No, I'm talking about a whole new libc -- based on whatever. There's lots of libc's, but they all seem to be functionally equivalent -- or at least attempt to be so.
In my experience, free software is helpful in making money doing consulting and custom programming, which is a significant source of overall programmer income. It does not in the slightest make it hard to get paid -- in fact easier, because the client is paying only you, not you and the software vendor.
But that's not even the point here -- the point is that proprietary software is based on the idea of false scarcity -- of withholding software use even though it would cause the owner no harm if it was more widely used. In more prosperous countries this isn't too big a deal -- people can afford most of the software they need. It would still be better for our society if people could get any software they needed...
But in the developing world the false scarcity can hit hard -- of course, copyright violation is much more widespread in these places, but that's something of a bandaid fix for the underlying problem. Scarcity is very real in those places, and to create false scarcity ontop of that is even worse.
Developing countries must invest in infrastructure. Free software is infrastructure -- it is something that can be built on. Proprietary software makes for bad infrastructure -- it costs more and more as you use it more and more, and your ability to extend and enhance it is greatly limited.
I always wondered: is it really necessary to put all this generality in the kernel? To me, it seems like it should be possible to implement all the clever features Hurd allows in libc -- only much more easily and incrementally.
Libc seems to me like an abstraction layer that nearly everything goes through -- you only need one abstraction layer to insert new features, and it doesn't need to be the lowest layer of abstraction. Yet libc has remained entirely static and boring...
Is there something I'm missing? Obviously, some programs bypass libc, but that should be a minority, and those programs are probably not portable anyway.
What is the advantage of PGP over S/MIME? They seem to be answering largely the same problem.
PGP is a product of its own, which is probably good and bad -- good, because you can use it with non-email, and (awkwardly) with most mail clients. S/MIME would have to be built in, I imagine -- but a couple of easy implementations would bring encryption (and decryption) to many more people than the current situation with PGP/GPG/whatever.
So why aren't people making S/MIME capable clients?
How hard is it to use a general purpose distrobution for a firewall? It seems like it might be nice to be able to add a web server, file server, print server, or whatever to your firewall -- especially if the firewall is more to provide NAT than to provide security. A general purpose distro makes this sort of thing easy, and any vaguely modern machine is going to have power to spare to provide other services.
Are there any packages for Debian or RedHat that provide firewall functionality easily?
Those cases would seem to prevent Slashdot from being libel for comments made by posters. But they don't relate to comments made by editors.
I believe Slashdot has also tried to protect itself by not editing or censoring comments -- which is why comments can be moderated far down, but aren't eliminated. When you begin to moderate a forum you become more responsible for the content.
Irregardless, I don't think the original poster was complete in his quoting of the law -- a public figure (and this includes corporations) does not have that level of protection, but has to show willfully malicious (or excedingly negligant) speach, which is demonstrably false. Anyone with any legal resources at all should be able to protect themselves -- SLAPP is all about attacking individuals with no legal resources.
I was being a bit patronizing in my tone, for which I apologize, but material that has gone through chemical reactions is qualitatively different. Things that haven't gone through any chemical reaction are usually aren't thrown away, because they weren't very useful in the first place. I suppose gravel qualifies. But the level on which the preservation of matter works is not the same level as the one on which the environment works -- the environment works on chemicals, not atoms. This planet doesn't have a atomic disposition that different from Venus, but it's chemical disposition and environment are very different.
There's a thing called conservation of matter. Sure, stuff gets shifted around alot, but the "stuff" remains the same amount. Filling up a landfill? How about dumping garbage into that stip-mine, quarry, etc...?
The process that makes this stuff hazardous is called, I believe, a "chemical reaction".
This is where atoms and molecules -- which existed beforehand -- are combined under circumstances where they change their molecular properties. After having done this, the molecules have different properties: these properties are often advantageous to some process. However, in a different context (e.g., as waste) these properties may in fact be harmful.
And, moreso, the concentrations of material may provide hazards because it overwhelms the environment's ability to tolerate normal levels -- the material being concentrated because someone went to great effort to extract the material from deep in the earth where it was previously harmless, dilluted, and/or in a chemically more neutral state.
