The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in.
No. For years, Sun have been refusing to permit distro makers to include java. Recently they relaxed slightly (distro makers are actually permitted to redistribute the thing now), but it is still impossible for anybody but Sun to support the thing.
The people that are acting to prevent anyone from getting access to java are Sun. Nobody else has any control over this.
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base.
Nonsense. There are many reasons why they can't do it, and they don't do it because it would be a big support issue. Currently, they can say "we will support this software and fix the problems". If they include things where that's not possible, then they can't say that any more.
You need to get your head out of your capitalist arse and realise that there are more important things about a piece of software than its price tag.
I've been using Linux for over 8 years now (10 maybe)... and I've only got Linux installed on ALL my computer. But it has taken quite some years and quite some HAIR-pulling to get anything to do what I want for my creature comforts...mp3 support, DVD region-free playbacks, Nvidia-3D gaming, Audigy-2 support, Obscure-web-cams, IN-Sane scanners etc.... not to mention the night that it took to get the new WIDE-Screen 1680-1050 up and running with editing etc/X11/xorg.conf with an entirely new modeline with numbers enough to scare the bajezuz outta "Svanson".
Let's see how easy it is to get those things working on Windows...
mp3 support? Install an audio player... same as on linux.
Region-free DVD playing? You're going to have to spend a fair bit of time trawling through fairly 'dubious' web pages looking for a suitable piece of software, and odds are it'll be malware-infested when you finally find one that is not region-locked.
3d gaming? Well, that's just not possible on Linux because all the 3d games are for Windows, no real argument there. But buy a playstation and stop trying to play commercial games on PCs, you'll save yourself a lot of pain.
Audigy 2? Presumably that's some new Creative Labs sound card... personally, I have never found the Windows drivers for Creative cards to be anything other than extreme pain. They come bundled with a whole bunch of crappy applications that I don't want, and they crash the system way too often - to the point where tech support for games now explicitly tells you to check for upgrades to your audio drivers, specifically because of the Creative ones that are so buggy. I just don't buy cards from Creative any more, but I doubt that the experience of getting them to work on Linux could be any worse than the experience on Windows.
Obscure web cams? Hell. Those are agony on Windows too. Buggy drivers that aren't compatible with ANY of the applications you want to use.
Scanners. Hah. At the company I work for, we have stopped even trying to use TWAIN scanners on Windows. If the scanner uses USB or SCSI or the parallel port or any other local device connection, we just say: we cannot and will not support this device. All the scanners used at the company are now smart network devices, which do their own scanning and upload the file via FTP or SMB. Trying to get TWAIN devices to work is just soooo painful that we refuse to make the attempt any more. I expect they're painful on Linux too, but probably no more than they are on Windows. I wouldn't know, on account of having nice network devices that do not require any software to install.
Obscurely-sized display devices? On both Windows and Linux, this requires an upgrade to the display drivers (in X, on Linux). The only difference is that on Linux, if you don't want to upgrade, it's possible to get the thing to work by writing your own modeline; on Windows you must upgrade and if there is no upgrade available, you are screwed.
So - most of what you said is true, but it's true of Windows as well. Windows will never be suitable for the regular idiot. The only difference is that with Windows, the regular idiots don't realise this, because Microsoft have been lying to them about it. I see no reason why some companies wouldn't be able to lie to them about Linux too.
I'm a computer professional and I like Linux and it's abilities, but there is no way my mom or dad could use it as far as installing new programs goes.
I'm a computer professional, and I also have a mom and a dad. And there is no way my mom could use Windows as far as installing new programs goes. If she ever tries, then sooner or later I am going to end up having to spend a weekend trying to clean up the mess of spyware and worms and recover her files.
I don't see what the point of your comparison is. It's hard to install new programs on Linux platforms. It's hard AND DANGEROUS to install new programs on Windows platforms. Either way it's outside the abilities of 'normal' users.
Certainly if Microsoft, or anybody else who generated a header file or API, tried to claim a copyright interest in programs written to that API, the world, and most of all the free software community, would be up in arms.
