The GPLv2 is the GPL we all have used since sometime in the 90's. The GPLv3 decide to add some activism onto it and as a result isn't compatible with the GPLv2 anymore.
The GPLv2 was also an implementation of activism and it too has plenty of detractors. Any license out of the FSF is going to be an implementation of activism. It's like the people who like Fox News "Because it is SOOOOO unbiased!". It's plenty biased but the bias lines up with their personal inclinations, causes little cognitive dissonance and is therefore seen as unbiased. In the same vein, the GPLv2 aligns with the goals of it's users and is thus seen as a purely practical tool for implementing them. What GPLv2 users who gripe about the GPLv3 REALLY mean is that they agree with some but not all of the FSF's "activism".
E's problem is that the devs are never happy with it so it never seems to enter a "last 10%" stage where all user visible things you can use like the file manager and Bling are made fast, stable, and good looking. This sort of polishing means putting pretty much a complete halt to adding Really Cool New Stuff for awhile. Everytime E is about to reach that stage, they announce a Total Rewrite That Will Be Better Than Ever. I lost patience with it years ago.
With a dynamic playlist, you aren't "continually defining new playlists". If you add or take away a bunch of stuff, you just find "All Collection" in the Dynamic Playlists and Load. Once that is done, the search bar works like you say. At least, that is what this Amarok 1.4 user does. If they took that functionality out of Amarok 2 then I'll join you on the Hater Wagon.
As for 4.0 Must Be Perfectly Cromulent Or I Will Be Really Mad, the same thing happened with KDE 2.0. They called it 2.0 because the underlying APIs and frameworks were done and the rest wouldn't follow unless there was a release to get the distros on board. They did a pretty good job with the the 2.0 underpinnings because they have lasted to the current KDE 3.5.9. On the other hand, I remember what running 2.0 was like at first and am waiting until 4.1 or 4.2 shows up as a Kubuntu default release (having a depo doesn't count. When it is a default then I know it will be polished enough not to annoy me). The KDE devs have done this exact thing before and it didn't take long for it to make a good desktop. So just chill and gently extricate yourself from the bleeding edge. All will be well.
As long as you absolutely require proprietary VSTs, you would still be in danger of "having the rug pulled" from under you even if Linux in all other ways could meet your needs. With the requirement for low latency and high throughput for high bit multitrack, no form of emulation would ever cut it. You'd have to be able to trust the closed VST developers to the same extent you could trust having the source to everything else on your system.
I think you're stuck for it one way or another no matter what you run.
Well, I suppose you could dedicate a box strictly to running old software and use it as a midi black box but still.....
The only thing that truly makes this class of machine interesting to me is the super low price for something that can do basic web surfing and document handling. That it runs Windows or Linux is largely immaterial except for the fact that they have to put in more hardware for it to run Windows and possibly pay for the Windows license. This makes the machine more expensive. A $499 and up machine that will compete with low end notebooks with 1024x768 screens does not excite me. A machine that costs $250 (or even less!) that is focused on certain kinds of basic functionality does.
The cheapy machine is something I can throw in my toolbag and use as such. ASUS continues to pimp these things out and raise the price point. I think they are jumping the shark already.
Ever says "Our product is ISO XXXXX compliant!" I'm going to reply, "I don't give a damn. I can sum up my regard for the ISO in five letters O . O . X . M. L.".
It took reverse engineering to make a BIOS that could be legally redistributed. The original IBM PC was made almost entirely out of off-the-shelf parts. The only thing preventing clones was the copyright on the BIOS. The first clone BIOS was produced by Chinese Wall reverse engineering. One team disassembled the BIOS and wrote a detailed specification which a second team implemented.
Sorry, I agree with the OP. The first IBM PCs were reasonably open machines from the user/developer point of view. They were only partially closed to third parties wishing to make their own versions of the machine.
No matter how hard they try, the legislature cannot regulate property rights out of existence. Anytime the government gets involved in the economy in this way, rights violations occur.
Unfortunately property rights cannot be absolute for any business whose infrastructure needs to be built on or across the property of others. Cable and telephone companies can't build their networks without obtaining right-of-way. Now, I suppose they could obtain that permission from each and every property owner whose land they have to cross but it would only take a handful of people saying "no under any circumstances" to ensure that we wouldn't have cable, landlines, railroads, or even roads for that matter. That would be just fine with a lot of hard-core libertarians but it is a non-starter in the real world.
