not written to specifically rely on IE and run just fine. On my windows box OpenOffice, Mozilla, Pegasus Mail all run just fine, along with a ton of games, and I absolutely refuse to have any piece of IE on my box.
The main 'application' so far that I've found to refuse to work without IE was yahoo messenger - so I just grabbed Trillian instead, of course.
This is possible. The recent todo with the drivers for the Philips webcams led to some folks that hadn't signed NDAs taking a closer look at them, and seems to have revealed some trickery and false advertising there.
Anyhow, so far as I can see, there are only two reasonable explanations why NVidia and ATI don't want to give developers enough specs to write the drivers. Either the decisionmakers are suffering from serious technical illiteracy and really think that this will stop the competition from reverse-engineering their products (which would require mind-boggling stupidity it seems to me, but having worked in corporate america before I've seen enough mind-boggling stupidity to find it credible... barely) or else they are covering up the kind of stuff you're talking about.
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Spamming is theft by conversion - unless your contract with your provider allows it of course, in which case that provider can simply be blackholed by the rest of the world.
Who's being naïve here? Do you really think those companies are more afraid of the FDA than they are of ruinous lawsuits? The FDA is a captive agency, it shields them from liability and leaves them far less afraid to screw up and kill people. On top of that, take away the ridiculous immunities vested in corporations qua corporations, as Badnarik discusses above, and you're talking about a situation where the consequences would be far more deterrence than anything the FDA could ever provide.
Don't start drooling, even if the rest of the bomb were still usable (it won't be) the fissionable material inside deteriorates quite rapidly. Nuclear warheads must be 'refurbished' every couple years or so, otherwise they deteriorate too much to explode. This one's been sitting there for how long? Forget about making it go off, without a lot of fresh material at least - and if you had that, you wouldn't need this antique.
Well my Win98 box wouldn't have drug their stats down at all. Of course, the key to that is a clean install where IE and all of it's many components have never touched the HDD. And, of course, rebooting it between once and twice a week. If the uptime gets too long, it definately gets buggy, but it's quite rare for it to actually crash on me - by windows standards of rare at least. I have plenty of exposure to XP, and it doesn't seem any more stable. The figure from this study is congruent with my experience.
Of course the only time I've seen Linux crash was when I had motherboard components failing, and my Mac only locks up about once a year (and almost never gets shut down or rebooted - logging out and back in always seems to be sufficient to fix it when it gets wierd.)
But I have to agree with another posters suggestion - I think that the instability in Windows is primarily from IE, and all the other little things that tie into it. Without that, even Win98 can be reasonably stable (meaning at least as stable as XP, which most people seem to consider 'stable enough' for a desktop or game machine - not stable enough for critical server tasks of course.)
Moderation is about as close to completely borked as it could be, without actually being useless. Perhaps it would be a good idea to only give modpoints to people that are currently browsing at -1, that would be a small help.
Which brings up an interesting point - does this organisation have any ties to the IOC goons? If they do, then I want nothing to do with them, if they don't, I hope they've got good lawyers...
Actually Ludwig von Mises predicted it in the 1920s. And he was right. The same fate will take NK if they don't reverse course.
Not true. States first appeared ca. 6k BC. Humans were around for well over a hundred thousand years before that - and the majority of humans lived outside of state structures until much more recently.
There are other, better ways to control library versions. I don't know in particular for example mplayers situation, and it may be necessary as a stopgap, but it's certainly not best practice - rather an indication something needs to be fixed. At any rate, now we don't seem to be talking about anything related to the LSB at all, are we?
Does anyone actually do that? I don't think so. Typically the developers distribute their source, and at most binaries for distros they actively use. Other people then package it for other distros. No one should be packaging libraries like you suggest, regardless. If you're talking about packaging a library in the application tarball/.deb/.rpm that's nonsense - it should clearly be in a separate package. You start packing libraries inside application packages and pretty soon you've got different applications installing duplicate copies of libraries - and that's a best case scenario. If you're talking about static linking that's just as bad.
How about you actually read the thread before you reply?
This was exactly my point. I said this was for binary-only developers, the other poster argued that it made it easier on everyone, I pointed out that it didn't and you pointed out that... I was right to begin with.
I left it up to the reader to determine if that was a bad thing or not, actually. It's simply a relevant fact that a great number of posters show themselves to be completely ignorant of every time the LSB comes up.
Rape? Pillage?? Is that a guilty conscience talking? Or are you just trying to bait me, or make me look unreliable by putting words in my mouth? I certainly never likened what you are doing to such heinous crimes.
You have every right to do what you're doing, we agree on that. That doesn't mean it's a good thing for the community, and it doesn't mean that anyone else has any obligation to make it easier for you to do - but it certainly is a far cry from 'rape and pillage.'
As long as the source is available, any software (and it doesn't really deserve to be called software if the source is not available, but that's another article) can easily be packaged for your distro, either by the maintainer or any number of other users with very modest technical skills. So I'm not at all sure this part of your argument makes any sense. LSB solves a problem that isn't really a problem for anyone but that group. Sure, someone else could use it, theoretically, but no one else seems to have any need to.
The rest of your argument I don't follow either. It's no harder to install packages designed for your distro than it is to install LSB compliant packages instead - in many cases it's probably easier.