Microsoft do claim that and people do not seem to be up in arms about it. You have to pay for a license that allows you to write programs using their tools. The license agreements clearly state their position that you may only do this because you've paid for it.
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly
This is a design feature of every camera surveillance system (the locations of cameras aren't as secret as the media makes out). They aren't supposed to stop crime, except for things like petty vandalism by bored school kids. Cameras are supposed to move crime to other places - away from rich people, and towards people who have little political influence. As an added bonus, these people tend to be less likely to report crimes (maybe not for murders, but fights and vandalism and suchlike often go unreported in poorer areas), so your crime figures go down.
Optimistically, you can say that by concentrating the crime in poorer areas, you will reduce the criminal population due to competition, and by limiting their revenue stream. Might even work. But mostly, cameras are about improving the security of the powerful at the expense of the poor. This should be expected - most people just don't care about crime in slum areas.
What about people who have not been convicted of a crime, but who the police have decided are suspects? Should they be treated as innocents or criminals?
Note that this includes virtually everybody who is arrested.
Your data is permanently kept, so that if ever one of the other few dozen people who have near-identical fingerprints to you (in the US alone) commits a crime, you can be charged with it, thereby reducing the number of unsolved cases. It's a form of patriotism.
If by beating Linux to the market you understand having the code taken by a company, and not seeing anything really valuable back in return, then yeah, you can praise OSX as much as you want.
Don't forget Windows. There's freebsd code in that too.
The biggest problem is that the jet engine cannot be powered by electricity - it fundamentally requires combustion to operate. We would need a serious alternative, and propellors just don't cut it for the bigger craft.
I expect that the justice department is quite aware of the reasons. Given the fact that they were in a strong position and settled for a pittance, it seems quite clear that they received political orders to back down, probably related to changes in the government at that time and some of Microsoft's campaign contributions.
If that's true then this new development must also be political. Who did Microsoft piss off this time?
Parades can increase security. Coffee shops can install cameras or hire security.
These things are security theatre. They do not usually increase the security of the customers (cameras actually decrease security, because now you have camera perverts watching your customers and picking their stalking targets). Most places genuinely cannot do anything to improve security because any possible measures would be too expensive and/or annoying to implement, or would involve factors outside their control.
Any forum of any kind where two or more people can meet and communicate is, sooner or later, going to be abused. There is nothing you can do about this. The justice system is about discovering these abuses after the fact, and discouraging the people responsible from doing it again. That's the best thing society has been able to come up with. The next best alternative is a police state, where all your actions are monitored and preemptive correction is used in case it looks like you might abuse something - practical experience has shown that these suck (although people will doubtless repeat the experiment again).
That seems to be the only solution businesses and politicians can come up with for their self-caused problems anymore.
It's the only solution they have.
If they did nothing, they would be seen as ineffective and lose popularity with their voters.
If they fixed the problem, they would be spending money which would reduce the bottom line and thus lose popularity with their voters.
The simple fact is that businesses (and therefore politicians) are better off having security flaws. If you have security flaws, nothing bad happens because everybody has security flaws and your customers are mostly too uninformed to know about it anyway. If you fix security flaws, you have to spend a lot of money on it. If people publicise security flaws, then you may be forced to fix them, which costs you money but does not gain you anything - so you want to stop people from publicising security flaws, any way you can. It's a fairly simple business decision.
This is why commercial (not proprietary) software is bad. Bad software makes more money than good software - because it's cheaper to make and sells just as well, as long as it's *just* good enough to function some of the time. That's also why community-developed software is so often better than commercial (even when the commercial software itself is free software).
Unfortunately this problem is hard to solve without creating more problems.
How bad/good would be if a process could "give" some space to other process?
Firstly, I'll just point out that shared memory systems are about as old as unix (sysv shm is *still* used in linux apps today, despite being the crustyest thing since sliced bread), and all the unix platforms implement at least one such system, often several of them.
It's 'good' in that it has uses. When you are dealing with huge amounts of data, it can be much faster than other IPC methods. One common use is the Xshm extension: your video player (xine) uses an shm mechanism to transfer the video frames to the X server, instead of the normal network socket, because it's much faster (but obviously, only works when the client and server applications are running on the same host).
