* Sound was a literal nightmare (given how many sleepless nights I spent trying to fix it) when they switched from OSS / ALSA to PulseAudio.
* Graphics is a crapshoot: if you have nVidia it can be OK if you perform the right incantation, if you have Intel you dont need to fuss with it but its not terribly performant, and if you have ATI/AMD you're out of luck.
* Gaming mouse support (7+ button support) historically required dark magic performed on the xorg.conf file, and/or the download of various utilities to properly configure it.
* Ventrilo (still quite popular) support requires straight up voodoo with Wine and ripped Windows DLLs (for the codecs); Skype may or may not work but (IIRC) hasnt been updated in about 3 centuries, and that all relies on you having done the right dance around pulseaudio to get mic input working.
Its called exaggeration. If I must spell it out, it was to highlight the absurdity by contrasting the nonfree IIS / schannel (not vulnerable to the biggest security flaw in a decade) with the free OpenSSL (vulnerable).
It's much easier to see that a Linux system isn't reporting to the NSA than Windows 8.1 Update 1
No, its a tiny bit easier, which is why so many of these horrendously critical security flaws persisted for years before being noticed. And FOSS promoters never seem to want to acknowledge the massive downside to open source-- often when a critical flaw is identified, you have to assume that bad guys knew about it all they way back to when it was added, and in many cases have to wonder whether the faulty commit wasnt intentional in the first place.
Updates with prerequisites have been around for years and it is not unusual for Microsoft to instruct you to perform certain updates before they continue troubleshooting a case-- and if you do not / cannot they will often note that it is now "best effort".
I can guarantee that how it will work is that you cannot install additional updates until you install this one-- just like always. Heck-- Windows XP SP3 will require no fewer than 2 updates to its update / installer components before it even lets you access the rest of Windows Update-- I know because I just performed an installation today for a test environment. This isnt new.
Thats not what Im saying. Im holding up FOSS bugs as a counterpoint to the implicit idea that somehow FOSS fixes all problems. Specifically I was taking aim at Stallman's statement that,
Nonfree software is likely to spy on its users, or mistreat them in other ways. It is software for suckers. Awareness of this is spreading, which helps us make the case for free software to people who are not computing experts.
Which is a little silly, because the fact that the Linux kernel is free and the Microsoft one is nonfree gives me no benefit as an end user as regards the security of its IPSec or SSL implication.
Another advantage of Free Software is that, if we like, we can examine the source code for back doors and the like
How many people are qualified to look at even a fraction of Firefox? How many could have spotted the issue with heartbleed? How many can vet that OpenSSL is even cryptologically sound? How many are capable of spotting the IPSec bug I mentioned, which (as I recall) went unspotted for years because of how niche that is?
It seems like there is a tendency to forget that some computer tasks require REALLY skilled people, and very often those people dont want to spend their off hours performing code audits on complex, maze-like projects like OpenSSL or the Linux kernel. Non-free software often as a corollary has a revenue stream, beholden customers, and sometimes regulatory obligations that they can meet with code audits paid for by said revenue stream. Closed source software with steady funding is an extreme oddity, and it is rare that FOSS evangelists want to even acknowledge that. They hold up Linux and RedHat as if thats the norm, and ignore the nightmarish infighting of OpenOffice or the horrendous complexity of OpenSSL or the sheer difficulty of getting code committed to Firefox (in some cases).
All Im asking for is for people like Stallman to step back and accept that FOSS is wonderful at some things, but it does not fix all problems and sometimes it can be its own problem. Maybe we should ask him whatever happened to Hurd?
Having bugs is an inevitability what with how software is written by fallible humans.
If I had seen anything resembling this concession from Stallman it might be something, but one of his responses centers around how this whole NSA thing is "because proprietary software", ignoring the massive damage done by the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
My point isnt that closed source is great and opensource is bad; I use android, I had Ubuntu as my primary OS from 2006 to 2009, I use and love Chrome (a chromium offshoot) and used (and loved) firefox for about the last decade prior to that. My point is that some people like Stallman are ideologically unable to accept that there are any benefits to closed source or any flaws with open source, and its absurd. The real world is calling, and "free software" isnt a panacea for every problem, or even for every computer problem.
