Open source is different in that anyone peeved about some missing or unfriendly feature can implement it. You do not need to become an official committer; just put your patch on the mailing list and it is likely to be picked up and integrated.
Open source is different in that people generally strive to build the best software they can; there is no management saying "This is good enough; we're not going to bother with feature/problem X", or worse, as in this case, "there is no problem X".
I am wondering if Apple has some sort of patent on using multitouch in a UI which is preventing other phones from implementing it without getting a license from them.
Case in point: The Motorola Droid (Android 2.0) has multitouch in Europe (where it is called Milestone), but apparently not in the US.
Either there is a god who one day popped into existence (or always existed), or there is a universe that one day popped into existence (or always existed).
Correct. But your preceding sentence that both theories require blind faith does not follow.
All the objective, measurable, factual evidence we have points to the second alternative. Unfortunately, we have no evidence yet showing why the universe did what it appears to have done. As soon as we obtain such evidence, it will be integrated into science's world view.
Replacing the current gap in our knowledge with mythical mumbo-jumbo ("God/Brahma/The Flying Spaghetti Monster did it") does no good (a principle called Occam's Razor), especially when people forget that it is a stop-gap and promote it as The Truth Not To Be Questioned.
So science means believing in what you see and not spewing unfounded tales about things that you cannot see (yet).
... became known on the Internet a few days after my father died from lung cancer within 4½ months of diagnosis. Watching Pausch's lecture in my state of bereavement was one of the most touching experiences of my life, as it dealt with the same topics I had to deal with at the time, and it did so in a rather different way than we in our family were able to do. As with many things precious to my heart, I find not many people around me I can or even want to try to share them with, but I am happy to read that many people around here feel as strongly about his fate, his lecture and his family as I do.
(Not a joke, this has been done countless times in espionage.)
gzip content can display while it is still loading
on
High Performance Web Sites
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Firefox 2 and IE7 do indeed begin to display gzip-compressed pages while they are still loading over the net. The method used to verify this was to insert a local Squid cache that uses "delay pools" to limit transfer bandwidth and that records time and duration of all network transfers made. Using this method, I could see that a lengthy compressed HTML page was transferred in 14 seconds, and the content became visible in IE7 after 6 seconds and finished loading after 18 seconds.
If you have a physically slow connection, you can probably do the same experiment with the Firebug plugin for Firefox (which shows you the loading time of the page elements) and a stop watch to time the browser display behaviour.
The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.
The idea is that people vote for/against an option by marking two/one column of three on their ballot paper, and select one column randomly to take home as a receipt. That receipt can contain anything, and so does not reveal their vote. Manipulating a ballot will run a 1 in 3 chance of being detected (provided people check their receipts), and thus cannot be done on a large scale.
Viewed differently, TCP/IP had the free BSD/Unix implementation available, whereas ISO/OSI implementations tended to be humongous and/or proprietary.
For ODF, we have at least one free implementation, plus commitment of various other vendors, whereas there is only one proprietary implementation of the supposed alternative.
"... court documents claim, Burst.com has evidence that Microsoft followed a policy of deliberately destroying e-mail that could be used as evidence against it."
Last time I checked rhel was entirely under the GPL. You have to pay for support which seems to have confused a lot of people who conflated gratis with libre, but it's definitely free software.
RedHat distribute Linux binaries. To get them, you must sign a support contract. That contract forbids you to install additional copies without additional licence fees. Such a restriction is forbidden by the GPL. Since the RHEL distribution requires you to sign this support contract, the distribution is encumbered with GPL-violating restrictions.
P.S. I am curious why there has not been any reaction by the FSF.
Red Hat violating the GPL!?
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 1
... they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.
Restricting the binaries in this fashion appears to violate Section 6 of the GPL:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
That means the FSF (or any other copyright holder of GPL software distributed by Red Hat) should make it clear to Red Hat that they are in violation of the GPL.