It's 'bad' in that in most cases, it's not useful. Anything other than one-way data transfer is extremely complicated because you have synchronisation issues between the processes involved - the same stuff that Torvalds was talking about. And for small amounts of data (probably in the vicinity of anything less than a few kb) it's slower than the more straightforward IPC systems, because the overheads of the system outweigh the time taken to copy the data. So most applications are better off using traditional pipes and sockets.
So yes, it can work. Just like Torvalds was saying for the kernel, it has issues. So it is only useful in special circumstances.
How do we expect that the patent office will be able to take these peer patent reviews seriously?
That's their own problem to deal with. It can't be any harder than the question of how they take these patent applications seriously.
How will this stand up in a court of law?
Not at all, by design. The peer review system allows the public to research and submit data. The patent examiner will then research what the public come up with, validate it, and reject the patent. This solves the problem of the patent examiner not having sufficient time (about one working day per patent, spread over a few weeks, is what they get) to search all available records for relevant information and discover that the patent is neither original nor inventive. They are effectively broadcasting a message saying "anybody know about this?" and using the replies as starting points. It is assumed that if you ask a large enough group of people, at least one of them will know something about it - like "I implemented one of those in 1972", which is all the patent examiner needs to compose a rejection for this application.
The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??
Such a conspiracy would work by publishing the broad scope of what's going on, with a few errors added, as fiction. And also publishing a lot of other related, fictional ideas with the same premise. That way it's still effectively secret - you'll never know which one of the X-Files episodes was a true story - and anybody who tries to blow the whistle will be treated like a conspiracy nut and ignored, because everybody already thinks of that as fiction.
It's an insidious idea and it would probably work. Our abilities to falsify images, documents, videos, and even reality (to some extent) have grown so effective that it's no longer possible to prove that aliens exist: even if I brought a live talking mollusc over to your house, you'd get on slashdot and post about three different ways that could have been faked.
The simple fact is that people believe what TV tells them to believe, and TV tells them that people who believe in UFOs and aliens are crazy conspiracy nuts. We will probably never know whether or not this is actually true; the subject has become so obscured that truth is most likely unobtainable at this point.
So, yes, there could be a conspiracy going back 30 years with thousands of people in the know. No, I'm not saying that it wouldn't have leaked by now. I'm saying that if there was a conspiracy, the mere fact that we're talking about it indicates that it has already leaked, and the leaks have been ignored by the public because most of them didn't believe any of it. This should not seem unreasonable to you, because there are hundreds of subjects which involve information, of interest to the general public, which is only known by a group of a few thousand individuals simply because the rest are too stupid to understand it, or because TV told them it wasn't true. Subjects like medicine, biology, physics, statistics, and most other technically inclined disciplines are full of such things. It is a very small step to move from this to outright secrecy, when the populace at large would neither believe or understand the information that is being kept secret.
Whether or not that has actually happened? Well, I've just spent ten minutes explaining why you'll never get a useful answer to that. For practical purposes, it is unlikely that it will ever matter to your life in any way (regardless of what the answer is), and that's probably more important.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to start agreeing with them, and aggressively promoting their viewpoint......to their investors.
"These companies are LOSING money because of massive internet piracy. Look, I can easily download all of their products. Why would you want to invest in these people?"
It's not like they aren't already operating a scorched earth policy towards their customers, so it could hardly make them behave worse. And slashing their investment capital would cripple their lobbying efforts.
It's cute, and gamers (especially the kind that spend their evenings arguing on the internet) hate cute.
This does not explain the existence of Phantom Brave - a game of pure cuteness, where you pick up cute things and proceed to bash other cute things with them, until everything has been reduced to a pile of theme songs.
I want to know when we'll get LSB support from the application vendors.
We won't. That's why LSB is such a big joke.
What the application vendors do is this: they go to Redhat and say, "What should we do to support your system? Do you want Redhat packages or LSB ones?". Redhat reply, "We want Redhat packages, not LSB ones". This process repeats for all other major platform vendors which the application vendor has an interest in.
