The obvious answer to that is don't buy if the rights the copyright holder wants to sell aren't the ones you want.
You've completely ignored the moral question: why should I even try to do things the copyright holder doesn't want me to do with books/movies/music, but not with GPL'ed code? Many people are applying a double standard.
This is really quite an unnewsworthy article as far as Slashdot is concerned. Most readers don't care if Windows supports XYZ 1.7 functionality, just as long as their favorite distro of Linux does.
Uhm, no. Most of us care greatly what Windows supports, because what Windows supports goes a long way toward determining what hardware gets built.
Whenever someone does something with a piece of GPL'ed code that the authors might not like, such as wrapping it with CORBA or COM and then making proprietary software talk to that CORBA or COM object, people say that even though they might *legally* be able to do this, it is *wrong*, because they are not respecting the author's wishes.
OK, I can buy that. Why doesn't the same argument apply to books and movies and music? I don't see why I should be concerned that it might be illegal for me to crack a protection scheme, because it would already be immoral for me to do so, since that is going against the wishes of the author, or the of the people the author sold the rights to.
Note that I'm talking about cracking protection schemes in order to make and use copies, not to reverse engineer for compatibility. That's a separate issue. Start another thread if you want to talk about that issue.
TOPS-10 had a cool way to do ACLs. Basically, if an access failed, the kernel would ask the FILMON daemon if the access should be allowed. The FILMON daemon looked for a file, ACCESS.USR, which contained the rules to decide who had access.
The beauty of this scheme is that no filesystem changes are required, and the kernel changes should be pretty minor, too.
Furthermore, in many ways, this is BETTER than access lists, because it better matches how people think of their directories. E.g., if I follow a convention that all my files are private except those named *.pub, it is much easier to write one rule that applies to all of my files, than to remember to put the rigth ACLs on each file. Newly created files will tend to have the right protection, because I will follow my convention. I don't need to remember each time to set the ACL.
Also with this scheme, there is no need to rewrite every utility to deal with ACLs.
MacOS X is a Unix that will run Microsoft Office. That's going to be a big incentive for a lot of people that want a Unix, but now have to keep a Windows machine around for Office.
If Apple can get enough developer interest in MacOS X to ensure the same level of application support that MacOS 8 and 9 have, then it will have more mainstream consumer apps than Linux or any other Unix. It won't be anywhere near the number that Windows has.
Keeping the data client-side but signed by the server seems like a good idea at first, but if someone hacks the server and steals the private key, they can then change the client-side data and resign it, so the server things it is valid. After the initial break-in and key stealing, they no longer need to do anything on the server to cheat, and so the chances of getting caught are much lower.
I just went to the linked site, and tried on of the sample quizes. Most of the questions were badly written, making it very unclear what they were actually asking, and often none of the multiple-choice answers were right.
Whether or not certification is a good idea can be debated, but IF it is to be a good idea, the tests must be good, and this one is not.
OK, here's an idea I had about 5 years ago, but was told by a friend who knows more about CPU design than I would not work. If this turns out to be a good idea, I'm going to be pissed.:-)
My understanding is that one of the big things limiting how much parallelism you can get is data dependencies. A given program or thread tends to be basically computing one thing at a time, and so things tend to depend on earlier things.
To address this, my idea was to put 2 sets of registers (general registers, stack pointer, program counter, paging control stuff, etc) on the CPU. Set 1 is the main set, which the CPU normally executes using. Whenever the instruction steam for set 1 is not parallizable enough, the CPU could take instructions from set 2. Since set 1 and set 2 would be refering to different processes, there would be no data dependencies between them.
Re:Ship linux games on bootable CD with source.
on
id On Linux: Bad News
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· Score: 1
Uhm...you haven't thought about this very much. The reason we want games for Linux is to avoid rebooting. That stand-alone Linux is not going to be setup to run any servers I need to run, nor will it be set up to allow me to get email, or do anything else I normally do. All it would be good for is playing that one game. Why not just boot to Windows to play the game?
Windows is a better gaming OS than Linux at this time (better 3D support, much better sound support, better input device support, better voice support, better networking support) (Before anyone flames me on the networking support, note that I'm JUST talking about for games).
Blame is relevant only if you wish to think emotionally instead of rationally, when deciding how to allocate the costs for damages. (Blame is relevant rationally when deciding how to allocate punishment, though).
So? You miss the point, which is that the gun manufacturers are in the best position to estimate what these damages will be and pay for them.
Trying to make the people who are to blame pay for their damages doesn't work when people can easily cause damage beyond their net worth. Instead, insurance is necessary. The only question is, who buys the insurance. There are several possibilities:
1. The victims. This is very inefficient...we'd have to all buy gunshot insurance, and disentegrating tire insurance, and exploding Pinto insurance, etc.
2. The government. This is how damages from natural disasters are handled, and works. We could treat gunshots (and tires and Pintos, etc) as natural disasters, I suppose.