I don't know what kind of science you were smoking, but this stuff should be junior high level material.
Spending time maintaining those computers is an excersize in suffering and frustration. Some students will have the will to go through that, and they'll learn something from it, but most will not. And very, very few teachers have the skill to fix those computers. Fixing hardware is not a useful skill anymore, and certainly not a productive.
Yes, I played with those very same computers when I was young, and got a lot out of it and all that. But at the time those computers were good, or at least decent, and weren't simply arcane. The arcane is not that useful... it doesn't feel adventurous or exciting to use something who's time has passed. Those computers are so far behind the time that it would be like giving a kid a broken calculator 15 years ago and expecting them to be excited about it.
And setting up old software is certainly not helpful. Educational software sucks -- it's only good for keeping kids busy while the teacher takes a break. The only valuable way for kids to use computers, IMHO, is doing real tasks with real software, where the computer is a tool not an end. Old DOS programs make lousy tools.
Re:Creates real inequity. Poor priced out of rushh
on
Every Road a Toll Road
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But the urban poor already aren't driving that much, I'd think? The rural poor need cars for basic livelyhood, and this new tax would shift some of the tax burden off of gasoline taxes. The rural poor will benefit, while the urban poor will be less effected because it is possible for them to arrange their lives not to need a car.
A gas tax is far less efficient: it will over-encourage (economically) inefficient fuel efficiency improvements
A gas tax should be environmentally (and otherwise) appropriate until it goes past the actual cost of gasoline in all its aspects. The base price of gasoline basically covers the effort it takes to extract and transport the gasoline, with a certain amount of profit. But it does not include the cost to the environment -- pollution/smog, CO2, oil spills; nor the political costs of numerous wars and conflicts; nor the aesthetic and social costs of roads.
The current gas taxes (in the US) only covers the cost of road construction. Congestion taxing provide better incentives in some ways, but even off-hour use of roads is costly, and road decay is related more to weight than merely distanced travelled, so a gas tax for road construction is still appropriate.
So I think it would be wise that gasoline taxes excede simply paying for car-related government expenses.
A big part of the problem with a One World Government is the people who are making this version. It is being formed by the most elite of the elite. And, of course, they will set it up to extend their own power.
The leftist support of nationalism is not a support of the nations that exist, but something like admitting that those nations, while messed up, are easier to fix than a world government -- the number of levels of obfuscation, obstruction, and entrenchment are fewer. It's easy to see that politics can be more easily effected by individuals the smaller the scale. Nader didn't do too well nationally, but Green Party candidates have won seats in local government. It's similar on the right.
Perhaps a global government could be set up to allow democratic participation and to not hoard power. But the current is obviously not that government, and the people who are making this new world government have clearly shown that they do not care for democracy. I do think it's a bit negative to then talk down world government entirely... too often, when we see something bad being created we become conservatives. Instead it would be better to offer a different solution, to provide alternatives instead of being reactionary. But I can't blame the naysayers -- first do no harm, after all.
And, of course, a world government tends not to allow alternatives. That's what law is about -- you don't get to choose your law (especially when it covers every part of the globe) and you don't choose whether to obey it. You can't say, "I will work to make this one place better" if it's in conflict with the world government. You can't ban products, you can't even demand they be labelled. Increasingly you cannot try to inform the public about products. You can't decide how information should be free to use. That's what they are doing now, who knows what they'll do later -- I only see it getting worse, not better.
I don't think that's too big a deal. If you have an application with multiple components, dealing with one of those components failing is very difficult -- you can try to make the best of a bad situation, maybe restart the component, try to continue the application with a hole in it, or something else... but that won't change the fact that a part of the application crashed.
So I don't think it's a big deal if the component takes down the entire application, as opposed to having the component just leave the application in a semi-usable state (or place undue burden on the main application developer to consider all failure conditions and create recovery procedures for each one).
