RotateLeftByte (797477) says: ... Anon coz I have to work closely with Canonical in my day job.
Uh oh. You're toast.
To be more on point, perhaps I'll be shot down in flames with you, but you're clearly correct. Ubuntu is far from the best ("highest quality") desktop distro, and it doesn't really make for an ideal server OS either, in light of the great Linux-based alternatives. I'm glad Canonical and Ubuntu exist because some of the projects they work on which set them apart may actually have broad appeal and be good for the "community" in the long run, but it is too bad it's them who have become synonymous with what [less-informed] people refer to as "Linux." People may not realize there are better alternatives, like these high-quality distros (in no particular order):
ArchLinux
Mint or just pure Debian
Gentoo
Fedora
FreeBSD or NetBSD (won't have as broad appeal and obviously not Linux, but very high-quality operating systems nonetheless)
A number of things. Most users will relate with at least one of these points:
It doesn't come pre-installed on any of the popular desktop operating systems (maybe it does come standard on some devices?).
It's not open source.
It will always carry the stigma it received during the time when it was nagware.
It's a very decent browser, but it simply doesn't surpass other browsers by a wide enough margin for most* people to justify switching from what they're already comfortable with.
* Although, those few who do switch will tend to be very evangelistic, constantly reminding people about Opera's virtues. Of course, evangelism is a common trait among those who embrace the unpopular.
Umm, whatever your beliefs about the relative "coolness" of both the C64 and the GBC, it can hardly be argued that the thing you linked to is cooler than this GBC emulator. Not only is the GBC considerably more complex as a machine, the emulator is surprisingly complete and very usable.
Actually, you're wrong. The BSD license allows anyone to come along and relicense the entire file/program or whatever, under any other license, so long as the conditions of the BSD license are followed.
Umm, that's not right at all. You seem to completely misunderstand copyright law and licensing in general. The BSDL begins with "All rights reserved," and nowhere in the license is there any statement that grants anyone who is not the owner of the copyright to relicense the work. On the contrary, the license states very clearly that the entire text of the license ("the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer") must not be removed from the source code and must be reproduced if the code is distributed in binary form. The only one who can relicense a work under the BSDL is the copyright owner, since all rights (including relicensing rights) are reserved and not granted in the license.
Any modifications to a file under the BSDL are subject to copyright by whoever made the modifications. Only if you made significant modifications to the entire file would you reasonably be able to claim it different enough that the whole thing could be owned and thus licensable by you, otherwise only your own modifications are owned and licensable by you.
So, no, relicensing "BSD stuff" (by non-owners) is not OK, even if the code remains available under a relatively free license like the GPL. Cutting out the BSDL text from header files and inserting a reference the GPL is in violation of the BSDL and is thus a copyright violation. It's that simple.
I don't know what the GP meant by calling noexec and SELinux a pain, but as a developer and "poweruser," I have legitimate reasons throughout the day for executing programs from/home. So, while it's clearly not a pain setting up noexec and SELinux, it is a pain just dealing with the result.
The said, as a savvy user, I'm also not dumb enough to run random programs off of the internet, so I don't lose sleep from being able to execute stuff from/home.
Kudos to Apple for doing what Microsoft has been doing for many years: the monthly updated malicious software removal tool included in Windows Update.
Only because it's been a problem on Windows for much longer, and considerably longer even than Microsoft has been releasing such "tools." In comparison, it's only the first modern, semi-widespread malware available for OS X, and apparently Apple is choosing to get involved.
I still can't quite figure out why that particular adulterer is even seriously considered
He isn't seriously considered, unless you assume that the fact that his announcement for candidacy is newsworthy means he has a chance to win the GOP nomination. He doesn't.
... and the company too small to compete with huge rivals like Apple and Google.
I don't even know what this means. There are many examples of small companies which are able to compete just fine against bigger (presumably more established) companies. In fact, in this case, RIM was the established company when Apple and Google entered the cellphone business. If RIM has not been able to hold onto their lead, it's not because they're too small. More likely they were just caught standing still.
I use Linux specifically for the powerful Bash-fu.
Yeah, because bash only runs under Linux. Oh wait, it runs under Mac OS X, *BSD, Windows... pretty much any operating system. There must be other reasons why you use Linux.
Isn't it more likely that you're having a problem with some sort of plugin?
A plugin that is allowed to leak memory is still a Firefox problem.
