Were they really the same? Are you sure that the CD hasn't been Loudness War compressed to hell and back? Assuming both were identical quality recordings and level controlled to the exact same loudness (if the record was even a hair louder you'd prefer it even if I didn't suspect romanticism was coloring your impressions....) , could you pick one versus the other in a blind A/B test?
Even if you could, If the audio from the vinyl were correctly mastered directly onto a CD or a lossless codec like FLAC you aren't going to tell the difference on a blind A/B switch. 44.1 khz, 16 bit may not have "soul" but it most definitely has the fidelity to pull that off if transferred correctly. Once we go to 96 kHz, 24 bit fuhgeddabout it. Hell, vacuum tube "warmth" is digitally recordable. Just don't exceed the headroom of the solid state amp (hint: this is VERY easy to do on a cheap one. Even then 10 kilobucks is well outside the point of diminishing returns.) and you won't spot that either.
I don't think Theo ever has a hard time complaining:-). That whole pissing match a month or two back was really sad. I had a high opinion of Theo then and I respect and still respect his no compromises approach to wireless and I appreciate and use OpenSSH every day. But he really did a good job of convincing me and a lot of other people I guess that he is a completely unreasonable headcase.
If you stare too long into the abyss, it will stare back at you. I think a certain part of the BSD crowd has hated the FSF and GPL so long that they have become what they hate. Don't get me wrong. I think it perfectly rational to have doubts and reservations about the FSF (I have them myself!) but the mere mention of RMS causes any discussion here to stop casting light and instead throwing a lot of heat.
Nice dialoging with you.
Okay. This makes the rest of your posts seem much more reasonable to me. I think your analysis of the GPLv3 may well be plausible but I'm reserving my opinion of the license until I see what happens with it practically and legally over the course of a year or two. Legalese isn't code after all. The GPLv3 may not even mean what Stallman thinks it means if it ever winds up in court.
I agree with you that my proposed method isn't legally necessary for GPLv2 stuff but it may be practically necessary if the more radical contingent of BSDers get publicly irate every time a bit of BSD code is used in a GPL project.
You seem to make the mistake of assuming that all users of the GPL buy into FSF cant lock, stock, and barrel. Torvalds certainly doesn't as do many other pragmatic users of the GPL. From the way some BSD proponents have been acting lately and Theo's bunch of Merry Men certainly qualify, insults like "Scientologist-like cultist" just as fairly apply to them as well. Like the FSFers you impugn: "if you don't agree with their belief system, you can make any kind of appeal you like, and it isn't going to make any difference whatsoever."
Where it gets interesting if substantial GPLed changes are made to a fork of a BSD codebase. Technically, the BSD bits are still BSD and while one can diff them back out the original BSD code is still available. Practically speaking such a work would have to be treated as GPL. If the BSD license is as you say then proprietary forks aren't legal either. If proprietary forks are okay but involuted arguments mean GPL forks aren't then I have to wonder just "True Freedom" is.
Suppose I did things this way:
BSD codeblock
yadda yadda
#######
GPL portion copyright 1997 domatic
codeblock
yadda yadda
#######
BSD portion resumes here
yadda yadda
What's more, altered BSD lines could just be left BSD to keep this simple. Technically I doubt that even that is necessary but if I'm being carped at by proponents of "True Freedom" (whatever THAT means and they say FSFers are fanatics......) it may be necessary to preserve a modicum of sanity.
You'd have to go a long way to overturn something like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics (for good reason). Individual scientists can be dogmatic but the enterprise as a whole really isn't. And sometimes the truism that "You have to wait for all the old scientists to die." has merit. But on the whole, science depends on dynamism to function. Look what happened to Einstein. He was dogmatic on the subject of Quantum Mechanics. Physics went on without him.
Dogmatism is a human attribute that isn't exclusive to either science or religion. But religion emphasizes dogma more than science ever will. This isn't without reason either as they serve different roles. The object of science is to describe all that is observable, testable, and can be modeled from the results. There is no conflict with religion unless some make the mistake of basing dogma on that which is observable and testable. One of the objects of religion is to unite and bind societies together. This requires everyone (in that religion at least) to be more or less on the same page, hence the need for dogma. Seminary schools even use phrases like "accepted dogma" so it isn't as though it is seen as a negative. It only becomes a perjorative when dogmas clash with one another. I'll also point out that scientists aren't doing science when they argue with religious people. That's just two people having an argument.