Let's completely modularize each tool function (such as layout, fonts, kerning, textures, linking, math and tables) and make each a separate interactive GUI tool. Like an erector set, applications could be constructed for specific needs.
You can't have one application do your kerning, and anouther do your textures. They all fit together. Fitting them together on the fly is a already being done, but you aren't recognizing it for what it is.
If you want modularity, you can have it right now -- that's what (good) programming languages provide. If you want allow the user the flexibility of combining those modules, you need to give them a programming environment, and they need to program. Specifying how to use such tools together is a programming task, not mere tool use.
That's not to say it's entirely impossible. You could use visually-based programming, instead of textual. But even the traditional Unix tools are held together by a programming language -- sh -- and more complex tools will lead to more complex programming by users.
Smalltalk in particular gives an example of a fine-grained user environment with programmable aspects. That the programming would be exposed to the user has always been an underlying goal of this system (at least by the original creators). Figuring out just how that's going to work has been the challenge they still haven't quite met.
"An operating system is everything that doesn't fit into your programming language. There shouldn't be one." -- Dan Ingalls (Aug 81 Byte Magazine)
Ximian is going to develop Mono - that much is clear. It doesn't matter what anyone says, they're going to use it.
If just Ximian develops Mono, then it won't matter whether Mono is good or bad -- it will never go anywhere. Mono's success depends on a larger group of people developing it, and it is pointless unless there is another group that develops apps on it.
This sort of public discussion is how the larger community makes the decision whether to get behind Mono. And that makes all the difference. If it weren't for something like this around KDE issues, Gnome wouldn't exist (and Qt wouldn't be GPLed either).
AFAIK, there hasn't been any evidence that DDT is harmful to humans, or most animals, except in concentration (as happens in the food chain).
The problem was with farmers who used lots of DDT over a long period. Targeted use of DDT isn't necessarily harmful -- though it is currently banned. I think I heard that the amount of DDT used in New Guinea to try to eliminate malaria (I think it was successful there) was about the same as the amount of DDT used on a single farm at the time. The people trying to eliminate malaria had a lot better reason than the farmers, and were acting much more responsibly.
Of course, for malaria they were only trying to eliminate a certain vector -- a mosquito biting one person who had malaria, and then biting a second person. They weren't trying to eliminate an entire species. After a few years of treatment, there weren't people with malaria and there wasn't a risk from mosquito bites.Before DDT, efforts to control malaria did involve eliminating entire species of mosquito.
They recently gave a "$500,000" software donation to my school that, based on the number of CD's and software boxes, probably cost them something in the neighborhood of $25 -- but it's still a half-million-dollar tax writeoff.)
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some loophole that a big corporation with lots of tax lawyers could use... but usually you can only write off the $25 it actually costs you. It's just too big of a loophole otherwise.
The $500,000 is for the benefit of publicity. The IRS is a little more skeptical about these things.
It probably doesn't matter -- MS has other techniques that have (AFAIK) kept them from paying corporate taxes for many years now. (But maybe this is one of those tactics)
Sun is being increasingly cannibalized in the low end market by Linux and BSD solutions
Maybe I'm being overly semantic, but Sun is not being "cannibalized". They are simply being "eaten" -- they didn't write Linux or *BSD, they didn't market them; if they are losing to those OSes it's because they are a better value, not because of a failed strategy by Sun.
So he argued against KDE, in favor of GNOME, a truely Free alternative.
And he actually tried to work with KDE before starting Gnome. Things like Harmony could have made KDE free without Troll Tech's help, but KDE developers seemed to choose not to work with RMS, and rebuffed his attempts at peace.
That's old history now, but people should know that RMS didn't go storming off at the first sign of conflict.
IBM is not in the business of losing money, and neither is RedHat. Neither needs SourceForge for PR purposes.
RedHat, and even IBM, do seem to be willing to invest in the betterment of Open Source, and SF (or a clone) is actually a great investment. An expensive investment, and an almost completely untargeted investment, but the cost of bandwidth, servers, and admins is directly related to the benefit gained from them (if SF was useless they could host it on a 486 running in some kids dorm room). And I think the cost of running SF is far, far less than the cost of all those projects doing similar things independently.
