But that non-x86 computer probably doesn't have a PCI slot where to plug that card in, so that detail doesn't seem to be very important.
Most computers where you can plug one into are going to start in text mode, and being unable to do things like changing the disk boot order in the BIOS would be quite annoying.
But it probably still uses a 8x16 pixel font, which doesn't look that good on a 30" screen.
I think the idea is that the video card could pretend it's VGA, while substituting an antialiased 32x64 font in its place. Nothing earthshaking of course, but that sure would look nice.
Unfortunately the BIOS and boot loader will still need VGA. Maybe Linux BIOS could remove that requirement, but you can't count on that.
They seem to have implemented it in a very cool way too. Quote from a linked OSNews article:
Aside from the logic reduction, this has other advantages. The screen resolution as seen by the host is decoupled from the physical display resolution. So while VGA thinks it's 640x400, the monitor could be at 2560x1600, without the need for a scaler. It's easily programmable, and we have complete control over how the text is processed into pixels; for instance, we could have HQ do some scaling or use a higher-res font different from what the host thinks we're using.
How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it. Here's a list of a few companies who have class A licenses and you wonder how much of it they are even using:
How would they take it back, after having sold it?
Should Russia just take back Alaska, because some time back they sold too much land too cheaply?
I'm afraid that giving somebody too much of something and regretting it years later doesn't entitle you to get it back.
Instead of hogging these, they should just give them up. They don't need all these addresses.
"Should"? Why exactly should they?
I thought America was the land of Capitalism, and as good capitalists of course they will keep them until the address space runs out, then make big bucks reselling the unused chunks.
Where do you expect to see it? We're talking about internal deals between companies, it's not like they publish the details of all their shady deals on their websites.
For instance, from the linked article:
A.M.D. also said in the case that a leading retailer based in Germany, Media Markt, carried Intel computers exclusively in exchange for annual payments by Intel.
If you expect to see an Intel CPU for $5 in a shop, you won't see it, it's not that simple.
The judge could of course demand the required information to tell whether that is the case, but given that "The European charges against Intel are confidential", I doubt we're going to see all the details
Why do you assume that someone who will use Windows 7 for free will actually think that its great?
I don't, it's just my guess of how this is supposed to work for MS. I'm actually a 100% Linux user.
I figure that they think many of those people who don't want Vista never tried it, and simply heard negative opinions from friends. That sort of thing doesn't exactly make you want to pay for it to see if maybe your friends were wrong. So giving it away for free might help people get to try it and see if they like it.
Of course that will only work if it's actually a decent OS.
No, I didn't. Microsoft doesn't need to get people to buy their OS. But they need them to run it.
Most people don't go into a shop and buy Windows. The vast majority of OS sales are going to be from OEMs. So Microsoft loses very little by letting everybody have it for free. I'm pretty sure there will be something that will stop OEMs from taking advantage of that, so they will still pay.
What MS does desperately need is for people to want to use it. Because if people keep resisting and asking for XP, then OEMs will keep demanding XP, and enough of them will be powerful enough to force MS to keep providing it. If that happens, then Win7 really isn't going to sell, and that's going to look very bad on the financial reports.
So it's very much in MS's interest to convince people that Win7 is going to be great, by giving it away for free even, if that prevents people from demanding XP with their new computers.
Intel is betting on that by selling below cost for long enough they can bankrupt AMD. Once that is done, they'll have no competition and will be able to charge a much higher price. You won't be benefitting then.
And if it's allowed to go on, it'll last like that forever, as Intel can simply repeat the same trick if a new competitor comes along.
That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?
Yes.
I play games to get away from the real world for a while. I already see ads on TV, walls, billboards, underground and my cellphone. That's more than enough, I don't want any more of them.
I'm mostly free of them on the web, thanks to ad blocking and simply avoiding anything where one manages to get through.
I can't wait to get rid of the rest of them, as soon as somebody invents image filtering glasses.
I do respect and understand your comments, even if I don't necessarily agree with them 100%. Thanks for stating them so calmly and rationally. I think we could have a good face to face discussion.
Thanks.
As I said elsewhere, I don't have a "religious" attachment to the GPL. I'm simply choosing the license which I think benefits me the most.
I don't completely exclude the BSD either though. For instance I think it's the best choice when trying to popularize something like the PNG image format. For something like that, software is simply a way to spread the file format, and the more it gets used, the better.