Also, established theological groups don't change that rapidly. The Catholics and Southern Baptists say have changed very very little in two years and if they did there would schisms. I'm sure there have been lots of little offshoots and cults in that time but most don't succeed. Science and Religion play very different roles in the society and have different needs and uses for "Standard Dogma". I think it very disingenuous to say that one is as dogmatic as the other.
It's perfectly possible to dislike something and be perfectly truthful. Positives can be deemphasized and negatives hyped to the stars but one can still be truthful. This is the smell test that Lyons fails on.
I've seen scientists entertain the idea that some "constants" may in fact change, that some "Conservation Laws" aren't, and that there are realms (Black Holes and the first Planck time instant of the Big Bang) where the usual "axioms" don't apply. Come to think of it, the true scientist is ready to throw out or least modify what doesn't work. Thinkers like Popper aside, the purpose of the exercise is to discover the universe as it is rather than how we'd have it. Flexibility of thought is required for that.
It's very possible. I've lost much of my admiration for PJ as this thing has drug on (though I have to give her points on being consistent about where she is coming from). Still, I believe that Lyons is backpedaling because SCO is so obviously toast. He's spewed anti-Linux crap for years and only lately does he try to re-invent himself (badly) as a balanced journalist. In general, your point is valid but in the particular case of "Lyin' Lyons" I don't buy it for a second.
I'm a KDE man myself and would use "Window Specific Settings" in KWin and/or pager with virtual desktops. I'm not saying GNOME is lame in any way but since I'm not a GNOME guy, I don't know what the equivalents are.
Because UNIX (primary dev environment) has extensive window handling options and GIMP isn't hard to manage there.
I'm not even saying many of the criticisms against GIMP aren't valid. It's just that articles about GIMP are like articles about RMS: more heat than light.
Re:Most important thing
on
GIMP 2.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.
But then there is this other group of people who will complain that GIMP is just being a PhotoShop wannabe and not innovating. If one wants something that acts Just Like PhotoShop then the thing to do is suck it up and buy PhotoShop.
Maybe 5 of the posts will have something actually illuminating. The rest of them will be GIMP and Photoshop fanbois going at each other. Let me save everybody the trouble.
GIMP has an unprofessional name! Waaaaaaaaaaah! GIMP only does 8-bit color! Waaaaaaaaaaah! GIMP isn't UI identical to PhotoShop on every menu 3 levels deep! Waaaaaaaaaaaah! GIMP manages windows sucky! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
These Linux companies are making money from many upstream projects. They get to make the money while the upstreams are thrown under the Microsoft Legal bus.
Disk space is cheap these days. I just keep "gigs of development libraries" installed. I don't even particularly care what they do so long as the apps I'm building against them are happy. I pretty blame problems like what you mention on the upstream project rather than blaming it on "Linux" in general. One of the measures of quality for a source distributed project is how much of a pain in the butt is it to build. I'll do./configure, make, checkinstall and even "apt-get install foo-dev.version.deb" a couple of times if the./configure complains. As long as the process is reliable and simple, I'm not knocking things like SCONS either. I don't care as long as project build files are robust and don't require me to be a build management maven to get the thing going. The very best of them will even say things like "You need to install the development libraries for 'foo' before running this again." If I get nothing but lots of console spew for my trouble, I move on to the competing project. It's probably already in Ubuntu's repositories for that reason.
Most of the time, the project maintainers of problem children will unwittingly warn you not to try their software. The warning goes something like this: "Frobnosticator requires the CVS version of libfoo to build." or worse "We require advanced functionality only found in the pre-alpha version of libfoo!"
Of course there is but one of the consequences of a criminal act is that you limit the scope and extent of your future trustworthiness. I might trust Kevin Mitnick to test the effectiveness of my security policies by trying to wheedle passwords out of people on the phone but I'd take steps to keep him from actually exploiting that knowledge. There'd be no tour of my facilities for instance. In the same vein, I wouldn't let a convicted flasher work around children but wouldn't have much of a problem with him sweeping warehouse floors on the graveyard shift.
Would you be laughing if staring into the wrong end of one? I understand that you think you have a "Real Gun" of some sort but I suspect a Glock could become one if you found yourself in the wrong situation.
