> Incorrect here. If you read the preabmble of the > GPL, it states "When we speak of free softare, we > are referring to freedom, not price."
While in theory you can charge for your free software, in practice it is not possible. Once everyone has the right to resell your software, and it really only takes one other person, its sale price must necessarily go to zero. Furthermore, if they do indeed manage to sell it for something other than zero, they would be getting that money unfairly, since it costs them nothing to produce. You, on the other hand, will have paid the price for making the software in the first place (because although it may not have cost you any money, it has certainly cost you in effort), and received nothing in return for it. That's how communism works, and while you might not call it that, I am still surprized that you consider it a good thing.
> Incorrect. Support houses, in all likelyhood, are also development houses.
They are also businesses that make up for the losses in one department with gains in another. They lose money on free software (since they give it away, while having to pay the programmers), but make up for it on support, which is an entirely different profession. I would like to emphasise this one more time: companies like RedHat are not making money from software. They are making money from supporting software. It is a completely different business. A tech support person can't just go and become a programmer and a programmer can't just become a tech support person. Because of this, the programmers employed by such a company are really on charity, since they are actually a net loss to the company. So:
> people do pay developers to work on Free software, > just like they pay developers to work on commercial > software, so you can get paid for writing your software!
But because the produced software can not be sold, you will not be producing anything of value to the company. Therefore, it is simply charity.
> Umm, so you're saying charity is evil?!
Absolutely. Charity means giving something away and getting nothing in return. If you waste away your wealth in this fashion, you will inevitably become a beggar just like those beggars to whom you gave it away in the first place. Because you see, there is not enough of anything in the world to let everyone live like a rich man. People breed beyond the natural capacity of the land, just as animals do, and there will always be more people than there are resources. The only question is how to distribute these resources.
In my view of life, the resources must be distributed according by ability, because it is the men of ability who can produce and make the society prosper, while the men who are able to do nothing are of no use to society and should get only that which nobody else wants. I call this good because this maximizes the society's wealth and production, which in turn allow for their happiness and well-being.
In the philosophy of charity, the resources are distributed to those most in need of them, and such people usually come from the "men who are able to do nothing" category. Poverty is a bottomless barrel; the more you give them, the more they need. The poor stay poor not because they have nothing, but because they can produce nothing and thus can not earn their living. Hence the philosophy of charity, propagated mostly by those who want more than they have earned, by those who want to get riches with no effort, who want to content themselves with a delusion of self-worth. The delusion of self-worth, created by your charity because while they proclaim that giving value for value is wrong, they themselves believe otherwise and rationalize their hope that you give not out of charity but in recognition of their value.
I call this evil, because it gives the limited resources to those most capable of wasting them. Evil, because when the society's wealth is squandered and destroyed, every one of its members will be a
> Communism and Free Software may be derived from > the same base class (more on this in a sec):) I would put it more like this:
template class Communism; class FreeSoftware : public Communism
> Incorrect. Stallman simply claims that end-users > should have the right to modify software as they > need, and re-distribute the changes as they need.
Yes, but I was describing it from the developer's point of view. To normal people, free software simply means that they don't have to pay for it; as a previous Slashdot article mentioned, users don't really care about modification. Because of this, it is largely irrelevant to them whether the software is under the GPL, BSD, or a public domain license.
The developer has a different point of view. GPL is specifically written to prevent programmers from making money from their work. Yes, you can make money from support, or custom modifications, but that's not the same thing.
When you make money from support, people pay you for the personal attention and for being the scapegoat for their troubles. They don't pay you for the program you are supporting. You didn't even have to write it in the first place; you can run a company supporting Microsoft products. When you make money from customization, you are selling the custom code you write for your customers. You are not selling the original program. You didn't even have to write it in the first place; you can run a company creating custom frontends for Microsoft Access.
Because of this, there really are no companies making money from free software. The free software is really free. I would also equate "free" with "worthless"; no, not to the end user, but to the developer. Once he puts his program under the GPL, that's the end of the program. That the GPL allows him to sell it anyway is irrelevant, since nobody will buy it when it is available for nothing. And if he can't sell it, he can't make money from his work, for that program is his work too, not just the support for it he might provide, or any additional code he might write in the future.
How will he eat? From charitable contributions, of course. Let's talk about that.
> Simply discarding the other side as too simplistic/naiive
There's nothing simplistic or naive about the philosophy of charity. That doesn't make it any less evil.
> Well, this is the way things work, your apparent cynicism aside
The cynicism is real, because things don't work that way most of the time.
> The community does indeed provide bug reports, > bug fixes, documentation, web site support, new > code, and so forth.
Yes, but not much. Having authored a few OSS projects myself I can say that this does indeed happen, but I can also say that the contributions are miniscule. It's not something you rely on, and it's not something that will advance your project in any significant way. You might find some developers to help you work on the project, who will do so to avoid writing the same thing from scratch, but most of the time the project is your own and you carry it on your own back. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it's something OSS advocates don't often mention.
> But not only rich people give money to the > developers; companies do when they buy software > from companies that employ FOSS developers, > end-users do in gratitude or because they want > to support the development,
And finally, we come to talk about charity. Yes, charity does work for some people. Linus himself is being paid for working on something that is given away for nothing. The problem with charity is that it makes your life dependent on other people's good will, and only on other people's good will. When dealing with a trader, you give value for value, your program for his food. You are giving him something he wants in exchange for something you want, bargaining until you are both satisfied with the transaction.Thi
> You'll be seeing lots more DVD players crash when > MS DRM is bundled with the next generation of DVDs
I doubt it. Implementing DRM is not difficult, and a form of it is, in fact, already in present day DVD players in the form of zone selection.
> where MS gets whipped whenever there's any opening in > their monopoly strategies for an alternative, like Linux
I don't know any normal people running Linux desktops at home. Whenever you hear about Linux on the desktops it is usually from big companies who want to cut costs and don't care what their employees thing about it.
