How I do my computing
stallman.org
stallman.org
We should all be thankful to rms for his unreasonableness. It has literally been the underpinning of so much of what we take for granted vis-a-vis free software.
I doubt it.
...and as a result, I think it gives a very good "user experience" - I wish more webpages were like this, plain and informative without distractions.
1. It loads lightning fast on my 512 kbps connection.
2. The font is preinstalled on my system, no separate request needs to be made.
3. It's easy to tell what is a link and what isn't.
4. Scrolling works like I'd expect it to, and doesn't involve any clever "transition" effects. More generally, there are next to no distracting animations or effects on the entire page.
> If your text hits the side of the browser, fuck off forever.
http://stylebot.me/styles/9425
Hrm... CodePen? Sure:
It loaded quickly, and it was a pleasure to edit. I liked it much better than writing tons of JS based on big web frameworks that often had bugs or non-obvious functionality.
Even with the small college blog, though, the CSS was a bit much. The fact that sites like this exist: http://howtocenterincss.com/ seems like a testament to the idea that CSS is a bit broken.
> yes, I know...wanna fight about it?
I use NoScript and RequestPolicy (for the moment incompatible with latest version of FF).
I maintain a site (for a loose definition of "maintain", I suppose) called http://fuckingblocksyntax.com. It's wildly popular in the Objective-C development community, due in no small part to the memorable domain name. But the site itself doesn't contain profanity or over-the-top machismo bravado, and there's a safe-for-work mirror URL at http://goshdarnblocksyntax.com.
A little profanity goes a long way.
I'm never paying for this website again.
And, more importantly, it makes the whole thing much more eye-catching. It's a fun way to a deliver a message - as a vitriolic, spit-flying rant. It would be ineffective if it was friendly and delicate.
Give it a "margin: 1in" and that'd be perfect.
I love simplicity.
Seriously, if all the web looked like this it would be more complicated to use for 99.9% of the world, so it would have remained a niche, so its overall usefulness would have remained limited.
Instead, talented hard-working people put lots of effort into making the web look a much more friendly place. This has made the web a much more inclusive place, and thus, much more of the world has started to use it.
RMS is a brand, and this 'zero design' is part of his brand. You already know who RMS is before you visit his site, and if you don't, you probably aren't part of his 'target market'. The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience. The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser, are comfortable adjusting the line width in whatever client they are using, so it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that the rest of the web would be a in a better place if it had remained looking like this. It would have remained an obscure corner of the world where a group of geeks met, and so many of the benefits of the internet would never have transpired.
I don't really miss Geocieties. I do, however:
* Think it's unpardonable that web pages are about as snappy as they were ten years ago, despite including about the same amount of information, while the available speed and bandwidth have increased at least ten times, not to mention computing power.
* Have to keep a full array of extensions and browser hacks in order to keep my own fucking choice of font types and especially sizes. If I wanted to see brilliant examples of typography and calligraphy, I'd have gone buy a book or visited a bloody exhibition.
* Miss the days when I could move around without having my ass tracked at every corner and having to keep an array of extension and browser hacks just so that I don't get spammed with questionable, sometimes outright tracking-based scams at every step.
The web can hardly be called "friendly" when the experience of browsing it without at least three or four extensions that deal with innovations in e-marketing, web design and development is so painful.
Saying that the web "got worse" in the last ten years is certainly midway between "you're not sure what Netscape is, right?" and "I bet you also think Motif was fucking sweet". But a lot of people who have seen it grow (myself included) are certainly disappointed at the huge, gaping chasm between what we dreamed it would be and what it turned out.
_THAT_ is the beauty of the web.
Bullshit.
It's optimized for advertising, tracking, and surveillance.
Oh, wait, actually, you're right.
See: those are the users. Content's just bait for us'n prey.
Do (most) users need all the shininess? Nope. Do they (most) prefer it? Absolutely.
Each product has an optimal "clutter" (in competitive terms, maybe a "Nash equilibrium"?) -- a good example is the Google homepage/search results; anything more complicated is clearly unfavorable in terms of competition, unless you offer a qualitative improvement.
I feel like it's more like 2x, maybe -- I got broadband in 2000, and it was 1.5MB (12Mb) down / 768KB (6Mb) up dsl with sub 10ms ping to most of the internet. It took me more than 10 years to get significantly better, and I pay more than I did then.
Logos and colors, design and layout are designed to make the web appealing and inviting to some group. Black text on white feels too much like a book and an amazingly large segment of society is put off from that.
Yet his page is fast, responsive, standards compliant, easy to navigate, accessible (screen readers have no problems with it). I don't have to addblock it, turn on readability, or any other nonsense to focus on the content. We've succeeded in simply trying to reinvent what we already have.