Having supported each of these platforms, the application vendor has no motivation to provide LSB packages, so they don't bother. The argument goes that LSB packages would be less work for them to produce - but most of the work goes into testing the result anyway (it's not difficult to create a bespoke installer to run on Redhat). And the application vendor doesn't really care, they want to do whatever the platform vendor wants. This is about certification and support, not convinience. Redhat wants Redhat packages, not LSB ones, so that's what you get.
I cannot imagine any real-world scenarios where a corporation would actually want to use LSB to distribute their proprietary software. LSB is a solution in search of a problem.
For a start, these DLL's should be installed into shared location (Common Files, or the System folder). Secondly, most installers now warn and ask you that you are about to overwrite a file of newer version than is currently being installed, and all is well.
Yes, this is in fact a better idea than the applications-as-one-blob idea. I'm guessing that you haven't seen it (as used on macosx). They don't install their libraries into a shared location, they keep one copy in the directory with each application. It's basically like static linking.
Of course, the failure of the Windows method is that incompatible versions of a DLL are frequently given the same name - they don't have an equivalent of the unix soname scheme. So installing a new DLL version can break existing applications.
Independent library packages and dependencies are still a better idea than either of them (regardless of whether you do it like Debian, Redhat, or Gentoo) - assuming of course that the vendor gets it right.
Nothing stops someone from bundling everything a program needs in a self-contained folder. That's how most of the proprietary apps I use are packaged. Open source devs could do this with their programs too, but it would be more effort without much benefit when the distros are going to package it anyway.
Actually, it's not because it's more effort. It's because it is fundamentally a bad idea.
If you bundle everything you need into one blob for each application, then suddenly your system has installed several hundred copies of gtk, all at different versions. Obviously this is quite wasteful of space, but even that is not the real problem. This is:
A security advisory was just released for all copies of gtk before a given version.
What exactly do you do now? You don't know which of your hundreds of applications has got that code included in it. Even if you could figure it out, you now have to either rebuild all of those by hand (if you can), or go to each individual upstream developer and download an updated version from them. If you're a desktop user then you probably aren't going to get this done, so you'll be running with known security holes in some applications. If you're a sysadmin then you're probably going to find a new job.
I would say that the ability to install security updates in a reasonably painless and secure manner is one of the most fundamental tests of any distrbution method. Applications-as-self-contained-blobs fails it badly.
You're half right. The bit you got wrong is that the profit motive does not inspire people to produce consistent software. Most commercial software is just inconsistent, with everything around it and sometimes even with itself. This happens because each piece of software has a different project leader, and nobody in management above them understands enough to impose a single vision on the whole system. Given a choice, an individual project team will usually attempt to differentiate their project from all the others, in the hope of getting more money and/or recognition.
So the conclusion is probably that different software created by different people is usually going to be different. That's probably a good thing and you should just get used to it. Nobody can invent a single way to do things that is right for every piece of software you might want to use in the future.
The sucking of your boss is an essential part of the air-conditioning system, therefore this issue cannot be fixed without breaking fire safety regulations. How else would we shift that much wind around the building?
I already want to kill him, but what I would actually do is to write a plugin for xine that identifies these adverts and blanks them out (assuming somebody else didn't beat me to it).
I don't look at adverts on slashdot, why should I look at them on TV? (Ignoring for the moment the minor point that I don't watch TV)
People need to find a better business model than adverts. And they definitely need to find a better model than charging you for the service and STILL having adverts. The BBC has been proving that there's a better way for decades.
On the other hand, I think email is not admissible as 'proof' in a court of law
The only thing I can think of which is admissible as proof in a court is a confession. Just about everything is admissible as evidence, but the court will be very skeptical about all of it (including first-hand witness reports - people are lousy witnesses). When there isn't any proof, a jury decides based on whatever they want.
All forms of uncertified mail are pretty worthless unless the other party admits to having written it, in which case that's a confession.
Slashdot Mirror
The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in.