> I'm not comparing Linux DVD players to Gates' demo - > I'm comparing the dedicated units that he's targeting for competition.
What exactly do you mean by a "dedicated unit"?
> the ability for any programmer to fix any bug and share > it with everyone else: the Open Source superiority.
"Any programmer" doesn't have time to fix your bugs. I do it sometimes, if the fix is easy to track down and requires changing only a few lines, but if it involves more than that, I usually just remove the application and move on to something that works. Sometimes it even means taking an extra minute to reboot into Windows. There's your Open Source superiority. Sure, someone can fix it, but most people don't want to. Normal people are not programmers, and programmers have better things to do than wade through somebody else's horrible buggy code just to print a letter.
> I struggled with getting a Win2K desktop to > connect to a WinCE iPaq, which it did correctly > 10 minutes ago, before I installed a commercial WinCE app.
No need to blame Microsoft here, it's your "commercial WinCE app" that probably shipped with outdated libraries and didn't bother to check version numbers before overwriting your current configuration. This happens on Linux too, but most people can avoid it by only installing packages that came with their distribution. It happens to me all the time, since I often download and compile stuff. Only last week I upgraded my X server to X.org 6.8.1 and it no longer switches modes with Ctrl+Alt++. Why? I have no idea. It only happens with the fbdev driver, so I switched to the nv driver. It makes startup slower, but it works. Sure, I probably could build a debug version of the server and step through the keyboard handler to figure it out, but why bother? I have better things to do.
> I'm glad that I outed you as a former MS employee,
I don't recall hiding it. I'm happy to tell anyone who asks about Microsoft and how little basis there is for bashing it.
> Who knew that you actually produced that crappy software?
Excuse me, but I did not produce any "crappy software". In fact, it was all pretty damn good, considering what it had to do. I don't know how long it's been since you've actually used any Microsoft software, but it must have been decades, since everything made by Microsoft on my machine is functioning very well, thank you. Any crashes I've seen were caused by third party software, mostly by games. Furthermore, I've seen no OS crashes since I've left Microsoft, where I had to run all those "buggy" daily builds of W2K, which in reality were more robust than the Linux developer branches.
> selling your developer soul to the beast
If that's how you say "making a living", you have my condolences.
> you don't even know that the only universal > language among programmers is "profanity"
I would clarify that "profanity" is the universal language of bad programmers. Good programmers don't curse as much because our code usually works, and we don't put profanity in it because we respect our coworkers and, generally, have good manners.
> when you don't even realize that Stallman, who actually *is* > a communist, doesn't speak for all of us in the commercial, yet open, software biz.
Oh goody! Stallman is a communist now, but you are not? Would you be so kind as to outline your disagreements? You seem to be in the same boat to me so far.
> Calling me a communist gets you a "fuck you" on Slashdot, and worse in person
Is that a threat?:) Oh dear, I think I'll be turning my tail and running now. The great "Doc Ruby" is after me! It's too bad he didn't even bother to find out whether I can fight.
> Here's a clue: since MS source code is as open within > an MS corporate project as is any GNU code to anyone
No, it isn't. You get only your group's source code, and only because you need it. You certainly do not get write access to any code that you are not directly working on. Although you can ask for the code from another group, it is not a common practice and I don't recall any instances where that happened.
> does that make the MS Redmond campus some kind of "commune"
More like a college, really.
> So drop the obnxoius "communist" rhetoric that betrays your fascist attitude.
Perhaps you could clarify your meaning of the word "fascist"? I am getting an impression that you use it as "someone who doesn't agree with me".
> rather than the monopoly fascism that you're defending from your ex-boss.
One of the reasons Microsoft has a monopoly is that nobody has written anything better. I don't consider OpenOffice as good as MSOffice, and OpenOffice seems to be the only noteworthy competitor. There's KOffice, and a few other copies, but nothing substantial. Why don't you write one, if you are so "secure in your own power"?
> the home users left hanging when they're just > trying to watch a movie that requires Bill's > latest monopoly gristle, and they were foolish > enough to unplug the remote
Oh, you poor thing. Your remote is broken:( Now you'll actually have to get off your lazy butt and walk ten feet to the DVD player and press the PLAY button. Such torture! How did people ever survive without remote control?
> I don't think this is FC3's fault here; sounds like you're > missing some config detail that is keeping you from connecting.
Well, of course it is! "Missing some config detail" is what pretty much all Linux problems come down to. And it's really sad that Linux programmers still have not figured out how to default sensibly (for a desktop user, not a server guru) nor how to write options dialogs. So all Linux programs have their ugly text configuration files which require hundreds of manual pages to describe every possible configuration option without giving a single example of what should be the most common setup (a home user on a personal desktop).
> Your brain is not getting the message that the OS > needs to be stable enough to handle changes like that.
Changes like what?
> What happens to the thousands of home users
Nothing much. The thousands of home users don't get blue screens on a regular basis. In fact it's been many years since I've seen one. I've had many other problems with Windows, but they were usually caused by misconfiguration and were easily fixable after a brief Google search. I should say at this point that configuration problems are far more common on Linux and their solutions tend to be considerably more complicated and hard to find.
> It's not acceptable to peddle something that fragile to unsophisticated > users who just want to watch their movie in their darkened living room.
Such users usually buy a DVD player. Only hardcore geeks have computer projection systems to watch movies. And as for fragility, most software is anyway. Linux software is just as fragile and can easily be made completely unusable with a misplaced # in the configuration file.
> Especially when they will *have* to use that > piece of crap, because their movie is sold with > DRM forcing them to play it on a Microsoft rig.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a DVD player "crash". Most problems with consumer electronics come from people not knowing how to use them. (I would say "too dumb to figure 'em out", but I really shouldn't, since my mother is one of them:)
> Sure, the BSoD onstage was the IR receiver taking over Windows
If you had read the article, you'd know that there was no BSoD. The presentation simply did not respond to Bill's remote control; it happened because the IR receiver at his seat malfunctioned. It could have been a hardware failure or interference from the environment. If Bill were using OpenOffice on Linux, the exact same thing would have happened, so your bashing is quite unfair.