What you call "marketable and thus monetizable", I (and I'm not a designer, though I do a little of my own print and web design) call "human-friendly." It's not that people don't want to read, it's that we have learned over the span of human history how to present information in a more accessible way, culminating for now--though surely not terminating--in high-signal, short forms: lectures, web content, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's an unequivocal good; as this post might show, I like to write, and I have more than occasionally been told that I like to "lecture" because I have and share thoughts that take more than a few sentences to get to their conclusion. But it's not purely for marketing, it's because this is how most people think. It's not a new thing, it's not Those Kids And Their Short Attention Spans, it's why a catchy slogan has always done better than a reasoned argument. You can speak to them in your language, and get mad that they Just Don't Understand, or you can speak to them in theirs.
There's a reason the absolute best work on the NSA and spying was John Oliver asking Edward Snowden if the NSA can see pictures of his penis. That one interview did more than literally every electron perturbed by the EFF and other groups to get this into people's heads.
That's more than marketing. That's human communication. And dismissing it is fashionable in nerdy circles and absolutely tragic at the same time. We need to get out of our own heads and understand other people, dammit. It's the only way we can really do good.
What you call understanding people is what I call pandering to the least common-denominator.
Most of those web-pages aren't better, they are objectively less informative, and harder to access useful information on - maybe the problem isn't that plain white on black isn't exciting enough but that people are so accustomed to being served low quality content packaged with frivolous design, explosions or 10 second sound-bites.
Here is a good discussion of the topic at large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Sure we may be going overboard with some of the latest javascript effects. That's just Flash all over again. But there's a reason that the web no longer looks like academic journal articles. Those are boring.
Instead, the web evolved, some people took advantage of that for their own ends, and we've ended up with a system which is better for most people, though a long way from being perfect for each individual group.
Today, lots of websites use full-width images and videos on their landing pages, make multiple requests for all sorts of assets and use all sorts of tracking and analytics code. More and more often I find myself closing a tab in frustration because the page is taking too long to load. Blogs, e-commerce sites, this is getting quite common.
I interpreted your parent comment as a call for minimalism, nothing more.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
But I honestly don't experience that moment. I see some text and I start reading it. You're over-thinking, IMO.
No, he's a person, trying to live the life he wants - just like everyone else. That he is talked about does not make him a brand. GNU is his brand.
> The jarring "Oh the CSS hasn't loaded" moment is precisely what he wants you to experience.
Actually, Stallman's website has been around for decades - as has the GNU project - and his sites have always been very plain. I don't think I'd describe consistent apathy for gimmick as a gimmick.
> The kind of people who visit his site know how to use reading mode on their browser
What's reading mode?
I prefer a strongly similar design for my own sites.
I think that it is something invented by the people that have pushed for huge javascript monstrosity websites so that they can avoid the javascript monstrosities...
Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc.
You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure.
It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs).
No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
The web became a worse place when marketers got involved. Marketers ruin everything. [0]
1. https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-brooklyn...
2. https://github.com/apache/incubator-brooklyn
The first is nothing but HTML and text, the second is a fully functioning web front end to a DVCS with issue tracking and documentation, plus metrics and graphs, all only possible due to the 'worsening' of the web with Javascript, CSS, Flash and so on.
I know I prefer GitHub, and the same is true for most modern web applications where there is a choice. And apologies for the shameless Apache Brooklyn plug ;)
An issue tracker is essentially a forum where the threads have an open/closed state attached. People have built such web applications before JS even existed.
Documentation is even simpler, just a bunch of HTML documents, maybe with an HTML form to edit them.
As for graphs, there are many here, and they work fine without JS or CSS: http://hydra.it.teithe.gr/munin/aetos/aetos/index.html
--
The problem with your first link is not the lack of CSS, it's that the information listed is less relevant than what Github shows.
But instead of comparing with that, try disabling the CSS in the GH page. Ignoring the header section, I think the file list and README look just fine, and I wouldn't be bothered at all to use it as such.
We had most of those other things in the web 1.0 days too.
Here's a directory hierarchy that's just as navigable as github's
ftp://modland.com/
in the old days, ftp sites used to even have some kind of readme that browsers would autoload and put at the top of the directory list as documentation.
Graphs have been back-end generated and served in web 1.0 days as well and just inlined as <img> tags.
It was basically the same, with less control of look-and-feel, but about as usable and hundreds of times quicker. Responsiveness and accessibility just sort of "happened".
But if Jack starts saying design #2 is awful, so we should remove the ability of browsers to display that kinda stuff, then Alice has to use #1 and may well stop using the issue queue entirely. That doesn't seem like a good outcome.
Let's optimise so that the maximum amount of utility can be had by the maximum number of people, instead of trying to push our own worldview on what the web should look like.
On GitHub, I vastly prefer the mobile site. Unfortunately you have to spoof your user-agent to get at it on desktop.
I use a lot of mobile versions of sites, even on desktop. They're usually much better for me. To a large extent because they're simpler. Even news sites tend to have mobile versions that are somewhat human-friendly, easy to understand, fast to load, etc.