I still see ads for "fat burners" and "body enhancement" on TV all the time. Don't even get me started on Enzyte Bob. Patent medicines are alive and well, there is just a more complicated set of rules about what you can and can't say. These rules in no way impede the basic dynamic of promising the world for almost nothing.
It doesn't sound like you have to manage email for a large organization. Experience demonstrates that we should not expect most users to think like hardened system administrators. I'm not coddling the users, I'm keeping my network up and running and fit for my employer's purposes. Yeah, It would be nice if I could trust people not to believe Jokey Smurf and open the surprises but prudence dictates that I do everything possible to keep the little blue bastard out. Over 90% of our incoming mail has been spam. With only one or two exceptions out of thousands, all executable attachments have been attack code. I'd have to be crazy or simply negligent to permit executable attachments in general email. I'll whitelist trusted sources but most them don't use email to send updates. Hmmmm.
I agree with you about the whitelists and blacklists. The problem is most people who don't work with computers and networks as their primary occupation don't want to be bothered. You can be damn sure I employ them though. As far as email from your ISP, if you aren't paying them to secure your comms for you then it mostly isn't their problem....until your machine becomes a spam zombie that is. Turning those people off until they clean up is an option for an ISP but that mentality can't hold for all internal providers of email.
Funny. Our ClamAV is set to block encrypted zips for that reason. And yes, I had to deal with asshats sending encrypted zips to our domain with included instructions to infect your PC ("type this number in to see hot naked chicks!!!") once received. If anyone wants us to access executables they will only do so with trusted and verifiable means.
There are distributions specifically for low end hardware. Puppy Linux is one that I've had success with. There are others. It is probably better in the long run for distros like Ubuntu to concentrate their efforts on current middle of the road hardware. Low end old hardware imposes a lot of tradeoffs that current general purpose distro's won't manage well. Distros made with such hardware specifically in mind tend to fare better. Puppy, for instance, could completely install itself in memory on the machine you mention at boot. Since the use case is browse Gmail with a browser, if the nic was lit up then you'd have been home with little or nothing to install.
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Were they really the same? Are you sure that the CD hasn't been Loudness War compressed to hell and back? Assuming both were identical quality recordings and level controlled to the exact same loudness (if the record was even a hair louder you'd prefer it even if I didn't suspect romanticism was coloring your impressions....) , could you pick one versus the other in a blind A/B test?
Even if you could, If the audio from the vinyl were correctly mastered directly onto a CD or a lossless codec like FLAC you aren't going to tell the difference on a blind A/B switch. 44.1 khz, 16 bit may not have "soul" but it most definitely has the fidelity to pull that off if transferred correctly. Once we go to 96 kHz, 24 bit fuhgeddabout it. Hell, vacuum tube "warmth" is digitally recordable. Just don't exceed the headroom of the solid state amp (hint: this is VERY easy to do on a cheap one. Even then 10 kilobucks is well outside the point of diminishing returns.) and you won't spot that either.
Vinyl IS plastic you know.
I don't think Theo ever has a hard time complaining :-). That whole pissing match a month or two back was really sad. I had a high opinion of Theo then and I respect and still respect his no compromises approach to wireless and I appreciate and use OpenSSH every day. But he really did a good job of convincing me and a lot of other people I guess that he is a completely unreasonable headcase.
If you stare too long into the abyss, it will stare back at you. I think a certain part of the BSD crowd has hated the FSF and GPL so long that they have become what they hate. Don't get me wrong. I think it perfectly rational to have doubts and reservations about the FSF (I have them myself!) but the mere mention of RMS causes any discussion here to stop casting light and instead throwing a lot of heat.
Nice dialoging with you.
Okay. This makes the rest of your posts seem much more reasonable to me. I think your analysis of the GPLv3 may well be plausible but I'm reserving my opinion of the license until I see what happens with it practically and legally over the course of a year or two. Legalese isn't code after all. The GPLv3 may not even mean what Stallman thinks it means if it ever winds up in court.
I agree with you that my proposed method isn't legally necessary for GPLv2 stuff but it may be practically necessary if the more radical contingent of BSDers get publicly irate every time a bit of BSD code is used in a GPL project.