He has done a lot of great things, but his general set of ideas is only workable for the sort of person who is allowed to reside for free on campus at berkeley. Someone who thinks apps are terrible because they justify their existance through profits, and doesnt connect the dots to why a truly free phone cant happen (its not profitable), isnt living in the real world.
The things he pushes for are great. I love free software, I love that there is that pressure out there for commercial software to succeed. I even love that people like him are enthusiastic about it. But I think Stallman takes it way over the edge and sees free software as the end, not the means. Software that is free but does not meet my needs does me no good; a cellphone that is free but I cannot buy (unaffordable, never makes it past prototyping) is useless. Sometimes truly smart people like Stallman take their ideology so far that they make the good the enemy of the perfect.
Touting how libre software solves all of your security concerns right after everything that wasnt IIS just got their private keys stolen because of libre software, is a bit ridiculous.
Im sure he would be quick to explain how wonderful Tor is and completely ignore how ineffective it probably is towards the NSA; but then, as far as I can tell its not about reality for him, but the ideology. I would hope that eventually Stallman will realize that we do not live and work in a vacuum, and that in the real world compromises must be made, and that you have to recognize the flaws even with the thing you are promoting.
I dont think I've ever seen him acknowledge a single issue with libre software (like its massive beauracracy a la GNU Hurd, or its funding issues, or the problems with vetting random contributors a la the IPSec kernel bug several years back); that in itself is indicative of him living in an echo chamber.
Not only that, but he acts like "free" software wasnt just hit with some of the most massive security holes in the last decade, over the last few years--
* the OpenSSL bug hitting everything thats not IIS
* the SSH random number bug which required everyone to regenerate their keys
* the IPSec kernel flaw some years back strongly suspected to have been added by an intel agency (cant currently find source or date, it was ~2008-2010).
Thats not to mention the uncountable critical flaws that have been patched in the kernel over the last several years. If stallman is making the case that libre software magically solves the NSA problem, hes out of his mind. But then hes a fanatic, and seems unable to accept that there could ever be any benefits to closed source software, ever-- even in situations like with BestCrypt, where it continues to be the only trustworthy software source that can do whole disk encryption for all major OSes out there right now (Truecrypt cannot handle GPT Win8 disks, and is somewhat short on the trust factor).
Theyre not ending support for 8.1, and you know it. Why anyone is finding it necessary to feign outrage over a headline that they know is false, is beyond me. Oh wait its for the karma-- carry on.
It doesnt show up because someone didnt complete the A tag. This is the source of the summary: [a] makes them smarter and improves such functions as exercise capacity[/a]
If Linux wants to grab desktop market share it has to develop a killer app. Microsoft realized that early on and focused hard on areas that it suffered in; in the mid 90s it realized its printing subsystem was terrible and developed it, it realized that its gaming capabilities didnt exist so they made DirectX, etc etc.
This is what we call a "chicken and egg problem". Seems simpler to just say this than to try to explain how there are no games for linux because its graphics and gaming capabilities have historically been terrible, and theyve been terrible because noone games on linux and thus theres no incentive to develop them
His point is theyre just now getting features that have been around on Windows for a while, which is a valid complaint.
"Anyone can improve it" holds a lot less water when we're talking about graphics subsystems-- how many people are legitimately qualified to work on that?
On a side note, isnt Mesa the crappy default driver thats usually replaced by the vendor's binary blob if you want decent performance? Or am I thinking of something else?
How did you get that location? Did you break any laws to get it? How does the cop know? Is there a chain of custody for that information? Are they indemnified if they act on your info, which turns out to be wrong because your iPhone's GPS went on the fritz?