If either company wanted to be more targeted, they could set something like SF up and be more selective of their projects.
No, I don't really know what's going on in the metal scene (to say the least). I only know what's being popularized -- and there are a considerable number of metal (or metal-inspired) bands that are being popularized. They seem to me to be fairly tedious -- that was my point. This is just what I'm getting from very brief samples of MTV, but you seem to agree (at least, if you will concede that there are new pop bands that can be classified as "metal" -- hey, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it doesn't have to be a talented duck to qualify as a member of the species...)
Like other people have said, SOM is like COM or CORBA, not a CLR. I think this is fairly different -- CORBA provides an interface to access foreign objects. A CLR does not involve any interface -- there are no foreign objects.
Any useful language has ways to access foreign code -- sometimes easy, usually hard, and usually targetting only C. CORBA or COM are just a common intermediaries for those foreign function calls. A CLR means all calls are native, even when in different languages. This means you get prettier code, but also that you don't get the speed penalty. People don't do intimate subclassing of COM objects as far as I know. That is, they don't treat the objects in an OO way.
For one thing, QCs do exist - in fact, they demonstrated Peter Shor's 1994 factoring algorithm on a recently built 7-qubit box, factoring 15 into 3 and 7
Many forms of regulation are beneficial to reputable companies. For instance, safety regulations often dictate that companies do what they should be doing all along, and reputable (and moral) companies will make safe products. But it is beneficial for these companies that there be regulations, because it means that they won't be undercut by companies that don't care about the safety of their products. It is often difficult for consumers to tell the difference between a safe product and an unsafe product (until it's too late), and the regulation means they don't have to try to make that distinction.
In some ways, the same is true of EULA's. Consumers really pay no attention to them -- they will only pay attention in the unlikely (but important) case that they hit a limitation.
A reputable company -- which among proprietary software companies is extremely uncommon -- will not manipulate their customers in this way. A reputable company will not ask their customer to make a decision when they are not well informed, and very, very few people are well informed (or in a situation when they can make a free choice) when they are asked to accept the EULA.
There are reputable companies. I don't know of many Linux distributions that have EULA's, or Open Source products in general. It would level the field for us. In this case, it will allow reviews of proprietary products to be fair and potentially critical -- a freedom that journalists already possess for OSS products.
Those, where the consumer has a choice:
*software*,food,housing,movie theatres,car manufactureres
In the case of food, housing, and in some areas cars, it is not a choice. You can choose between providers and manufacturers, but you simply can't choose not to have them. And in many cases, where an explicit or implicit cartel exists, none of the choices are any good, and you might as well have no choice at all. I don't want to make the choice between food that might be poisonous and food that isn't. Or an apartment that is a fire trap (I'd probably learn that a bit late if I learned it at all). Are you sad you can't get cars with fuel tanks underneith the seats anymore? I don't know what you want, but regulation isn't that bad for me.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm talking about a whole new libc -- based on whatever. There's lots of libc's, but they all seem to be functionally equivalent -- or at least attempt to be so.
But that's not even the point here -- the point is that proprietary software is based on the idea of false scarcity -- of withholding software use even though it would cause the owner no harm if it was more widely used. In more prosperous countries this isn't too big a deal -- people can afford most of the software they need. It would still be better for our society if people could get any software they needed...
But in the developing world the false scarcity can hit hard -- of course, copyright violation is much more widespread in these places, but that's something of a bandaid fix for the underlying problem. Scarcity is very real in those places, and to create false scarcity ontop of that is even worse.
Developing countries must invest in infrastructure. Free software is infrastructure -- it is something that can be built on. Proprietary software makes for bad infrastructure -- it costs more and more as you use it more and more, and your ability to extend and enhance it is greatly limited.
Libc seems to me like an abstraction layer that nearly everything goes through -- you only need one abstraction layer to insert new features, and it doesn't need to be the lowest layer of abstraction. Yet libc has remained entirely static and boring...
