Btw, I upgraded my Linux kernel the other day, and some of the patches came from employees of RedHat and IBM. I've never paid them a dime, so I guess I can say I have their free labor too. Nice the way that works out, isn't it?
Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the concept of software patents, but as implemented they hurt the field rather than help it. The reason is that they are (1) too easy to get for something that really isn't novel, and (2) last for too long in a field where things are evolving quite rapidly.
21 years is fine if you created a new industrial machine that took 5 years of work to create. It's not so fine for a 3 month software hack. Where we disagree is that I think there really are truly novel ideas in software, at least as much as in the physical world of design.
At some point in the future I'll be listed (last, as my contribution was minor) as an inventor on a software patent. I don't think its bad though, as the system is way ahead of anything else available, and resulted from several man-years of work by PhDs. Alas, the average software patent is more like Amazon's 1-click patent than the one I describe, so the system in general is hurting the industry. Much like copyright, I think it could be fixed without abolishing it entirely as some people propose.
I think in an ideal world, the length of a patent should reflect both the industry it operates in, and the amount of innovation represented. Thus the length would depend on the patent. Something like 1-click isn't worth more than a year or two IMO (if it was novel, which is debatable), and something more significant should be around 5-7 years, as this is a field which is moving quickly. Note that this allows questionable patents to disappear more quickly, limiting any damage they do. On the other hand, if someone dramatically improves the design of the piston engine with some reasonaly large modification, I don't think a 30-year patent would be unreasonable. Right now the USPTO can only decide between zero and the legislated maximum, but I think there should be more choices than that.
The bombs in Madrid were set off using the alarm feature of the phones, so turning off the mobile network wouldn't have affected them at all.
There's no way they'd shut emergency response people out of the network, so at most it was shut to normal users. However I'm guessing the it was hard to make calls because (1) everyone was trying to use the network at once, and (2) emergency services get priority (and rightly so). Networks are built to withstand normal peak usage, and simply can't scale to everyone calling everyone they know in a short time.
You missed they part where they relocated to northern Europe and replaced all of their staff. Maybe it was an acquisition, though in that case they should be called "The Troll Group", or TTG for short.
Bush (Jr) has appointed no justices, and thus has nothing to do with this. Look at the list of justices, how they ruled on this case, and who appointed them; I'll bet its not what you were expecting. There's plenty of things to blame on the current whitehouse, but this isn't one of them.
In general though, I don't know why people give credit/blame to the executive branch so much on domestic issues, when congress is where the real action (read: damage) typically occurs these days. I guess it's easier to blame one person in charge than a few hundred in congress. Of course in this case it's the supreme court doing the damage; I guess they felt left out of screwing the little guy compared to the other two branches.
I resent that statement. While your beloved FreeBSD was adding these "features" such as "scalability", I'll have you know that NetBSD has been ported to three new architectures that nobody has ever heard of, and OpenBSD has fixed a very important sercurity flaw which happens when a cosmic ray passes through the earth and hits the MMU on an Intel Pentium 3. "Preparation for fine-grained locking" doesn't look so cool now, does it?
If you look at the ruling, the three most liberal justices ruled for it, while the three most conservative justices all dissented. It did of course require some of the less-conservative conservatives to rule for it to get a majority though. Maybe it just shows the difference between "traditional" Republicans that still believe in gov't having a smaller role, and "modern" ones like most who are currently in congress. I am depressed by the fact that all the Dem-appointed judges ruled for governments and against individuals; They certainly aren't helping the oppressed and underprivileged this time.
Sandra O'Connor, the only really "normal" person on the court IMO, ruled against it and issued the dissenting view that I think hits the problem spot on.
The only sure thing is that big companies with lots of swing with their local governments will use this ruling to its fullest. They might as well have ruled that large companies have emininent domain rights, and just skip the middleman of a local puppet government.