The interview is real, was conducted in English, translated into German and authorised by a German employee of Microsoft. Prof. Brunnstein from Germany managed to obtain the interviewer's original notes (before they were translated). Here is his contribution to the RISKS digest (ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks/17/risks-17.44):
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 15:28:33 +0100 From: Klaus Brunnstein <brunnstein@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.d400.de> Su bject: Re: Gates interview [RISKS-17.42]
Following my report on Mr. Gates` interview in FOCUS (RISKS-17.42), some colleagues assumed that my translation might have adversely change Mr. Gates` original words, or the German interviewer may have misunderstood some phrases. The interviewer, Dr. Juergen Scriba <scriba@focus.burda.com> was born in USA and grew up there, so his English qualification should be good. The interview was in English, translated and "redactionally adapted" in German (e.g. to remove redundancies and polish sentences, as is usually done in such interviews). Finally, the German version was authorised by a German employee of Microsoft.
Dr. Scriba was so kind to read my "translation back to English". Though some of my phrases differed from Mr. Gates original speak (due to "polishing"), he regarded my text as semantically essentially correct, with one exception: I mistranslated "Maschinenstuermer" as "machine addict" but the correct translation is "Luddite". Apologies for this serious fault:-)
Dr. Scriba sent me "original Mr. Gates", so I append this "raw text". In comparing the published interview with the spoken one, I regard the journalist having been really friendly with Bill:-)
Enjoy Mr. Gates` original speak. Klaus Brunnstein (November 4,1995)
----- Original interview text of Mr. Bill Gates before translation and adaptation; German (not this English) version was authorized -------
FOCUS: Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the older one is also more complex and has more features... Gates: No, only if that is what'll sell!
FOCUS: But... Gates: Only if that is what'll sell! We've never done a piece of software unless we thought it would sell. That's why everything we do in software... it's really amazing: We do it because we think that's what customers want. That's why we do what we do.
FOCUS: But on the other hand - you would say: Okay, folks, if you don't like these new features, stay with the old version, and keep the bugs? Gates: No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version - it's not there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version.
FOCUS: But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to have fixed. Gates: No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
FOCUS: Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from version 5.11 to 6.0". Gates: No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe that you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS: Yeah, I did... Gates: It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that. - The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.
FOCUS: How come I keep being told by computer vendors "Well, we know about this bug, wait till the next version is there, it'll be fixed"? I hear this all the time. How come? If you're telling me there are no significant bugs in software and there is no reason to do a new version? Gates: No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
FOCUS: Probably you have other contacts to your software developers. But if Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store or a support line and says, "Hey listen, there's a bug"... 90 percent of the time I get the answer "Oh, well, yeah, that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll be fixed". That's how the system works.
Gates: Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year. FOCUS: Hm, a couple of million dollars?
Gates: 500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone calls and classify them. That's the input we use to do the next version. So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop. People call in - we decide what to do on it. Do you want to know what percentage of those phonecalls relates to bugs in the software? Less than one percent.
FOCUS: So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have this and that feature"? Gates: Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software. That's the primary thing. We could have you sit and listen to these phone calls. There are millions and millions of them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing". ...
FOCUS: So where does this comon feeling of frustration come from that unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every day that these things simply don't work like they should. Gates: Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that - oh, yeah, I know that bug." - I can understand that phenomenon sociologically, not technically.
Original text with kind permission of Interviewer: Dr. Juergen Scriba (FOCUS)
Teach them about the difference between directory entries and inodes (hard links, files disappearing only after close) and show them how this allows one to replace files in use without reboot.
Second, teach them about symbolic links and how this makes it possible to separate logical from physical file locations.
Third, show them how to do tasks with shell pipelines (don't forget to explain that file globbing is done by the shell rather that by each command).
Finally, show them that there is complete documentation for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source is different in that anyone peeved about some missing or unfriendly feature can implement it. You do not need to become an official committer; just put your patch on the mailing list and it is likely to be picked up and integrated.
Open source is different in that people generally strive to build the best software they can; there is no management saying "This is good enough; we're not going to bother with feature/problem X", or worse, as in this case, "there is no problem X".