Is there something I'm missing? Obviously, some programs bypass libc, but that should be a minority, and those programs are probably not portable anyway.
PGP is a product of its own, which is probably good and bad -- good, because you can use it with non-email, and (awkwardly) with most mail clients. S/MIME would have to be built in, I imagine -- but a couple of easy implementations would bring encryption (and decryption) to many more people than the current situation with PGP/GPG/whatever.
So why aren't people making S/MIME capable clients?
Are there any packages for Debian or RedHat that provide firewall functionality easily?
I believe Slashdot has also tried to protect itself by not editing or censoring comments -- which is why comments can be moderated far down, but aren't eliminated. When you begin to moderate a forum you become more responsible for the content.
Irregardless, I don't think the original poster was complete in his quoting of the law -- a public figure (and this includes corporations) does not have that level of protection, but has to show willfully malicious (or excedingly negligant) speach, which is demonstrably false. Anyone with any legal resources at all should be able to protect themselves -- SLAPP is all about attacking individuals with no legal resources.
I was being a bit patronizing in my tone, for which I apologize, but material that has gone through chemical reactions is qualitatively different. Things that haven't gone through any chemical reaction are usually aren't thrown away, because they weren't very useful in the first place. I suppose gravel qualifies. But the level on which the preservation of matter works is not the same level as the one on which the environment works -- the environment works on chemicals, not atoms. This planet doesn't have a atomic disposition that different from Venus, but it's chemical disposition and environment are very different.
This is where atoms and molecules -- which existed beforehand -- are combined under circumstances where they change their molecular properties. After having done this, the molecules have different properties: these properties are often advantageous to some process. However, in a different context (e.g., as waste) these properties may in fact be harmful.
And, moreso, the concentrations of material may provide hazards because it overwhelms the environment's ability to tolerate normal levels -- the material being concentrated because someone went to great effort to extract the material from deep in the earth where it was previously harmless, dilluted, and/or in a chemically more neutral state.
I don't know what kind of science you were smoking, but this stuff should be junior high level material.
Yes, I played with those very same computers when I was young, and got a lot out of it and all that. But at the time those computers were good, or at least decent, and weren't simply arcane. The arcane is not that useful... it doesn't feel adventurous or exciting to use something who's time has passed. Those computers are so far behind the time that it would be like giving a kid a broken calculator 15 years ago and expecting them to be excited about it.
And setting up old software is certainly not helpful. Educational software sucks -- it's only good for keeping kids busy while the teacher takes a break. The only valuable way for kids to use computers, IMHO, is doing real tasks with real software, where the computer is a tool not an end. Old DOS programs make lousy tools.
But the urban poor already aren't driving that much, I'd think? The rural poor need cars for basic livelyhood, and this new tax would shift some of the tax burden off of gasoline taxes. The rural poor will benefit, while the urban poor will be less effected because it is possible for them to arrange their lives not to need a car.
The current gas taxes (in the US) only covers the cost of road construction. Congestion taxing provide better incentives in some ways, but even off-hour use of roads is costly, and road decay is related more to weight than merely distanced travelled, so a gas tax for road construction is still appropriate.
So I think it would be wise that gasoline taxes excede simply paying for car-related government expenses.
The leftist support of nationalism is not a support of the nations that exist, but something like admitting that those nations, while messed up, are easier to fix than a world government -- the number of levels of obfuscation, obstruction, and entrenchment are fewer. It's easy to see that politics can be more easily effected by individuals the smaller the scale. Nader didn't do too well nationally, but Green Party candidates have won seats in local government. It's similar on the right.
Perhaps a global government could be set up to allow democratic participation and to not hoard power. But the current is obviously not that government, and the people who are making this new world government have clearly shown that they do not care for democracy. I do think it's a bit negative to then talk down world government entirely... too often, when we see something bad being created we become conservatives. Instead it would be better to offer a different solution, to provide alternatives instead of being reactionary. But I can't blame the naysayers -- first do no harm, after all.