Not to mention that the model of time travel in 12 Monkeys was pretty consistent with TFA. It was repeatedly mentioned in the movie that "you can't change the past", but can only hope to learn more information to help in the future. That was a damn good movie, and I guess its about time I should see it again:)
That's good, because BSD is quite monolithic. If you look at things such as VFS, Linux actually has a more modular design in comparison, while BSD has the more tightly integrated design. This is of course discounting things such as Mach or the new (and quite promising IMO) work on DragonFly BSD. OpenBSD is unlikely to use anything from either project, so its irrelevant....there's a boatload of subtle and not-so-subtle stuff... I'm not sure I care enough to come up with a list right now, but it can be damn frustrating.
In other words "It really sucks, but I don't care enough to tell anyone why." That's not particularly actionable, and thus its unlikely to get fixed. Or you're just making stuff up. I'll give some concrete examples of things I can't stand:
OpenBSD had a crappy installer the last time I played with it. Even Debian's ancient-ass installer was easier to use. Hopefully that's improved some for OpenBSD, as most Linux distros now have very nice installers. If I go back to *BSD again I'm definitely trying FreeBSD instead. I think that's the project which Theo should be worried about losing users to.
Windows still letters the drives and doesn't let you move mount points around a global namespace. "C:?" What the hell year is it? At least the UI papers over this fault for now, but I don't consider that a real solution. Be careful not to rearrange drive cables when adding a hard drive or programs will start failing, and no, there isn't a single line fix for it like in *nix. Maybe longhorn will fix the naming problem, in which case congratulations for catching up the Unix from the 1970s.
Is Linux perfect? Hell no, but at least nothing is so irritating that I can't live with it. Well, that and it also has a leader who quietly herds cats rather than screaming at the wind.
SHOW SOME PRIDE FOLKS. Your contributions will be seen by thousands of people. Run it through the debugger at least once. Make sure it is doing what you expect. If you have comments like 'does this belong here'. Do you *KNOW* you have the problem fixed or are you just guessing?
Do you know how Linux development works, or are you just guessing? Why don't you go browse LKML, so you know how it is developed? There really isn't a line of code that goes in today that isn't looked at by multiple people.
Grepping a recent kernel for the "horrible" comment that drove someone to BSD comes up empty. They may have started from amateur roots, but that's only history today. Unix started much the same way, only it was a research project rather than a hobby.
Now if you are talking about GNU/Linux userspace, then Theo's got a point. There's a lot of crap code out there with a GPL on it. However you can choose your distribution to suit your needs, and for the most part that makes up for it. Coders have to start somewhere anyway. Dogmatic elitism won't grow your community.
Overall, most of your complaints could have been solved simply by asking a Mac forum (most of us are quite friendly;) ), or some Google searches.
I think that's the GP's whole point. It doesn't "just work", and this isn't really any different than with a Linux distribution. In either case you have to solve problems with google, forums, or mailing lists.
Personally I think a lot of the problem is that people choose an unsuitable distribution. If you don't want to mess with things, use Ubuntu or Mandrake. Don't go using Debian and complain you have to use a CLI, or use Gentoo and complain that an upgrade broke something.
Of course, that requires some who isn't too lazy to use google.
It is forever going to relegate Linux to hobbyist status at best
Maybe for audio this will be true, but the unqualified broad statement you made is already quite false. I wouldn't call the fastest two computers in the world "hobby projects".
This audio card I bought that is bog-standard doesn't work for shit in Linux
You should check the hardware you want to buy for compatibility with the operating system you want to use. This is also the case with OS X, and was the case for WinNT before it became "mainstream". Only in the currently most popular version of Windows can you get away without checking your hardware, since every hardware manufacturer targets it with a driver. Even then, buying any hardware without checking reviews for how it works in the OS of your choice is dumb, since even though its "designed for Windows Me", it could easily work horribly due to a low quality driver.
Also, he's allowed to complain about Mozilla. Having been one of the foremost advocates for "doing the right thing" at Netscape...