Who knows why the built-in Git web UI is so abstruse? Whatever the reasons, they have nothing to do with Javascript, Flash, or even really CSS. A skilled and dedicated designer or typographer could certainly come up with a simple text-based layout that conveys the necessary information, if that were the restriction. Probably git's web UI is not the result of professional designers?
Some early movers got away with crappy visual aesthetics for a long time (like my former company), but today an 'RMS-style' (or old craigslist style) website would not stand a chance upon entering a competitive market.
This works a bit like we judge other humans, perhaps: based on appearance, before they even open their mouths (and maybe that's the reason why we have better haircuts now but whether we are better characters than a few generations ago, is debatable).
2. You should read a newspaper, they load even faster!
As others have pointed out, you should be able to adjust your browser to get the reading experience you want. Turn your tablet vertically if reading in landscape. Open current tab in new window and make it as narrow as you want. Or have smart browser extensions that do it automatically for YOU.
Browsers used to have controls to toggle CSS stylesheets on or off. Frankly, I'd prefer they still did.
> javascript:document.getElementById("hnmain").width="50%"
javascript:(function(){document.getElementById("hnmain").width="50%"})();
I'm not sure if HN will accept the link:
<a onclick="alert('Drag this link to your bookmarks bar'); href="javascript:(function(){var body = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];var style = body.style;var ss = [55,34,21,13,8];var sx = ('bodyMaxWidthIndex' in body) ? body.bodyMaxWidthIndex : 1;style.setProperty('max-width', ss[++sx % ss.length]+'cm', 'important');style.setProperty('line-height', '1.5');style.setProperty('margin-left', 'auto');style.setProperty('margin-right', 'auto');style.setProperty('font-family', 'sans-serif');body.bodyMaxWidthIndex = sx;})();">→🖺←</a>
Maybe add in the trendy color: #222.
Or you can resize your window?
So no: failing to set max width on a web page is not a good way to just present a clean page of information rather than an experience. It's just a bad webpage.
It even is themeable: http://blog.fefe.de/?css=bild.css (to make it look like the German tabloid BILD) the CSS links can be external, as well, and an empty css parameter clears the theme cookie.
That's what I consider plain and informative.
But I guess that's not his fault since it's the default browser style. No idea why they chose a serif font.
Google, Netflix, Amazon, Uber & AirBnb - What you search for & e-mail about, What you watch, What you buy, Where you travel to & from & Where you stay - perfect tracking of everything. Add NSA & others on top & 1984 seems like a poor cousin of the world we live in.
We need some one like Richard to show us what the COLD water looks like. Not the slightly boiled one, not the warm one, the COLD water. Zero tracking of anything as much as possible.
He has lived his life trying to be as true to his philosophy as he can - at great personal cost & a LOT of sacrifice. I have personally seen some of the medical issues & his assets as such if any are shockingly meager for someone so well thought of (not something he will admit). Not like most of us (me included) - who will give up any data if it means a little bit of convenience.
Please consider donating: https://my.fsf.org/donate/
I have considered the all free laptop route and technically this would not hurt my writing and work efforts, but I like to experiment with new stuff, and I really enjoy having a Windows 8.1 and a Mac laptop to experiment with, in addition to my Linux laptop. I have the bizarre work habit of rotating between Linux, Windows, and OS X every four or five hours. My work flow is the same, and I enjoy the variety so much that the slight change-over effort is worthwhile. This is a stupid habit that I should probably change.
Stallman is really important for our tech community and I personally like his political stands. +1000 for Richard Stallman.
It get to great length to describe how uncompromising and coherent with his views RMS is, to the point of showing how tough it is for him and everyone around.
Unfortunately, the post is only available in Spanish:
https://gallir.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/un-viaje-con-richard...
Google translate version is relatively good: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev...
I think is fascinating insight...
I have a Spotify subscription, I'm watching the Football on Sky Go which uses Silverlight, I'm using a browser rather than emailing myself web pages.
A lot of this is just bizarre and I just don't see non-free software as inherently evil.
The world would be a better place if fewer people just went on autopilot and short-term gratification.
The benefit accessibility, which unfortunately often relies on non-free software, provides is of great value to many people.
Stallman has the privilege of an education from MIT where he learned the ins-and-outs of computing and is able to function efficiently with this knowledge. I have friends who have to work for subsistence wages who simply wouldn't have the time nor the energy to learn everything about how to use fully free software, and they get huge benefits from using the Internet.
My mute brother often uses proprietary voice assistance software to speak that locks him into Apple's platform. He doesn't care. The benefits of him being able to communicate efficiently far outweigh the cost in terms of both the cost of the software and the "dangers" of using proprietary software. Admittedly, I'd like it if I could modify the source code, but it's better than starting from scratch.