But in the end, the users pay for the phones. If they don't buy the phones, no money for carrier and manufacturer.
I am wondering if Apple has some sort of patent on using multitouch in a UI which is preventing other phones from implementing it without getting a license from them.
Case in point: The Motorola Droid (Android 2.0) has multitouch in Europe (where it is called Milestone), but apparently not in the US.
This nag message is gone since Acrobat Reader 9 (IIRC)
Either there is a god who one day popped into existence (or always existed), or there is a universe that one day popped into existence (or always existed).
Correct. But your preceding sentence that both theories require blind faith does not follow.
All the objective, measurable, factual evidence we have points to the second alternative. Unfortunately, we have no evidence yet showing why the universe did what it appears to have done. As soon as we obtain such evidence, it will be integrated into science's world view.
Replacing the current gap in our knowledge with mythical mumbo-jumbo ("God/Brahma/The Flying Spaghetti Monster did it") does no good (a principle called Occam's Razor), especially when people forget that it is a stop-gap and promote it as The Truth Not To Be Questioned.
So science means believing in what you see and not spewing unfounded tales about things that you cannot see (yet).
... became known on the Internet a few days after my father died from lung cancer within 4½ months of diagnosis. Watching Pausch's lecture in my state of bereavement was one of the most touching experiences of my life, as it dealt with the same topics I had to deal with at the time, and it did so in a rather different way than we in our family were able to do. As with many things precious to my heart, I find not many people around me I can or even want to try to share them with, but I am happy to read that many people around here feel as strongly about his fate, his lecture and his family as I do.
Tearful,
Hmm, I see an obvious way to corrupt you.
(Not a joke, this has been done countless times in espionage.)
Firefox 2 and IE7 do indeed begin to display gzip-compressed pages while they are still loading over the net. The method used to verify this was to insert a local Squid cache that uses "delay pools" to limit transfer bandwidth and that records time and duration of all network transfers made. Using this method, I could see that a lengthy compressed HTML page was transferred in 14 seconds, and the content became visible in IE7 after 6 seconds and finished loading after 18 seconds.
If you have a physically slow connection, you can probably do the same experiment with the Firebug plugin for Firefox (which shows you the loading time of the page elements) and a stop watch to time the browser display behaviour.
The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.
A way around this has recently been published by Ronald L. Rivest as "The ThreeBallot Voting System" (PDF): http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThreeB allotVotingSystem.pdf
The idea is that people vote for/against an option by marking two/one column of three on their ballot paper, and select one column randomly to take home as a receipt. That receipt can contain anything, and so does not reveal their vote. Manipulating a ballot will run a 1 in 3 chance of being detected (provided people check their receipts), and thus cannot be done on a large scale.
Viewed differently, TCP/IP had the free BSD/Unix implementation available, whereas ISO/OSI implementations tended to be humongous and/or proprietary. For ODF, we have at least one free implementation, plus commitment of various other vendors, whereas there is only one proprietary implementation of the supposed alternative.
"... court documents claim, Burst.com has evidence that Microsoft followed a policy of deliberately destroying e-mail that could be used as evidence against it."
RedHat distribute Linux binaries. To get them, you must sign a support contract. That contract forbids you to install additional copies without additional licence fees. Such a restriction is forbidden by the GPL. Since the RHEL distribution requires you to sign this support contract, the distribution is encumbered with GPL-violating restrictions.
P.S. I am curious why there has not been any reaction by the FSF.
Restricting the binaries in this fashion appears to violate Section 6 of the GPL:
That means the FSF (or any other copyright holder of GPL software distributed by Red Hat) should make it clear to Red Hat that they are in violation of the GPL.Search for linux on MSN: 572 hits
Search for linux on Google: 57.1 million hits
Does this mean the search space of Google is 100,000 times as big?