No. For years, Sun have been refusing to permit distro makers to include java. Recently they relaxed slightly (distro makers are actually permitted to redistribute the thing now), but it is still impossible for anybody but Sun to support the thing.
The people that are acting to prevent anyone from getting access to java are Sun. Nobody else has any control over this.
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base.
Nonsense. There are many reasons why they can't do it, and they don't do it because it would be a big support issue. Currently, they can say "we will support this software and fix the problems". If they include things where that's not possible, then they can't say that any more.
You need to get your head out of your capitalist arse and realise that there are more important things about a piece of software than its price tag.
I've been using Linux for over 8 years now (10 maybe)... and I've only got Linux installed on ALL my computer. But it has taken quite some years and quite some HAIR-pulling to get anything to do what I want for my creature comforts...mp3 support, DVD region-free playbacks, Nvidia-3D gaming, Audigy-2 support, Obscure-web-cams, IN-Sane scanners etc.... not to mention the night that it took to get the new WIDE-Screen 1680-1050 up and running with editing etc/X11/xorg.conf with an entirely new modeline with numbers enough to scare the bajezuz outta "Svanson".
Let's see how easy it is to get those things working on Windows...
mp3 support? Install an audio player... same as on linux.
Region-free DVD playing? You're going to have to spend a fair bit of time trawling through fairly 'dubious' web pages looking for a suitable piece of software, and odds are it'll be malware-infested when you finally find one that is not region-locked.
3d gaming? Well, that's just not possible on Linux because all the 3d games are for Windows, no real argument there. But buy a playstation and stop trying to play commercial games on PCs, you'll save yourself a lot of pain.
Audigy 2? Presumably that's some new Creative Labs sound card... personally, I have never found the Windows drivers for Creative cards to be anything other than extreme pain. They come bundled with a whole bunch of crappy applications that I don't want, and they crash the system way too often - to the point where tech support for games now explicitly tells you to check for upgrades to your audio drivers, specifically because of the Creative ones that are so buggy. I just don't buy cards from Creative any more, but I doubt that the experience of getting them to work on Linux could be any worse than the experience on Windows.
Obscure web cams? Hell. Those are agony on Windows too. Buggy drivers that aren't compatible with ANY of the applications you want to use.
Scanners. Hah. At the company I work for, we have stopped even trying to use TWAIN scanners on Windows. If the scanner uses USB or SCSI or the parallel port or any other local device connection, we just say: we cannot and will not support this device. All the scanners used at the company are now smart network devices, which do their own scanning and upload the file via FTP or SMB. Trying to get TWAIN devices to work is just soooo painful that we refuse to make the attempt any more. I expect they're painful on Linux too, but probably no more than they are on Windows. I wouldn't know, on account of having nice network devices that do not require any software to install.
Obscurely-sized display devices? On both Windows and Linux, this requires an upgrade to the display drivers (in X, on Linux). The only difference is that on Linux, if you don't want to upgrade, it's possible to get the thing to work by writing your own modeline; on Windows you must upgrade and if there is no upgrade available, you are screwed.
So - most of what you said is true, but it's true of Windows as well. Windows will never be suitable for the regular idiot. The only difference is that with Windows, the regular idiots don't realise this, because Microsoft have been lying to them about it. I see no reason why some companies wouldn't be able to lie to them about Linux too.
I'm a computer professional and I like Linux and it's abilities, but there is no way my mom or dad could use it as far as installing new programs goes.
I'm a computer professional, and I also have a mom and a dad. And there is no way my mom could use Windows as far as installing new programs goes. If she ever tries, then sooner or later I am going to end up having to spend a weekend trying to clean up the mess of spyware and worms and recover her files.
I don't see what the point of your comparison is. It's hard to install new programs on Linux platforms. It's hard AND DANGEROUS to install new programs on Windows platforms. Either way it's outside the abilities of 'normal' users.
Certainly if Microsoft, or anybody else who generated a header file or API, tried to claim a copyright interest in programs written to that API, the world, and most of all the free software community, would be up in arms.
Microsoft do claim that and people do not seem to be up in arms about it. You have to pay for a license that allows you to write programs using their tools. The license agreements clearly state their position that you may only do this because you've paid for it.