Since we deem such infrastructure necessarily, there is some abrogation of property rights so that cable companies and phone companies can build out. That being the case, I'm not all against precluding certain types of dickery with what is partially a public good.
Killing the parent process will get rid of a zombie. The problem here is that the system has been pwned and the hidden parent process is "msdirtytricks".
I think you missed the point. A "drive-by-wire" wheel is possible and IMHO is a better analogy for controlling pivoting wheels on a car. Wheels also allow a variety of ways of gripping the controller, some of which are more comfortable than others. Why does the controller have to be a joystick?
There is one thing about "fly-by-wire" type tech in cars that scares me though. What if you lose power or suffer system failure in the control electronics at highway speed? A car with mechanical linkages is still controllable in that situation.
What I like even better than the Amiga fanboys is the legacy of the platform itself. It seems that every three or four years someone buys the Amiga IP...for accounting writeoff I bet...and makes an announcement about the Return Real Soon of the All New Amiga. Then the four or five remaining Amiga fans get all hot and bothered. It's the zombie of the OS world staggering about the landscape crying for "Braaaaaaiiiiinnns!"
Mozilla always has Linux tarballs of Firefox that you can just drop in your home directory. I'm running FF3beta4 on Ubuntu Gutsy just fine. Course, backup or move your.mozilla directory if you're just trying it out.
The other thing I did was to remove the plugins directory after untarring and made a symlink to/usr/lib/firefox/plugins for Flash and so-forth.
I don't care for the sucky aspects of it either but ultimately I have to keep email useful for the users on my network. We usually have ~=1000 valid incoming emails a day. Likely many of those are spam too but I've cranked up the filters as high as I dare. Blocking off residential IP space spares us from having to filter and deliver 50,000 to 100,000 spams a day. That is a pretty good chunk of CPU and bandwidth saved right there. An immediate 50:1 to 100:1 reduction on incoming server load is hard to pass up. Furthermore, some percentage of the traffic that we DO let through turns out to be spam anyway. My best estimate is perhaps 50 spams get through a day. If I had to categorize botnet traffic, that would inevitably go up and get users barking at me.
Now, I COULD let the botnet traffic in and heavily penalize it in spam points. On the other hand, I whitelist maybe two or three servers on residential IP space a year. The tradeoff in bandwidth, server resources, and filter accuracy between "allow categorized residential" and "block residential minus whitelist" is simply too favorable in the blocking direction.
Functional democracies require ways to deter griefers or at least the very worst of griefers. The spammers have made SMTP their personal playground and there is no end in sight to it. It is they who should have the blame for mail servers being configured as fortresses. It is all the mail admins can do to keep on top of their shenanigans.
I'll take everything everyone else has said about autonomy...that is being an actual robot...as given. You want to get me to watch? Lose the Lexan encased "arena" and the studio audience.
Put the thing somewhere like the Bonneville salt flats and make it anything goes. And I do mean "anything": strong corrosives, blowtorches, missile weapons, guns, woodchippers, explosives , or anything else destructive the builders can think of. I've seen all the hammers, wedges, and spinny things I care to. Bring on some real robot war.
The only way I could get Spamassassin 3.2.4 in the form of a deb was from Ubuntu so I built the source DEBs (there were some dependencies) on a machine that I use as a build host and testing playground. That Spamassassin instance has been chugging along without a hitch for a couple of months now on an Etch server. There is no way I'm to going install Ubuntu binary debs on a running server but dpkg-buildpackage really DOES make it all one big happy family. I've also built Sid source DEBs for my Ubuntu desktops.
This is one of the things I like most about Debian derived distros. The packages are highly compatible at the source level. My experiences a few years back rebuilding SRPMs between say RedHat and Mandrake weren't nearly as smooth.
Farmer Giles of Ham would work passably well as a children's book. Tolkien wrote that and a few other short stories in a conventional narrative style rather than the Old-Testament-like style of the Silmarillion.
The Christian God, especially the Old Testament version, shows a lot of human attributes. We're warned that he is a jealous God, he can be either angry or pleased, he's been known to make the odd wager with Satan, and if none of that clinches it certain Protestant sects emphasize one's personal relationship with God. We're furthermore told that Man was made in God's Image. I hate to be snarky here but the God as described in the Bible is practically begging to described in terms of human analogies.