Except that this really has nothing to do with software. Software == source. This is about binary-only stuff, which is not 'soft' or changeable to the customer.
Caldera == The SCO Group aka 'new SCO.' Therefore obviously he did work for them.
Now this doesn't mean he's an evil person, and that's not what I said, although several of you seem to have taken it that way.
A lot of great folks have worked for Caldera over the years. But the fact is, Caldera was about leveraging Free Software to sell unfree software from day one. And that's what the LSB is about as well. That's the obvious link here.
This has nothing to do with the LSB. The LSB is simply about making linux-on-intel friendly to people that want to put out binary-only commercial programs.
Debian, god only knows why, is attempting to support this stuff. Doesn't seem to fit their social contract at all, and the LSB folks have thumbed their nose at Debian repeatedly, but for some reason they keep trying.
Slackware doesn't and has no interest in it. Another case, I think, where Volkerding gets it.
Given the background and goals of the LSB, I'll be using their certified list as a list of distros to avoid at all costs.
Terpstra himself summed it up pretty well on a debian list:
Let me repeat the operative words here: commercial software, binary only, Intel.
This has nothing to do with Free and/or Open software, except in that it's an attempt to get Free and Open Software developers to be more helpful to commercial software houses that want to use their work for free (as in beer, not speech.)
Do you think it's only a coincidence that Terpstra works for Caldera/SCO?
The same MS that got caught lying over and over again in court, lost their case badly, and then still managed to get out of it without any consequences whatsoever?
This has been primarily due to two issues.
GCC support hasn't been, and still isn't, as good on PPC as x86. That's improved a lot, so it isn't as big an issue as it once was, but it's still there.
Economy of scale. A PPC chip costs more just because fewer of them are made. Since we usually compare by price, this makes them look bad. Again, this has been getting better, but it's still there.
If PPC production was at the same volume as AMD or Intel production, it would be the x86 chips that would be underperformers for their price, by a large margin. This new product line by IBM may herald a real push to increase their production volume and lower their prices. It would make sense for them to sell at a loss for a year or two, if necessary, just to increase the marketshare. PPC production wouldn't need to match x86, just get closer to the same ballpark, for them to become the price/performance leaders. And put IBM back in the drivers seat in the PC world.
Of course, in the past, they seem to have shown no interest in taking that place back. Something about antitrust prosecution, bad reputations, bad experiences long past but still alive in the corporate culture. That could be changing though.
Actually, not. Emulating x86 on a PPC chip is easy.
What would be truly impressive would be running, say, Wolfenstein3d Mac on an x86 box, with reasonable speed. That would be far more difficult.
Reading the article, it sounds like a lot of hype, and I suspect the product behind it, even if it's pretty well done, will never live up to the hype.
This 'problem' was solved in *nix decades ago. Contrary to the parent post, you CAN keep multiple libraries, it's very easy. Whatstitlib3.4.2.so and Whatstitlib4.8.2.so and dozens of other versions can be installed simultaneously, this is no problem whatsoever.
You make some good points. But remember a few other things.
NT is (or at least was) a microkernel. That's been compromised considerably with poor decisions later on, but you can't consider it a monolithic kernel - it's really a hybrid kernel that started as a microkernel and then adopted some monolithic practices.
On the other hand, Linux started as a monolithic kernel, and clearly still is, but it's incorporated an awful lot of that 'modular design' logic when it made sense to Linus, and in some ways could be considered closer to a microkernel. You don't see the UI running in kernel space, obviously, while NT, the ostensible microkernel of the pair, does exactly that. Linus started with a monolithic kernel and adopted microkernel-ish logic wherever it made sense to him, whereas MS started with a microkernel and imported monolithic logic where it made sense to them.
So the labels can be a bit confusing when applied to the real world. There isn't just A and B, but all sorts of possible variations and permutations with some features of each.
L4-Hurd, I agree, will be something very sweet, when it's finally ready, but it does seem to be a dish that needs a very long simmering time.
Lastly, I'm not sure who you're listening to, but obviously not people worth listening to, if they're saying that binary-only drivers are a good thing. They aren't. Linus doesn't support them, the Linux development model doesn't support them, they are strictly not to be encouraged. Anything that discourages them is probably a good thing.
Poorly programmed applications do break, yes. However, many programs are not written to specifically rely on IE and run just fine. On my windows box OpenOffice, Mozilla, Pegasus Mail all run just fine, along with a ton of games, and I absolutely refuse to have any piece of IE on my box. The main 'application' so far that I've found to refuse to work without IE was yahoo messenger - so I just grabbed Trillian instead, of course.
This is possible. The recent todo with the drivers for the Philips webcams led to some folks that hadn't signed NDAs taking a closer look at them, and seems to have revealed some trickery and false advertising there.
Anyhow, so far as I can see, there are only two reasonable explanations why NVidia and ATI don't want to give developers enough specs to write the drivers. Either the decisionmakers are suffering from serious technical illiteracy and really think that this will stop the competition from reverse-engineering their products (which would require mind-boggling stupidity it seems to me, but having worked in corporate america before I've seen enough mind-boggling stupidity to find it credible... barely) or else they are covering up the kind of stuff you're talking about.