> Fuck you, fascist, with your insane "commie" talk
Why is it that most Open Source advocates are so foul-mouthed? Calling the "Open Source" philosophy "communist" is not insane, but rather accurate. Communism is based on the "from each by ability, to each by his need" idea, and free software is simply a direct application of this idea. According to Stallman, each programmer should work on software for his own personal enjoyment and give it to the community. Then the community will pay him back with modifications and the rich people will pay him money, generously satisfying all his needs because he's just such a great and unselfish fellow.
> to a person richer, smarter, and with more Windows > programming experience than you. Microslave.
Ha, ha, ha! Even calling me a Microsoft employee as a final insult:) (FYI, I left Microsoft four years ago, but I am sure most of the smart people I knew there still are) Oh, this is rich! Now wait, weren't we supposed to be criticising Windows here? Even if I were the Devil himself, Bill's problems would still have been with the IR receiver.
The problem was with the IR receiver; a hardware failure, not a software crash. Read the article before you start saying how everyone gets "hung out to dry with a crashed Windows app thousands of times a day" because "rest of us don't have Alexander, the MS Media Center Team, or the Windows source code". You might discover that it doesn't further your communist agenda after all.
> True, but you are now specifying a cooling system.
You can't design a circuit without also designing a cooling system for it. There isn't a single desktop CPU that can run without one, and while monster fans are ubiqutous, liquid cooling is becoming popular. Of course, back in the mainframe days, plumbing was the computer:)
> If you were to surround them with a hot spherical > shell, then they would become HOTTER than the average temperature of that shell
Right, but if you can keep the shell temperature low, you would then also set a limit on the core temperature. If liquid cooling can keep a flat chip at 30C, the center of a likewise cooled sphere should be well within its normal operating temperature range.
> You don't just spray silicon like a coat of paint! > You need a perfect (~99.9999999999%) pure crystal.
Well, no, you don't. You just need pure crystals in the spots where the transistors are supposed to be. Perhaps it would be easier to create a grid of small pure crystals instead of a single perfect one. In fact, how about growing them chemically and then painting them on? You could even have P and N crystals made separately. I am not sure how to go about connecting them (monolayer deposition followed by CVD to fill the gaps perhaps?), but I think something like this could warrant some consideration.
> When you sandwich together different materials there > is serious risk of cracking over time as they heat up and cool down.
How about pre-cracking them then? Build in natural fault lines into the circuits and let them break, leaving the pieces connected with stretchable metal wires.
> But how do you think timing will be impacted if one layer is typically hotter than another?
But you will know about this situation at design time. At steady state the temperature gradient is constant, and with proper cooling should remaing that way. In fact, it would be more stable than in a flat circuit because of the ball's greater thermal mass.
> How do you connect both layers together? You would > need to grow metal posts *through* the new substrate layer.
No, you would grow the metal posts *while* you grow the substrate layer. Masking and etching should work just fine as long as the posts are wide enough to not suffer greatly from misalignment. You can also do inductive coupling.
> How is signal integrity impacted?
Why would it be? Signals travel on a spherical surface as easily as on a flat one. Look at Earth.
> How do you supply enough power?
Radially. Because the radial connections must already be thicker, they would offer a lower voltage drop, and by being able to route power directly to any point on the sphere you would be able to reduce the length of the power lines in the circuit.
> When something goes wrong and an entire batch of wafers > is destroyed (at millions of dollars in cost)
And that's another problem. Shouldn't they be thinking really hard about how to make the process cheaper? Take a look at Ball Semiconductor, for instance. They claim a 5 day turnaround time! If you could do that with your bad chips, perhaps you wouldn't spend too much time "laser fixing" a particular bad wire. It would cost less to just restart the process.
That company also have discovered some even more interesting advantages of doing spherical circuits. It turns out that the balls can be made without a cleanroom, which is obviously an enormous expenditure. They also cite lower environmental cost, due to less silicon going to waste. And making an inductor coil on the surface for communication is way cool!
> but you still want to remove it so the center doesn't get hotter than the surface.
Now this I don't understand. My DRAM chips are sitting in a case with relatively poor ventilation and are still managing to keep from overheating by simple air cooling, with no heat sink at all. Granted, heat retention will be greater inside the sphere, but with the CPU being immersed in an essentially bottomless heat sink in form of liquid coolant, I don't see how the circuits in the center could keep heating the sphere faster than the coolant can draw it away. Remember, even red-hot steel balls can be easily quenched in a barrel of water, and it only takes a second or two.
Re:You obviously haven't studied chip design
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> You obviously haven't studied chip design
Perhaps that's why I am able to come up with a novel idea? Because nobody told me it's impossible, it just might work. But, of course, I welcome constructive criticism.
> How do you deposit another fresh layer of > uncorrupted substrate on top of a processed layer?
With this technology it is already possible to do exactly that. It just needs a bigger nozzle.
> Chemical vapor deposition? It's not as easy as it sounds.
Neither was putting the man on the moon. But we did it anyway. Sure there will be engineering challenges here, but I see no theoretical problems with using CVD for this.
> What about thermal expansion/contraction?
Thermal effects in the sphere are no different from the ones in a flat plate. Also, there have been recent advances in painting transistors on flexible substrates, which could help on the surface layers.
> thermal effects on timing
How will they be any different from the ones in a flat CPU? Besides, you need to remember that with the clock in the center, timing is going to be far easier to implement.
> IR drop of a sandwich layer of > substrate-oxide-metal-oxide-substrate-oxide-metal?
Perhaps you could explain this problem to those of us who don't understand the reference?
> How do you analyze process defects on the lower layers?