You have to accept that we dont live in a simple world. It's "simple" to go down and get your phone, its a lot more complicated to get a judge to agree that the info you have is worth A) his time and B) a warrant.
Im under the impression that conservatives are more likely to object to porn than liberals, just as theyre more likely to reject ANYTHING that isnt "conservative".
There are no implications: everything from the summary to the circle of links is speculation. noone knows anything for sure, but that hasnt stopped wild theories based on other wild theories based on a WSJ article.
DoJ is encouraging banks to close bank accounts of risky actors. We have no reason at this point to believe that means "kill all pornstar bank accounts", especially since there are apparently only 2 or 3 porn stars experiencing this. Strangely enough none of them are big names. Its almost like someones trying to create a story where there is none.
Google does not stop you from manufacturing a phone with Cyanogenmod (like Oppo) and loading it with the google services (like Oppo). You just cant call it android, or "by google".
I'm a so called "wingnut" republican, and this story isnt even a little believable. The day Obama administration goes after porn sites is the day the tea party embraces obamacare.
Would be nice if all of the folks so ostensibly concerned with the direction this takes us, had actually bothered to read the article. Sort of gives the lie to your moral crusading when you cant even be bothered to get informed on the issue.
What it means is that literally noone here read the article, so theyre getting their panties in a bunch over a summary which twists already highly spun nonsense.
Theyre not. The speculation is that banks are doing it voluntarily at the encouragement of the DoJ, but even that is a huge leap based on hysterical speculation by Reason based on hysterical speculation by vice which is based on a "maybe...?" article on WSJ.
Noone knows, we only have a handful of pornstars who have lost bank accounts, and some guessing about what "operation chokepoint is".
This is stupid trollbait, and everyone here is falling for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Must be a conservative state, because this peculiar strain of stupidity is generally right-wing in nature.
Well certainly THIS is a well reasoned argument.
Careful, your bias is showing.
* Sound was a literal nightmare (given how many sleepless nights I spent trying to fix it) when they switched from OSS / ALSA to PulseAudio.
* Graphics is a crapshoot: if you have nVidia it can be OK if you perform the right incantation, if you have Intel you dont need to fuss with it but its not terribly performant, and if you have ATI/AMD you're out of luck.
* Gaming mouse support (7+ button support) historically required dark magic performed on the xorg.conf file, and/or the download of various utilities to properly configure it.
* Ventrilo (still quite popular) support requires straight up voodoo with Wine and ripped Windows DLLs (for the codecs); Skype may or may not work but (IIRC) hasnt been updated in about 3 centuries, and that all relies on you having done the right dance around pulseaudio to get mic input working.
At least networking just works, generally.
Its called exaggeration. If I must spell it out, it was to highlight the absurdity by contrasting the nonfree IIS / schannel (not vulnerable to the biggest security flaw in a decade) with the free OpenSSL (vulnerable).
It's much easier to see that a Linux system isn't reporting to the NSA than Windows 8.1 Update 1
No, its a tiny bit easier, which is why so many of these horrendously critical security flaws persisted for years before being noticed. And FOSS promoters never seem to want to acknowledge the massive downside to open source-- often when a critical flaw is identified, you have to assume that bad guys knew about it all they way back to when it was added, and in many cases have to wonder whether the faulty commit wasnt intentional in the first place.
Updates with prerequisites have been around for years and it is not unusual for Microsoft to instruct you to perform certain updates before they continue troubleshooting a case-- and if you do not / cannot they will often note that it is now "best effort".
I can guarantee that how it will work is that you cannot install additional updates until you install this one-- just like always. Heck-- Windows XP SP3 will require no fewer than 2 updates to its update / installer components before it even lets you access the rest of Windows Update-- I know because I just performed an installation today for a test environment. This isnt new.
Thats not what Im saying. Im holding up FOSS bugs as a counterpoint to the implicit idea that somehow FOSS fixes all problems. Specifically I was taking aim at Stallman's statement that,
Nonfree software is likely to spy on its users, or mistreat them in other ways. It is software for suckers.