However, the thing that freaks me out is that your/. id is DaleGlass, and my real name is Dale Gass (which you couldn't know from my ID). Sorry, but that really freaks me out that you'd happen to reply to my comment. Either that's an incredible coincence or karma in the universe, or you're stalking me (which I seriously doubt would be worth anyone's while:).
Coincidence. It's not my real name either. It's the user name I use in Second Life.
I chose the first name "Dale" because I wanted to pick something short, simple, not especially distinctive and not religious.
I chose the last name "Glass" from among the choices provided by the registration process. During registration you have to pick from a list and can't use a custom one. So I went with the least strange and simplest thing I found in the list.
I got very used to it after a few years though, and didn't use my real name when I went to the Second Life convention.
First, as *BSDs show, the GPL is not a sine-qua-non for having a pretty good open source operating system. This piece of evidence is frequently neglected by the wishful thinking/fallacious thought process of GPL fanboys or members of the Cult of Stallman. Going further, the adoption of FreeBSD userland code in Mac OS X has allowed for a truly great thing, a Unix for the masses (and, BTW, Apple has contributed code back as well as hired FreeBSD developers).
"Cult of Stallman"? Biased much?
Won't argue though due to lack of experience in the area.
Third, to stay away from the obvious, I'd like to consider the fact that there would be other, better, languages to program software in Linux, with faster and safer development cycles. Specifically, I'm talking about Eiffel and Ada that had powerful IDEs and compiler released under dual-licenses (GPL is your project if your project is GPL) but that didn't result in even a bleep on the radar screen of developers. Now, I know there's a cultural barrier (overindulgence in C/C++) but the fact is that releasing dual-licensed IDEs and compilers didn't help.
Yeah, for every niche language there's somebody claiming that it's wonderful and everybody should use it.
Thing is though, there's little reason to learn Ada or write anything in it. The vast majority of source is in C or C++. The libraries are plentiful. Source examples and documentation are all over the web.
If the license had anything to do with it, how do you explain the amount of C and C++ code, even though the most used tools all come from GNU?
Third, the Church of FSF gets it all wrong by focusing on "freedom for code." Code is an abstract, inanimate thing. "Freedom" as a category applies to humans. Humans should be free to choose what to do with code. Open-source code can't be "stolen" because the fountain of resource keeps on giving. The Church of the FSF is a moralist cult.
I don't really care what the "Church of FSF" as you call it thinks, but my personal interests are: First of all, me, then my project, and your own interests are way down the list of importance.
I don't code for your convenience, I do it for mine, and I'd much prefer to force you to contribute to my project than let you have it without strings attached.
Fourth, there is no way small software houses can compete with huge firms if they release GPL code. Everybody knows this. They'll take your code and give it to their staff. Greenspun wrote about this eons ago.
Done right, the huge firm will have to release all their changes. I don't really care who does the development so long it's done and I can use it. So if some huge company decides to do the coding for me, they can go right ahead.
Finally, fifth, quit with the non-proprietary code hating. Currently, what's needed for the widepsread adoption for, e.g., Linux, is the hability to use a machine as a normal machine.
As a programmer I don't like proprietary code for practical purposes. If it breaks, I can't fix it. Right now sometimes I get crashes that are somewhere within the bowels of the nvidia drivers, and I can't wait for getting rid of that one.
Therefore, we need proprietary codecs, unless all the free software signal processing freaks (you there?) get together on a project like the BBC dirac, which is not happening for whatever reason... Otherwise, e.g., Linux will not be usable. So, the community's got to stop hating on distros that mingle Linux with those codecs, and stop hyping distros that require too much tweaking. Right now, throw some RAM and something like Matisse and Linux can impress people as much as, say, Vista.
See, I don't really care about that. Linux works well enough for me right now. World domination would be nice, but it isn't something I'm terribly interested in.
My own view of usability is heavily dependent on how much of it I can debug, and in that sense, the less closed source there is, the more usable it gets.
I repeat, I don't use the GPL because of religious issues or anything of the sort. I don't care about the "free" or "not free" debacle. I'm not involved with the FSF and RMS doesn't come to my mind very often.
The GPL simply does what I want it to do. It's a purely pragmatic choice.
Let's start with the last phrase: you are not working for others, since you are selling a product yourself. Right there you made a factual, conceptual mistake.
That assumes I have a product. What if I'm just an user?
Where's my incentive to contribute something that your company will repackage and sell?
Second, you assume, as a premise, that there are no incentives in contributing. But it easily seen that the incentives might lie in contributing to the maintenance of a common source tree which would otherwise be too laborious to maintain yourself. This constitutes a rational, work-related reason, totally alien to one's political views of the world (which seems to be part of the GPL thing).