I use Chrome on machines that have plenty of memory. Chrome simply uses more memory. I can't run it on my old Thinkpad with 512MB RAM because it'll start thrashing with two tabs. So, I've been happy enough running Firefox on that machine. Memory usage does creep up, but it's not an issue because I power off the laptop regularly enough. I was hoping Firefox 4 would be slimmer and less leaky, but so far this hasn't been the case. Chrome may use more memory, but at least it doesn't leak it and it uses what it takes to make browsing fast.
Well here's my take on the matter.
Although the original article has been altered somewhat so direct comparison is impossible, I took the time to compare the two blog entries; one, his original entry on the subject, and two, his comments with direct quotes from the article.
Nowhere do they lift his words in the article. Not even one sentence, not even a half a sentence. So, no copyright infringement (at even the most generous definition of the word) and no plagerism. The news author just did some research and wrote an article.
This isn't a college paper, this is a newspaper article, and a brief one at that. (One could argue the newspaper version is a vast improvement, actually).
It may well be certain facts were gleaned from his blog entry.... facts that could have been independently verified by the news author. Verifiable facts do not enjoy copyright protection (deliberate lies inter-spread with facts do, believe it or not, that's how they copyright the phone book... but if the alleged offender omits the lies, you're case is over).
That leaves lifting his words verbatim, which also didn't happen. Case dismissed.
I use Linux. Fortunately, nvidia does have the software to utilitize their hardware. It's too bad they can't open it due to licensing issues (which may or may not be under their practical control), but at least it works which is more than can be said for ATI's drivers and some of the free drivers. Nevertheless, I'm not going to lose sleep over a binary blob in the kernel any more than I am going to call my operating system "GNU/Linux." If it works, it works.
In my experience, Mac OS was an example of a cooperative-multitasking OS done right (or at least as good as it could be). By contrast, the Windows of the day certainly crashed more often than I had to reboot my Mac OS machine. But in those days, operating systems simply crashed more than they do now. It depended a lot on what programs you ran.
Anyway, I wonder how successful Apple would have been had they bought Be instead of NeXT. They've certainly done well on the route they took, but BeOS seemed to have a lot to offer, too.
If a developer in the forest offers to distribute 3rd party GPLv3 code, and no-one is there to see this, has a GPLv3 violation occured?
Good question. Let's wait and see what RMS' lawyers have to say. Or just use a different license that is shorter and simple enough for everyone to understand clearly and doesn't inherently cause a barrage of inter-license incompatibilities. A simple, down-to-earth license is joy.
Or just take advantage of the large amount of non-copyleft yet open source code available. Then you don't have to take an option off the table entirely, ironically. People who work hard on their projects and want to restrict distribution in accordance with the ideals of the GPL should (and do) have that choice; there is plenty of free stuff (and more) available to those who choose not to be so rigid.
But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Is it because the open source community fails to get its "act" together? Or the audio and video codecs are encumbered with so many dubious patents and intellectual property claims. And the closed source vendors are using that to create walled gardens?
Except codecs are rarely (if ever) the problem with open source audio/video; we have long had all of the popular codecs available to us, patents notwithstanding. The drivers are what suck, not to mention (in the case of Linux) basically the entire audio stack from ALSA to PulseAudio.
Aye. Lucky for us there are still free (even according to RMS' redefinition of the term) operating systems which continue to stick to the Unix philosophy. Even if not BSD, you can always go Gentoo and compile your system without all the dbus gconfd gstreamer esd pulseaudio crap. Emerge OSSv4 and you can even have sane and robust sound support.
Don't worry; the dream isn't dead yet! It just may cost a couple hours of compiling.
Now, there well may be technical reasons why a reboot is a bad idea, but this article doesn't present any. If you want to claim "You shouldn't reboot," then you need to present technical reasons why not. Just having more uptime or being somehow "better" than Windows admins is not a reason, it is silly posturing.
It's clear to me you didn't actually read the article, because there was [one] very good technical reason why rebooting as a troubleshooting technique is a Bad Idea, and it was even on the front page: If the system is having problems and you don't know what's wrong, then the same problem may also prevent the system from coming back up cleanly (or at all). Worse, the reboot may have destroyed some evidence as to how the problem started (i.e. in the form of temporary files). You're now probably not any closer to diagnosing the problem, and you may be in a less convenient position to make the actual repairs needed.