I'll take Mozilla/Firefox over Netscape 1.0-4.77 any day. Mozilla is not without problems, but jwz often sounds like a Win95 developer complaining about WinNT.
Did you read the FAQ entry? ...this does not require you to *do* anything physically for them.
We have a license to the source, but they don't have to give it to us. What this means is that anyone who has it can give it to us and IBM can't stop them. The GPL is very clear that you only have to give source to those who get the binary, but the license has a guaranteed sublicense to whoever you give it to, so they can give it to anyone.
This is all moot anyway, as IBM has posted the sources to LKML already. Search for "BPA" on any list archive.
Anyway, the cell will hopefully drive forward the adoption of multithreaded game engines
i.e. the Cell, the processor for the PS3 and with roots in IBM's Power/PowerPC processors, is what is driving game engines forward. The XBox360 is also Power/PowerPC based. There is no x86 bias whatsoever, but rather a console bias. Rightly so, because those *do* drive the industry whether you like it or not. Macs and Linux certainly don't. Go back and crawl in your hole.
TCP offload, stream encryption, and compression are all things you could run on a cell SPE. Someone else mentioned building a database kernel to run on SPEs for simple queries. Sure, it's still more suited for numerical computation, but a lot of servers do some crunching on the side.
People die naturally all the time. Does that mean you support the death penalty and murder? There's a big difference between meaning harm, and harm just happening to find someone/something.
Life-begins-at-conception and life-begins-at-birth are both oversimplifications of a very complex phenomena. Then there's all the times in between too. You could allow for the complexity and respect other's beliefs, or you could make fun of other people for their beliefs, holding your own theory to be the only "correct" one, with little or no evidence to support it.
America is about tolerance, yet both sides of many issues seem to have forgotten this.
I've seen this before, and recall them not objecting to casual use of the word for junk email, but not allowing conflicting trademarks or products. Looking at it again, the critical quite is this:
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term.
So DSPAM is fine as a project name for a random program, and DSPAM's problem started when they decided to trademark it. Hormel is being pretty reasonable IMO.
So you trust the AP more than someone from the mentioned team itself? I am a member of Carnegie Mellon's team CMDash, and I was there at the open. We placed first among the teams from the Americas, which one could find out if one asked any member of any team. Obviously the AP writer didn't bother to do so. I'd bet they didn't even attend the game, as it would be pretty obvious where the American team was from, since every one of us had a shirt that said "Carnegie Mellon".
Errors aside, several US teams are similar in their competitiveness. UPenn, UT Austin, and Carnegie Mellon aren't far apart in ability, so if the games were played again, the outcome could be different. The German team, as part of the defending champion, was expected to do well. They have enough money that last year they entered every regional competition: Europe, the US, Japan and Australia. They also have about 5x the manpower of every other team. I admire their achievement, but its in the same way one admires the Yankees when playing against Cleveland.
Prof. Dannenburg never said stealing was ok, he simply said he's not going to help a group that refuses to do what it claims is its mission (help artists). The RIAA isn't only saying stealing is wrong, they are saying that colleges MUST help them, for the sake of all the poor artists. The professor is responding that "If you don't help artists why should I help you?".
P.S. Carnegie Mellon is already not very P2P-friendly: Computing services warns you in several places that if you violate copyright you could get in trouble with the law. There are people on campus paid (presumably by a certain industry group) to rat out other students on the network. It looks like they have all the tools they need, so why should I help them? It's not my job to police artificially low speeding limits or badly placed stop signs.
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And the BSD license would help this how?
Btw, I upgraded my Linux kernel the other day, and some of the patches came from employees of RedHat and IBM. I've never paid them a dime, so I guess I can say I have their free labor too. Nice the way that works out, isn't it?
Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the concept of software patents, but as implemented they hurt the field rather than help it. The reason is that they are (1) too easy to get for something that really isn't novel, and (2) last for too long in a field where things are evolving quite rapidly.