I consider that a very weak incentive.
Yes, of course it's easier to contribute a one line fix for a buffer overrun, than to manually patch every new version.
You however have a big incentive not to contribute anything that might make you more competitive.
Long term this sort of thing will result in all the interesting technology being in the proprietary forks, and an open codebase that doesn't do anything interesting, but runs well.
Furthermore, the modifications I make give me an exclusive edge, because of customizations that might only be relevant to me, due to circumstances, not to the majority.
And here, again, why I don't release BSD code. I don't want you to have an exclusive edge, I want you to contribute to my project.
Honestly, what's the problem with BSD over GPL? So I take a BSD kernel (for example), hack it up with my fancy mods, resell it as a proprietary product. I am required to note, hey, this product uses BSD software under the hood. Any competitor is free to grab the same base software, and apply his own talents to competing with me.
The problem is that there's no incentive to contribute. You can take, but nothing makes you give back. Especially because if you give back, you're effectively working for your competitors.
So yeah, BSD is excellent from a "leech" point of view. It's not that good from the "project" point of view. It's not that good from the contributor point of view either. Why should I bother contributing when that in effect makes me an unpaid employee of every company using that source?
I take a a GNU product, apply some of my special magic to it, and I'm screwed (businesswise, at least). I have to give away any enhancements I make. Blah. LGPL at least lets me use compilers, interpreted languages, libraries, and so on, as a bit of dodge. (I feel LGPL only exists because if it didn't, everybody would run screaming from GPL, and it would have died long ago. I can't link to a freakin' library without releasing my code? No thanks.)
The LGPL exists for a strategic reason.
For some things, such as the C library, there exist many reimplementations. Making that GPLd drives people to alternatives, and loses on any potential contributions. So the LGPL is a compromise to still get contributions to that code.
Stallman considers that a library should be GPLd when it provides a competitive advantage. If it's GPL or "code your own", he hopes you'll go with the GPL one.
In a perfect happy world where all our needs and wants and income is taken care of, GPL all the way, man... But in world where one has to express one's talents to make a living, the socialistic ideal of GPL just doesn't jive with business.
On the contrary, it jives perfectly fine with business.
Take Red Hat for instance, and other companies that pay for GPL development. Why do they do that? Because they know that even if IBM takes advantage of their improvements, the moment they fix something in Red Hat's code, they have to give back as well. So not only does Red Hat get better drivers or SMP support, they also get free fixes from IBM for it!
The BSD on the other hand doesn't have such things. Red Hat would write their driver, release as closed source, not contribute it back obviously, and every other company would do the same. The end result is that BSD won't get the driver until some volunteer happens to contribute it.
There's also lots of GPLd code in various devices you rarely look at very closely, such as cash registers. The companies that work for those don't sell code. They sell hardware + software + support, and have no problem with contributing bugfixes for whatever GPLd code they used, because their business loses nothing by doing so. And without the GPL they wouldn't bother to contribute, because that takes programmer time, and as such won't be done if optional.
In practice, I use GPL'd software a lot, and I am appreciative. But other than for the odd bug fix, I shy away from *ever* touching the source code, period; from a business standpoint, it'd be death.
It's only death if your business is selling software on the shelf. There are many companies with different business models, which sell routers, or cash registers, or support, and for which the GPL isn't a hindrance in the slightest.
On BSD style code I've used, I've gone in, made enhancements, and redistributed things; and when I found bugs in the core of the stuff I've worked with, I've contributed back. (But not my new, proprietary enhancements.) So I've been motivated to contribute more to the BSD-style-license world, than the GPL one.
There's no linux compatible sticker on anything much.
Here's one that does have it (scroll down to the bottom of the page) Cowon D2+
Bought the D2 (without the +) and I'm very happy with it.
Buy things that are aligned with your interests so that there will be more of them in the future, instead of trying of giving money to people who don't really seem to want it.
Do you really think it's better for humanity as a whole if we focus more on curing rare diseases than common ones, that by definition affect *far* more people? You alleviate the most suffering "for your money spent" by focusing on *common* diseases.
Common diseases don't need extra funding. There's lots of research into cancer and AIDS. Things with obvious applications generally don't need extra funding to get researched, there's already plenty motivation available. There's lots of money in making medicines that will be bought by a large percentage of the population.
