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Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

richard.stallman.usesthis.com

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Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#251

Post by hollerith »

burgerbrain wrote: post #248
hollerith wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running Windows? I was using a 633MHz PIII until about 3 y ago, then using it again recently when my main computer died, and its gotten a lot harder (on Linux) over those 3 y.

No, ubuntu specifically on that machine. The only tricky part as I can see it should be the webbrowser. You'd either have to use an old one, or a featureless one.

I was using an old one (Firefox 1.5) and it was extremely painful with Amazon.com. Amazon.com seems to have changed in the 3 years since I used it last with that browser.

I always thought that a "featureless" one (one without modern JS or CSS) would be extremely painful or useless, too.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#252

Post by chimeracoder »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #106
Estragon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RMS would [refuse a Nobel] without any questions. What's the difference between a Nobel and a MacArthur Genius grant? http://tech.mit.edu/V110/N30/rms.30n.html

Perhaps a MacArthur Genius grant carries a little less baggage than a Nobel prize? A MacArthur Genius grant is a no strings attached "do any research or work you want" funded by people who didn't have the huge negative impact on world society that Nobel did. I would gladly accept either honor :-)

They're both honors, yes, but incredibly different in the implementation. A MacArthur is much more of an abstract honor ('You have done some great work, possibly in some field that can't even be named because it is so unique, so here is some money that we hope you will use to continue doing great work.'). Many MacArthur recipients would never in their lifetimes be eligible for a Nobel. (On the other hand, many Nobel laureates would never receive a MacArthur either).

A Nobel prize, by contrast, is only given in certain fields, which already constrains the way that it is perceived. With a MacArthur, you're not necessarily competing against others in your field, because you oftentimes don't have a field (what you do is so highly specialized that nobody else really comes close). Furthermore, the prize is a political tool as much as anything else nowadays. (Looking at many of the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, I think anybody would agree to that.) The MacArthur has much less political identification, even compared to the prizes for biology/chemistry. It's nice to be able to attach it to your name when convenient as it gets a little bit more respect, but it's hard to interpret it in a negative way (or to see a recipient of a MacArthur as somehow compromising his/her views -- remember that Stallman has rather weak opinions on money per se when it comes to freedom; one can have a FLOSS product that nevertheless generates money).

(And as for the awards, I agree - at this point in my life I would probably be satisfied with either one!)

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#253

Post by logain2006 »

rhizome wrote: post #164
logain2006 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Disrespectful comments are just a symptom of the disease. The disease is people saying unbelievably idiotic things, with no regard to fact or logic. Now, if no one were to post retarded bullshit like "Steve Jobs is so much like Stallman", it would be damn difficult for me to disrespect him/her. PS - The mere fact that many people decided to downvote the obvious facts in my previous post just says this pla…

You're making it worse.

@rhizome

Please return to sticking your head back up your ass and pretending that what you do on Rails is "coding".

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#254

Post by sdellysse »

jeffreyg wrote: post #160
logain2006 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I think that's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. Yes, Steve Jobs, the guy who wants absolute control over every single device that he sells you FOR MONEY - on both software AND hardware level is JUST LIKE Stallaman. I have to say, the quality of HN has gone so downhill recently, I might have to seek an alternative community.

If people were to pick one reason HN has 'gone downhill', disrespectful comment replies would top the list. A controversial feature request- when a new account reaches a negative karma level within a certain period, HN will display all other usernames associated with the IP address of the throwaway.

How about a "silent shadow" system? When an account reaches a slope on the negativekarma-time graph, just make it so that a very small, random group of users are the only ones who actually see what they posted. To everyone else, it would be as if they hadn't posted at all. All the while, if what they do post gets a large percentage of upvotes compared to the amount that see the post, shorten the "shadow silent" accordingly.

It will not be made known to the user that their posts cannot be seen. They will have no reason to use alts, and we will have no reason to IP tracking, which could affect non-troll users.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#255

Post by dalke »

Shamanmuni wrote: post #127
dalke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through the list of licenses which the FSF considers not-free but which are listed on opensource.org as "open source": NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3 (NASA 1.3), Reciprocal Public License (RPL 1.5). I'm hard pressed to think of something which can be considered free software but not open source. My point though is that you commingled the free software movement with open source efforts. Google etc. could have im…

Your distinctions in reality are pretty meaningless, you can be an open source guy using the GPL (look at Linus) or a free software guy using BSD. Both movements overlap enourmously, and the differences between them are very small compared to the rest of the software ecosystem. I wish we could stop all the silly infighting and see that we are all heading in the same direction.

The issue is that I did not like and do not agree with the statement "Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement."

(There's the trivial sense of "way they do today" in the Microsoft, which uses some BSD technology in Windows, would also be here in the "way they do today" without that technology, but it would be generally the same.)

Do you agree with the above statement? If the free software movement had not existed, would Google and Facebook be seriously different than what they have become? How so?