Just as you analyze process defects on flat CPUs: by testing them. I don't think chip manufacturers actually look at each chip under the microscope to see if something went wrong.
> If you want to do 3D, just make alot of chips and stack them together.
I don't see how that helps with anything. If you have flat chips anyway, why not just spread them out?
No it isn't. All you need to do is create your etching maps as projected on a sphere and illuminate the entire surface at once. I doubt it is any more difficult than doing it on a flat surface; just add more projectors and account for distortion at the surface. The etching process is exactly the same, since only the surface is etched.
> b) you still have the distance problem, you just got a one-time gain
The sphere gives you diametric connectivity, which will always be pi/2 times shorter than the surface distance. I think that's a pretty good gain. Furthermore, with the clock at the center, the propagation time becomes irrelevant, since you will no longer have to synchronize two different areas by surface transmission. This will allow the chip designer greater freedom of layout, since every point on the sphere is in synchrony with any other.
> How are you going to remove the heat from the center of that sphere?
You won't. You put cool curcuits in the center and hot circuits on the surface. This is possible because memory circuits, which should be in the center, generate less heat than the ALU circuits on the surface (this also allows equal memory latency for all parts of the CPU). Then you take the CPU ball and float it in a nonconductive coolant. Hey, if they can make a nuclear reactor work like this, how hard can it be for a CPU?
> but there are times when you have to have low > latency and there's no substitute for smallness > then; light just isn't that fast!
True, but your thinking is just SO 2D! What we need is to make the L2 cache into a sphere and paint the CPU on the surface. Then you put the clock in the center, guaranteeing synchronization at every point. When are chip manufacturers going to leave Flatland?
> I was replying to someone who was trying to make their whole home directory read-only
No, you were replying to my post, and I only have my home directory with 510 permissions, not on a read-only fs. Of course, I don't think that having no user-writable file space should prevent KDE from starting. If I just want to run Konqueror to look at some web pages, why would I need to write anything? It's just plain bad design; that's what I think.
> If you can't write to your home directory, how can > you write to ~/.kde/ to save the DCOP state anyway?
My home directory is set with permissions 510 to prevent creation of unnecessary configuration files. It's not on a read-only filesystem.
> I'd hardly call being able to write to your own > home directory "excessive permission"
I would when the application does not need to write anything. Unless I customize its settings in some way, there is no reason for it to write a configuration file at all, and it most certainly should not refuse to run if it can not create one, like KDE does.
Furthermore, there is the problem of having the DCOP state file in the first place. I can understand that they wanted multiple applications to find the DCOP server, but that is something X already does more appropriately by placing the protocol pipe globally in/tmp. If DCOP is by its nature a global service, like X, or sendmail, it should be run as such instead of writing superfluous files all over the place polluting my home directory at the root level. Another alternative would have been to look it up through IPC, which is appropriately transient and invisible to the user.
X.org (6.8.1) is, by the way, another example of excessive permission requirement, wanting write access to/var/log to write its log instead of doing it through the syslog interface like a good application should. This means that I am forced to run X suid root even though it is using fbdev driver which does not require such extravagant privileges.
> What does locking down your home directory have to > do with running with administrator privelages verses non-admin privelages?
When a Windows application fails to run without Administrator privileges, it is usually because it wants to write someplace where it should not. For instance, many applications open their registry key requesting full access at all times regardless of whether anything is actually being written, even under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. You can see the analogy clearly if you think of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as being "locked down".
Do you know how to get KDE to run with a read-only home directory? You won't find the answer in the documentation. Searching the net yields helpful advice to set KDE_HOME_READONLY=true, but it still doesn't work because DCOP wants to write its state file in the home directory (now, who came up with that idea?). Naturally, there is no help anywhere to be found. But, if you happen to be a programmer and have time to comb through hundreds of lines of code, you can figure out that you also need to set three additional variables, which let you run with a read-only home. Well, not exactly; you still need to put those state files somewhere, and as they are not uniquely named,/tmp is not really an option. So I'll put them in ~/.kde. To do this I had to set:
DCOP_SAVE_DIR=$HOME/.kde ICEAUTHORITY=$HOME/.kd e/ICEauthority DCOPAUTHORITY=$HOME/.kde/DCOP_serv er
So pull the log from your own eye before taking the speck from Microsoft's eye, for programmers assume excessive permissions on all platforms. And please, would somebody at least mention this in the documentation?
"You see Mom, there are Good worms and there are Bad worms"
Re:What's the practical problem here?
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 1
> If you put the copylefted spellchecker in a > separate process, and you have it talk to your > proprietary word processor over a pipe or a local > socket and make sure to document the protocol
And how is this different from using a published API? When you call a function in a shared library, the procedure is not very different from doing it through a pipe. You write your arguments to the stack and tell the computer the function you want to call (by setting eip to it rather than doing dynamic lookup on a protocol command). I don't see how this is different. In fact, even static linking does the same. The separation of "my code" and "their code" is just as clear, differing only in the location of called code. If taking a book home from a library is allowed, why isn't borrowing a piece of code (temporarily) into my address space an identical situation?
> you can make any wildass claim you like if you don't have to provide proof.
Very true. And I will not ask you to take me on faith, since that would be a moral crime. Just go read the text of the PATRIOT act and its sequel. I think you will see what I mean, even if you disagree with my interpretation.
> You spoke. I listened. Now it's my turn to speak. > That's how it works in a free and open society.
Yes, but neither of us said anything important. You see, the ruling party doesn't care much about petty criticisms. They come and go and all eventually die off. Very rarely the government may have to pass some token act to placate the populace, but mostly it is simpler to just ignore what people say. On the other hand, if we were discussing something that threatened their interests, we would quite likely be promptly shut up, named "terrorists", and thrown in jail for an indefinite time.
Slashdot Mirror
> Incorrect here. If you read the preabmble of the
> GPL, it states "When we speak of free softare, we
> are referring to freedom, not price."
