Oh... and that electronic floppy ejection system, which was controlled by the OS, might have had a part in that too.
Man was that cool or what? I mean, watching your Mac friend eject a disk without hitting the eject button! Oh the envy!
When USB first came out and they started offering USB floppy drivers, I always wondered if some company would sell an "enhanced" floppy drive for PCs that had an electronic eject. It would have required a non-standard driver, but would it have been cool or what!
Except for that to work, you'd need to know when the person replaced the drive with a different one. That that is actually impossible with floppy drives.
Why would they want to? Hard drives were for people with money.
That and it wasn't until "recent" that a BIOS would let you change the boot order. That feature only became widespread (IIRC) when people started to want to boot off CD-ROMS. And that wasn't really possible until CD-ROMS all plugged into your IDE port instead of weird proprietary cards that required weird proprietary drivers.
Back in those days, the only "feature" most BIOS's offered was the ability fool your OS into thinking your A: drive was your B: drive so you didn't have to physically swap the cable.
But I wager most kids under the age of 15 have never actually seen a floppy drive. In addition, I doubt they've seen a cassette tape and I bet many have never seen a video using VHS.
What is funny is I bet when those kids have children of their own, the record player will still be used.
What is really nuts though, is our kids will be doing crazy shit we never dreamed of because unlike us, they grew up with cell phones, the internet and the web. Wait until they come of age and things will really get interesting.
The only way the OS even knew your floppy drive existed was through the bios. If you told the BIOS you had a floppy drive and you didn't, the OS would be none the wiser. And if the OS didn't know if there really was a drive or not, I somehow doubt the technology could even support unique device ID's like modern stuff.
In other words, your plan would work if floppy drives had device ids, but they dont, so your idea won't work either!
Device ID? What is this "plug and play" you are speaking of?
You didn't have to have a floppy drive plugged in to have an "A:" drive. On the PC, if you tried to access the non-existant "A:" drive, the computer would assume you just needed to insert a disk. It didn't know you don't own a floppy drive!
The only way to "detect" the floppy drive was manually in the bios. You could tell the damn thing you had one of the new 2.88mB drives* when all you really had was a 360kB 5 1/4 drive.
Kids these days with their plug-and-play facebooks and their blue ray cassette tapes. Why USB cable is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!
* I dont know what the hell you'd need all that space for either. I guess people using C instead of assembly...
Floppys were the worst too. There was like no standard way to put in the ribbon cable so that Pin-1 on the cable hit Pin-1 on the drive. Some of the ribbons had a filled hole to act as a key--some of the disks had a pin there so that cable didn't work. Some of the disks were designed for the key'd ribbon, but all you had on hand were non-keyed cabling. Some of them had a plastic key on the ribbon so they wouldn't work on the drive missing the slot for the key.
None of the disks had a plastic mold that surrounded the pins. That lead to you connecting the ribbon so the pins were all off by a row. Then when you pulled out the ribbon, it was very easy to bend all the pins.
Keep in mind you were usually doing all this while the disk was screwed into the case and tucked into some god-awful location too. So you'd be inserting this ribbon essentially blind. As a result, every drive I owned had pins that were bent to shit because it would take like 4 try's to get the damn thing working. And worse, you'd never know if you didn't hook it up right until you booted the box and tried to read from the drive.
Oh and if you did manage to get them working, the media was so unreliable that sometimes you could take a brand new disk, write to it, carry it to class and find all your data corrupt. Woe is the fool who didn't write the same file to two disks, lest he arrive with nothing but a bad disk.
Floppy disks sucked. There was nothing good about them. Slow, unreliable and ill designed. Fuck them and the free AOL disks they wrote on.
Considering the only way most software was installed on a machine was via a floppy disk, wasn't your example the most common case? Unless you mean they basically implemented the "detect disk/w-out spinning up and if disk is in, write crap?"
I know its not the msway but a would regkey you could manually set have been that hard?
Yes, it would have. Then they'd have to support it for all eternity. Even Windows 7 would have to support this one cute hack (does Windows 7 even support floppy disks?)
People with no business fiddling with their computer would mess around with this setting and make their computer less stable. "Not Microsoft's Problem" you say? Try telling that to the person who did the fiddling! Won't fly!
In other words, adding this registry hack seems simple on the surface, but it ain't.