In fact, the article doesn't even mention "precious uptime" as a reason not to reboot, so most (all?) of your speculation doesn't apply. Furthermore, the subtitle of the article is fairly accurate, whether you're offended by it and consider it posturing or not: "Rebooting Windows boxes is a way of life, but rebooting by default can you get you nowhere fast when running Unix." Rebooting really is a troubleshooting step most Windows admins follow, as far as I've seen. There are good reasons to reboot a Unix server (let uptime be damned), but rebooting just because you don't know what's wrong is not smart, and that's what the article is actually about., according to someone who actually read it. I also happen to agree with most of the article.
To be fair those numbers were inflated by people who wanted to show that a game on linux can be profitable.
[citation needed]. And please DO your homework first
I don't know if any formal study has been done (and I'm certainly not interested enough to conduct one myself), but even as a Linux user I think it's a fairly safe (albeit unsupported at this time) assumption to say that the GP is right. At the time, I also remember seeing people encouraging others to be generous just so developers would hopefully start to see Linux as a significant market for games. Ditto for humble bundle.
Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.
Actually, it's completely different for the simple reason that applications are much more important than the operating system. Give me the exact same application on top of a different operating system, and I still have everything I need. Swap out an application with unique features for something less capable and there's a problem. Ubuntu is a viable replacement for Windows because they're both just operating systems. You might as well give me NetBSD or Solaris for all it matters. But a platform which doesn't have the applications I need is useless, no matter the operating system.
If you're going to be honest with yourself (and assuming you're event aware), you have to admit that Thunderbird is not a complete replacement for Outlook, Gimp is not a direct replacement for Photoshop, and some people may argue that even LibreOffice doesn't have the features they need which Office provides. There may be workarounds to satisfy some of the needs of these people which may or may not actually be satisfactory, but for some applications there really are no real replacements.
Admitting the truth and working to improve our reality is not a knock against open source.
I can play H.264. I can't play H.264 in Firefox with HTML5 tags, because Firefox doesn't support it due to patent concerns.
Again, that's a limitation imposed by Mozilla (and the Chromium people). There is no reason they couldn't provide a fallback HTML5 video handler which piggy-backs off of system libraries that virtually all users of "desktop Linux" have already installed (i.e. ffmpeg). Such a mechanism is smart software engineering, and it would give the users the ability to decide which codecs they might want to use.
In other words, if you can't play h.264 in your browser on desktop Linux, your platform (including your browser vendor) isn't providing you with enough options.
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RotateLeftByte (797477) says:
...
Anon coz I have to work closely with Canonical in my day job.
Uh oh. You're toast.
To be more on point, perhaps I'll be shot down in flames with you, but you're clearly correct. Ubuntu is far from the best ("highest quality") desktop distro, and it doesn't really make for an ideal server OS either, in light of the great Linux-based alternatives. I'm glad Canonical and Ubuntu exist because some of the projects they work on which set them apart may actually have broad appeal and be good for the "community" in the long run, but it is too bad it's them who have become synonymous with what [less-informed] people refer to as "Linux." People may not realize there are better alternatives, like these high-quality distros (in no particular order):
What is holding Opera back from the mainstream?
A number of things. Most users will relate with at least one of these points:
* Although, those few who do switch will tend to be very evangelistic, constantly reminding people about Opera's virtues. Of course, evangelism is a common trait among those who embrace the unpopular.
Cool, but not as cool as the JavaScript C64 emulator.
Umm, whatever your beliefs about the relative "coolness" of both the C64 and the GBC, it can hardly be argued that the thing you linked to is cooler than this GBC emulator. Not only is the GBC considerably more complex as a machine, the emulator is surprisingly complete and very usable.
Actually, you're wrong. The BSD license allows anyone to come along and relicense the entire file/program or whatever, under any other license, so long as the conditions of the BSD license are followed.
Umm, that's not right at all. You seem to completely misunderstand copyright law and licensing in general. The BSDL begins with "All rights reserved," and nowhere in the license is there any statement that grants anyone who is not the owner of the copyright to relicense the work. On the contrary, the license states very clearly that the entire text of the license ("the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer") must not be removed from the source code and must be reproduced if the code is distributed in binary form. The only one who can relicense a work under the BSDL is the copyright owner, since all rights (including relicensing rights) are reserved and not granted in the license.
Any modifications to a file under the BSDL are subject to copyright by whoever made the modifications. Only if you made significant modifications to the entire file would you reasonably be able to claim it different enough that the whole thing could be owned and thus licensable by you, otherwise only your own modifications are owned and licensable by you.
So, no, relicensing "BSD stuff" (by non-owners) is not OK, even if the code remains available under a relatively free license like the GPL. Cutting out the BSDL text from header files and inserting a reference the GPL is in violation of the BSDL and is thus a copyright violation. It's that simple.