Even his stance on cell phones ignores the concerns of many people. I don't know where Stallman lives, but I'm betting it's a pretty safe area for him. He can live without a cell phone because the likelihood that he will need to call 911 when he's out and about is low. Constant tracking is bad, but being assaulted is worse.
All that being said, I wish more software was free. It'd lead to more eyes on the software everyone is using which would probably improve it a lot in terms of functionality, security, and performance. It's hard for one person or a small group of people to have expertise in every area that a good piece of modern software requires.
The only parts that proscribe are the sections about DRM, and even those are not "you should sacrifice yourself to oppose DRM" but "only buy DRMed content if you can break it", which is more a personal advice than a moral commandment.
In general, rms doesn't tell software users they are bad people for using proprietary software or for allowing tracking; he's just alerting people about the dangers of doing so. His criticisms are usually solely directed at software producers and at the organizations that track people.
"let's reject any social networking site which insists on connecting an account to a person's real identity"
Or just search the page for the word "should" or "you"
I agree with him but let's not pretend he isn't proselytizing
I think this is the benefit we can gain from RMS' article. Most of what he's outlining here are very extreme executions of fundamental viewpoints. Most of us are not going to turn down watching a show on Hulu or a documentary on Netflix with our friends if we value that kind of social interaction more than having our "freedom". The important thing here is that by reading this and going "why the hell would anyone do that?", RMS has perhaps made us think about the software we use on a slightly deeper level than we usually do. Whether you or I draw the same conclusions as him is irrelevant, the most important thing is that we took a second look at the stuff we use because there's someone out there that either doesn't use it or uses it differently.
I'd say I fall into that category. He raises a lot of very important issues, however it would be too much for me to change my lifestyle to address all of those issues, and then some of his points, such as proprietary software being inherently evil, I don't agree with.
Does your software choices harm you, not could harm you, but harm you? Do you want the freedoms described in all cases, or are you willing to trade some parts of them for other goods? That's the bargain you should consider.
Freedom isn't the end-all of life, nor should it be. If you want to live on principle, do so, but it really doesn't make you intrinsically better as a person.
I'm interested in how you measure future benefits of someone else's life.
Does anybody know what the first two GNU windowing systems were? Is he talking about GNUstep?
A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such an affront to freedom that I could not be party to its use under any circumstances whatsoever. These streaming dis-services are malicious technology designed to make people antisocial.
Right, Richard, it's the Netflix users who are antisocial, not the people who get irate when their "friend" tries to load a website.
As a car owner, I should have the freedom to open my car, inspect its inner workings, change/fix things as desired, and share my knowledge others. The ability to openly inspect the inner workings also allows me to assure that the car is only performing operations I purchased it to perform.
However, as a car developer, I cannot possibly hope to make money by giving the car away for free. There have been significant hours invested into the design of the car. Sure, there's money to made in maintenance, but realistically most people don't care about routine maintenance. They'd rather buy the car and ride it 'til the wheels fall off - maybe an oil change here and there.
Are these two views fundamentally incompatible? Does anyone pay an upfront cost for free software in recognition of the time spent building/designing the product as they might with proprietary?
The problem of course is that this also says that labor is worthless and nobody gets to eat and find shelter unless they have some significant patronage. So sure I can build my Sprocket-Cog Software more easily because many of the software components that go into it are available to me for free (beer) so long as I free the entire thing at the end (freedom).
The follow-on argument is that you can always try to build a services model around Sprocket-Cog Software and live from that. But there's a subtle implication there that building turnkey software is not an option if you want to live, but making broken, user-hostile, hard-to-use software is the only morally "good" option.
(there's another argument that can be dismissed that you aren't prohibited from selling your software commercially under the right license, but that's a stupid argument, nobody will buy software from you if you just make it available for free (beer) anyways, so your only valid option (and the only one that has so far sorta "worked" in the marketplace is to provide services)
RMS of course dismisses all of this with a bunch of handwaivyness, like he does issues with hardware, food, etc. because he simply doesn't have to worry about them (because he has money) or because he can't find a path he can personally follow. It's hard to take claims about morality seriously when they only apply to software and not anything else that's far more embedded in life.
I've been programming professionally for 15 years, and I've gotten well paid for it. But I never worked for a company that sold its software without handing out the code right with it. Many times it has not met RMS' standards, because some of the code used proprietary libraries, but using said libraries was always the customer choice.
Most of the time, the customer that uses the code keeps it to themselves, just like they keep the actual executables they compile to themselves. A few times, however, my code was just released with an open license. Either way, I'd have still gotten paid, every single time, if copyrights or patents did not cover software at all.
Remember that the original complaints that made this movement happen had little to do with software being for pay, but with the chains that come along with not allowing modification: Printer driver has a bug? Tough. Game doesn't work in a newer computer? Buy a remake. Bought a new computer because the old one broke? Call MS and see if they will let you transfer the OS from machine to machine. It's issues like that free software wanted to change. Making it hard to, say, sell videogames in that kind of model, is not the real objective, but collateral damage.