21 years is fine if you created a new industrial machine that took 5 years of work to create. It's not so fine for a 3 month software hack. Where we disagree is that I think there really are truly novel ideas in software, at least as much as in the physical world of design.
At some point in the future I'll be listed (last, as my contribution was minor) as an inventor on a software patent. I don't think its bad though, as the system is way ahead of anything else available, and resulted from several man-years of work by PhDs. Alas, the average software patent is more like Amazon's 1-click patent than the one I describe, so the system in general is hurting the industry. Much like copyright, I think it could be fixed without abolishing it entirely as some people propose.
I think in an ideal world, the length of a patent should reflect both the industry it operates in, and the amount of innovation represented. Thus the length would depend on the patent. Something like 1-click isn't worth more than a year or two IMO (if it was novel, which is debatable), and something more significant should be around 5-7 years, as this is a field which is moving quickly. Note that this allows questionable patents to disappear more quickly, limiting any damage they do. On the other hand, if someone dramatically improves the design of the piston engine with some reasonaly large modification, I don't think a 30-year patent would be unreasonable. Right now the USPTO can only decide between zero and the legislated maximum, but I think there should be more choices than that.
The bombs in Madrid were set off using the alarm feature of the phones, so turning off the mobile network wouldn't have affected them at all.
There's no way they'd shut emergency response people out of the network, so at most it was shut to normal users. However I'm guessing the it was hard to make calls because (1) everyone was trying to use the network at once, and (2) emergency services get priority (and rightly so). Networks are built to withstand normal peak usage, and simply can't scale to everyone calling everyone they know in a short time.
Do those wizards inhabit caves? Maybe they are trolls after all...
*waves magic emacs*
Yet both Gnome and KDE have both managed to have very large footprints.
You missed they part where they relocated to northern Europe and replaced all of their staff. Maybe it was an acquisition, though in that case they should be called "The Troll Group", or TTG for short.
Bush (Jr) has appointed no justices, and thus has nothing to do with this. Look at the list of justices, how they ruled on this case, and who appointed them; I'll bet its not what you were expecting. There's plenty of things to blame on the current whitehouse, but this isn't one of them.
In general though, I don't know why people give credit/blame to the executive branch so much on domestic issues, when congress is where the real action (read: damage) typically occurs these days. I guess it's easier to blame one person in charge than a few hundred in congress. Of course in this case it's the supreme court doing the damage; I guess they felt left out of screwing the little guy compared to the other two branches.
I resent that statement. While your beloved FreeBSD was adding these "features" such as "scalability", I'll have you know that NetBSD has been ported to three new architectures that nobody has ever heard of, and OpenBSD has fixed a very important sercurity flaw which happens when a cosmic ray passes through the earth and hits the MMU on an Intel Pentium 3. "Preparation for fine-grained locking" doesn't look so cool now, does it?
If you look at the ruling, the three most liberal justices ruled for it, while the three most conservative justices all dissented. It did of course require some of the less-conservative conservatives to rule for it to get a majority though. Maybe it just shows the difference between "traditional" Republicans that still believe in gov't having a smaller role, and "modern" ones like most who are currently in congress. I am depressed by the fact that all the Dem-appointed judges ruled for governments and against individuals; They certainly aren't helping the oppressed and underprivileged this time.
Sandra O'Connor, the only really "normal" person on the court IMO, ruled against it and issued the dissenting view that I think hits the problem spot on.
The only sure thing is that big companies with lots of swing with their local governments will use this ruling to its fullest. They might as well have ruled that large companies have emininent domain rights, and just skip the middleman of a local puppet government.
Not to mention that the model of time travel in 12 Monkeys was pretty consistent with TFA. It was repeatedly mentioned in the movie that "you can't change the past", but can only hope to learn more information to help in the future. That was a damn good movie, and I guess its about time I should see it again :)
...I'm not thinking micro/macrokernel here...