(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
I'm confused with. Does that mean that if you use my library or incorporate my code, your whole codebase becomes MS-PL'd?
I never made the claim you can back port MS-PL code to BSD... though the licenses are similar enough that you just might be able to. Thinking about it, it is actually rather hard to backport anything into BSD, at least if you take the license very literally (whatever I mean by that...).
It is just additionally licensed as GPL and they happen to don't contradict each other
A fine bit of propaganda you've got there. You would make a fine politician! You see, you glossed over the bit about "additionally licensed as GPL". What additionaly actually means is that your code has now been "enhanced" in a way that makes it impossible to move back into your BSD codebase without GPL'ing the BSD code.
You can use weasel words all you want, but the bottom line is GPL is one-way. It is only compatible so much as you can take code with other licenses and incorporate it into your GPL project. Rarely, if ever, can you do the reciprocal.
And I'm glad I just misread you and toned down my response figuring as much:-)
Of course the BSD is compatible with the GPL as well
To further my analogy of blackhole-dom. BSD is pretty much the anti-blackhole (whitehole?)
I have *never* heard somebody say "the GPL is compatible with the BSD license" and I doubt you would either.
Sure I have, hell I'm probably guilty of phrasing it that way myself.
The FSF plays word-games all the time hoping nobody notices. Only the most astute, careful reader would notice the subtle difference between "the GPL is fully compatible with the BSD license" and "the BSD license is fully compatible with the GPL".
Now, whether they intentionally phrase it this way in hopes most people who gloss over the sentence leave thinking "GPL is two-way, baby", well, I dont want to travel there.
Ever see the "debate" that happens when ever somebody suggests GIMP do something about its horrible window management? Ever see the aftermath when somebody asks how to draw in GIMP?
I dont think he is exaggerating too much.
Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux.
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
Um
It's not Windows, there's no little blue 'e' icon, where's my internet?"
That is actually valid criticism. People want things to work the way they are used to.
Explain the bit where I'm wrong. If GPL was "two-way" compatible, this scenario would be possible:
1) BSD driver gets written. 2) GPL guys take driver, incorporate it into their code and make improvements. 3) BSD guys merge changes back into their code. 4) BSD guys codebase remains BSD licensed.
If I'm a troll, then my assertion would be deliberately wrong. I fail to see where I'm wrong. Unless I'm wrong, the "two-way" scenario I just outlined is impossible.
You are funny. Did you read that page? Pretty much every damn license in existance is incompatible with the GPL. But the "fun" one is this:
OpenSSL license.......We recommend using GNUTLS instead of OpenSSL in software you write. However, there is no reason not to use OpenSSL and applications that work with OpenSSL.
This program does not support a "wheel group" that restricts who can su to super-user accounts, because that can help fascist system administrators hold unwarranted power over other users.
Yeah, screw security! Who needs passwords! Down with sysadmins!!
I might as well quote the rest of it because it is so juice and nobody will bother to follow the link above:
Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman) Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keep- ing it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
PS: Just realized that the FreeBSD man-page thingy offers way more man pages than just for FreeBSD. Check it out!
I thought the point of open source was to make and share useful things. Things like development libraries, controls, frameworks, protocol stacks, and plenty of other useful widgets. Or is the goal really to just get free shit and I'm missing the point?
GPL isn't the final word on open source licenses. Quite frankly, I'm pleased to see more options and further, I'm glad people are taking the time to think before they just blindly stamp a GPL on their project. GPL is good for some projects, but it isn't good for all.
And maybe I'm paranoid.
You are. If Microsoft starts going open source, it means you've won.
It is the same with the environmental movement. The environmentalists won. Their cause grew from a fringe group of "tree huggers" to something that is pretty much a solid part of our culture and values. Now every company is trying to go green. Now maybe *how* a company goes green might not be exactly what the environmentalists would have liked, but the important bit is they *are* making an effort.
For the simple reason it is worded pretty much like the BSD license, only it doesn't demand you name the copyright holders. When I open source stuff and people contribute, there are multiple people who own copyright on all the bits of code. The BSD license (at least the template on Codeplex) really only lets you enter one copyright holder. MS-PL is worded so that you don't have to list every single contributor.
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"Ideas" are worthless. Everybody has good ideas. It is actually implementing the idea that is the hard part.