An extreme absurd version of the logic (NOT to say the moral implications are the same, just to understand the logic!!) is this: it may be easier to get rich owning slaves, but you should not own slaves. I don't care how hard life is for you or how hard you have to work or how impossible your business would be without slaves. No slavery.
http://mimiandeunice.com/2010/08/25/for-the-children/
The fact that an unethical business model can be successful doesn't matter. We should reject it and figure out whatever else we have to do to get by.
Software is different; copying and distribution essentially costs only as much as the power it takes to move bits around.
As long as physical materials are not free, I don't think it contradicts supporting free software - even paying developers for their effort - and also paying for a car. There's no incompatibility here.
... but today, cars do contain software, which makes the situation a lot more complex...
I disagree. Software, too, requires nontrivial resources to produce.
I guess what I'm arguing is that inherent value for both is in production / design. When you buy a vehicle, you're paying for the design, the function, etc..., not the physical materials. However, the object being purchased in the case of a vehicle must manifest itself through physical materials, and so the physical materials are the barrier for reproduction / distribution. This barrier forces payment towards the production / design.
In the software case, the barrier is artificially introduced by closing the source. This seems to be the way many force payment to the production / design of software. But naturally this cripples the users freedom.
Obviously software can be duplicated for free but it often takes significant labor. Often more than making a few thousand cars.
More fundamentally, the production of goods comes at a price that can't necessarily be easily expressed in terms of money. Extracting and using natural resources often damages the environment and more obviously deprives other people of the use of those resources.
You aren't paying $30k just for materials, but you aren't paying $30k for just labor and perceived value either. Resources used in the production of cars are sometimes naturally scarce, and if you own such resources, people will pay you to extract them.
your misconception of the position is addressed in the above essay.
RMS: Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price doesn't make the software free, or even closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
also: making closed and open versions is OK by rms.
If you think of kickstarter etc for free software projects, that is like selling one copy.
It's strange to me that you mention Google and Apple, because in both cases they built their empires largely on using open-source software that was available to them, and keeping some software closed isn't obviously relevant to their business model or success.
I've got a lot of respect for RMS. What he does is important, and i want him to keep fighting for what he believes in. I just don't want him to win. We're all better for the opposition between the corporate interests driving forward usability and inclusiveness, and the philisophical interests pushing openness and ethics and impractical idealism.
About DRM: he seems to say that if you can break it, it's ok to use it, even if it's unfree. Also, is Netflix breakable? I don't use it myself, but I was once told you can rip the movies with some programs.
Quite the contrary. Since the Snowden revelations, all of his emails have the following header:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]That's what I based my comment on.
Although he's changed, apparently, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559834
By this measure, browsing the web through an email proxy renders most surveillance methods blind to your activities.
Anyway, a regular free vpn (from his description, I'm sure he'd never exceed the limits) would achieve the same goals (and he could still use lynx et al and browse offline). Hell, browsing with javascript and cookies turned off shoud already defeat most surveillance, plus maybe change your IP every so often.
However, you're moving the goalposts. You said: "So [RMS] thinks emails can't be spied on [because he said 'One consequence of <my internet browsing> method is that most of the survellance methods used on the Internet can't see me.'". My comment illuminated the reasoning behind RMS's use of the word "most" and addressed your misunderstanding of the same.
Actually... if you use a console based email program (like pine) that you use over SSH, then all of your email to other users on the same system never traverse a network.
If it's a web based interface, then you need to worry about stripping SSL and rogue CAs and all of those threats.
But if two people SSH into the same system and send email to each other with pine (or elm or whatever), the email itself never traverses a network (it's just a local copy operation) and the reading of the email is over SSH.
It may interest you to know that not one single piece of rsync.net internal company email has ever traversed a network.
EDIT: nevermind, just read elsewhere that this technique was for offline browsing and now he does use a browser.
That seems very unlikely. Since the stuff in the emails is publicly available on the net there would be no point in encrypting them. You might be able to determine what RMS is interested in, but everyone already knows what RMS is interested in ... in some detail.
is right after the description of how he browses. It sounds like he doesn't want people knowing what he's browsing.
Although "most" could exclude the NSA and anyone capable of intercepting emails.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3809836
An idea: if somebody makes the diff between the page then and now we can talk about what he changed since the previous discussion and also refer to the previous discussion for the unchanged aspects.
The main differences seem to be updated information such as about his laptop, and changes to the prose for clarification.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120407053822/http://stallman.o...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150517163401/https://stallman....
For example, what is wrong with paying for digital services on the web? I mean, serious, what is wrong with it? Or, I found his opinion on Netflix quite funny. Netflix never intends to sell its users anything. The whole premise is to watch without buying. Like library (but you pay for the service). You can't exactly complain that you can't, says, tear apart a library book, can you? So, why DRM on Netfix a problem? The users don't own those video! Well o well.
