How do they not get this yet, you burn stuff you produce CO2. I don't care what you burn, CO2 is given off. Practically every country exept for America accepts global warming as a problem, CO2 emissions will not get better when you keep burning stuff for energy, How are these people not getting this! For god's sake, these are scientists, they've seen the evidence and know that CO2 is a problem so stop trying to find new inventive ways to produce it. Apparently you're not getting it. Sure burning plant-carbon fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere. But where did the Carbon in the plant come from? That's right, from the atmosphere! Specifically from the CO2 in the atmosphere! So burning bio-fuels like ethanol won't actually increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it just cycles it through a system that provides us with useful energy.
america wants to keep burning stuff instead of using hydro-electric, wave power, or tidal- all of which are viable. That is WRONG!/Rant over It's all a matter of efficiency. Hydro, wave and tidal energy can only produce and transmit electricity, you can't ship water across the state for processing into electricity, so you have to build processing and transmission infrastructure everywhere you want to gather that energy. With biofuel, you don't need a processing plant on every farm, you can build a single high capacity plant to handle all the farms in a region.
The defendant would probably then be charged with destroying evidence when the chips were found to contain no data... What would be even more amusing is if the plaintiff (MPAA) tried to put it into another computer to read it. Because the act of booting would destroy whatever remnants of data might possibly be on the RAM, so technically they would be the ones destroying evidence.
It's usually up to the plaintiff and the defendant to provide expert knowledge, not the court. I doubt the judge came up with this "get their RAM" idea all by himself, more likely the plaintiff asked for it and the judge was just granting the request. So either the plaintiff has an idiot expert (highly likely given past experience), or they think they can actually recover enough information from the defendant's RAM (which may be possible, but I wouldn't bet my case on it).
Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility? Um, probably. Isn't that how most non-technical users regard their computer?
Nouveau will probably tell you that their biggest hurdle is not writing efficient code, it's reverse engineering the hardware interface. That is why people who want to help them are asked to run the REnouveau utility.
That's why Linux hackers want all drivers in the kernel tree, so they can find anything which breaks due to an API change, and fix the problems.
And that's exactly why hardware manufacturers DON'T want their drivers to live in the kernel tree. They don't get:
Bug fix backports: Kernel hackers apply a patch to the latest vanilla kernel, then say backports are the distro's problem. Two distros do, fifteen don't, users of those fifteen scream at the hardware companies for having buggy drivers. With an out-of-tree driver, you just need to update the driver. Windows and OSX are light-years ahead of Linux here.
I don't think I've ever heard of someone blaming the hardware company when there was a patch already available, just because their distro of choice hadn't incorporated that patch. Is this a straw man, or have you actually encountered it? Even so, how would having an open-source driver prevent them from providing patched binaries directly to the user?
Community contributions: Kernel hackers only add GPLed code; very few even allow dual-license, and certain vocal hackers are zealously GPL-only (to the extent of rewriting code JUST to make it GPLed). Which means the hardware vendor can't take a fix from a linux driver and integrate it into a Windows driver without GPLing that too. The vendor has to either GPL all drivers (Windows included), or maintain two separate trees (GPL and non-GPL), or not open drivers at all. Guess which is easiest / cheapest?
Code added to the Linux kernel MUST be GPL, that's the licensing requirement. However, contributors are still free to release their code under other, even proprietary licenses. There is nothing to stop nVidia from providing GPL and non-GPL drivers that share code. If someone makes a patch to their driver, and releases it only under the GPL, then of course it can't be re-licensed without permission. However, if there is no GPL code, they don't get any user submitted patches anyway, so they don't gain anything with non-GPL. An alternative would be to foster development on a BSD-style license, or ask for a copyright grant from the contributor so they can relicense it.
Driver API stability: a modern 3D graphics driver is a full OS in its own right, with internal threading models, schedulers, memory management, context switches, etc.; a modern driver needs more than just bugfixes. Every good developer knows the way to keep two large codebases manageable is a stable API between them; the only people who don't seem to get this are otherwise-intelligent Linux kernel hackers.