You seem to make the mistake of assuming that all users of the GPL buy into FSF cant lock, stock, and barrel. Torvalds certainly doesn't as do many other pragmatic users of the GPL. From the way some BSD proponents have been acting lately and Theo's bunch of Merry Men certainly qualify, insults like "Scientologist-like cultist" just as fairly apply to them as well. Like the FSFers you impugn: "if you don't agree with their belief system, you can make any kind of appeal you like, and it isn't going to make any difference whatsoever."
Where it gets interesting if substantial GPLed changes are made to a fork of a BSD codebase. Technically, the BSD bits are still BSD and while one can diff them back out the original BSD code is still available. Practically speaking such a work would have to be treated as GPL. If the BSD license is as you say then proprietary forks aren't legal either. If proprietary forks are okay but involuted arguments mean GPL forks aren't then I have to wonder just "True Freedom" is.
Suppose I did things this way:
BSD codeblock
yadda yadda
#######
GPL portion copyright 1997 domatic
codeblock
yadda yadda
#######
BSD portion resumes here
yadda yadda
What's more, altered BSD lines could just be left BSD to keep this simple. Technically I doubt that even that is necessary but if I'm being carped at by proponents of "True Freedom" (whatever THAT means and they say FSFers are fanatics......) it may be necessary to preserve a modicum of sanity.
Good! Have a piece and use it to mellow out this grammer nazi problem you're having.
You'd have to go a long way to overturn something like the Three Laws of Thermodynamics (for good reason). Individual scientists can be dogmatic but the enterprise as a whole really isn't. And sometimes the truism that "You have to wait for all the old scientists to die." has merit. But on the whole, science depends on dynamism to function. Look what happened to Einstein. He was dogmatic on the subject of Quantum Mechanics. Physics went on without him. Dogmatism is a human attribute that isn't exclusive to either science or religion. But religion emphasizes dogma more than science ever will. This isn't without reason either as they serve different roles. The object of science is to describe all that is observable, testable, and can be modeled from the results. There is no conflict with religion unless some make the mistake of basing dogma on that which is observable and testable. One of the objects of religion is to unite and bind societies together. This requires everyone (in that religion at least) to be more or less on the same page, hence the need for dogma. Seminary schools even use phrases like "accepted dogma" so it isn't as though it is seen as a negative. It only becomes a perjorative when dogmas clash with one another. I'll also point out that scientists aren't doing science when they argue with religious people. That's just two people having an argument. Also, established theological groups don't change that rapidly. The Catholics and Southern Baptists say have changed very very little in two years and if they did there would schisms. I'm sure there have been lots of little offshoots and cults in that time but most don't succeed. Science and Religion play very different roles in the society and have different needs and uses for "Standard Dogma". I think it very disingenuous to say that one is as dogmatic as the other.
It's perfectly possible to dislike something and be perfectly truthful. Positives can be deemphasized and negatives hyped to the stars but one can still be truthful. This is the smell test that Lyons fails on.
The rate of change in scientific thought over even 10 years doesn't support scientific dogmatism very well.
I've seen scientists entertain the idea that some "constants" may in fact change, that some "Conservation Laws" aren't, and that there are realms (Black Holes and the first Planck time instant of the Big Bang) where the usual "axioms" don't apply. Come to think of it, the true scientist is ready to throw out or least modify what doesn't work. Thinkers like Popper aside, the purpose of the exercise is to discover the universe as it is rather than how we'd have it. Flexibility of thought is required for that.
It's very possible. I've lost much of my admiration for PJ as this thing has drug on (though I have to give her points on being consistent about where she is coming from). Still, I believe that Lyons is backpedaling because SCO is so obviously toast. He's spewed anti-Linux crap for years and only lately does he try to re-invent himself (badly) as a balanced journalist. In general, your point is valid but in the particular case of "Lyin' Lyons" I don't buy it for a second.
I'm a KDE man myself and would use "Window Specific Settings" in KWin and/or pager with virtual desktops. I'm not saying GNOME is lame in any way but since I'm not a GNOME guy, I don't know what the equivalents are.
Because UNIX (primary dev environment) has extensive window handling options and GIMP isn't hard to manage there. I'm not even saying many of the criticisms against GIMP aren't valid. It's just that articles about GIMP are like articles about RMS: more heat than light.
but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.