The interview is real, was conducted in English, translated into German and authorised by a German
u bject: Re: Gates interview [RISKS-17.42]
:-)
:-)
... it's really amazing: We do it because we think that's
... 90 percent of the time I get the answer
employee of Microsoft. Prof. Brunnstein from Germany managed to obtain the interviewer's original notes (before they were translated). Here is his contribution to the RISKS digest (ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks/17/risks-17.44):
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 15:28:33 +0100
From: Klaus Brunnstein <brunnstein@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.d400.de>
S
Following my report on Mr. Gates` interview in FOCUS (RISKS-17.42), some
colleagues assumed that my translation might have adversely change Mr.
Gates` original words, or the German interviewer may have misunderstood some
phrases. The interviewer, Dr. Juergen Scriba <scriba@focus.burda.com> was
born in USA and grew up there, so his English qualification should be good.
The interview was in English, translated and "redactionally adapted" in
German (e.g. to remove redundancies and polish sentences, as is usually done
in such interviews). Finally, the German version was authorised by a German
employee of Microsoft.
Dr. Scriba was so kind to read my "translation back to English". Though some
of my phrases differed from Mr. Gates original speak (due to "polishing"), he
regarded my text as semantically essentially correct, with one exception: I
mistranslated "Maschinenstuermer" as "machine addict" but the correct
translation is "Luddite". Apologies for this serious fault
Dr. Scriba sent me "original Mr. Gates", so I append this "raw text". In
comparing the published interview with the spoken one, I regard the journalist
having been really friendly with Bill
Enjoy Mr. Gates` original speak. Klaus Brunnstein (November 4,1995)
----- Original interview text of Mr. Bill Gates before translation
and adaptation; German (not this English) version was authorized -------
FOCUS: Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the older
one is also more complex and has more features...
Gates: No, only if that is what'll sell!
FOCUS: But...
Gates: Only if that is what'll sell! We've never done a piece of software
unless we thought it would sell. That's why everything we do in
software
what customers want. That's why we do what we do.
FOCUS: But on the other hand - you would say: Okay, folks, if you don't
like these new features, stay with the old version, and keep the bugs?
Gates: No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version - it's not
there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version.
FOCUS: But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to
have fixed.
Gates: No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
significant number of users want fixed.
FOCUS: Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the
page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page
numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from
version 5.11 to 6.0".
Gates: No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe
that you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS: Yeah, I did...
Gates: It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so
you should look into that. - The reason we come up with new versions
is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to
buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots
of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense, is
stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.
FOCUS: How come I keep being told by computer vendors "Well, we know about
this bug, wait till the next version is there, it'll be fixed"? I hear
this all the time. How come? If you're telling me there are no
significant bugs in software and there is no reason to do a new version?
Gates: No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not
enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft
Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?"
You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of
bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
FOCUS: Probably you have other contacts to your software developers. But if
Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store or a support line and says,
"Hey listen, there's a bug"
"Oh, well, yeah, that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll
be fixed". That's how the system works.
Gates: Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year.
FOCUS: Hm, a couple of million dollars?
Gates: 500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone calls
and classify them. That's the input we use to do the next version.
So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop. People call in - we
decide what to do on it. Do you want to know what percentage of those
phonecalls relates to bugs in the software? Less than one percent.
FOCUS: So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have this and
that feature"?
Gates: Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get advice
on how to do a certain thing with the software. That's the primary thing.
We could have you sit and listen to these phone calls. There are millions
and millions of them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in
and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait,
just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I
found a bug in this thing".
...
FOCUS: So where does this comon feeling of frustration come from that
unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every day that these
things simply don't work like they should.
Gates: Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that - oh,
yeah, I know that bug." - I can understand that phenomenon
sociologically, not technically.
Original text with kind permission of Interviewer: Dr. Juergen Scriba (FOCUS)
Second, teach them about symbolic links and how this makes it possible to separate logical from physical file locations.
Third, show them how to do tasks with shell pipelines (don't forget to explain that file globbing is done by the shell rather that by each command).
Finally, show them that there is complete documentation for everything.