In Linux, drivers are a part of the Kernel, not outside programs. It is, in a sense, a single large codebase, not multiple large code bases. nVidia wants to be part of that codebase, without actually contributing itself to that codebase.
Kernel API freedom: Kernel hackers like stable userspace APIs (for good reason). But hardware vendors don't need to provide stable APIs if they have a shim library that actually talks to the cards (e.g. atioglxx.dll, the ATI OpenGL implementation). It's a lot easier to let the API change rapidly and only commit to a stable API at the library interface (the OpenGL API).
It's even easier to let those people who are changing the API make the changes for you, which is what the Kernel devs are asking for.
Easier work. The Linux kernel development process is optimized for making the kernel hacker's life easier at the expense of the driver developer's (hint: saying "we'll update your driver for you" clashes very badly when the HW vendor is simultaneously making changes). If kernel hackers want to see better device drivers, they need to stop treating drivers as second-class citizens. Microsoft is very good at courting driver developers; Linux is the definition of arrogance.
which box, certainly not the box the hardware comes in because they all seem to be Windows and Mac only. Here's a fun little game, try running Windows on a PPC Mac box, and Mac OS X on a Windows box. Guess what happens? Now try Linux on either box, guess what happens?
You're saying that it will cost NVidia (and others) money to open source their drivers.
Not exactly - that it cost them money to develop the drivers, including their own R&D into how to best squeeze performance out of their cards, and gain an edge over their competitors. This is highly sensitive information and undoubtedly cost them a lot to develop. To open source their drivers would be to give this all away to their competitors, who you can be sure would be the first to look at the code. A highly efficient driver can get the most performance out of the hardware, but it can't make the hardware better than it is. An open-source driver might reveal some coding tricks to make better use of nVidia hardware, but that probably won't help Intel or ATI drivers, and certainly won't help their hardware. Further more, the R&D cost has already been spent, and since they don't sell the closed-source driver, they can't recoup that money except through hardware sales. I can't think of any possible reason why an open-source driver would do anything but increase hardware sales. Intel made this decision, and is now the most widely recommended video hardware I see for Linux. Dell's Ubuntu line uses Intel instead of the nVidia chipsets of their Windows equivalents specifically because they have open-source drivers.
As good as the open source environment is, they do not have the specialists or the resources to develop a cutting-edge product which is, after all, exactly what the video card market is. That point might be relevant if people were trying to create an open-source GPU, because the GPU is complex and cutting-edge. But we aren't asking for that, we're asking for an open-source driver, which only needs to pass instructions back and forth between the Linux kernel and the graphics card. This is a remarkably easier task, and certainly within the ability of open-source development.
Drivers are programmed against the kernel API, and as such will not need to be rewritten unless the kernel API changes. That said, drivers are COMPILED against the kernel ABI, which means that whenever the ABI changes, the drivers have to be recompiled.
Linux hackers want driver code in the kernel tree so that they will be automatically recompiled against the new kernel, instead of the user having to download and compile the driver source every time they get a new kernel. They also want them in the kernel tree because so many drivers require the same functionality, and it's better to re-use and improve common code, rather than each driver containing their own implementation.
Then you need to read up on what VeriSign actually does. Someone with a VeriSign ssl cert hasn't verified who they are, they've only verified that they have (or more likely 'had') a credit card number and a small amount of money. I haven't tried it, but you can probably get one with a pre-paid Visa gift card.
I would rather trust a cert verified by me, than one verified by VeriSign.
Any developer can create their own SSL Certificates for free. It's getting a certificate that's been signed by a vendor already in Firefox's whitelist that they are paying for. I would rather each developer create their own self-signed certificate, then I get to decide who to trust, not Verisign.