While in theory you can charge for your free software, in practice it is not possible. Once everyone has the right to resell your software, and it really only takes one other person, its sale price must necessarily go to zero. Furthermore, if they do indeed manage to sell it for something other than zero, they would be getting that money unfairly, since it costs them nothing to produce. You, on the other hand, will have paid the price for making the software in the first place (because although it may not have cost you any money, it has certainly cost you in effort), and received nothing in return for it. That's how communism works, and while you might not call it that, I am still surprized that you consider it a good thing.
> Incorrect. Support houses, in all likelyhood, are also development houses.
They are also businesses that make up for the losses in one department with gains in another. They lose money on free software (since they give it away, while having to pay the programmers), but make up for it on support, which is an entirely different profession. I would like to emphasise this one more time: companies like RedHat are not making money from software. They are making money from supporting software. It is a completely different business. A tech support person can't just go and become a programmer and a programmer can't just become a tech support person. Because of this, the programmers employed by such a company are really on charity, since they are actually a net loss to the company. So:
> people do pay developers to work on Free software,
> just like they pay developers to work on commercial
> software, so you can get paid for writing your software!
But because the produced software can not be sold, you will not be producing anything of value to the company. Therefore, it is simply charity.
> Umm, so you're saying charity is evil?!
Absolutely. Charity means giving something away and getting nothing in return. If you waste away your wealth in this fashion, you will inevitably become a beggar just like those beggars to whom you gave it away in the first place. Because you see, there is not enough of anything in the world to let everyone live like a rich man. People breed beyond the natural capacity of the land, just as animals do, and there will always be more people than there are resources. The only question is how to distribute these resources.
In my view of life, the resources must be distributed according by ability, because it is the men of ability who can produce and make the society prosper, while the men who are able to do nothing are of no use to society and should get only that which nobody else wants. I call this good because this maximizes the society's wealth and production, which in turn allow for their happiness and well-being.
In the philosophy of charity, the resources are distributed to those most in need of them, and such people usually come from the "men who are able to do nothing" category. Poverty is a bottomless barrel; the more you give them, the more they need. The poor stay poor not because they have nothing, but because they can produce nothing and thus can not earn their living. Hence the philosophy of charity, propagated mostly by those who want more than they have earned, by those who want to get riches with no effort, who want to content themselves with a delusion of self-worth. The delusion of self-worth, created by your charity because while they proclaim that giving value for value is wrong, they themselves believe otherwise and rationalize their hope that you give not out of charity but in recognition of their value.
I call this evil, because it gives the limited resources to those most capable of wasting them. Evil, because when the society's wealth is squandered and destroyed, every one of its members will be a
> Communism and Free Software may be derived from :) I would put it more like this:
> the same base class (more on this in a sec)
template class Communism;
class FreeSoftware : public Communism
> Incorrect. Stallman simply claims that end-users
> should have the right to modify software as they
> need, and re-distribute the changes as they need.
Yes, but I was describing it from the developer's point of view. To normal people, free software simply means that they don't have to pay for it; as a previous Slashdot article mentioned, users don't really care about modification. Because of this, it is largely irrelevant to them whether the software is under the GPL, BSD, or a public domain license.
The developer has a different point of view. GPL is specifically written to prevent programmers from making money from their work. Yes, you can make money from support, or custom modifications, but that's not the same thing.
When you make money from support, people pay you for the personal attention and for being the scapegoat for their troubles. They don't pay you for the program you are supporting. You didn't even have to write it in the first place; you can run a company supporting Microsoft products. When you make money from customization, you are selling the custom code you write for your customers. You are not selling the original program. You didn't even have to write it in the first place; you can run a company creating custom frontends for Microsoft Access.
Because of this, there really are no companies making money from free software. The free software is really free. I would also equate "free" with "worthless"; no, not to the end user, but to the developer. Once he puts his program under the GPL, that's the end of the program. That the GPL allows him to sell it anyway is irrelevant, since nobody will buy it when it is available for nothing. And if he can't sell it, he can't make money from his work, for that program is his work too, not just the support for it he might provide, or any additional code he might write in the future.
How will he eat? From charitable contributions, of course. Let's talk about that.
> Simply discarding the other side as too simplistic/naiive
There's nothing simplistic or naive about the philosophy of charity. That doesn't make it any less evil.
> Well, this is the way things work, your apparent cynicism aside
The cynicism is real, because things don't work that way most of the time.
> The community does indeed provide bug reports,
> bug fixes, documentation, web site support, new
> code, and so forth.
Yes, but not much. Having authored a few OSS projects myself I can say that this does indeed happen, but I can also say that the contributions are miniscule. It's not something you rely on, and it's not something that will advance your project in any significant way. You might find some developers to help you work on the project, who will do so to avoid writing the same thing from scratch, but most of the time the project is your own and you carry it on your own back. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it's something OSS advocates don't often mention.
> But not only rich people give money to the
> developers; companies do when they buy software
> from companies that employ FOSS developers,
> end-users do in gratitude or because they want
> to support the development,
And finally, we come to talk about charity. Yes, charity does work for some people. Linus himself is being paid for working on something that is given away for nothing. The problem with charity is that it makes your life dependent on other people's good will, and only on other people's good will. When dealing with a trader, you give value for value, your program for his food. You are giving him something he wants in exchange for something you want, bargaining until you are both satisfied with the transaction.Thi
> You'll be seeing lots more DVD players crash when
> MS DRM is bundled with the next generation of DVDs
I doubt it. Implementing DRM is not difficult, and a form of it is, in fact, already in present day DVD players in the form of zone selection.
> where MS gets whipped whenever there's any opening in
> their monopoly strategies for an alternative, like Linux
I don't know any normal people running Linux desktops at home. Whenever you hear about Linux on the desktops it is usually from big companies who want to cut costs and don't care what their employees thing about it.
> I'm not comparing Linux DVD players to Gates' demo -
> I'm comparing the dedicated units that he's targeting for competition.