3. The product manufacturers. They know exactly how many products are manufactured, and they should know the risks, so they are in the best position to figure out how much insurance is needed.
Blame is irrelevant.
It makes economic sense to hold gun manufacturers responsible for damages for illegal gun use because they are in the best position to estimate how much those damages will be and take steps to deal with it. It's a lot more efficient for a few gun manufacturers to buy insurance to cover those damages than it is to have everyone who may be harmed by illegal gun use to try to assess their risks and buy their own insurance.
DVD player software for Linux does not have to be GPL'ed, so pretty much your entire post is worthless. Before calling people idiots, you should try to get some basic notion about the subject you are attemption to pontificate upon.
Wow...the PowerPC chips use a lot less power than the Intel chips. No wonder Mac laptop battery life is so much...oh, wait...Mac laptop battery life is the same as comparable PC laptop battery life.
So, remind me why I'm supposed to care about CPU power consumption?
Well, since you are going to have to bring your NTSC TV to France to watch those NTSC US movies, it shouldn't be too much extra trouble to bring your US DVD player, too.:-)
The GPL does NOT prevent corporate interests from exploiting your work with no remuneration to you. For example, if I can arrange my money-making scheme so that all your GPL'ed code is running on my server somewhere, and the clients are just accessing it over the web, guess what? I'm making money from your code, and I don't have to give it to anyone.
Clint/server approaches can take a lot of the bite out of GPL. Look at TiVo. They are certainly benefiting greatly from Linux, but the guts of their stuff runs as an application, and so does not have to be GPL'ed. They take the regular Linux kernel, make a few mods (which they GPL), and then use it to run their proprietary application.
And then there is component-based computing: COM on the Windows side, and CORBA everywhere else. GPL, which is fundamentally based on a dying model of how computer programs work, provides basically no protection then.
Finding code under the BSD license is like being a little kid who on his birthday gets from Grandma a pair of socks and a $20 bill.
Finding code under the GPL is like being a little kid who on his birthday gets from Grandma a pair of socks and a $40 gift certificate for "Underwear Emporium".
Interesting, but wrong. As they note, a millennium is an interval of 1000 years. Thus, every instant, a millenium is ending.
We can choose any set of disjoint millenniums whose union covers all time we want to use for our millennium celebrations. All such choices are equally valid. Thus, the question boils down to what set should we choose and bestow the label of the millennium upon.
The fact that people approximately 2000 years ago decided to start a new count does not seem to me to be particularly important, especially since they had no clear idea of when the event they were trying to sync to (birth of Jesus) actually took place, and so definitely missed by at least a few years.
We might as well do our millennia so they end in x999 years.
Slashdot Mirror
You've completely ignored the moral question: why should I even try to do things the copyright holder doesn't want me to do with books/movies/music, but not with GPL'ed code? Many people are applying a double standard.
Uhm, no. Most of us care greatly what Windows supports, because what Windows supports goes a long way toward determining what hardware gets built.
Whenever someone does something with a piece of GPL'ed code that the authors might not like, such as wrapping it with CORBA or COM and then making proprietary software talk to that CORBA or COM object, people say that even though they might *legally* be able to do this, it is *wrong*, because they are not respecting the author's wishes.
OK, I can buy that. Why doesn't the same argument apply to books and movies and music? I don't see why I should be concerned that it might be illegal for me to crack a protection scheme, because it would already be immoral for me to do so, since that is going against the wishes of the author, or the of the people the author sold the rights to.
Note that I'm talking about cracking protection schemes in order to make and use copies, not to reverse engineer for compatibility. That's a separate issue. Start another thread if you want to talk about that issue.
Could people who submit stories just give the facts and leave off the stupid remarks?
TOPS-10 had a cool way to do ACLs. Basically, if an access failed, the kernel would ask the FILMON daemon if the access should be allowed. The FILMON daemon looked for a file, ACCESS.USR, which contained the rules to decide who had access. The beauty of this scheme is that no filesystem changes are required, and the kernel changes should be pretty minor, too. Furthermore, in many ways, this is BETTER than access lists, because it better matches how people think of their directories. E.g., if I follow a convention that all my files are private except those named *.pub, it is much easier to write one rule that applies to all of my files, than to remember to put the rigth ACLs on each file. Newly created files will tend to have the right protection, because I will follow my convention. I don't need to remember each time to set the ACL. Also with this scheme, there is no need to rewrite every utility to deal with ACLs.
Perhaps it is time to update that old conspiracy theory to 500 miles/gallon?
Q: What are the most efficient vehicles in history?
A: The ships Columbus used. He got thousands of miles per galleon.
If Apple can get enough developer interest in MacOS X to ensure the same level of application support that MacOS 8 and 9 have, then it will have more mainstream consumer apps than Linux or any other Unix. It won't be anywhere near the number that Windows has.
That Mersenne prime gives away too much information. It gives anyone who receives the message an estimate of our level of computer technology.