The things that need funding from the government are the ones without a direct short term benefit. Things like CERN for instance. Perhaps in 20 years the results of that work will turn out to be groundbreaking and change the world, but it's very hard for a company to justify investing in something like that.
Tiny? Not in the slightest. Most Linux webservers don't have a GUI. What do you want one there for, in case somebody wants to run photoshop on it? It's a box that sits and serves webpages with no human connected to it 99% of the time.
Linux runs on devices like wireless access points. What do you want a GUI for, on a device with 4MB RAM and 16MB of flash?
In those environments, servers are centrally managed and generally not used individually. If there's a GUI, it's on the sysadmin's computer, not on each server.
Why don't they have a GUI? I mean, what's the point? It only consumes memory or CPU when a user's actually logged-in to it, and you wouldn't expect servers to have people logged-in very often, if at all. Is it because Linux GUIs are shitty and crash constantly? I mean, seriously, what the hell is the point of that?
It always consumes memory. It takes a large amount of code to support a GUI. On a Linux box, when nobody is logged in, the display manager is running, for instance kdm. This takes about 24MB of memory. There's also X, and various other stuff.
24MB might seem like tiny, but VPS hosting is currently popular. A Linux VM with 64MB RAM allocated to it can serve webpages perfectly fine. Why would you, as a customer, take up memory you could be using for something more useful, or as the provider, make every VM fatter with the result of being able to run less per server?
If you're going to mention it'll get swapped to disk when not used, that won't do either. VPSes all share disk, and hard disks do very badly when they seek too much. So VPSes are generally much more limited in disk I/O than any normal system. Heavy disk usage due to swapping is a near guarantee that your VM will get throttled.
You can do all of that using Windows. Look into the Scheduled Tasks control panel. Every single thing you just typed up there. Maybe your Linux distribution doesn't have those features, but they do exist in other GUIs.
It's called "cron", it's existed for longer than Windows has.
There's nothing preventing you from doing that with a GUI, in theory
I don't care about theory, I care about practice. Concrete examples please.
For instance, download images, apply a filter on them, convert to another image format, upload them to another server that only has SSH access. Has to be fully automatic with no user interaction. For bonus points, make it run in parallel.
I've got a task very similar to this running right now.
Example: Why the fuck would I ever want to do that?
When I'm arguing, I like not to talk completely out of my ass. So a reasonable ballpark number was needed, and going line by line counting is way too boring and slow. How would you have done it? Your reply seems to indicate you couldn't have done it.
But, this specific example was just to demonstrate what kind of stringing up applications I had in mind.
But who gives a shit what "the full list of actions" are? If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I know know "the full list of actions" when I start my car, and, as long as am updated on whether it successfully started or not, I could not care less.
I do. Because sometimes things don't work, or work but not well enough, or work for mysterious reasons and I want to understand why.
What if something works on one computer and not on another? Knowing exactly what is being done and in what order is very helpful when you're trying to make the same thing happen on another computer.
But they *could* be, if there weren't so many scared-of-change, memorization-over-spatial-reasoning, hates-the-user people like you in the Linux community.
Oh, here we go again. Look, I used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PTS/DOS, PC-
The problem is that you don't know jack shit about GUIs, at least not about decent ones.
Ok, what's your definition of a decent GUI? Linux or Windows example please, since I don't have a Mac for reference.
I don't even know why you're still bothering with this thread.
I enjoy arguments. You?
Why do you think those two things are mutually-exclusive? They aren't!
GUIs certainly are mutually exclusive with server environments that don't have a GUI. As in no X, no framebuffer console.
Automation and flexibility of the sort I'm interested in is also sort of mutually exclusive with a GUI.
My kind of "automation" is one which happens in response to external events or on a timer, can be done in a fully automated manner without any interaction with the user, doesn't interfer with usage of the computer by popping up windows on the screen, and generates logs that can be examined later.
My kind of "flexibility" is one that allows stringing up multiple applications to perform complex tasks.
Example: How do you count the number of options in the mencoder manpage?
man mencoder | grep -P "^\s+-" | sed '/^$/d' | wc -l
Take manpage, find all lines that begin with spaces followed by a "-", remove blank lines, count resulting lines. Also the pipes between applications are buffered, which means that this sort of thing benefits from multicore CPUs to an extent. It's not simply performing one stage after the other.
The belief that flexibility, automation, and "ease of understanding" (BS argument for CLI, but I'll let it drop for now)
You're misquoting me. I said "ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed". The words after "understanding" aren't optional.
By that I mean that in a script I can see all the options being used in one line of text. In a GUI I have to check every dialog and tab, and to know the default state of that option to find out which changes were made as compared to the defaults.