...for they are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
[Yeah, it's an old one, but do I get bonus points for spelling 'ketchup' correctly?]
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly
This is a design feature of every camera surveillance system (the locations of cameras aren't as secret as the media makes out). They aren't supposed to stop crime, except for things like petty vandalism by bored school kids. Cameras are supposed to move crime to other places - away from rich people, and towards people who have little political influence. As an added bonus, these people tend to be less likely to report crimes (maybe not for murders, but fights and vandalism and suchlike often go unreported in poorer areas), so your crime figures go down.
Optimistically, you can say that by concentrating the crime in poorer areas, you will reduce the criminal population due to competition, and by limiting their revenue stream. Might even work. But mostly, cameras are about improving the security of the powerful at the expense of the poor. This should be expected - most people just don't care about crime in slum areas.
What about people who have not been convicted of a crime, but who the police have decided are suspects? Should they be treated as innocents or criminals?
Note that this includes virtually everybody who is arrested.
Your data is permanently kept, so that if ever one of the other few dozen people who have near-identical fingerprints to you (in the US alone) commits a crime, you can be charged with it, thereby reducing the number of unsolved cases. It's a form of patriotism.
Sadly I'm not joking.
If by beating Linux to the market you understand having the code taken by a company, and not seeing anything really valuable back in return, then yeah, you can praise OSX as much as you want.
Don't forget Windows. There's freebsd code in that too.
The biggest problem is that the jet engine cannot be powered by electricity - it fundamentally requires combustion to operate. We would need a serious alternative, and propellors just don't cut it for the bigger craft.
I wonder if ion thrusters work any better...
I expect that the justice department is quite aware of the reasons. Given the fact that they were in a strong position and settled for a pittance, it seems quite clear that they received political orders to back down, probably related to changes in the government at that time and some of Microsoft's campaign contributions.
If that's true then this new development must also be political. Who did Microsoft piss off this time?
Parades can increase security.
Coffee shops can install cameras or hire security.
These things are security theatre. They do not usually increase the security of the customers (cameras actually decrease security, because now you have camera perverts watching your customers and picking their stalking targets). Most places genuinely cannot do anything to improve security because any possible measures would be too expensive and/or annoying to implement, or would involve factors outside their control.
Any forum of any kind where two or more people can meet and communicate is, sooner or later, going to be abused. There is nothing you can do about this. The justice system is about discovering these abuses after the fact, and discouraging the people responsible from doing it again. That's the best thing society has been able to come up with. The next best alternative is a police state, where all your actions are monitored and preemptive correction is used in case it looks like you might abuse something - practical experience has shown that these suck (although people will doubtless repeat the experiment again).
Shoot the Messenger.
That seems to be the only solution businesses and politicians can come up with for their self-caused problems anymore.
It's the only solution they have.
If they did nothing, they would be seen as ineffective and lose popularity with their voters.
If they fixed the problem, they would be spending money which would reduce the bottom line and thus lose popularity with their voters.
The simple fact is that businesses (and therefore politicians) are better off having security flaws. If you have security flaws, nothing bad happens because everybody has security flaws and your customers are mostly too uninformed to know about it anyway. If you fix security flaws, you have to spend a lot of money on it. If people publicise security flaws, then you may be forced to fix them, which costs you money but does not gain you anything - so you want to stop people from publicising security flaws, any way you can. It's a fairly simple business decision.
This is why commercial (not proprietary) software is bad. Bad software makes more money than good software - because it's cheaper to make and sells just as well, as long as it's *just* good enough to function some of the time. That's also why community-developed software is so often better than commercial (even when the commercial software itself is free software).
Unfortunately this problem is hard to solve without creating more problems.
How bad/good would be if a process could "give" some space to other process?
Firstly, I'll just point out that shared memory systems are about as old as unix (sysv shm is *still* used in linux apps today, despite being the crustyest thing since sliced bread), and all the unix platforms implement at least one such system, often several of them.