Also, who is a member of the free software movement who also uses primarily a BSD license?

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#256

Post by pooriaazimi »

dalke wrote: post #157
pooriaazimi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry. Maybe the iOS app was irrelevant to his/her point. But I think most web startups would want to create iOS clients too, and that's how GPL might be a limitation to them. > I have to ask, do you actually work in the software industry? No, I'm just a student/programmer. I mean I'm not working in an IT department in a big company, so you've got a point there that I might not be realistic. > All you've done is…

"If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place?" You've got your history wrong. Apple created Webkit, so they never needed to make that decision. You meant to write "If KHTML was GPL ... " (BTW, the qualification 'pure' is meaningless here; LGPLv2 is not an 'impure' version of GPLv2.) Steve Jobs has been anti-GPL since the NeXT days, with the Objective C contribution to…

I missed your response yesterday.

> You've got your history wrong.

You're right. I was careless there, however I knew about WebKit's root, and I use a custom fork of WebKit for one of my own projects... And I never remember which version of GPL and LGPL imposes what restriction, so what I meant by pure GPL was the most restrictive kind of GPL.

> There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprietary browser from scratch."

No, there isn't. But Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that. With the current hindsight, yes, It's clear that using an open source browser was the best choice for them. But at the time, no one knew that WebKit (and Chrome) would be such a success (with the huge adaption of Chrome on desktops and Safari on iOS's). That's just the way they did and continue to do their business. So while my assertion was just a guess, it's not a baseless one. We can never know.

> ...the license does not seems to affect the amount of feedback or amount of uptake.

No comment on that, because my experience is far less than you. I just feel that it must be easier to talk a non-technical manager into using a BSD/MIT/Apache-licensed codebase than a GPL one.

Again, I agree that my comment above was sloppy and I should've made my points clearer and spell them out as my thoughts, not facts.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#257

Post by logain2006 »

sdellysse wrote: post #254
jeffreyg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people were to pick one reason HN has 'gone downhill', disrespectful comment replies would top the list. A controversial feature request- when a new account reaches a negative karma level within a certain period, HN will display all other usernames associated with the IP address of the throwaway.

How about a "silent shadow" system? When an account reaches a slope on the negativekarma-time graph, just make it so that a very small, random group of users are the only ones who actually see what they posted. To everyone else, it would be as if they hadn't posted at all. All the while, if what they do post gets a large percentage of upvotes compared to the amount that see the post, shorten the "shadow silent" accor…

That is indeed, a pretty fucking retarded solution.

I suggest the next time you see a "troll" post, you just tape over your monitor.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#258

Post by nmridul »

dkarl wrote: post #218
syawaworht wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to belittle RMS's achievements, but as a general point, I don't think that simply adhering to conviction is courageous. It's the easy way out. It's the way that doesn't address the greys in reality, for the sake of simplicity of what you believe in. You are not tested in your decisions, because you have already refused to make any.

Socially speaking, I find it's easier to see gray. When you run into somebody in a social situation who knows you see him as heinously immoral, or maybe just a little bit of a sleazebag, there's tension. The tension is likely to get to him, causing him to needlessly bring up the issue in some contrived way. At that point, there's a magic phrase to completely banish the tension: "Well, yeah, shit's complicated." Sudde…

I seriously feel there should be a way in HN to save / bookmark comments that we like. Currently we can only save the main story thread. Now I have to add this comment so as to bookmark your comment.

Re: Richard Stallman's Computer Setup

#260

Post by dalke »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #256
dalke wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If Webkit was (pure) GPL, do you think Apple would even consider using it in the first place?" You've got your history wrong. Apple created Webkit, so they never needed to make that decision. You meant to write "If KHTML was GPL ... " (BTW, the qualification 'pure' is meaningless here; LGPLv2 is not an 'impure' version of GPLv2.) Steve Jobs has been anti-GPL since the NeXT days, with the Objective C contribution to…

I missed your response yesterday. > You've got your history wrong. You're right. I was careless there, however I knew about WebKit's root, and I use a custom fork of WebKit for one of my own projects... And I never remember which version of GPL and LGPL imposes what restriction, so what I meant by pure GPL was the most restrictive kind of GPL. > There's no evidence that without KHTML they would have done a "proprieta…

"Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that"

In this case, it was to break the dependency on IE. Mozilla existed for the Mac, but the Mozilla codebase was clumsy. "KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant." (Quote from Wikipedia.)

It's then a business question of how to develop the project: proprietary/licensed (like IE and Opera), proprietary/internal (like ... AOL?), or public (like Mozilla). I think Opera was enough to give some estimate on the market size, and show there isn't all that much of a benefit to staying proprietary.

But hindsight is 20/20. I don't know why Apple went from releasing only WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the LGPL components of WebKit) to releasing all of WebKit (the rest under a BSD license, I think).

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