But using HTTPS wouldn't solve this problem either, because Verisign will sell a certificate to anyone with money. What should be happening is that developers sign their packages like they do for DEB and RPM package distros. That way you always know that you're getting your updates from the same person, no matter what your internet connection.
some of the basic lack of medical support we have here - its not that its available, its that people can't afford it i.e. no insurance.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Someone get the man a prize.
This was my point all along, we don't need more medicine available in the US. We need better healthcare coverage through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid for those who can't afford personal coverage. We need governments investing in pharmaceutical research in exchange for an equivalent share in the drugs produced, so that these programs can offer low or no cost name-brand drugs. We need to close the loopholes pharmaceutical companies use to extend patent protection beyond what is beneficial to society.
Wine isn't an emulator exactly, I don't see speed differences between Wine and Windows. Right, Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API on the Linux kernel instead of a Win32 kernel. Sometimes is slower than Windows, but many times people report apps running faster on Linux+Wine, so YMMV.
My PC is incapable of running Vista+Aero(according to MS, I haven't actually tried), but runs fine with Ubuntu+Beryl with all the bells and whistles my videocard supports (everything but annotate and water). I'm not going to generalize this to every case, but for me at least his claim was accurate.
Will this machine be more likely to be usable until she is no longer physically capable of using a computer? That is more likely to be true with Linux than Windows while keeping the OS up-to-date.
Heh, kind of puts "free upgrades for life" into a whole new perspective, doesn't it?
Tagline could be "Ubuntu: you'll die before it does."
You say "binary blob" like you won't be able to access the SQLite database without Firefox. SQLite is open source and public domain, you can download the programs needed to access the file on multiple platforms.
No, you can't open it in your text editor, but then again it's not a document it's a database. You can't get what you need for the Places feature from a document unless you subsequently treat it like a database, which would truly be a performance disaster.
But, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too. The Mozdev article says that your bookmarks.html file will be updated when changes are made to the SQLite database. I'm not sure if this will be the case in the final release or if it's just in place for alpha/beta testing.
Except that you have to construct SQL queries instead of the leaner unabstracted way of function calls. Constructing a scripting query and parsing the resultls is always going to be extremely slow compared to a dedicated function call.
Well that all depends on what's on the other side of the function call, doesn't it? Parsing an SQL query is orders of magnitude less resource intensive than filtering and sorting a few hundred bookmark records based on multiple criteria. If SQLite can do the filtering and sorting faster than the difference between parsing SQL and calling a function, then it's a performance win. Remember that function arguments also have to be parsed, evaluated, then the results used for filtering and sorting when using the current XHTML bookmarks file.
Firefox currently stores bookmarks in an XHTML file so it currently uses an XML parser to load bookmarks, I don't think you'll notice any negative performance hit from SQLite.
Bookmarks were strings 10 years ago, now they are multi-field records, especially things like live RSS bookmarks. The hole point of the "Places" component is to give more state and functionality to bookmarks and history.
I also think the SQLite engine is going to be used for the new client-side persistence framework which does need database capabilities, so it would be there regardless.
Education and computer equipment is already available in public schools and public libraries, which anybody in the USA can get access to. Medicine is available to some extent to those who can't afford it through government programs. It's not that there isn't enough to go around, do you think there is a physical shortage of antibiotics in the USA? Do you think kids in NYC don't have at least 1 hospital and 2 public schools within walking distance or their home?
Do we need to improve these there? Sure. I'd like to see more teachers to reduce class size. I'd like to see more computers available in libraries. I'd like to see poor people given better medical care in our hospitals. But that doesn't change the fact that they do have access to computers, and they do have access to medicine. You can't say that about large parts of Africa.
That doesn't change the fact that a percentage exists that doesn't have acess to them.
True, but neither will adding more of them change that fact. Which was entirely my point.
That you can believe black is white absolutely astonishes me. A person in inner-city New York or Appalachia who given acess to a doctor or a teacher won't have their lives significantly impacted?