In other words, the money (and the devil) is in the details.
I've not really followed this project, but aren't the design documents public? If so, some other company could pick this up and run with it, no?
Man was that cool or what? I mean, watching your Mac friend eject a disk without hitting the eject button! Oh the envy!
When USB first came out and they started offering USB floppy drivers, I always wondered if some company would sell an "enhanced" floppy drive for PCs that had an electronic eject. It would have required a non-standard driver, but would it have been cool or what!
Except for that to work, you'd need to know when the person replaced the drive with a different one. That that is actually impossible with floppy drives.
Why would they want to? Hard drives were for people with money.
That and it wasn't until "recent" that a BIOS would let you change the boot order. That feature only became widespread (IIRC) when people started to want to boot off CD-ROMS. And that wasn't really possible until CD-ROMS all plugged into your IDE port instead of weird proprietary cards that required weird proprietary drivers.
Back in those days, the only "feature" most BIOS's offered was the ability fool your OS into thinking your A: drive was your B: drive so you didn't have to physically swap the cable.
But I wager most kids under the age of 15 have never actually seen a floppy drive. In addition, I doubt they've seen a cassette tape and I bet many have never seen a video using VHS.
What is funny is I bet when those kids have children of their own, the record player will still be used.
What is really nuts though, is our kids will be doing crazy shit we never dreamed of because unlike us, they grew up with cell phones, the internet and the web. Wait until they come of age and things will really get interesting.
The only way the OS even knew your floppy drive existed was through the bios. If you told the BIOS you had a floppy drive and you didn't, the OS would be none the wiser. And if the OS didn't know if there really was a drive or not, I somehow doubt the technology could even support unique device ID's like modern stuff.
In other words, your plan would work if floppy drives had device ids, but they dont, so your idea won't work either!
Device ID? What is this "plug and play" you are speaking of?
You didn't have to have a floppy drive plugged in to have an "A:" drive. On the PC, if you tried to access the non-existant "A:" drive, the computer would assume you just needed to insert a disk. It didn't know you don't own a floppy drive!
The only way to "detect" the floppy drive was manually in the bios. You could tell the damn thing you had one of the new 2.88mB drives* when all you really had was a 360kB 5 1/4 drive.
Kids these days with their plug-and-play facebooks and their blue ray cassette tapes. Why USB cable is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!
* I dont know what the hell you'd need all that space for either. I guess people using C instead of assembly...
Floppys were the worst too. There was like no standard way to put in the ribbon cable so that Pin-1 on the cable hit Pin-1 on the drive. Some of the ribbons had a filled hole to act as a key--some of the disks had a pin there so that cable didn't work. Some of the disks were designed for the key'd ribbon, but all you had on hand were non-keyed cabling. Some of them had a plastic key on the ribbon so they wouldn't work on the drive missing the slot for the key.
None of the disks had a plastic mold that surrounded the pins. That lead to you connecting the ribbon so the pins were all off by a row. Then when you pulled out the ribbon, it was very easy to bend all the pins.
Keep in mind you were usually doing all this while the disk was screwed into the case and tucked into some god-awful location too. So you'd be inserting this ribbon essentially blind. As a result, every drive I owned had pins that were bent to shit because it would take like 4 try's to get the damn thing working. And worse, you'd never know if you didn't hook it up right until you booted the box and tried to read from the drive.
Oh and if you did manage to get them working, the media was so unreliable that sometimes you could take a brand new disk, write to it, carry it to class and find all your data corrupt. Woe is the fool who didn't write the same file to two disks, lest he arrive with nothing but a bad disk.
Floppy disks sucked. There was nothing good about them. Slow, unreliable and ill designed. Fuck them and the free AOL disks they wrote on.
You could have taken the cheap shot by slightly altering your sentence to:
Much more colourful.
IIRC, didn't they also have one of those pinholes somewhere on the case so you could do a hard-reset on it? I forget...
Considering the only way most software was installed on a machine was via a floppy disk, wasn't your example the most common case? Unless you mean they basically implemented the "detect disk /w-out spinning up and if disk is in, write crap?"
Yes, it would have. Then they'd have to support it for all eternity. Even Windows 7 would have to support this one cute hack (does Windows 7 even support floppy disks?)