I don't understand this, if it makes your searches more relevant to you, what's wrong?
I used duckduckgo for a while, but the results were very poor compared to Google, since Google knows what i usually search (i.e. programing-related stuff, not cooking or w/e) and what interests me.
If you fear about being prosecuted, then sure don't use the service, or you could also fight to improve regulations.
http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/
I thought RMS is still using his old Leemote. Evidently not.
http://www.fsf.org/news/endorsement-criteria
Specifically, the seller must use the term "GNU/Linux" for any reference to an entire operating system which includes GNU and Linux, not "Linux" or "Linux-based system" or "a system with the Linux kernel" or any other term that mentions "Linux" without "GNU". Likewise, the seller must talk about "free software" more prominently than "open source."
....am I the only one, or does it seem petty to anyone else?
The second part is also problematic, first because it's inaccurate (MIT- and BSD-licensed software is also open source but not free software i.e copyleft, which is bad), and second because it misses the point of free software: allowing others to use your work without contributing back is is very comparable to the right to enslave. So free software says that software being free is more important than people being free to do what they want with it. Much like we generally think that people being free is more important than others being free to do what they want to their neighbors.
So it's only petty if you're not accustomed to these ideas, which you are supposed to be anyway if you go through the effort of reading these rules. That's why this label exists after all: so you don't have to give it as much thought as these people did.
Additionally, it makes for awkward copy. Made with GNU/Linux can be mentally parsed a few different ways; it could mean they're joined, or could mean an either or. Furthermore, the FSF shows their pettiness in other ways, such as how they cram GNU/ into the names of Linux distributions that don't use it [2]. Their actions on this front just end up feeling petty and petulant.
[1] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-tutorial/stable/c24.html
http://www.devthought.com/2012/06/09/richard-stallman-robbed...
- could someone explain this passage?
Edit: does he mean the island Java?
Can anyone outline the argument against Netflix, Spotify, etc.? I don't follow. Is he suggesting the content should be free?
Here is one of the FSF's sites about DRM: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
Personally I do use Netflix and I don't think that the company or its users are unethical, but ultimately if there were a reasonably priced service that offered DRM-free content and didn't rely on closed-source plugins and apps, I would switch in a heartbeat.
In some ways it parallels internet piracy. ISPs for the most part are sick of policing their users and sending out C&D letters for copyright infringement, but they more or less have to due to pressure from major studios.
You would have thought that rms would have made more of an effort to build a great Lisp on which to build better free software. Developers would be much more productive in Lisp than C or Java, for example.
Lisp:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp
"Richard Stallman chose Lisp as the extension language for his rewrite of Emacs"
and
C compiler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection
"When Tanenbaum told him that while the Free University was free, the compiler was not, Stallman decided to write his own."
It's not about the "theoretical possibilities" it's about the practical limitations.
I can't refer to you to any single resource regarding the limitations of any Lisp for implementing the free-source replacement of Unix, but if you investigate how the Lisp in Emacs was actually implemented you can get the picture. Provided you have enough basic knowledge about the low level aspects of the CPUs, compilers and interpreters and also the limitations of all the hardware before the most modern CPUs. Even today, what's "good enough" on the desktop can be "too much demanded" from the lower power systems. But the lower power systems of today are also much more advanced than what we had for decades during which GNU project grew.
GCC 1.0 was released in 1987. The 2000 USD computer had less than 1 MB of RAM then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
Million polygon levels running at 60fps when the majority of games on that system had 1-2 orders of magnitude less geometry and ran at 30fps and were written in C/C++
I'm NOT saying therefore RMS should have used lisp instead of C but I am suggesting that any perf objections or memory objections are mostly not factual. It's perfectly possible to make a performant non-memory hungry lisp.
https://www.ma.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/2001/001119.html
RMS: fighting proprietary software for more than 3 decades.
Also interesting: the game company "transitioned to C++ for future projects" according to Wikipedia.
We'd all agree C isn't as necessary today. Lots of great stuff is done in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Clojure, etc. Developers are building editors in browsers (atom.io) and Microsoft used atom with 200k of Typescript in their new cross-platform tools.
Lots of the applications written in ML are barely viable; the only reason they're performant now is due to Moore's law.
And all this is not because of what RMS did or didn't do. He did great things, and I don't agree that anybody can claim that he could have done something differently given the real constrains he had.
Which would mean he likes C.
How then is it doing the world a favor to write less of one of his favorite languages?
As he ultimately decided to not go this direction, I'm going to assume he considered it more of a dead end.
It's very easy to do hyperbolic statements like lauding lisp, it's hard to use it in practical situations.
Very few of the software from the GNU project have been written by RMS, they are often starten outside the GNU project and join or get adopted later.
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...
The default comparison is to Java: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/lisp.html
>>I'm assuming the optimization/safety settings are…<<
They are shown: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...