I don't know what the GP meant by calling noexec and SELinux a pain, but as a developer and "poweruser," I have legitimate reasons throughout the day for executing programs from /home. So, while it's clearly not a pain setting up noexec and SELinux, it is a pain just dealing with the result.
/home.
The said, as a savvy user, I'm also not dumb enough to run random programs off of the internet, so I don't lose sleep from being able to execute stuff from
Kudos to Apple for doing what Microsoft has been doing for many years: the monthly updated malicious software removal tool included in Windows Update.
Only because it's been a problem on Windows for much longer, and considerably longer even than Microsoft has been releasing such "tools." In comparison, it's only the first modern, semi-widespread malware available for OS X, and apparently Apple is choosing to get involved.
I still can't quite figure out why that particular adulterer is even seriously considered
He isn't seriously considered, unless you assume that the fact that his announcement for candidacy is newsworthy means he has a chance to win the GOP nomination. He doesn't.
I don't even know what this means. There are many examples of small companies which are able to compete just fine against bigger (presumably more established) companies. In fact, in this case, RIM was the established company when Apple and Google entered the cellphone business. If RIM has not been able to hold onto their lead, it's not because they're too small. More likely they were just caught standing still.
I use Linux specifically for the powerful Bash-fu.
Yeah, because bash only runs under Linux. Oh wait, it runs under Mac OS X, *BSD, Windows... pretty much any operating system. There must be other reasons why you use Linux.
Why does this always have to degenerate into a Campbell's Chunky Soup "Fork or Spoon" debate?
I have no idea. It's fairly obvious to me that a spoon is the obvious choice when eating a soup of any type.
Isn't it more likely that you're having a problem with some sort of plugin?
A plugin that is allowed to leak memory is still a Firefox problem.
I use Chrome on machines that have plenty of memory. Chrome simply uses more memory. I can't run it on my old Thinkpad with 512MB RAM because it'll start thrashing with two tabs. So, I've been happy enough running Firefox on that machine. Memory usage does creep up, but it's not an issue because I power off the laptop regularly enough. I was hoping Firefox 4 would be slimmer and less leaky, but so far this hasn't been the case. Chrome may use more memory, but at least it doesn't leak it and it uses what it takes to make browsing fast.
... champion of traditional American values like free speech and personal responsibility!
Indeed. He should have been a Democraft so he could maybe get in on that Fannie Mae Freddie Mac action.
Well here's my take on the matter. Although the original article has been altered somewhat so direct comparison is impossible, I took the time to compare the two blog entries; one, his original entry on the subject, and two, his comments with direct quotes from the article. Nowhere do they lift his words in the article. Not even one sentence, not even a half a sentence. So, no copyright infringement (at even the most generous definition of the word) and no plagerism. The news author just did some research and wrote an article. This isn't a college paper, this is a newspaper article, and a brief one at that. (One could argue the newspaper version is a vast improvement, actually). It may well be certain facts were gleaned from his blog entry .... facts that could have been independently verified by the news author. Verifiable facts do not enjoy copyright protection (deliberate lies inter-spread with facts do, believe it or not, that's how they copyright the phone book ... but if the alleged offender omits the lies, you're case is over).
That leaves lifting his words verbatim, which also didn't happen. Case dismissed.
I use Linux. Fortunately, nvidia does have the software to utilitize their hardware. It's too bad they can't open it due to licensing issues (which may or may not be under their practical control), but at least it works which is more than can be said for ATI's drivers and some of the free drivers. Nevertheless, I'm not going to lose sleep over a binary blob in the kernel any more than I am going to call my operating system "GNU/Linux." If it works, it works.
In my experience, Mac OS was an example of a cooperative-multitasking OS done right (or at least as good as it could be). By contrast, the Windows of the day certainly crashed more often than I had to reboot my Mac OS machine. But in those days, operating systems simply crashed more than they do now. It depended a lot on what programs you ran.
Anyway, I wonder how successful Apple would have been had they bought Be instead of NeXT. They've certainly done well on the route they took, but BeOS seemed to have a lot to offer, too.
If a developer in the forest offers to distribute 3rd party GPLv3 code, and no-one is there to see this, has a GPLv3 violation occured?
Good question. Let's wait and see what RMS' lawyers have to say. Or just use a different license that is shorter and simple enough for everyone to understand clearly and doesn't inherently cause a barrage of inter-license incompatibilities. A simple, down-to-earth license is joy.
Woohoo. Stick it to the man, bro!