I never said they wouldn't. But why don't those people get access to a doctor or a teacher? Are there no doctors or teachers within a reasonable distance from them? Sure there are. They don't get access to them for reasons unrelated to availability. So will adding more doctors and teachers to those areas make a difference? No. You have to change whatever it was that was keeping them from seeing the hundreds of doctors and teachers that were already there.
While you're right that they'll have more of an impact in a worse off place, the implication is that the poor and starving living in a 1st world country are somehow less needy than those in a 3rd.
No, the implication is that the poor and starving in the 1st world aren't that way due to a lack of money and food in the first world. The USA already has enough money and food to keep everyone here from starving, so adding more money and food to the equation wouldn't solve our problems. There are other places in the world where there is literally not enough food or water for everybody, in those places increasing the amount available can actually save lives.
I'm all for helping the poor and the hungry in the USA, but what we're doing in Africa wouldn't help them if we did it over here. I use the word "wasted" because that's exactly what it would be, we would spend time and resources on projects that didn't help anybody, so they are wasted.
The thing is, with Ubuntu Joe Sixpack doesn't need to buy Quicken, a DVD creator, a DVD player or Greetings Workshop, because their equivalents all available for free through the Ubuntu repositories! Commercial software doesn't have to exist for every need, just for the ones where there isn't an open source equivalent.
So (in bizzaro world, where Walmart employees know anything about Linux) the salesperson would explain to Joe that if he gets the $60 more expensive Ubuntu system, he doesn't need to spend $100 on all those other programs. Plus he gets a full office suite installed by default, so he doesn't have to spend multiple $100s on MS Office. Oh, and he doesn't need to buy those virus scanners and spyware removal tools, saving even more money. Then the saleperson will tell Joe that if he buys the Ubuntu system, he will get free upgrades for life, for all of the products it comes with. Sounds a bit more compelling when you put it that way, doesn't it?
The only thing you would have trouble with is games, which is a known problem for Linux as it used to be for Mac. Since Mac doesn't have DirectX, I would guess that they use OpenGL for 3D games, so it wouldn't take much of a Linux market to make it worthwhile for the games companies to port their Mac version to run on Linux too.
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It's usually up to the plaintiff and the defendant to provide expert knowledge, not the court. I doubt the judge came up with this "get their RAM" idea all by himself, more likely the plaintiff asked for it and the judge was just granting the request. So either the plaintiff has an idiot expert (highly likely given past experience), or they think they can actually recover enough information from the defendant's RAM (which may be possible, but I wouldn't bet my case on it).
Actually the research shows that despite Apache being the more popular web server, IIS had more instances of hosting malware.
Nouveau will probably tell you that their biggest hurdle is not writing efficient code, it's reverse engineering the hardware interface. That is why people who want to help them are asked to run the REnouveau utility.
And that's exactly why hardware manufacturers DON'T want their drivers to live in the kernel tree. They don't get:
I don't think I've ever heard of someone blaming the hardware company when there was a patch already available, just because their distro of choice hadn't incorporated that patch. Is this a straw man, or have you actually encountered it? Even so, how would having an open-source driver prevent them from providing patched binaries directly to the user?
Community contributions: Kernel hackers only add GPLed code; very few even allow dual-license, and certain vocal hackers are zealously GPL-only (to the extent of rewriting code JUST to make it GPLed). Which means the hardware vendor can't take a fix from a linux driver and integrate it into a Windows driver without GPLing that too. The vendor has to either GPL all drivers (Windows included), or maintain two separate trees (GPL and non-GPL), or not open drivers at all. Guess which is easiest / cheapest?
Code added to the Linux kernel MUST be GPL, that's the licensing requirement. However, contributors are still free to release their code under other, even proprietary licenses. There is nothing to stop nVidia from providing GPL and non-GPL drivers that share code. If someone makes a patch to their driver, and releases it only under the GPL, then of course it can't be re-licensed without permission. However, if there is no GPL code, they don't get any user submitted patches anyway, so they don't gain anything with non-GPL. An alternative would be to foster development on a BSD-style license, or ask for a copyright grant from the contributor so they can relicense it.