What exactly do you mean by a "dedicated unit"?
> the ability for any programmer to fix any bug and share
> it with everyone else: the Open Source superiority.
"Any programmer" doesn't have time to fix your bugs. I do it sometimes, if the fix is easy to track down and requires changing only a few lines, but if it involves more than that, I usually just remove the application and move on to something that works. Sometimes it even means taking an extra minute to reboot into Windows. There's your Open Source superiority. Sure, someone can fix it, but most people don't want to. Normal people are not programmers, and programmers have better things to do than wade through somebody else's horrible buggy code just to print a letter.
> I struggled with getting a Win2K desktop to
> connect to a WinCE iPaq, which it did correctly
> 10 minutes ago, before I installed a commercial WinCE app.
No need to blame Microsoft here, it's your "commercial WinCE app" that probably shipped with outdated libraries and didn't bother to check version numbers before overwriting your current configuration. This happens on Linux too, but most people can avoid it by only installing packages that came with their distribution. It happens to me all the time, since I often download and compile stuff. Only last week I upgraded my X server to X.org 6.8.1 and it no longer switches modes with Ctrl+Alt++. Why? I have no idea. It only happens with the fbdev driver, so I switched to the nv driver. It makes startup slower, but it works. Sure, I probably could build a debug version of the server and step through the keyboard handler to figure it out, but why bother? I have better things to do.
> I'm glad that I outed you as a former MS employee,
:) Oh dear, I think I'll be turning my tail and running now. The great "Doc Ruby" is after me! It's too bad he didn't even bother to find out whether I can fight.
:( Now you'll actually have to get off your lazy butt and walk ten feet to the DVD player and press the PLAY button. Such torture! How did people ever survive without remote control?
I don't recall hiding it. I'm happy to tell anyone who asks about Microsoft and how little basis there is for bashing it.
> Who knew that you actually produced that crappy software?
Excuse me, but I did not produce any "crappy software". In fact, it was all pretty damn good, considering what it had to do. I don't know how long it's been since you've actually used any Microsoft software, but it must have been decades, since everything made by Microsoft on my machine is functioning very well, thank you. Any crashes I've seen were caused by third party software, mostly by games. Furthermore, I've seen no OS crashes since I've left Microsoft, where I had to run all those "buggy" daily builds of W2K, which in reality were more robust than the Linux developer branches.
> selling your developer soul to the beast
If that's how you say "making a living", you have my condolences.
> you don't even know that the only universal
> language among programmers is "profanity"
I would clarify that "profanity" is the universal language of bad programmers. Good programmers don't curse as much because our code usually works, and we don't put profanity in it because we respect our coworkers and, generally, have good manners.
> when you don't even realize that Stallman, who actually *is*
> a communist, doesn't speak for all of us in the commercial, yet open, software biz.
Oh goody! Stallman is a communist now, but you are not? Would you be so kind as to outline your disagreements? You seem to be in the same boat to me so far.
> Calling me a communist gets you a "fuck you" on Slashdot, and worse in person
Is that a threat?
> Here's a clue: since MS source code is as open within
> an MS corporate project as is any GNU code to anyone
No, it isn't. You get only your group's source code, and only because you need it. You certainly do not get write access to any code that you are not directly working on. Although you can ask for the code from another group, it is not a common practice and I don't recall any instances where that happened.
> does that make the MS Redmond campus some kind of "commune"
More like a college, really.
> So drop the obnxoius "communist" rhetoric that betrays your fascist attitude.
Perhaps you could clarify your meaning of the word "fascist"? I am getting an impression that you use it as "someone who doesn't agree with me".
> rather than the monopoly fascism that you're defending from your ex-boss.
One of the reasons Microsoft has a monopoly is that nobody has written anything better. I don't consider OpenOffice as good as MSOffice, and OpenOffice seems to be the only noteworthy competitor. There's KOffice, and a few other copies, but nothing substantial. Why don't you write one, if you are so "secure in your own power"?
> the home users left hanging when they're just
> trying to watch a movie that requires Bill's
> latest monopoly gristle, and they were foolish
> enough to unplug the remote
Oh, you poor thing. Your remote is broken
> I don't think this is FC3's fault here; sounds like you're
> missing some config detail that is keeping you from connecting.
Well, of course it is! "Missing some config detail" is what pretty much all Linux problems come down to. And it's really sad that Linux programmers still have not figured out how to default sensibly (for a desktop user, not a server guru) nor how to write options dialogs. So all Linux programs have their ugly text configuration files which require hundreds of manual pages to describe every possible configuration option without giving a single example of what should be the most common setup (a home user on a personal desktop).
> Your brain is not getting the message that the OS
:)
> needs to be stable enough to handle changes like that.
Changes like what?
> What happens to the thousands of home users
Nothing much. The thousands of home users don't get blue screens on a regular basis. In fact it's been many years since I've seen one. I've had many other problems with Windows, but they were usually caused by misconfiguration and were easily fixable after a brief Google search. I should say at this point that configuration problems are far more common on Linux and their solutions tend to be considerably more complicated and hard to find.
> It's not acceptable to peddle something that fragile to unsophisticated
> users who just want to watch their movie in their darkened living room.
Such users usually buy a DVD player. Only hardcore geeks have computer projection systems to watch movies. And as for fragility, most software is anyway. Linux software is just as fragile and can easily be made completely unusable with a misplaced # in the configuration file.
> Especially when they will *have* to use that
> piece of crap, because their movie is sold with
> DRM forcing them to play it on a Microsoft rig.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a DVD player "crash". Most problems with consumer electronics come from people not knowing how to use them. (I would say "too dumb to figure 'em out", but I really shouldn't, since my mother is one of them
> Sure, the BSoD onstage was the IR receiver taking over Windows
:) (FYI, I left Microsoft four years ago, but I am sure most of the smart people I knew there still are) Oh, this is rich! Now wait, weren't we supposed to be criticising Windows here? Even if I were the Devil himself, Bill's problems would still have been with the IR receiver.