And, of course, a world government tends not to allow alternatives. That's what law is about -- you don't get to choose your law (especially when it covers every part of the globe) and you don't choose whether to obey it. You can't say, "I will work to make this one place better" if it's in conflict with the world government. You can't ban products, you can't even demand they be labelled. Increasingly you cannot try to inform the public about products. You can't decide how information should be free to use. That's what they are doing now, who knows what they'll do later -- I only see it getting worse, not better.
So I don't think it's a big deal if the component takes down the entire application, as opposed to having the component just leave the application in a semi-usable state (or place undue burden on the main application developer to consider all failure conditions and create recovery procedures for each one).
If you want modularity, you can have it right now -- that's what (good) programming languages provide. If you want allow the user the flexibility of combining those modules, you need to give them a programming environment, and they need to program. Specifying how to use such tools together is a programming task, not mere tool use.
That's not to say it's entirely impossible. You could use visually-based programming, instead of textual. But even the traditional Unix tools are held together by a programming language -- sh -- and more complex tools will lead to more complex programming by users.
Smalltalk in particular gives an example of a fine-grained user environment with programmable aspects. That the programming would be exposed to the user has always been an underlying goal of this system (at least by the original creators). Figuring out just how that's going to work has been the challenge they still haven't quite met.
"An operating system is everything that doesn't fit into your programming language. There shouldn't be one." -- Dan Ingalls (Aug 81 Byte Magazine)
This sort of public discussion is how the larger community makes the decision whether to get behind Mono. And that makes all the difference. If it weren't for something like this around KDE issues, Gnome wouldn't exist (and Qt wouldn't be GPLed either).
The problem was with farmers who used lots of DDT over a long period. Targeted use of DDT isn't necessarily harmful -- though it is currently banned. I think I heard that the amount of DDT used in New Guinea to try to eliminate malaria (I think it was successful there) was about the same as the amount of DDT used on a single farm at the time. The people trying to eliminate malaria had a lot better reason than the farmers, and were acting much more responsibly.
Of course, for malaria they were only trying to eliminate a certain vector -- a mosquito biting one person who had malaria, and then biting a second person. They weren't trying to eliminate an entire species. After a few years of treatment, there weren't people with malaria and there wasn't a risk from mosquito bites.Before DDT, efforts to control malaria did involve eliminating entire species of mosquito.
The $500,000 is for the benefit of publicity. The IRS is a little more skeptical about these things.
It probably doesn't matter -- MS has other techniques that have (AFAIK) kept them from paying corporate taxes for many years now. (But maybe this is one of those tactics)
That's old history now, but people should know that RMS didn't go storming off at the first sign of conflict.
If either company wanted to be more targeted, they could set something like SF up and be more selective of their projects.
No, I don't really know what's going on in the metal scene (to say the least). I only know what's being popularized -- and there are a considerable number of metal (or metal-inspired) bands that are being popularized. They seem to me to be fairly tedious -- that was my point. This is just what I'm getting from very brief samples of MTV, but you seem to agree (at least, if you will concede that there are new pop bands that can be classified as "metal" -- hey, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it doesn't have to be a talented duck to qualify as a member of the species...)
Any useful language has ways to access foreign code -- sometimes easy, usually hard, and usually targetting only C. CORBA or COM are just a common intermediaries for those foreign function calls. A CLR means all calls are native, even when in different languages. This means you get prettier code, but also that you don't get the speed penalty. People don't do intimate subclassing of COM objects as far as I know. That is, they don't treat the objects in an OO way.
In some ways, the same is true of EULA's. Consumers really pay no attention to them -- they will only pay attention in the unlikely (but important) case that they hit a limitation.
A reputable company -- which among proprietary software companies is extremely uncommon -- will not manipulate their customers in this way. A reputable company will not ask their customer to make a decision when they are not well informed, and very, very few people are well informed (or in a situation when they can make a free choice) when they are asked to accept the EULA.
There are reputable companies. I don't know of many Linux distributions that have EULA's, or Open Source products in general. It would level the field for us. In this case, it will allow reviews of proprietary products to be fair and potentially critical -- a freedom that journalists already possess for OSS products.