Driver API stability: a modern 3D graphics driver is a full OS in its own right, with internal threading models, schedulers, memory management, context switches, etc.; a modern driver needs more than just bugfixes. Every good developer knows the way to keep two large codebases manageable is a stable API between them; the only people who don't seem to get this are otherwise-intelligent Linux kernel hackers.
In Linux, drivers are a part of the Kernel, not outside programs. It is, in a sense, a single large codebase, not multiple large code bases. nVidia wants to be part of that codebase, without actually contributing itself to that codebase.
Kernel API freedom: Kernel hackers like stable userspace APIs (for good reason). But hardware vendors don't need to provide stable APIs if they have a shim library that actually talks to the cards (e.g. atioglxx.dll, the ATI OpenGL implementation). It's a lot easier to let the API change rapidly and only commit to a stable API at the library interface (the OpenGL API).
It's even easier to let those people who are changing the API make the changes for you, which is what the Kernel devs are asking for.
Easier work. The Linux kernel development process is optimized for making the kernel hacker's life easier at the expense of the driver developer's (hint: saying "we'll update your driver for you" clashes very badly when the HW vendor is simultaneously making changes). If kernel hackers want to see better device drivers, they need to stop treating drivers as second-class citizens. Microsoft is very good at courting driver developers; Linux is the definition of arrogance.
Not exactly - that it cost them money to develop the drivers, including their own R&D into how to best squeeze performance out of their cards, and gain an edge over their competitors. This is highly sensitive information and undoubtedly cost them a lot to develop. To open source their drivers would be to give this all away to their competitors, who you can be sure would be the first to look at the code. A highly efficient driver can get the most performance out of the hardware, but it can't make the hardware better than it is. An open-source driver might reveal some coding tricks to make better use of nVidia hardware, but that probably won't help Intel or ATI drivers, and certainly won't help their hardware. Further more, the R&D cost has already been spent, and since they don't sell the closed-source driver, they can't recoup that money except through hardware sales. I can't think of any possible reason why an open-source driver would do anything but increase hardware sales. Intel made this decision, and is now the most widely recommended video hardware I see for Linux. Dell's Ubuntu line uses Intel instead of the nVidia chipsets of their Windows equivalents specifically because they have open-source drivers. As good as the open source environment is, they do not have the specialists or the resources to develop a cutting-edge product which is, after all, exactly what the video card market is. That point might be relevant if people were trying to create an open-source GPU, because the GPU is complex and cutting-edge. But we aren't asking for that, we're asking for an open-source driver, which only needs to pass instructions back and forth between the Linux kernel and the graphics card. This is a remarkably easier task, and certainly within the ability of open-source development.
Drivers are programmed against the kernel API, and as such will not need to be rewritten unless the kernel API changes. That said, drivers are COMPILED against the kernel ABI, which means that whenever the ABI changes, the drivers have to be recompiled.
Linux hackers want driver code in the kernel tree so that they will be automatically recompiled against the new kernel, instead of the user having to download and compile the driver source every time they get a new kernel. They also want them in the kernel tree because so many drivers require the same functionality, and it's better to re-use and improve common code, rather than each driver containing their own implementation.
They're talking about ABI, not API. The Linux kernel API is extremely stable.
Then you need to read up on what VeriSign actually does. Someone with a VeriSign ssl cert hasn't verified who they are, they've only verified that they have (or more likely 'had') a credit card number and a small amount of money. I haven't tried it, but you can probably get one with a pre-paid Visa gift card.
I would rather trust a cert verified by me, than one verified by VeriSign.
Any developer can create their own SSL Certificates for free. It's getting a certificate that's been signed by a vendor already in Firefox's whitelist that they are paying for. I would rather each developer create their own self-signed certificate, then I get to decide who to trust, not Verisign.