It looks an awful lot to me like semantic games are being played so that theists can duck entire swaths of apologetics and have their cake and eat it too. Playing around with the definition of the word "sentient" would be one such game. We have a being who we are clearly told has thoughts and feelings and can take independent actions for His own reasons yet somehow he isn't sentient because it opens the door to uncomfortable arguments. Incidentally, I wouldn't terribly if you dragged those old "straw man" chestnuts out. I must have missed out on those watching old flamewars on alt.atheism.
My answer to Dionysius is that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.........
You're taking yourself far too seriously. The fact of the matter and point I'm making is that spammers cause mail admins a lot of grief. As a result of that grief, some of us use blue language to vent. For instance, I like the idea of an electric chair with a dial instead of a switch so the execution will last a good goddamn long time for spammers. If actually on a jury, I'd recommend 5 years or so and feel justice was done.
It's called "Getting fuckin' pissed." and when a spam run manages to get elude what I've done and I'm on the receiving end of mails from users who don't understand the realities angrily ask me "To see to it that I don't get nasty mails like this again!!!" I get fuckin' pissed! And when I get fuckin' pissed I wish no end of nasty things on spammers who are criminals when all is said and done. It doesn't mean I'd actually juice a bound spammer in a torturing electric chair or watch one being raped but I won't claim to be so big that it isn't fun to think about.
I'm not going to be sad that a spammer went to prison and I'm not going to be terribly offended that others are reveling in some possible consequences of that. The spammer certainly should have thought about prison before turning to crime for living. If prison rape actually offends you that much then spend some productive time on prison reform. Don't presume to lecture those who have to continually battle these criminal assholes.
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The GPLv2 is the GPL we all have used since sometime in the 90's. The GPLv3 decide to add some activism onto it and as a result isn't compatible with the GPLv2 anymore.
The GPLv2 was also an implementation of activism and it too has plenty of detractors. Any license out of the FSF is going to be an implementation of activism. It's like the people who like Fox News "Because it is SOOOOO unbiased!". It's plenty biased but the bias lines up with their personal inclinations, causes little cognitive dissonance and is therefore seen as unbiased. In the same vein, the GPLv2 aligns with the goals of it's users and is thus seen as a purely practical tool for implementing them. What GPLv2 users who gripe about the GPLv3 REALLY mean is that they agree with some but not all of the FSF's "activism".
E's problem is that the devs are never happy with it so it never seems to enter a "last 10%" stage where all user visible things you can use like the file manager and Bling are made fast, stable, and good looking. This sort of polishing means putting pretty much a complete halt to adding Really Cool New Stuff for awhile. Everytime E is about to reach that stage, they announce a Total Rewrite That Will Be Better Than Ever. I lost patience with it years ago.
With a dynamic playlist, you aren't "continually defining new playlists". If you add or take away a bunch of stuff, you just find "All Collection" in the Dynamic Playlists and Load. Once that is done, the search bar works like you say. At least, that is what this Amarok 1.4 user does. If they took that functionality out of Amarok 2 then I'll join you on the Hater Wagon.
As for 4.0 Must Be Perfectly Cromulent Or I Will Be Really Mad, the same thing happened with KDE 2.0. They called it 2.0 because the underlying APIs and frameworks were done and the rest wouldn't follow unless there was a release to get the distros on board. They did a pretty good job with the the 2.0 underpinnings because they have lasted to the current KDE 3.5.9. On the other hand, I remember what running 2.0 was like at first and am waiting until 4.1 or 4.2 shows up as a Kubuntu default release (having a depo doesn't count. When it is a default then I know it will be polished enough not to annoy me). The KDE devs have done this exact thing before and it didn't take long for it to make a good desktop. So just chill and gently extricate yourself from the bleeding edge. All will be well.
As long as you absolutely require proprietary VSTs, you would still be in danger of "having the rug pulled" from under you even if Linux in all other ways could meet your needs. With the requirement for low latency and high throughput for high bit multitrack, no form of emulation would ever cut it. You'd have to be able to trust the closed VST developers to the same extent you could trust having the source to everything else on your system.
I think you're stuck for it one way or another no matter what you run.