If you had read the article, you'd know that there was no BSoD. The presentation simply did not respond to Bill's remote control; it happened because the IR receiver at his seat malfunctioned. It could have been a hardware failure or interference from the environment. If Bill were using OpenOffice on Linux, the exact same thing would have happened, so your bashing is quite unfair.
> Fuck you, fascist, with your insane "commie" talk
Why is it that most Open Source advocates are so foul-mouthed? Calling the "Open Source" philosophy "communist" is not insane, but rather accurate. Communism is based on the "from each by ability, to each by his need" idea, and free software is simply a direct application of this idea. According to Stallman, each programmer should work on software for his own personal enjoyment and give it to the community. Then the community will pay him back with modifications and the rich people will pay him money, generously satisfying all his needs because he's just such a great and unselfish fellow.
> to a person richer, smarter, and with more Windows
> programming experience than you. Microslave.
Ha, ha, ha! Even calling me a Microsoft employee as a final insult
The problem was with the IR receiver; a hardware failure, not a software crash. Read the article before you start saying how everyone gets "hung out to dry with a crashed Windows app thousands of times a day" because "rest of us don't have Alexander, the MS Media Center Team, or the Windows source code". You might discover that it doesn't further your communist agenda after all.
> True, but you are now specifying a cooling system.
:)
You can't design a circuit without also designing a cooling system for it. There isn't a single desktop CPU that can run without one, and while monster fans are ubiqutous, liquid cooling is becoming popular. Of course, back in the mainframe days, plumbing was the computer
> If you were to surround them with a hot spherical
> shell, then they would become HOTTER than the average temperature of that shell
Right, but if you can keep the shell temperature low, you would then also set a limit on the core temperature. If liquid cooling can keep a flat chip at 30C, the center of a likewise cooled sphere should be well within its normal operating temperature range.
> You don't just spray silicon like a coat of paint!
> You need a perfect (~99.9999999999%) pure crystal.
Well, no, you don't. You just need pure crystals in the spots where the transistors are supposed to be. Perhaps it would be easier to create a grid of small pure crystals instead of a single perfect one. In fact, how about growing them chemically and then painting them on? You could even have P and N crystals made separately. I am not sure how to go about connecting them (monolayer deposition followed by CVD to fill the gaps perhaps?), but I think something like this could warrant some consideration.
> When you sandwich together different materials there
> is serious risk of cracking over time as they heat up and cool down.
How about pre-cracking them then? Build in natural fault lines into the circuits and let them break, leaving the pieces connected with stretchable metal wires.
> But how do you think timing will be impacted if one layer is typically hotter than another?
But you will know about this situation at design time. At steady state the temperature gradient is constant, and with proper cooling should remaing that way. In fact, it would be more stable than in a flat circuit because of the ball's greater thermal mass.
> How do you connect both layers together? You would
> need to grow metal posts *through* the new substrate layer.
No, you would grow the metal posts *while* you grow the substrate layer. Masking and etching should work just fine as long as the posts are wide enough to not suffer greatly from misalignment. You can also do inductive coupling.
> How is signal integrity impacted?
Why would it be? Signals travel on a spherical surface as easily as on a flat one. Look at Earth.
> How do you supply enough power?
Radially. Because the radial connections must already be thicker, they would offer a lower voltage drop, and by being able to route power directly to any point on the sphere you would be able to reduce the length of the power lines in the circuit.
> When something goes wrong and an entire batch of wafers
> is destroyed (at millions of dollars in cost)
And that's another problem. Shouldn't they be thinking really hard about how to make the process cheaper? Take a look at Ball Semiconductor, for instance. They claim a 5 day turnaround time! If you could do that with your bad chips, perhaps you wouldn't spend too much time "laser fixing" a particular bad wire. It would cost less to just restart the process.
> Ball Semiconductor
:) /me does the happy dance.
Hah! I knew it!
That company also have discovered some even more interesting advantages of doing spherical circuits. It turns out that the balls can be made without a cleanroom, which is obviously an enormous expenditure. They also cite lower environmental cost, due to less silicon going to waste. And making an inductor coil on the surface for communication is way cool!
> but you still want to remove it so the center doesn't get hotter than the surface.
Now this I don't understand. My DRAM chips are sitting in a case with relatively poor ventilation and are still managing to keep from overheating by simple air cooling, with no heat sink at all. Granted, heat retention will be greater inside the sphere, but with the CPU being immersed in an essentially bottomless heat sink in form of liquid coolant, I don't see how the circuits in the center could keep heating the sphere faster than the coolant can draw it away. Remember, even red-hot steel balls can be easily quenched in a barrel of water, and it only takes a second or two.
> You obviously haven't studied chip design
?
Perhaps that's why I am able to come up with a novel idea? Because nobody told me it's impossible, it just might work. But, of course, I welcome constructive criticism.
> How do you deposit another fresh layer of
> uncorrupted substrate on top of a processed layer?
With this technology it is already possible to do exactly that. It just needs a bigger nozzle.
> Chemical vapor deposition? It's not as easy as it sounds.
Neither was putting the man on the moon. But we did it anyway. Sure there will be engineering challenges here, but I see no theoretical problems with using CVD for this.
> What about thermal expansion/contraction?
Thermal effects in the sphere are no different from the ones in a flat plate. Also, there have been recent advances in painting transistors on flexible substrates, which could help on the surface layers.
> thermal effects on timing
How will they be any different from the ones in a flat CPU? Besides, you need to remember that with the clock in the center, timing is going to be far easier to implement.
> IR drop of a sandwich layer of
> substrate-oxide-metal-oxide-substrate-oxide-metal
Perhaps you could explain this problem to those of us who don't understand the reference?
> How do you analyze process defects on the lower layers?