Awareness of this is spreading, which helps us make the case for free software to people who are not computing experts.
Which is a little silly, because the fact that the Linux kernel is free and the Microsoft one is nonfree gives me no benefit as an end user as regards the security of its IPSec or SSL implication.
Another advantage of Free Software is that, if we like, we can examine the source code for back doors and the like
How many people are qualified to look at even a fraction of Firefox? How many could have spotted the issue with heartbleed? How many can vet that OpenSSL is even cryptologically sound? How many are capable of spotting the IPSec bug I mentioned, which (as I recall) went unspotted for years because of how niche that is?
It seems like there is a tendency to forget that some computer tasks require REALLY skilled people, and very often those people dont want to spend their off hours performing code audits on complex, maze-like projects like OpenSSL or the Linux kernel. Non-free software often as a corollary has a revenue stream, beholden customers, and sometimes regulatory obligations that they can meet with code audits paid for by said revenue stream. Closed source software with steady funding is an extreme oddity, and it is rare that FOSS evangelists want to even acknowledge that. They hold up Linux and RedHat as if thats the norm, and ignore the nightmarish infighting of OpenOffice or the horrendous complexity of OpenSSL or the sheer difficulty of getting code committed to Firefox (in some cases).
All Im asking for is for people like Stallman to step back and accept that FOSS is wonderful at some things, but it does not fix all problems and sometimes it can be its own problem. Maybe we should ask him whatever happened to Hurd?
Having bugs is an inevitability what with how software is written by fallible humans.
If I had seen anything resembling this concession from Stallman it might be something, but one of his responses centers around how this whole NSA thing is "because proprietary software", ignoring the massive damage done by the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
My point isnt that closed source is great and opensource is bad; I use android, I had Ubuntu as my primary OS from 2006 to 2009, I use and love Chrome (a chromium offshoot) and used (and loved) firefox for about the last decade prior to that. My point is that some people like Stallman are ideologically unable to accept that there are any benefits to closed source or any flaws with open source, and its absurd. The real world is calling, and "free software" isnt a panacea for every problem, or even for every computer problem.
He has done a lot of great things, but his general set of ideas is only workable for the sort of person who is allowed to reside for free on campus at berkeley. Someone who thinks apps are terrible because they justify their existance through profits, and doesnt connect the dots to why a truly free phone cant happen (its not profitable), isnt living in the real world.
The things he pushes for are great. I love free software, I love that there is that pressure out there for commercial software to succeed. I even love that people like him are enthusiastic about it. But I think Stallman takes it way over the edge and sees free software as the end, not the means. Software that is free but does not meet my needs does me no good; a cellphone that is free but I cannot buy (unaffordable, never makes it past prototyping) is useless. Sometimes truly smart people like Stallman take their ideology so far that they make the good the enemy of the perfect.
Touting how libre software solves all of your security concerns right after everything that wasnt IIS just got their private keys stolen because of libre software, is a bit ridiculous.
Im sure he would be quick to explain how wonderful Tor is and completely ignore how ineffective it probably is towards the NSA; but then, as far as I can tell its not about reality for him, but the ideology. I would hope that eventually Stallman will realize that we do not live and work in a vacuum, and that in the real world compromises must be made, and that you have to recognize the flaws even with the thing you are promoting.
I dont think I've ever seen him acknowledge a single issue with libre software (like its massive beauracracy a la GNU Hurd, or its funding issues, or the problems with vetting random contributors a la the IPSec kernel bug several years back); that in itself is indicative of him living in an echo chamber.
Not only that, but he acts like "free" software wasnt just hit with some of the most massive security holes in the last decade, over the last few years--
* the OpenSSL bug hitting everything thats not IIS
* the SSH random number bug which required everyone to regenerate their keys
* the IPSec kernel flaw some years back strongly suspected to have been added by an intel agency (cant currently find source or date, it was ~2008-2010).