Well, I suppose you could dedicate a box strictly to running old software and use it as a midi black box but still.....
The only thing that truly makes this class of machine interesting to me is the super low price for something that can do basic web surfing and document handling. That it runs Windows or Linux is largely immaterial except for the fact that they have to put in more hardware for it to run Windows and possibly pay for the Windows license. This makes the machine more expensive. A $499 and up machine that will compete with low end notebooks with 1024x768 screens does not excite me. A machine that costs $250 (or even less!) that is focused on certain kinds of basic functionality does.
The cheapy machine is something I can throw in my toolbag and use as such. ASUS continues to pimp these things out and raise the price point. I think they are jumping the shark already.
Ever says "Our product is ISO XXXXX compliant!" I'm going to reply, "I don't give a damn. I can sum up my regard for the ISO in five letters O . O . X . M. L.".
Ubuntu 8.04 will include AppArmor by default. I don't how much of a difference it will make in a pressure cooker like a hacking competition though.
It took reverse engineering to make a BIOS that could be legally redistributed. The original IBM PC was made almost entirely out of off-the-shelf parts. The only thing preventing clones was the copyright on the BIOS. The first clone BIOS was produced by Chinese Wall reverse engineering. One team disassembled the BIOS and wrote a detailed specification which a second team implemented.
Sorry, I agree with the OP. The first IBM PCs were reasonably open machines from the user/developer point of view. They were only partially closed to third parties wishing to make their own versions of the machine.
By your reasoning the cable companies already used the government to violate property rights to get what they want. So why any sympathy for them now?
No matter how hard they try, the legislature cannot regulate property rights out of existence. Anytime the government gets involved in the economy in this way, rights violations occur.
Unfortunately property rights cannot be absolute for any business whose infrastructure needs to be built on or across the property of others. Cable and telephone companies can't build their networks without obtaining right-of-way. Now, I suppose they could obtain that permission from each and every property owner whose land they have to cross but it would only take a handful of people saying "no under any circumstances" to ensure that we wouldn't have cable, landlines, railroads, or even roads for that matter. That would be just fine with a lot of hard-core libertarians but it is a non-starter in the real world.
Since we deem such infrastructure necessarily, there is some abrogation of property rights so that cable companies and phone companies can build out. That being the case, I'm not all against precluding certain types of dickery with what is partially a public good.
Killing the parent process will get rid of a zombie. The problem here is that the system has been pwned and the hidden parent process is "msdirtytricks".
I think you missed the point. A "drive-by-wire" wheel is possible and IMHO is a better analogy for controlling pivoting wheels on a car. Wheels also allow a variety of ways of gripping the controller, some of which are more comfortable than others. Why does the controller have to be a joystick?
There is one thing about "fly-by-wire" type tech in cars that scares me though. What if you lose power or suffer system failure in the control electronics at highway speed? A car with mechanical linkages is still controllable in that situation.
What I like even better than the Amiga fanboys is the legacy of the platform itself. It seems that every three or four years someone buys the Amiga IP...for accounting writeoff I bet...and makes an announcement about the Return Real Soon of the All New Amiga. Then the four or five remaining Amiga fans get all hot and bothered. It's the zombie of the OS world staggering about the landscape crying for "Braaaaaaiiiiinnns!"
Wake me up when they send in the Navy Seals to kill spambot herders.
It's SP2 or three years after release in our organization. There must also be a fully baked Server 2008 to go along with it.
Well, Barnum DID say "There's a sucker born every minute." I think he was being charitable.
Mozilla always has Linux tarballs of Firefox that you can just drop in your home directory. I'm running FF3beta4 on Ubuntu Gutsy just fine. Course, backup or move your .mozilla directory if you're just trying it out.
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins for Flash and so-forth.
The other thing I did was to remove the plugins directory after untarring and made a symlink to
Any minute now, you're going to get one of those "why this won't work forms" ;-).
I don't care for the sucky aspects of it either but ultimately I have to keep email useful for the users on my network. We usually have ~=1000 valid incoming emails a day. Likely many of those are spam too but I've cranked up the filters as high as I dare. Blocking off residential IP space spares us from having to filter and deliver 50,000 to 100,000 spams a day. That is a pretty good chunk of CPU and bandwidth saved right there. An immediate 50:1 to 100:1 reduction on incoming server load is hard to pass up. Furthermore, some percentage of the traffic that we DO let through turns out to be spam anyway. My best estimate is perhaps 50 spams get through a day. If I had to categorize botnet traffic, that would inevitably go up and get users barking at me.