...there's a boatload of subtle and not-so-subtle stuff... I'm not sure I care enough to come up with a list right now, but it can be damn frustrating.
That's good, because BSD is quite monolithic. If you look at things such as VFS, Linux actually has a more modular design in comparison, while BSD has the more tightly integrated design. This is of course discounting things such as Mach or the new (and quite promising IMO) work on DragonFly BSD. OpenBSD is unlikely to use anything from either project, so its irrelevant.
In other words "It really sucks, but I don't care enough to tell anyone why." That's not particularly actionable, and thus its unlikely to get fixed. Or you're just making stuff up. I'll give some concrete examples of things I can't stand:
OpenBSD had a crappy installer the last time I played with it. Even Debian's ancient-ass installer was easier to use. Hopefully that's improved some for OpenBSD, as most Linux distros now have very nice installers. If I go back to *BSD again I'm definitely trying FreeBSD instead. I think that's the project which Theo should be worried about losing users to.
Windows still letters the drives and doesn't let you move mount points around a global namespace. "C:?" What the hell year is it? At least the UI papers over this fault for now, but I don't consider that a real solution. Be careful not to rearrange drive cables when adding a hard drive or programs will start failing, and no, there isn't a single line fix for it like in *nix. Maybe longhorn will fix the naming problem, in which case congratulations for catching up the Unix from the 1970s.
Is Linux perfect? Hell no, but at least nothing is so irritating that I can't live with it. Well, that and it also has a leader who quietly herds cats rather than screaming at the wind.
SHOW SOME PRIDE FOLKS. Your contributions will be seen by thousands of people. Run it through the debugger at least once. Make sure it is doing what you expect. If you have comments like 'does this belong here'. Do you *KNOW* you have the problem fixed or are you just guessing?
Do you know how Linux development works, or are you just guessing? Why don't you go browse LKML, so you know how it is developed? There really isn't a line of code that goes in today that isn't looked at by multiple people.
Grepping a recent kernel for the "horrible" comment that drove someone to BSD comes up empty. They may have started from amateur roots, but that's only history today. Unix started much the same way, only it was a research project rather than a hobby.
Now if you are talking about GNU/Linux userspace, then Theo's got a point. There's a lot of crap code out there with a GPL on it. However you can choose your distribution to suit your needs, and for the most part that makes up for it. Coders have to start somewhere anyway. Dogmatic elitism won't grow your community.
Overall, most of your complaints could have been solved simply by asking a Mac forum (most of us are quite friendly ;) ), or some Google searches.
I think that's the GP's whole point. It doesn't "just work", and this isn't really any different than with a Linux distribution. In either case you have to solve problems with google, forums, or mailing lists.
Personally I think a lot of the problem is that people choose an unsuitable distribution. If you don't want to mess with things, use Ubuntu or Mandrake. Don't go using Debian and complain you have to use a CLI, or use Gentoo and complain that an upgrade broke something.
Of course, that requires some who isn't too lazy to use google.
It is forever going to relegate Linux to hobbyist status at best
Maybe for audio this will be true, but the unqualified broad statement you made is already quite false. I wouldn't call the fastest two computers in the world "hobby projects".
This audio card I bought that is bog-standard doesn't work for shit in Linux
You should check the hardware you want to buy for compatibility with the operating system you want to use. This is also the case with OS X, and was the case for WinNT before it became "mainstream". Only in the currently most popular version of Windows can you get away without checking your hardware, since every hardware manufacturer targets it with a driver. Even then, buying any hardware without checking reviews for how it works in the OS of your choice is dumb, since even though its "designed for Windows Me", it could easily work horribly due to a low quality driver.
Also, he's allowed to complain about Mozilla. Having been one of the foremost advocates for "doing the right thing" at Netscape...
I'll take Mozilla/Firefox over Netscape 1.0-4.77 any day. Mozilla is not without problems, but jwz often sounds like a Win95 developer complaining about WinNT.