It was about Clojure vs Haskell and more specifically, dynamic vs static typing. Person was claiming that it was so much easier to change statically typed languages. It get more difficult to maintain large projects that are Lisps.
From what I've learned so far about languages, it makes sense. It looks that Lisps are more suitable for implementing algorithms because of the reductionism, but in more realistic systems world, you build interfaces, add random strings, and so on.
If you are patient and good enough, you can probably build significant part of a system, but not all of it. I do not know any systems built entirely on Lisp, but I might be wrong.
For some examples of systems built on Lisp: Emacs, Hacker News, Paul Graham's startup Viaweb, the original Reddit.
[1]: http://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Type-Errors-at-Compile-Time
It's nowhere near Haskell/ML, or even C/Java.
Static typing certainly makes it easier to maintain large systems, but it's certainly not a requirement.
You can certainly write entire systems in Lisp; people have made entire computers in order to run Lisp in hardware; there have been operating systems etc.
Moreover, you don't really need to use it for whole systems; use it where it works. There need not be One True Language.
At the moment, Clojure is used in production at Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, Akamai, etc etc etc.
And some lisps, such as Racket, allow you to switch from untyped to typed with nominal changes.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done in one weekend. (Disclosure: We used my web.py library.) The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain.
http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand.
...
We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear.
...
The entire task took less than a week, with 80% of the code written in a single weekend.
I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for similar reasons. Perl, Python, Java, etc. were faster to write in, performed better, and had better long-term maintainability (okay, maybe not Perl). Nobody regrets those switches except for a couple Lispers who continue to complain about how none of this is true, even after Lisp didn't provide the results, and something else did.
Continuing to claim that Lisp is better than all the proven better alternatives starts to make it smell like religion. Trying to explain away why a Lisp didn't work for whatever reason, but it's still the best start to taste like religion.
At some point its important to just make a call and realize that Lisps are interesting, you can compute with them, and they've had important influence, but they aren't the best way to do things - for many reasons. There's always another language choice that's faster, or easier, or offers a better ecosystem.
GNU CL has been out for a long while now, and it hasn't taken the world by storm. "Better", while qualitative in many respects, is also obvious, and it's obvious across a sample of millions of software projects that there are simply better holistic software development tools.
edit it makes me really happy when this gets downvoted without comment. Nobody ever downvotes an anti-Lisp rant with a pointer to a large and ongoing Lisp-based project. They just virtually claim I'm wrong without any substantial backup.
> I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for similar reasons.
I've seen lots of large corporations rewriting all kinds of software. For example I've seen a lot C++ software being rewritten in Java.
Large corporations are not interested to use 'powerful' languages like Lisp. They are more interested in cost cutting, outsourcing, offshoring, 'industrialized' software production, cheap supply of labor, ...
> Continuing to claim that Lisp is better than all the proven better alternatives starts to make it smell like religion.
It's religion. Stallman's statement is decades old. Lisp is powerful, flexible, etc. ... but there are a lot of great alternatives. Plus, as I said above, in many companies 'powerful' and 'flexible' is not the most important criteria when selecting languages and tools. Java got successful because of other qualities: being developed by SUN (then Google and IBM) for enterprise software development.
'GNU CL' was never a GNU project as such. GNU CL based on KCL/AKCL and has been used in a few applications. It never has been a focus of the GNU project - it's merely published under their umbrella.
Stallman also never was a fan of Common Lisp - when he developed Emacs Lisp, he developed a very much simpler version, also based on Maclisp - which Common Lisp replaced.
- to use a lisp on large-scale production software, the developers need to be experts, while the same isn't true of other languages
- if you just commit long enough, a lisp will come through in the end
- unless it's the wrong lisp (without specifying what is a right lisp)
- large corporations don't want to use languages that are powerful or flexible, they prefer weak and rigid languages
- lisps don't provide cheap, large-scale, easy to synchronize development at an industrial scale
- other languages became successful because they targeted their audience
So let's invert that and derive the ideal audience for a lisp that you just described:
- not on a large scale project or team (something you can write 80% over a weekend in Python is too large)
- already at an expert level
- will commit to a path even when it's not working
I'm not saying this to bash your statement, but I think you've provided a microcosm of why not to use Lisp. From a language selection standpoint, there are pitifully few consequential projects that scope to the ideal for a lisp. There's no obvious as to why its better, and there is to all of the alternatives. Based on this, it's possible to make easy arguments as to why to choose Asm, Perl or 80's Basic over a lisp that make those languages look like great ideas for almost any project where a lisp might be proposed.
And nobody still has backed up a downvote with a pointer to a good lisp project. Not even one. I can probably find a list of ongoing MS-Basic projects without too much fuss, but it's like doing dentistry on an angry tiger to get something similar from the lisp community.
and then
"Google+ offers to hide the user's real name, but demands people prove an "established identity" or provide ID."