Problem fixed.
Or just take advantage of the large amount of non-copyleft yet open source code available. Then you don't have to take an option off the table entirely, ironically. People who work hard on their projects and want to restrict distribution in accordance with the ideals of the GPL should (and do) have that choice; there is plenty of free stuff (and more) available to those who choose not to be so rigid.
It's a Unix system, I know this!
That was kinda bad, but at least it really was Unix. It would be truly facepalm-worthy if it had been Windows 3.1 or Mac OS System 6 on the screen.
But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Is it because the open source community fails to get its "act" together? Or the audio and video codecs are encumbered with so many dubious patents and intellectual property claims. And the closed source vendors are using that to create walled gardens?
Except codecs are rarely (if ever) the problem with open source audio/video; we have long had all of the popular codecs available to us, patents notwithstanding. The drivers are what suck, not to mention (in the case of Linux) basically the entire audio stack from ALSA to PulseAudio.
Aye. Lucky for us there are still free (even according to RMS' redefinition of the term) operating systems which continue to stick to the Unix philosophy. Even if not BSD, you can always go Gentoo and compile your system without all the dbus gconfd gstreamer esd pulseaudio crap. Emerge OSSv4 and you can even have sane and robust sound support.
Don't worry; the dream isn't dead yet! It just may cost a couple hours of compiling.
Now, there well may be technical reasons why a reboot is a bad idea, but this article doesn't present any. If you want to claim "You shouldn't reboot," then you need to present technical reasons why not. Just having more uptime or being somehow "better" than Windows admins is not a reason, it is silly posturing.
It's clear to me you didn't actually read the article, because there was [one] very good technical reason why rebooting as a troubleshooting technique is a Bad Idea, and it was even on the front page: If the system is having problems and you don't know what's wrong, then the same problem may also prevent the system from coming back up cleanly (or at all). Worse, the reboot may have destroyed some evidence as to how the problem started (i.e. in the form of temporary files). You're now probably not any closer to diagnosing the problem, and you may be in a less convenient position to make the actual repairs needed.
In fact, the article doesn't even mention "precious uptime" as a reason not to reboot, so most (all?) of your speculation doesn't apply. Furthermore, the subtitle of the article is fairly accurate, whether you're offended by it and consider it posturing or not: "Rebooting Windows boxes is a way of life, but rebooting by default can you get you nowhere fast when running Unix." Rebooting really is a troubleshooting step most Windows admins follow, as far as I've seen. There are good reasons to reboot a Unix server (let uptime be damned), but rebooting just because you don't know what's wrong is not smart, and that's what the article is actually about., according to someone who actually read it. I also happen to agree with most of the article.
To be fair those numbers were inflated by people who wanted to show that a game on linux can be profitable.
[citation needed]. And please DO your homework first
I don't know if any formal study has been done (and I'm certainly not interested enough to conduct one myself), but even as a Linux user I think it's a fairly safe (albeit unsupported at this time) assumption to say that the GP is right. At the time, I also remember seeing people encouraging others to be generous just so developers would hopefully start to see Linux as a significant market for games. Ditto for humble bundle.
Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.
Actually, it's completely different for the simple reason that applications are much more important than the operating system. Give me the exact same application on top of a different operating system, and I still have everything I need. Swap out an application with unique features for something less capable and there's a problem. Ubuntu is a viable replacement for Windows because they're both just operating systems. You might as well give me NetBSD or Solaris for all it matters. But a platform which doesn't have the applications I need is useless, no matter the operating system. If you're going to be honest with yourself (and assuming you're event aware), you have to admit that Thunderbird is not a complete replacement for Outlook, Gimp is not a direct replacement for Photoshop, and some people may argue that even LibreOffice doesn't have the features they need which Office provides. There may be workarounds to satisfy some of the needs of these people which may or may not actually be satisfactory, but for some applications there really are no real replacements. Admitting the truth and working to improve our reality is not a knock against open source.
I can play H.264. I can't play H.264 in Firefox with HTML5 tags, because Firefox doesn't support it due to patent concerns.
Again, that's a limitation imposed by Mozilla (and the Chromium people). There is no reason they couldn't provide a fallback HTML5 video handler which piggy-backs off of system libraries that virtually all users of "desktop Linux" have already installed (i.e. ffmpeg). Such a mechanism is smart software engineering, and it would give the users the ability to decide which codecs they might want to use.
In other words, if you can't play h.264 in your browser on desktop Linux, your platform (including your browser vendor) isn't providing you with enough options.