Did you read the FAQ entry?
...this does not require you to *do* anything physically for them.
We have a license to the source, but they don't have to give it to us. What this means is that anyone who has it can give it to us and IBM can't stop them. The GPL is very clear that you only have to give source to those who get the binary, but the license has a guaranteed sublicense to whoever you give it to, so they can give it to anyone.
This is all moot anyway, as IBM has posted the sources to LKML already. Search for "BPA" on any list archive.
You sir, are an idiot. GP said:
Anyway, the cell will hopefully drive forward the adoption of multithreaded game engines
i.e. the Cell, the processor for the PS3 and with roots in IBM's Power/PowerPC processors, is what is driving game engines forward. The XBox360 is also Power/PowerPC based. There is no x86 bias whatsoever, but rather a console bias. Rightly so, because those *do* drive the industry whether you like it or not. Macs and Linux certainly don't. Go back and crawl in your hole.
TCP offload, stream encryption, and compression are all things you could run on a cell SPE. Someone else mentioned building a database kernel to run on SPEs for simple queries. Sure, it's still more suited for numerical computation, but a lot of servers do some crunching on the side.
Hey, I frequently run a word processor on my rack of blade servers you insensitive clod! I'm hoping clippy will be self aware soon...
Boot Linux on it and run "cat /proc/pci"; That'll tell you what the chip is immediately. Or run an equivalent OSX command if there is one.
People die naturally all the time. Does that mean you support the death penalty and murder? There's a big difference between meaning harm, and harm just happening to find someone/something.
Life-begins-at-conception and life-begins-at-birth are both oversimplifications of a very complex phenomena. Then there's all the times in between too. You could allow for the complexity and respect other's beliefs, or you could make fun of other people for their beliefs, holding your own theory to be the only "correct" one, with little or no evidence to support it.
America is about tolerance, yet both sides of many issues seem to have forgotten this.
I've seen this before, and recall them not objecting to casual use of the word for junk email, but not allowing conflicting trademarks or products. Looking at it again, the critical quite is this:
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term.
So DSPAM is fine as a project name for a random program, and DSPAM's problem started when they decided to trademark it. Hormel is being pretty reasonable IMO.
I thought it was:
Think Different;
Otherwise you're Stealing from us.
So you trust the AP more than someone from the mentioned team itself? I am a member of Carnegie Mellon's team CMDash, and I was there at the open. We placed first among the teams from the Americas, which one could find out if one asked any member of any team. Obviously the AP writer didn't bother to do so. I'd bet they didn't even attend the game, as it would be pretty obvious where the American team was from, since every one of us had a shirt that said "Carnegie Mellon".
Errors aside, several US teams are similar in their competitiveness. UPenn, UT Austin, and Carnegie Mellon aren't far apart in ability, so if the games were played again, the outcome could be different. The German team, as part of the defending champion, was expected to do well. They have enough money that last year they entered every regional competition: Europe, the US, Japan and Australia. They also have about 5x the manpower of every other team. I admire their achievement, but its in the same way one admires the Yankees when playing against Cleveland.
Mod parent up!
Prof. Dannenburg never said stealing was ok, he simply said he's not going to help a group that refuses to do what it claims is its mission (help artists). The RIAA isn't only saying stealing is wrong, they are saying that colleges MUST help them, for the sake of all the poor artists. The professor is responding that "If you don't help artists why should I help you?".
P.S. Carnegie Mellon is already not very P2P-friendly: Computing services warns you in several places that if you violate copyright you could get in trouble with the law. There are people on campus paid (presumably by a certain industry group) to rat out other students on the network. It looks like they have all the tools they need, so why should I help them? It's not my job to police artificially low speeding limits or badly placed stop signs.
If the MAP was $20, couldn't the store advertise the price as "$20 or less" on the main page? That'd at least give people a vague idea of the price.