Sounds contradictive.
i don't think rms is contradicting himself.
This webpage and its content made me thinking about the purpose of internet as both communication media and e-commerce. Can someone picture the alternative internet following contents of that page as guideline?
It's also a bit odd that for a guy who intentionally buys a 10+ year old or so hardware to run free/libreboot on it (at least partially to trust the boot layers), didn't mind buying a Chinese laptop which was not only made in China, but also designed from parts natively developed in China including the CPU by a government institute.
His browsing habits are also a bit well laughable tbh, both because at the end even if he hogs the free WiFI at Starbucks he is traceable, and delivering internet pages of email ins't intrinsically more secure or surveillance resilient than browsing them directly.
This guy always interested me in some ways, it's quite amazing how one can be so talented and so coo coo for cocoa puffs at the same time, and in contrast to the usual extreme left social anarchists or marxists also very accomplished.
Stallman is trying his best to live up to his ethical principles. What is the point of your uncharitable criticism?
You should read some of his essays :)
"Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. (Bill Gates made this comparison in a 1998 issue of Fortune Magazine.) No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim."
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html
"05 June 2006 (Dutch paedophiles form political party) Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
I can't find any evidence for him being either of these things. He has described himself as a Liberal [1], and praised Dennis Kucinich, whose political positions are quite progressive, but hardly "extreme left anarchist/Marxist" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, these kinds of views are pretty mainstream in Western Europe and other places.
[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2009-sep-dec.html#10%20Decembe...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Dennis_...
Now being a vanguard for free software is one thing, but using your reputation to go and protest children in developing nations getting PC's because they've switched from GNU to Windows? That's some hard core vegan shit there like dying because you refuse to eat a burger.. So yep I do hold his views and actions as extremes, not all of them ofc, some i might even agree on in practice if not in justification.
ayy lmao
and you are calling somebody an extremist?
talk about hyperbole.
When Steve Jobs died he made this post on his site:
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Sorry but i don't need a hyperbole to relate my position that this guy has quite a few extreme views, and takes quite a few extreme actions.
P.S. Wanting to cancel a program that was aimed at bringing computing to children in underdeveloped nations is actually worse than dying out of stubbornness for your beliefs, it's actively denying people who have very little just because you think that running Windows is a Sin, this is the equivalent of Christians evangelists holding out donations to African countries that do not institute anti-gay and anti-sodomy laws.
can you provide me with the source materials for these protests? i'm not really accepting them at face value, due to your previous hyperbole.
in many cases you can protest against behaviour whilst allowing that behaviour to continue. peaceful protest versus using violence for example.
thanks for the apology re the previous hyperbole.
here's links to the steve jobs statements that you find so extreme, in case anyone is particularly interested in them(rather than reading the shortened version you have presented)
https://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2...
https://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#27_October_2...
i'm sure most people have said similar about those who have passed who do not have their enduring admiration.
In his essay, He has already mentioned that he considers Microwaves, TV's, ATM's as utilities and has no qualms,
>"if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer.",
So, it derives that he is OK with flying on planes (which has proprietary software but is not prone to updates like your PC software is) or maybe an MRI machine or an Xray machine of the sorts for your life threatening scenario you mentioned. These are utilities.
Now, I don't consider updates to be abnormal, but neither is it something I'd ever list in response to "how do you normally use your phone?"
Or my kindle. I update the software on that far less frequently.
Thus, the iPhone is very much a computer.
Contrast this with -say- most computer monitors. There is software running in them, but -in (almost?) every case- upgrading that software requires either gaining access to programming ports inside the monitor and performing an arcane ritual that might involve specialized hardware or physically swapping out chips.
If, in some convoluted way, one were faced with the choice between death and purposely installing non-free software on one's own device, I expect RMS would consider you to be a victim and feel sorry for you, but recommend that of course you should do the thing that saves your life.
I would further expect - only slightly more weakly - that he'd take his own advice.
Particularly given that he's himself used a proprietary BIOS when there were no other options, for simple "ability to do computing" which is clearly less severe than preserving life (it's awfully hard to do the one without the other).
As a side note: the pendulum is swinging the other way in regards to cholesterol - so in many cases doctors are not actually concerned about high cholesterol in the same way they used to be.
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He may think that he isn't participating, but he is. GCC is used by every major vendor to both Wall St and the DOD. IF we are only talking about the freedom of people who purchase expensive consumer items to use them as they see fit...and that includes, let's say, a data mining company that produces metadata that is used for targeting drone strikes WHO USE GCC...then we are talking about a very narrowly focused issue...and yeah, he's probably right that it's bullshit that I can't get the source code to the OS that runs my TV...but I don't think that it's necessarily as important as he does. That is, if its even actually important at all.
you are still critiquing his behaviour and not saying what he should be doing instead.
consider that gnu, fsf and eff are related organisations.