Also in cases where multiple steps have to be applied to the file, they're right in the script as well.
How many hundreds of extremely advanced, easy-to-use, software products have to come out before you'll cram that into your skull?
I do use GUIs. I repeat I'm typing this into one. I do think GUIs have advantages. Such as, I much prefer pgadmin over psql, because for instance a GUI can display more data on the screen than a 80 column terminal, and makes working with multiple tables more comfortable. I also use IDEs for similar reasons.
I don't however think that GUIs are always superior for every possible task, sorry.
The options you can't use (either because you have the wrong object selected, or because they are mutually-exclusive with other options) are conveniently greyed-out and inaccessible-- a feature you won't get in a CLI app.
Sure you can have it.
If you're speaking about commandline arguments, then the options can be appropiately grouped in the documentation, and of course it will tell you when two options are mutually exclusive, or depend on another.
For example, for the "find" command, in the documentation, you find the list of things "-printf" can handle right under the entry for "-printf".
There also exist dialog style commandline programs, such as one of the ways to configure the Linux kernel, or the questions asked by the Perl CPAN module during install.
But my point still applies: there are tons and tons of GUI apps with more than 375 (or whatever it was) options. You saying that this is some extraordinarily rare occurrence, or implying that all of those applications suck, is plain ignorance.
For the kind of programs we're discussing here, yes, they suck.
In Visual Studio to figure out the build parameters for a whole program I will have to see the properties for each of the 20 projects in the solution, then check every tab, then the tabs often have several screens inside them.
In comparison, in a Makefile the same information can be found by simply locating the CFLAGS line.
Wow, if only there was some kind of GUI to give you a graphical preview of the option without having to process your entire movie first...
You can do previews with mencoder too, though a GUI can make it more convenient. I find it that often it's pretty hard to tell which is better though, as compressed video is always degraded in some way, and telling which kind of compression artifact looks better is often not trivial.
There are options where previews don't help though, such as container choices.
Yeah, but a GUI can help you understand the options. You're seriously arguing that it's easier/quicker to learn all those options by reading them off a manpage, memorizing them by rote, instead of having a GUI environment where you can learn them all by playing with them and getting near-instant feedback on what they all do?
Why memorize them? I write scripts. Figure it out once, use again every time it's needed after that.
Feedback on many options is of limited use. For instance, I needed to encode video for my portable player. It comes with a Windows program that produces the right output, but what is that output and how do I reproduce it with mencoder?
Figuring out the codec, resolution and the lack of the player's support for B-frames was the difficult part. Once I knew that, searching the manpage for "b-frame" and figuring out the right option (vmax_b_frames) is easy.
With that figured out, I have a shell script that encodes a video for the player and automatically copies it to the right folder when done.
Like I said above, either you've never actually used a GUI, or you're simply not interested in having a honest discussion on the matter. Because you're bringing up extremely easily-refuted-- and frankly kind of stupid-- points to support your position.
We simply have different priorities.
Your priority is ease of use. My priority is flexibility, automation and ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed.
I strive to reduce every task to a script I can use without having to go through dialogs, clicking, or dealing with the results, and which can work fully automatically without my intervention.
That frees time for dealing with more interesting things.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you could.
But that non-x86 computer probably doesn't have a PCI slot where to plug that card in, so that detail doesn't seem to be very important.
Most computers where you can plug one into are going to start in text mode, and being unable to do things like changing the disk boot order in the BIOS would be quite annoying.
But it probably still uses a 8x16 pixel font, which doesn't look that good on a 30" screen.
I think the idea is that the video card could pretend it's VGA, while substituting an antialiased 32x64 font in its place. Nothing earthshaking of course, but that sure would look nice.
Your text mode could look like this
Sure it does, the BIOS boot screen, settings, etc are kind of important to be able to see sometimes. The boot loader also counts on the VGA mode too.
Now of course you could use Linux BIOS instead, but then that adds the requirement to have a supported motherboard, and wanting to risk flashing it.
Unfortunately the BIOS and boot loader will still need VGA. Maybe Linux BIOS could remove that requirement, but you can't count on that.
They seem to have implemented it in a very cool way too. Quote from a linked OSNews article:
How do you escalate privileges by exploiting grep?
How would they take it back, after having sold it?
Should Russia just take back Alaska, because some time back they sold too much land too cheaply?
I'm afraid that giving somebody too much of something and regretting it years later doesn't entitle you to get it back.