Keeping the data client-side but signed by the server seems like a good idea at first, but if someone hacks the server and steals the private key, they can then change the client-side data and resign it, so the server things it is valid. After the initial break-in and key stealing, they no longer need to do anything on the server to cheat, and so the chances of getting caught are much lower.
I just went to the linked site, and tried on of the sample quizes. Most of the questions were badly written, making it very unclear what they were actually asking, and often none of the multiple-choice answers were right.
Whether or not certification is a good idea can be debated, but IF it is to be a good idea, the tests must be good, and this one is not.
Huh? SCSI drives have controllers built into the drive. What did you think executed the SCSI commands once they were sent to the drive?
OK, here's an idea I had about 5 years ago, but was told by a friend who knows more about CPU design than I would not work. If this turns out to be a good idea, I'm going to be pissed. :-)
My understanding is that one of the big things limiting how much parallelism you can get is data dependencies. A given program or thread tends to be basically computing one thing at a time, and so things tend to depend on earlier things.
To address this, my idea was to put 2 sets of registers (general registers, stack pointer, program counter, paging control stuff, etc) on the CPU. Set 1 is the main set, which the CPU normally executes using. Whenever the instruction steam for set 1 is not parallizable enough, the CPU could take instructions from set 2. Since set 1 and set 2 would be refering to different processes, there would be no data dependencies between them.
Uhm...you haven't thought about this very much. The reason we want games for Linux is to avoid rebooting. That stand-alone Linux is not going to be setup to run any servers I need to run, nor will it be set up to allow me to get email, or do anything else I normally do. All it would be good for is playing that one game. Why not just boot to Windows to play the game? Windows is a better gaming OS than Linux at this time (better 3D support, much better sound support, better input device support, better voice support, better networking support) (Before anyone flames me on the networking support, note that I'm JUST talking about for games).
I don't see any indication of an energy conservation problem from that article. Momentum, on the other hand...
Blame is relevant only if you wish to think emotionally instead of rationally, when deciding how to allocate the costs for damages. (Blame is relevant rationally when deciding how to allocate punishment, though).
So? You miss the point, which is that the gun manufacturers are in the best position to estimate what these damages will be and pay for them. Trying to make the people who are to blame pay for their damages doesn't work when people can easily cause damage beyond their net worth. Instead, insurance is necessary. The only question is, who buys the insurance. There are several possibilities: 1. The victims. This is very inefficient...we'd have to all buy gunshot insurance, and disentegrating tire insurance, and exploding Pinto insurance, etc. 2. The government. This is how damages from natural disasters are handled, and works. We could treat gunshots (and tires and Pintos, etc) as natural disasters, I suppose. 3. The product manufacturers. They know exactly how many products are manufactured, and they should know the risks, so they are in the best position to figure out how much insurance is needed. Blame is irrelevant.
It makes economic sense to hold gun manufacturers responsible for damages for illegal gun use because they are in the best position to estimate how much those damages will be and take steps to deal with it. It's a lot more efficient for a few gun manufacturers to buy insurance to cover those damages than it is to have everyone who may be harmed by illegal gun use to try to assess their risks and buy their own insurance.
DVD player software for Linux does not have to be GPL'ed, so pretty much your entire post is worthless. Before calling people idiots, you should try to get some basic notion about the subject you are attemption to pontificate upon.
It's not the number of courses on computer architecture you've taken that counts. It's the number that you've passed. Come back when that is non-zero.
So, remind me why I'm supposed to care about CPU power consumption?
Ever try to blow your nose with one of those? A curse on bathroom designers who leave out the paper towels.
Well, since you are going to have to bring your NTSC TV to France to watch those NTSC US movies, it shouldn't be too much extra trouble to bring your US DVD player, too. :-)
Clint/server approaches can take a lot of the bite out of GPL. Look at TiVo. They are certainly benefiting greatly from Linux, but the guts of their stuff runs as an application, and so does not have to be GPL'ed. They take the regular Linux kernel, make a few mods (which they GPL), and then use it to run their proprietary application.
And then there is component-based computing: COM on the Windows side, and CORBA everywhere else. GPL, which is fundamentally based on a dying model of how computer programs work, provides basically no protection then.
Finding code under the BSD license is like being a little kid who on his birthday gets from Grandma a pair of socks and a $20 bill.
Finding code under the GPL is like being a little kid who on his birthday gets from Grandma a pair of socks and a $40 gift certificate for "Underwear Emporium".
We can choose any set of disjoint millenniums whose union covers all time we want to use for our millennium celebrations. All such choices are equally valid. Thus, the question boils down to what set should we choose and bestow the label of the millennium upon.
The fact that people approximately 2000 years ago decided to start a new count does not seem to me to be particularly important, especially since they had no clear idea of when the event they were trying to sync to (birth of Jesus) actually took place, and so definitely missed by at least a few years.
We might as well do our millennia so they end in x999 years.