Now, I COULD let the botnet traffic in and heavily penalize it in spam points. On the other hand, I whitelist maybe two or three servers on residential IP space a year. The tradeoff in bandwidth, server resources, and filter accuracy between "allow categorized residential" and "block residential minus whitelist" is simply too favorable in the blocking direction.
Functional democracies require ways to deter griefers or at least the very worst of griefers. The spammers have made SMTP their personal playground and there is no end in sight to it. It is they who should have the blame for mail servers being configured as fortresses. It is all the mail admins can do to keep on top of their shenanigans.
I'll take everything everyone else has said about autonomy...that is being an actual robot...as given. You want to get me to watch? Lose the Lexan encased "arena" and the studio audience.
Put the thing somewhere like the Bonneville salt flats and make it anything goes. And I do mean "anything": strong corrosives, blowtorches, missile weapons, guns, woodchippers, explosives , or anything else destructive the builders can think of. I've seen all the hammers, wedges, and spinny things I care to. Bring on some real robot war .
The only way I could get Spamassassin 3.2.4 in the form of a deb was from Ubuntu so I built the source DEBs (there were some dependencies) on a machine that I use as a build host and testing playground. That Spamassassin instance has been chugging along without a hitch for a couple of months now on an Etch server. There is no way I'm to going install Ubuntu binary debs on a running server but dpkg-buildpackage really DOES make it all one big happy family. I've also built Sid source DEBs for my Ubuntu desktops.
This is one of the things I like most about Debian derived distros. The packages are highly compatible at the source level. My experiences a few years back rebuilding SRPMs between say RedHat and Mandrake weren't nearly as smooth.
"Money gooooooood!, Napster baaaaaaaaaad!"
Farmer Giles of Ham would work passably well as a children's book. Tolkien wrote that and a few other short stories in a conventional narrative style rather than the Old-Testament-like style of the Silmarillion.
http://www.amazon.com/Farmer-Giles-Ham-Adventures-Worminghall/dp/0618009361
The Christian God, especially the Old Testament version, shows a lot of human attributes. We're warned that he is a jealous God, he can be either angry or pleased, he's been known to make the odd wager with Satan, and if none of that clinches it certain Protestant sects emphasize one's personal relationship with God. We're furthermore told that Man was made in God's Image. I hate to be snarky here but the God as described in the Bible is practically begging to described in terms of human analogies.
It looks an awful lot to me like semantic games are being played so that theists can duck entire swaths of apologetics and have their cake and eat it too. Playing around with the definition of the word "sentient" would be one such game. We have a being who we are clearly told has thoughts and feelings and can take independent actions for His own reasons yet somehow he isn't sentient because it opens the door to uncomfortable arguments. Incidentally, I wouldn't terribly if you dragged those old "straw man" chestnuts out. I must have missed out on those watching old flamewars on alt.atheism.
My answer to Dionysius is that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.........
You're taking yourself far too seriously. The fact of the matter and point I'm making is that spammers cause mail admins a lot of grief. As a result of that grief, some of us use blue language to vent. For instance, I like the idea of an electric chair with a dial instead of a switch so the execution will last a good goddamn long time for spammers. If actually on a jury, I'd recommend 5 years or so and feel justice was done.
It's called "Getting fuckin' pissed." and when a spam run manages to get elude what I've done and I'm on the receiving end of mails from users who don't understand the realities angrily ask me "To see to it that I don't get nasty mails like this again!!!" I get fuckin' pissed! And when I get fuckin' pissed I wish no end of nasty things on spammers who are criminals when all is said and done. It doesn't mean I'd actually juice a bound spammer in a torturing electric chair or watch one being raped but I won't claim to be so big that it isn't fun to think about.
I'm not going to be sad that a spammer went to prison and I'm not going to be terribly offended that others are reveling in some possible consequences of that. The spammer certainly should have thought about prison before turning to crime for living. If prison rape actually offends you that much then spend some productive time on prison reform. Don't presume to lecture those who have to continually battle these criminal assholes.