"Should"? Why exactly should they?
I thought America was the land of Capitalism, and as good capitalists of course they will keep them until the address space runs out, then make big bucks reselling the unused chunks.
Where do you expect to see it? We're talking about internal deals between companies, it's not like they publish the details of all their shady deals on their websites.
For instance, from the linked article:
If you expect to see an Intel CPU for $5 in a shop, you won't see it, it's not that simple.
The judge could of course demand the required information to tell whether that is the case, but given that "The European charges against Intel are confidential", I doubt we're going to see all the details
I don't, it's just my guess of how this is supposed to work for MS. I'm actually a 100% Linux user.
I figure that they think many of those people who don't want Vista never tried it, and simply heard negative opinions from friends. That sort of thing doesn't exactly make you want to pay for it to see if maybe your friends were wrong. So giving it away for free might help people get to try it and see if they like it.
Of course that will only work if it's actually a decent OS.
No, I didn't. Microsoft doesn't need to get people to buy their OS. But they need them to run it.
Most people don't go into a shop and buy Windows. The vast majority of OS sales are going to be from OEMs. So Microsoft loses very little by letting everybody have it for free. I'm pretty sure there will be something that will stop OEMs from taking advantage of that, so they will still pay.
What MS does desperately need is for people to want to use it. Because if people keep resisting and asking for XP, then OEMs will keep demanding XP, and enough of them will be powerful enough to force MS to keep providing it. If that happens, then Win7 really isn't going to sell, and that's going to look very bad on the financial reports.
So it's very much in MS's interest to convince people that Win7 is going to be great, by giving it away for free even, if that prevents people from demanding XP with their new computers.
You're not thinking long term enough.
Intel is betting on that by selling below cost for long enough they can bankrupt AMD. Once that is done, they'll have no competition and will be able to charge a much higher price. You won't be benefitting then.
And if it's allowed to go on, it'll last like that forever, as Intel can simply repeat the same trick if a new competitor comes along.
Microsoft doesn't need people to buy their OS. It's not like they have much of a choice anyway.
What they really need is to get people to stop replacing it with an older version, and to stop trying to get the older one on their new hardware.
Yes.
I play games to get away from the real world for a while. I already see ads on TV, walls, billboards, underground and my cellphone. That's more than enough, I don't want any more of them.
I'm mostly free of them on the web, thanks to ad blocking and simply avoiding anything where one manages to get through.
I can't wait to get rid of the rest of them, as soon as somebody invents image filtering glasses.
Thanks.
As I said elsewhere, I don't have a "religious" attachment to the GPL. I'm simply choosing the license which I think benefits me the most.
I don't completely exclude the BSD either though. For instance I think it's the best choice when trying to popularize something like the PNG image format. For something like that, software is simply a way to spread the file format, and the more it gets used, the better.
Coincidence. It's not my real name either. It's the user name I use in Second Life.
I chose the first name "Dale" because I wanted to pick something short, simple, not especially distinctive and not religious.
I chose the last name "Glass" from among the choices provided by the registration process. During registration you have to pick from a list and can't use a custom one. So I went with the least strange and simplest thing I found in the list.
I got very used to it after a few years though, and didn't use my real name when I went to the Second Life convention.
"Cult of Stallman"? Biased much?
Won't argue though due to lack of experience in the area.
Yeah, for every niche language there's somebody claiming that it's wonderful and everybody should use it.
Thing is though, there's little reason to learn Ada or write anything in it. The vast majority of source is in C or C++. The libraries are plentiful. Source examples and documentation are all over the web.
If the license had anything to do with it, how do you explain the amount of C and C++ code, even though the most used tools all come from GNU?
I don't really care what the "Church of FSF" as you call it thinks, but my personal interests are: First of all, me, then my project, and your own interests are way down the list of importance.
I don't code for your convenience, I do it for mine, and I'd much prefer to force you to contribute to my project than let you have it without strings attached.
Done right, the huge firm will have to release all their changes. I don't really care who does the development so long it's done and I can use it. So if some huge company decides to do the coding for me, they can go right ahead.
As a programmer I don't like proprietary code for practical purposes. If it breaks, I can't fix it. Right now sometimes I get crashes that are somewhere within the bowels of the nvidia drivers, and I can't wait for getting rid of that one.
See, I don't really care about that. Linux works well enough for me right now. World domination would be nice, but it isn't something I'm terribly interested in.
My own view of usability is heavily dependent on how much of it I can debug, and in that sense, the less closed source there is, the more usable it gets.