It's 'good' in that it has uses. When you are dealing with huge amounts of data, it can be much faster than other IPC methods. One common use is the Xshm extension: your video player (xine) uses an shm mechanism to transfer the video frames to the X server, instead of the normal network socket, because it's much faster (but obviously, only works when the client and server applications are running on the same host).
It's 'bad' in that in most cases, it's not useful. Anything other than one-way data transfer is extremely complicated because you have synchronisation issues between the processes involved - the same stuff that Torvalds was talking about. And for small amounts of data (probably in the vicinity of anything less than a few kb) it's slower than the more straightforward IPC systems, because the overheads of the system outweigh the time taken to copy the data. So most applications are better off using traditional pipes and sockets.
So yes, it can work. Just like Torvalds was saying for the kernel, it has issues. So it is only useful in special circumstances.
How do we expect that the patent office will be able to take these peer patent reviews seriously?
That's their own problem to deal with. It can't be any harder than the question of how they take these patent applications seriously.
How will this stand up in a court of law?
Not at all, by design. The peer review system allows the public to research and submit data. The patent examiner will then research what the public come up with, validate it, and reject the patent. This solves the problem of the patent examiner not having sufficient time (about one working day per patent, spread over a few weeks, is what they get) to search all available records for relevant information and discover that the patent is neither original nor inventive. They are effectively broadcasting a message saying "anybody know about this?" and using the replies as starting points. It is assumed that if you ask a large enough group of people, at least one of them will know something about it - like "I implemented one of those in 1972", which is all the patent examiner needs to compose a rejection for this application.
The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??
Such a conspiracy would work by publishing the broad scope of what's going on, with a few errors added, as fiction. And also publishing a lot of other related, fictional ideas with the same premise. That way it's still effectively secret - you'll never know which one of the X-Files episodes was a true story - and anybody who tries to blow the whistle will be treated like a conspiracy nut and ignored, because everybody already thinks of that as fiction.
It's an insidious idea and it would probably work. Our abilities to falsify images, documents, videos, and even reality (to some extent) have grown so effective that it's no longer possible to prove that aliens exist: even if I brought a live talking mollusc over to your house, you'd get on slashdot and post about three different ways that could have been faked.
The simple fact is that people believe what TV tells them to believe, and TV tells them that people who believe in UFOs and aliens are crazy conspiracy nuts. We will probably never know whether or not this is actually true; the subject has become so obscured that truth is most likely unobtainable at this point.
So, yes, there could be a conspiracy going back 30 years with thousands of people in the know. No, I'm not saying that it wouldn't have leaked by now. I'm saying that if there was a conspiracy, the mere fact that we're talking about it indicates that it has already leaked, and the leaks have been ignored by the public because most of them didn't believe any of it. This should not seem unreasonable to you, because there are hundreds of subjects which involve information, of interest to the general public, which is only known by a group of a few thousand individuals simply because the rest are too stupid to understand it, or because TV told them it wasn't true. Subjects like medicine, biology, physics, statistics, and most other technically inclined disciplines are full of such things. It is a very small step to move from this to outright secrecy, when the populace at large would neither believe or understand the information that is being kept secret.
Whether or not that has actually happened? Well, I've just spent ten minutes explaining why you'll never get a useful answer to that. For practical purposes, it is unlikely that it will ever matter to your life in any way (regardless of what the answer is), and that's probably more important.
Maybe the best thing to do would be to start agreeing with them, and aggressively promoting their viewpoint... ...to their investors.
"These companies are LOSING money because of massive internet piracy. Look, I can easily download all of their products. Why would you want to invest in these people?"
It's not like they aren't already operating a scorched earth policy towards their customers, so it could hardly make them behave worse. And slashing their investment capital would cripple their lobbying efforts.
It's cute, and gamers (especially the kind that spend their evenings arguing on the internet) hate cute.
This does not explain the existence of Phantom Brave - a game of pure cuteness, where you pick up cute things and proceed to bash other cute things with them, until everything has been reduced to a pile of theme songs.
I want to know when we'll get LSB support from the application vendors.
We won't. That's why LSB is such a big joke.