But then there is this other group of people who will complain that GIMP is just being a PhotoShop wannabe and not innovating. If one wants something that acts Just Like PhotoShop then the thing to do is suck it up and buy PhotoShop.Maybe 5 of the posts will have something actually illuminating. The rest of them will be GIMP and Photoshop fanbois going at each other. Let me save everybody the trouble.
GIMP has an unprofessional name! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP only does 8-bit color! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP isn't UI identical to PhotoShop on every menu 3 levels deep! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP manages windows sucky! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Does not! Does too! Does not!.................
These Linux companies are making money from many upstream projects. They get to make the money while the upstreams are thrown under the Microsoft Legal bus.
I suspect "plausible deniability" wasn't in the lexicon when this once sat on a President's desk.
Disk space is cheap these days. I just keep "gigs of development libraries" installed. I don't even particularly care what they do so long as the apps I'm building against them are happy. I pretty blame problems like what you mention on the upstream project rather than blaming it on "Linux" in general. One of the measures of quality for a source distributed project is how much of a pain in the butt is it to build. I'll do ./configure, make, checkinstall and even "apt-get install foo-dev.version.deb" a couple of times if the ./configure complains. As long as the process is reliable and simple, I'm not knocking things like SCONS either. I don't care as long as project build files are robust and don't require me to be a build management maven to get the thing going. The very best of them will even say things like "You need to install the development libraries for 'foo' before running this again." If I get nothing but lots of console spew for my trouble, I move on to the competing project. It's probably already in Ubuntu's repositories for that reason.
Most of the time, the project maintainers of problem children will unwittingly warn you not to try their software. The warning goes something like this: "Frobnosticator requires the CVS version of libfoo to build." or worse "We require advanced functionality only found in the pre-alpha version of libfoo!"
Of course there is but one of the consequences of a criminal act is that you limit the scope and extent of your future trustworthiness. I might trust Kevin Mitnick to test the effectiveness of my security policies by trying to wheedle passwords out of people on the phone but I'd take steps to keep him from actually exploiting that knowledge. There'd be no tour of my facilities for instance. In the same vein, I wouldn't let a convicted flasher work around children but wouldn't have much of a problem with him sweeping warehouse floors on the graveyard shift.
Would you be laughing if staring into the wrong end of one? I understand that you think you have a "Real Gun" of some sort but I suspect a Glock could become one if you found yourself in the wrong situation.
I still see ads for "fat burners" and "body enhancement" on TV all the time. Don't even get me started on Enzyte Bob. Patent medicines are alive and well, there is just a more complicated set of rules about what you can and can't say. These rules in no way impede the basic dynamic of promising the world for almost nothing.
It doesn't sound like you have to manage email for a large organization. Experience demonstrates that we should not expect most users to think like hardened system administrators. I'm not coddling the users, I'm keeping my network up and running and fit for my employer's purposes. Yeah, It would be nice if I could trust people not to believe Jokey Smurf and open the surprises but prudence dictates that I do everything possible to keep the little blue bastard out. Over 90% of our incoming mail has been spam. With only one or two exceptions out of thousands, all executable attachments have been attack code. I'd have to be crazy or simply negligent to permit executable attachments in general email. I'll whitelist trusted sources but most them don't use email to send updates. Hmmmm.
I agree with you about the whitelists and blacklists. The problem is most people who don't work with computers and networks as their primary occupation don't want to be bothered. You can be damn sure I employ them though. As far as email from your ISP, if you aren't paying them to secure your comms for you then it mostly isn't their problem....until your machine becomes a spam zombie that is. Turning those people off until they clean up is an option for an ISP but that mentality can't hold for all internal providers of email.
Funny. Our ClamAV is set to block encrypted zips for that reason. And yes, I had to deal with asshats sending encrypted zips to our domain with included instructions to infect your PC ("type this number in to see hot naked chicks!!!") once received. If anyone wants us to access executables they will only do so with trusted and verifiable means.
There are distributions specifically for low end hardware. Puppy Linux is one that I've had success with. There are others. It is probably better in the long run for distros like Ubuntu to concentrate their efforts on current middle of the road hardware. Low end old hardware imposes a lot of tradeoffs that current general purpose distro's won't manage well. Distros made with such hardware specifically in mind tend to fare better. Puppy, for instance, could completely install itself in memory on the machine you mention at boot. Since the use case is browse Gmail with a browser, if the nic was lit up then you'd have been home with little or nothing to install.
Now they only need to get Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa operational.