What church?
I repeat, I don't use the GPL because of religious issues or anything of the sort. I don't care about the "free" or "not free" debacle. I'm not involved with the FSF and RMS doesn't come to my mind very often.
The GPL simply does what I want it to do. It's a purely pragmatic choice.
That assumes I have a product. What if I'm just an user?
Where's my incentive to contribute something that your company will repackage and sell?
I consider that a very weak incentive.
Yes, of course it's easier to contribute a one line fix for a buffer overrun, than to manually patch every new version.
You however have a big incentive not to contribute anything that might make you more competitive.
Long term this sort of thing will result in all the interesting technology being in the proprietary forks, and an open codebase that doesn't do anything interesting, but runs well.
And here, again, why I don't release BSD code. I don't want you to have an exclusive edge, I want you to contribute to my project.
The problem is that there's no incentive to contribute. You can take, but nothing makes you give back. Especially because if you give back, you're effectively working for your competitors.
So yeah, BSD is excellent from a "leech" point of view. It's not that good from the "project" point of view. It's not that good from the contributor point of view either. Why should I bother contributing when that in effect makes me an unpaid employee of every company using that source?
The LGPL exists for a strategic reason.
For some things, such as the C library, there exist many reimplementations. Making that GPLd drives people to alternatives, and loses on any potential contributions. So the LGPL is a compromise to still get contributions to that code.
Stallman considers that a library should be GPLd when it provides a competitive advantage. If it's GPL or "code your own", he hopes you'll go with the GPL one.
On the contrary, it jives perfectly fine with business.
Take Red Hat for instance, and other companies that pay for GPL development. Why do they do that? Because they know that even if IBM takes advantage of their improvements, the moment they fix something in Red Hat's code, they have to give back as well. So not only does Red Hat get better drivers or SMP support, they also get free fixes from IBM for it!
The BSD on the other hand doesn't have such things. Red Hat would write their driver, release as closed source, not contribute it back obviously, and every other company would do the same. The end result is that BSD won't get the driver until some volunteer happens to contribute it.
There's also lots of GPLd code in various devices you rarely look at very closely, such as cash registers. The companies that work for those don't sell code. They sell hardware + software + support, and have no problem with contributing bugfixes for whatever GPLd code they used, because their business loses nothing by doing so. And without the GPL they wouldn't bother to contribute, because that takes programmer time, and as such won't be done if optional.
It's only death if your business is selling software on the shelf. There are many companies with different business models, which sell routers, or cash registers, or support, and for which the GPL isn't a hindrance in the slightest.
The whole argument about which is more free is lame semantics.
I use the GPL because it does what I want. Whether you call that "freedom", "restrictions" or "communism" is completely irrelevant.
I don't choose a license because of its freedom value, but because it does what I want.
At $4 per line, that's quite a lot of cash they'll have to get before the amount of lines of code becomes limiting.
Here's one that does have it (scroll down to the bottom of the page)
Cowon D2+
Bought the D2 (without the +) and I'm very happy with it.
Buy things that are aligned with your interests so that there will be more of them in the future, instead of trying of giving money to people who don't really seem to want it.
Common diseases don't need extra funding. There's lots of research into cancer and AIDS. Things with obvious applications generally don't need extra funding to get researched, there's already plenty motivation available. There's lots of money in making medicines that will be bought by a large percentage of the population.
The things that need funding from the government are the ones without a direct short term benefit. Things like CERN for instance. Perhaps in 20 years the results of that work will turn out to be groundbreaking and change the world, but it's very hard for a company to justify investing in something like that.
Tiny? Not in the slightest. Most Linux webservers don't have a GUI. What do you want one there for, in case somebody wants to run photoshop on it? It's a box that sits and serves webpages with no human connected to it 99% of the time.
Linux runs on devices like wireless access points. What do you want a GUI for, on a device with 4MB RAM and 16MB of flash?
In those environments, servers are centrally managed and generally not used individually. If there's a GUI, it's on the sysadmin's computer, not on each server.
It always consumes memory. It takes a large amount of code to support a GUI. On a Linux box, when nobody is logged in, the display manager is running, for instance kdm. This takes about 24MB of memory. There's also X, and various other stuff.
24MB might seem like tiny, but VPS hosting is currently popular. A Linux VM with 64MB RAM allocated to it can serve webpages perfectly fine. Why would you, as a customer, take up memory you could be using for something more useful, or as the provider, make every VM fatter with the result of being able to run less per server?