Just as you analyze process defects on flat CPUs: by testing them. I don't think chip manufacturers actually look at each chip under the microscope to see if something went wrong.
> If you want to do 3D, just make alot of chips and stack them together.
I don't see how that helps with anything. If you have flat chips anyway, why not just spread them out?
> a) fabrication is hard
No it isn't. All you need to do is create your etching maps as projected on a sphere and illuminate the entire surface at once. I doubt it is any more difficult than doing it on a flat surface; just add more projectors and account for distortion at the surface. The etching process is exactly the same, since only the surface is etched.
> b) you still have the distance problem, you just got a one-time gain
The sphere gives you diametric connectivity, which will always be pi/2 times shorter than the surface distance. I think that's a pretty good gain. Furthermore, with the clock at the center, the propagation time becomes irrelevant, since you will no longer have to synchronize two different areas by surface transmission. This will allow the chip designer greater freedom of layout, since every point on the sphere is in synchrony with any other.
> How are you going to remove the heat from the center of that sphere?
You won't. You put cool curcuits in the center and hot circuits on the surface. This is possible because memory circuits, which should be in the center, generate less heat than the ALU circuits on the surface (this also allows equal memory latency for all parts of the CPU). Then you take the CPU ball and float it in a nonconductive coolant. Hey, if they can make a nuclear reactor work like this, how hard can it be for a CPU?
> but there are times when you have to have low
> latency and there's no substitute for smallness
> then; light just isn't that fast!
True, but your thinking is just SO 2D! What we need is to make the L2 cache into a sphere and paint the CPU on the surface. Then you put the clock in the center, guaranteeing synchronization at every point. When are chip manufacturers going to leave Flatland?
> I was replying to someone who was trying to make their whole home directory read-only
No, you were replying to my post, and I only have my home directory with 510 permissions, not on a read-only fs. Of course, I don't think that having no user-writable file space should prevent KDE from starting. If I just want to run Konqueror to look at some web pages, why would I need to write anything? It's just plain bad design; that's what I think.
> If you can't write to your home directory, how can
/tmp. If DCOP is by its nature a global service, like X, or sendmail, it should be run as such instead of writing superfluous files all over the place polluting my home directory at the root level. Another alternative would have been to look it up through IPC, which is appropriately transient and invisible to the user.
/var/log to write its log instead of doing it through the syslog interface like a good application should. This means that I am forced to run X suid root even though it is using fbdev driver which does not require such extravagant privileges.
> you write to ~/.kde/ to save the DCOP state anyway?
My home directory is set with permissions 510 to prevent creation of unnecessary configuration files. It's not on a read-only filesystem.
> I'd hardly call being able to write to your own
> home directory "excessive permission"
I would when the application does not need to write anything. Unless I customize its settings in some way, there is no reason for it to write a configuration file at all, and it most certainly should not refuse to run if it can not create one, like KDE does.
Furthermore, there is the problem of having the DCOP state file in the first place. I can understand that they wanted multiple applications to find the DCOP server, but that is something X already does more appropriately by placing the protocol pipe globally in
X.org (6.8.1) is, by the way, another example of excessive permission requirement, wanting write access to
> What does locking down your home directory have to
> do with running with administrator privelages verses non-admin privelages?
When a Windows application fails to run without Administrator privileges, it is usually because it wants to write someplace where it should not. For instance, many applications open their registry key requesting full access at all times regardless of whether anything is actually being written, even under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. You can see the analogy clearly if you think of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as being "locked down".
Do you know how to get KDE to run with a read-only home directory? You won't find the answer in the documentation. Searching the net yields helpful advice to set KDE_HOME_READONLY=true, but it still doesn't work because DCOP wants to write its state file in the home directory (now, who came up with that idea?). Naturally, there is no help anywhere to be found. But, if you happen to be a programmer and have time to comb through hundreds of lines of code, you can figure out that you also need to set three additional variables, which let you run with a read-only home. Well, not exactly; you still need to put those state files somewhere, and as they are not uniquely named, /tmp is not really an option. So I'll put them in ~/.kde. To do this I had to set:
d e/ICEauthorityv er
DCOP_SAVE_DIR=$HOME/.kde
ICEAUTHORITY=$HOME/.k
DCOPAUTHORITY=$HOME/.kde/DCOP_ser
So pull the log from your own eye before taking the speck from Microsoft's eye, for programmers assume excessive permissions on all platforms. And please, would somebody at least mention this in the documentation?
> classes that are written entirely in txt msg spk that U or I do ! understnd.
That's not text message speak, you fool; it's encryption!
"You see Mom, there are Good worms and there are Bad worms"
> If you put the copylefted spellchecker in a
> separate process, and you have it talk to your
> proprietary word processor over a pipe or a local
> socket and make sure to document the protocol
And how is this different from using a published API? When you call a function in a shared library, the procedure is not very different from doing it through a pipe. You write your arguments to the stack and tell the computer the function you want to call (by setting eip to it rather than doing dynamic lookup on a protocol command). I don't see how this is different. In fact, even static linking does the same. The separation of "my code" and "their code" is just as clear, differing only in the location of called code. If taking a book home from a library is allowed, why isn't borrowing a piece of code (temporarily) into my address space an identical situation?
> you can make any wildass claim you like if you don't have to provide proof.
Very true. And I will not ask you to take me on faith, since that would be a moral crime. Just go read the text of the PATRIOT act and its sequel. I think you will see what I mean, even if you disagree with my interpretation.
> You spoke. I listened. Now it's my turn to speak.
> That's how it works in a free and open society.
Yes, but neither of us said anything important. You see, the ruling party doesn't care much about petty criticisms. They come and go and all eventually die off. Very rarely the government may have to pass some token act to placate the populace, but mostly it is simpler to just ignore what people say. On the other hand, if we were discussing something that threatened their interests, we would quite likely be promptly shut up, named "terrorists", and thrown in jail for an indefinite time.