Thats not to mention the uncountable critical flaws that have been patched in the kernel over the last several years. If stallman is making the case that libre software magically solves the NSA problem, hes out of his mind. But then hes a fanatic, and seems unable to accept that there could ever be any benefits to closed source software, ever-- even in situations like with BestCrypt, where it continues to be the only trustworthy software source that can do whole disk encryption for all major OSes out there right now (Truecrypt cannot handle GPT Win8 disks, and is somewhat short on the trust factor).
Theyre not ending support for 8.1, and you know it. Why anyone is finding it necessary to feign outrage over a headline that they know is false, is beyond me.
Oh wait its for the karma-- carry on.
It doesnt show up because someone didnt complete the A tag. This is the source of the summary:
[a] makes them smarter and improves such functions as exercise capacity[/a]
Whoops. Missing an HREF there.
If Linux wants to grab desktop market share it has to develop a killer app. Microsoft realized that early on and focused hard on areas that it suffered in; in the mid 90s it realized its printing subsystem was terrible and developed it, it realized that its gaming capabilities didnt exist so they made DirectX, etc etc.
This is what we call a "chicken and egg problem". Seems simpler to just say this than to try to explain how there are no games for linux because its graphics and gaming capabilities have historically been terrible, and theyve been terrible because noone games on linux and thus theres no incentive to develop them
His point is theyre just now getting features that have been around on Windows for a while, which is a valid complaint.
"Anyone can improve it" holds a lot less water when we're talking about graphics subsystems-- how many people are legitimately qualified to work on that?
On a side note, isnt Mesa the crappy default driver thats usually replaced by the vendor's binary blob if you want decent performance? Or am I thinking of something else?
How did you get that location? Did you break any laws to get it? How does the cop know? Is there a chain of custody for that information? Are they indemnified if they act on your info, which turns out to be wrong because your iPhone's GPS went on the fritz?
You have to accept that we dont live in a simple world. It's "simple" to go down and get your phone, its a lot more complicated to get a judge to agree that the info you have is worth A) his time and B) a warrant.
Im under the impression that conservatives are more likely to object to porn than liberals, just as theyre more likely to reject ANYTHING that isnt "conservative".
There are no implications: everything from the summary to the circle of links is speculation. noone knows anything for sure, but that hasnt stopped wild theories based on other wild theories based on a WSJ article.
DoJ is encouraging banks to close bank accounts of risky actors. We have no reason at this point to believe that means "kill all pornstar bank accounts", especially since there are apparently only 2 or 3 porn stars experiencing this. Strangely enough none of them are big names. Its almost like someones trying to create a story where there is none.
Google does not stop you from manufacturing a phone with Cyanogenmod (like Oppo) and loading it with the google services (like Oppo). You just cant call it android, or "by google".
because according to the google agreement the manufacturers can't build any non-google android phones.
https://cyngn.com/products/n1/
http://www.engadget.com/2014/0...
Whoops, i guess that makes you 100% wrong.
They dont sell them because theres a small market. But theres no reason you cant do it, and Oppo is doing it.
I'm a so called "wingnut" republican, and this story isnt even a little believable. The day Obama administration goes after porn sites is the day the tea party embraces obamacare.
Would be nice if all of the folks so ostensibly concerned with the direction this takes us, had actually bothered to read the article. Sort of gives the lie to your moral crusading when you cant even be bothered to get informed on the issue.
What it means is that literally noone here read the article, so theyre getting their panties in a bunch over a summary which twists already highly spun nonsense.
Theyre not. The speculation is that banks are doing it voluntarily at the encouragement of the DoJ, but even that is a huge leap based on hysterical speculation by Reason based on hysterical speculation by vice which is based on a "maybe...?" article on WSJ.
Noone knows, we only have a handful of pornstars who have lost bank accounts, and some guessing about what "operation chokepoint is".
This is stupid trollbait, and everyone here is falling for it.