If you're going to mention it'll get swapped to disk when not used, that won't do either. VPSes all share disk, and hard disks do very badly when they seek too much. So VPSes are generally much more limited in disk I/O than any normal system. Heavy disk usage due to swapping is a near guarantee that your VM will get throttled.
It's called "cron", it's existed for longer than Windows has.
I don't care about theory, I care about practice. Concrete examples please.
For instance, download images, apply a filter on them, convert to another image format, upload them to another server that only has SSH access. Has to be fully automatic with no user interaction. For bonus points, make it run in parallel.
I've got a task very similar to this running right now.
When I'm arguing, I like not to talk completely out of my ass. So a reasonable ballpark number was needed, and going line by line counting is way too boring and slow. How would you have done it? Your reply seems to indicate you couldn't have done it.
But, this specific example was just to demonstrate what kind of stringing up applications I had in mind.
I do. Because sometimes things don't work, or work but not well enough, or work for mysterious reasons and I want to understand why.
What if something works on one computer and not on another? Knowing exactly what is being done and in what order is very helpful when you're trying to make the same thing happen on another computer.
Oh, here we go again. Look, I used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PTS/DOS, PC-
Ok, what's your definition of a decent GUI? Linux or Windows example please, since I don't have a Mac for reference.
I enjoy arguments. You?
GUIs certainly are mutually exclusive with server environments that don't have a GUI. As in no X, no framebuffer console.
Automation and flexibility of the sort I'm interested in is also sort of mutually exclusive with a GUI.
My kind of "automation" is one which happens in response to external events or on a timer, can be done in a fully automated manner without any interaction with the user, doesn't interfer with usage of the computer by popping up windows on the screen, and generates logs that can be examined later.
My kind of "flexibility" is one that allows stringing up multiple applications to perform complex tasks.
Example: How do you count the number of options in the mencoder manpage?
Take manpage, find all lines that begin with spaces followed by a "-", remove blank lines, count resulting lines. Also the pipes between applications are buffered, which means that this sort of thing benefits from multicore CPUs to an extent. It's not simply performing one stage after the other.
You're misquoting me. I said "ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed". The words after "understanding" aren't optional.
By that I mean that in a script I can see all the options being used in one line of text. In a GUI I have to check every dialog and tab, and to know the default state of that option to find out which changes were made as compared to the defaults.
Also in cases where multiple steps have to be applied to the file, they're right in the script as well.
I do use GUIs. I repeat I'm typing this into one. I do think GUIs have advantages. Such as, I much prefer pgadmin over psql, because for instance a GUI can display more data on the screen than a 80 column terminal, and makes working with multiple tables more comfortable. I also use IDEs for similar reasons.
I don't however think that GUIs are always superior for every possible task, sorry.
Sure you can have it.
If you're speaking about commandline arguments, then the options can be appropiately grouped in the documentation, and of course it will tell you when two options are mutually exclusive, or depend on another.
For example, for the "find" command, in the documentation, you find the list of things "-printf" can handle right under the entry for "-printf".
There also exist dialog style commandline programs, such as one of the ways to configure the Linux kernel, or the questions asked by the Perl CPAN module during install.
For the kind of programs we're discussing here, yes, they suck.
In Visual Studio to figure out the build parameters for a whole program I will have to see the properties for each of the 20 projects in the solution, then check every tab, then the tabs often have several screens inside them.
In comparison, in a Makefile the same information can be found by simply locating the CFLAGS line.
You can do previews with mencoder too, though a GUI can make it more convenient. I find it that often it's pretty hard to tell which is better though, as compressed video is always degraded in some way, and telling which kind of compression artifact looks better is often not trivial.
There are options where previews don't help though, such as container choices.
Why memorize them? I write scripts. Figure it out once, use again every time it's needed after that.
Feedback on many options is of limited use. For instance, I needed to encode video for my portable player. It comes with a Windows program that produces the right output, but what is that output and how do I reproduce it with mencoder?
Figuring out the codec, resolution and the lack of the player's support for B-frames was the difficult part. Once I knew that, searching the manpage for "b-frame" and figuring out the right option (vmax_b_frames) is easy.
With that figured out, I have a shell script that encodes a video for the player and automatically copies it to the right folder when done.
We simply have different priorities.
Your priority is ease of use. My priority is flexibility, automation and ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed.
I strive to reduce every task to a script I can use without having to go through dialogs, clicking, or dealing with the results, and which can work fully automatically without my intervention.
That frees time for dealing with more interesting things.