People with no business fiddling with their computer would mess around with this setting and make their computer less stable. "Not Microsoft's Problem" you say? Try telling that to the person who did the fiddling! Won't fly!
In other words, adding this registry hack seems simple on the surface, but it ain't.
That was my original interpretation as well. It just threw me off the second time I read it.
I'm now actually confused. I reread the MS-PL and now I'm not clear if it is closer to GPL or BSD.
It is this line:
I'm confused with. Does that mean that if you use my library or incorporate my code, your whole codebase becomes MS-PL'd?
Now I'm confused... ah well.
I never made the claim you can back port MS-PL code to BSD... though the licenses are similar enough that you just might be able to. Thinking about it, it is actually rather hard to backport anything into BSD, at least if you take the license very literally (whatever I mean by that...).
A fine bit of propaganda you've got there. You would make a fine politician! You see, you glossed over the bit about "additionally licensed as GPL". What additionaly actually means is that your code has now been "enhanced" in a way that makes it impossible to move back into your BSD codebase without GPL'ing the BSD code.
You can use weasel words all you want, but the bottom line is GPL is one-way. It is only compatible so much as you can take code with other licenses and incorporate it into your GPL project. Rarely, if ever, can you do the reciprocal.
And I'm glad I just misread you and toned down my response figuring as much :-)
To further my analogy of blackhole-dom. BSD is pretty much the anti-blackhole (whitehole?)
Sure I have, hell I'm probably guilty of phrasing it that way myself.
The FSF plays word-games all the time hoping nobody notices. Only the most astute, careful reader would notice the subtle difference between "the GPL is fully compatible with the BSD license" and "the BSD license is fully compatible with the GPL".
Now, whether they intentionally phrase it this way in hopes most people who gloss over the sentence leave thinking "GPL is two-way, baby", well, I dont want to travel there.
Very cool! Too bad they don't transcode it to flash and use a free flash player on top. I hate downloading large video...
(I'm just complaining in hopes the maintainer reads this and does exactly that)
Rule #3: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
How that fits in with the theme of this story and the discussion soon to follow, I'll leave to the dear reader.
Ever see the "debate" that happens when ever somebody suggests GIMP do something about its horrible window management? Ever see the aftermath when somebody asks how to draw in GIMP?
I dont think he is exaggerating too much.
Um
That is actually valid criticism. People want things to work the way they are used to.
Explain the bit where I'm wrong. If GPL was "two-way" compatible, this scenario would be possible:
1) BSD driver gets written.
2) GPL guys take driver, incorporate it into their code and make improvements.
3) BSD guys merge changes back into their code.
4) BSD guys codebase remains BSD licensed.
If I'm a troll, then my assertion would be deliberately wrong. I fail to see where I'm wrong. Unless I'm wrong, the "two-way" scenario I just outlined is impossible.
You are funny. Did you read that page? Pretty much every damn license in existance is incompatible with the GPL. But the "fun" one is this:
Yeah, right. Reminds me of this gem buried in the old man pages for the GNU implementation of su :
Yeah, screw security! Who needs passwords! Down with sysadmins!!
I might as well quote the rest of it because it is so juice and nobody will bother to follow the link above:
PS: Just realized that the FreeBSD man-page thingy offers way more man pages than just for FreeBSD. Check it out!
I thought the point of open source was to make and share useful things. Things like development libraries, controls, frameworks, protocol stacks, and plenty of other useful widgets. Or is the goal really to just get free shit and I'm missing the point?
GPL isn't the final word on open source licenses. Quite frankly, I'm pleased to see more options and further, I'm glad people are taking the time to think before they just blindly stamp a GPL on their project. GPL is good for some projects, but it isn't good for all.
You are. If Microsoft starts going open source, it means you've won.
It is the same with the environmental movement. The environmentalists won. Their cause grew from a fringe group of "tree huggers" to something that is pretty much a solid part of our culture and values. Now every company is trying to go green. Now maybe *how* a company goes green might not be exactly what the environmentalists would have liked, but the important bit is they *are* making an effort.
Just giving you something to ponder...
For the simple reason it is worded pretty much like the BSD license, only it doesn't demand you name the copyright holders. When I open source stuff and people contribute, there are multiple people who own copyright on all the bits of code. The BSD license (at least the template on Codeplex) really only lets you enter one copyright holder. MS-PL is worded so that you don't have to list every single contributor.