What the application vendors do is this: they go to Redhat and say, "What should we do to support your system? Do you want Redhat packages or LSB ones?". Redhat reply, "We want Redhat packages, not LSB ones". This process repeats for all other major platform vendors which the application vendor has an interest in.
Having supported each of these platforms, the application vendor has no motivation to provide LSB packages, so they don't bother. The argument goes that LSB packages would be less work for them to produce - but most of the work goes into testing the result anyway (it's not difficult to create a bespoke installer to run on Redhat). And the application vendor doesn't really care, they want to do whatever the platform vendor wants. This is about certification and support, not convinience. Redhat wants Redhat packages, not LSB ones, so that's what you get.
I cannot imagine any real-world scenarios where a corporation would actually want to use LSB to distribute their proprietary software. LSB is a solution in search of a problem.
For a start, these DLL's should be installed into shared location (Common Files, or the System folder). Secondly, most installers now warn and ask you that you are about to overwrite a file of newer version than is currently being installed, and all is well.
Yes, this is in fact a better idea than the applications-as-one-blob idea. I'm guessing that you haven't seen it (as used on macosx). They don't install their libraries into a shared location, they keep one copy in the directory with each application. It's basically like static linking.
Of course, the failure of the Windows method is that incompatible versions of a DLL are frequently given the same name - they don't have an equivalent of the unix soname scheme. So installing a new DLL version can break existing applications.
Independent library packages and dependencies are still a better idea than either of them (regardless of whether you do it like Debian, Redhat, or Gentoo) - assuming of course that the vendor gets it right.
Nothing stops someone from bundling everything a program needs in a self-contained folder. That's how most of the proprietary apps I use are packaged. Open source devs could do this with their programs too, but it would be more effort without much benefit when the distros are going to package it anyway.
Actually, it's not because it's more effort. It's because it is fundamentally a bad idea.
If you bundle everything you need into one blob for each application, then suddenly your system has installed several hundred copies of gtk, all at different versions. Obviously this is quite wasteful of space, but even that is not the real problem. This is:
A security advisory was just released for all copies of gtk before a given version.
What exactly do you do now? You don't know which of your hundreds of applications has got that code included in it. Even if you could figure it out, you now have to either rebuild all of those by hand (if you can), or go to each individual upstream developer and download an updated version from them. If you're a desktop user then you probably aren't going to get this done, so you'll be running with known security holes in some applications. If you're a sysadmin then you're probably going to find a new job.
I would say that the ability to install security updates in a reasonably painless and secure manner is one of the most fundamental tests of any distrbution method. Applications-as-self-contained-blobs fails it badly.
You're half right. The bit you got wrong is that the profit motive does not inspire people to produce consistent software. Most commercial software is just inconsistent, with everything around it and sometimes even with itself. This happens because each piece of software has a different project leader, and nobody in management above them understands enough to impose a single vision on the whole system. Given a choice, an individual project team will usually attempt to differentiate their project from all the others, in the hope of getting more money and/or recognition.
So the conclusion is probably that different software created by different people is usually going to be different. That's probably a good thing and you should just get used to it. Nobody can invent a single way to do things that is right for every piece of software you might want to use in the future.
The sucking of your boss is an essential part of the air-conditioning system, therefore this issue cannot be fixed without breaking fire safety regulations. How else would we shift that much wind around the building?
I already want to kill him, but what I would actually do is to write a plugin for xine that identifies these adverts and blanks them out (assuming somebody else didn't beat me to it).
I don't look at adverts on slashdot, why should I look at them on TV? (Ignoring for the moment the minor point that I don't watch TV)
People need to find a better business model than adverts. And they definitely need to find a better model than charging you for the service and STILL having adverts. The BBC has been proving that there's a better way for decades.
On the other hand, I think email is not admissible as 'proof' in a court of law
The only thing I can think of which is admissible as proof in a court is a confession. Just about everything is admissible as evidence, but the court will be very skeptical about all of it (including first-hand witness reports - people are lousy witnesses). When there isn't any proof, a jury decides based on whatever they want.
All forms of uncertified mail are pretty worthless unless the other party admits to having written it, in which case that's a confession.