But using HTTPS wouldn't solve this problem either, because Verisign will sell a certificate to anyone with money. What should be happening is that developers sign their packages like they do for DEB and RPM package distros. That way you always know that you're getting your updates from the same person, no matter what your internet connection.
This was my point all along, we don't need more medicine available in the US. We need better healthcare coverage through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid for those who can't afford personal coverage. We need governments investing in pharmaceutical research in exchange for an equivalent share in the drugs produced, so that these programs can offer low or no cost name-brand drugs. We need to close the loopholes pharmaceutical companies use to extend patent protection beyond what is beneficial to society.
But we don't need more medicine.
My PC is incapable of running Vista+Aero(according to MS, I haven't actually tried), but runs fine with Ubuntu+Beryl with all the bells and whistles my videocard supports (everything but annotate and water). I'm not going to generalize this to every case, but for me at least his claim was accurate.
It looks like Dreamweaver 8 runs perfectly well under Wine.8 2
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=34
You might also want to try Quanta as an alternative to Dreamweaver:
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/index.php
Tagline could be "Ubuntu: you'll die before it does."
You say "binary blob" like you won't be able to access the SQLite database without Firefox. SQLite is open source and public domain, you can download the programs needed to access the file on multiple platforms.
No, you can't open it in your text editor, but then again it's not a document it's a database. You can't get what you need for the Places feature from a document unless you subsequently treat it like a database, which would truly be a performance disaster.
But, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too. The Mozdev article says that your bookmarks.html file will be updated when changes are made to the SQLite database. I'm not sure if this will be the case in the final release or if it's just in place for alpha/beta testing.
Firefox currently stores bookmarks in an XHTML file so it currently uses an XML parser to load bookmarks, I don't think you'll notice any negative performance hit from SQLite.
Bookmarks were strings 10 years ago, now they are multi-field records, especially things like live RSS bookmarks. The hole point of the "Places" component is to give more state and functionality to bookmarks and history.
I also think the SQLite engine is going to be used for the new client-side persistence framework which does need database capabilities, so it would be there regardless.
Education and computer equipment is already available in public schools and public libraries, which anybody in the USA can get access to. Medicine is available to some extent to those who can't afford it through government programs. It's not that there isn't enough to go around, do you think there is a physical shortage of antibiotics in the USA? Do you think kids in NYC don't have at least 1 hospital and 2 public schools within walking distance or their home?
Do we need to improve these there? Sure. I'd like to see more teachers to reduce class size. I'd like to see more computers available in libraries. I'd like to see poor people given better medical care in our hospitals. But that doesn't change the fact that they do have access to computers, and they do have access to medicine. You can't say that about large parts of Africa.
I'm all for helping the poor and the hungry in the USA, but what we're doing in Africa wouldn't help them if we did it over here. I use the word "wasted" because that's exactly what it would be, we would spend time and resources on projects that didn't help anybody, so they are wasted.
The thing is, with Ubuntu Joe Sixpack doesn't need to buy Quicken, a DVD creator, a DVD player or Greetings Workshop, because their equivalents all available for free through the Ubuntu repositories! Commercial software doesn't have to exist for every need, just for the ones where there isn't an open source equivalent.
So (in bizzaro world, where Walmart employees know anything about Linux) the salesperson would explain to Joe that if he gets the $60 more expensive Ubuntu system, he doesn't need to spend $100 on all those other programs. Plus he gets a full office suite installed by default, so he doesn't have to spend multiple $100s on MS Office. Oh, and he doesn't need to buy those virus scanners and spyware removal tools, saving even more money. Then the saleperson will tell Joe that if he buys the Ubuntu system, he will get free upgrades for life, for all of the products it comes with. Sounds a bit more compelling when you put it that way, doesn't it?
The only thing you would have trouble with is games, which is a known problem for Linux as it used to be for Mac. Since Mac doesn't have DirectX, I would guess that they use OpenGL for 3D games, so it wouldn't take much of a Linux market to make it worthwhile for the games companies to port their Mac version to run on Linux too.