Yes, and I've got OpenGL 3.2 support with the nvidia linux drivers, but those are obviously proprietary. The GP was most definitely referring to Mesa, the open source implementation, which still targets OpenGL 2.1.
I don't think it's much of a problem. No GL developer doing serious work is going to be using a software implementation anyway. It's nice that Mesa is there as a backup, but it's certainly not the end of the world if it is several versions behind. The software implementation just isn't up to the task of running anything but the most simple GL programs, even with a fast CPU, so anyone running GL apps are definitely going to be using their video cards' implementation which will definitely be newer than OpenGL 2.1.
Besides, I don't even think Microsoft's software implementation is as new as OpenGL 2.1, so it's not like that's necessarily a base configuration developers are using.
How did government control of the postal service mean more freedom of information (getting a letter from A to B in less than several months!)? How did government control of highways mean more freedom of movement (Fewer highway robbers and turnpike toll bandits)? How did government control/regulation of telegraph, radio, television, telephones mean more freedom of information? NN is not about "make content fair", it's about "make queuing/lining up for service fair"
+5 Interesting? There must be a lot of koolaid-drinking moderators because your use of logical fallacy is not exactly subtle. You made a list of things you think the government has succeeded at in an attempt to make it seem obvious that the government would also be good at regulating the internet, but that is not at all obvious. One could counter with a lengthy list of government regulatory failures; see the problem?
Nobody agrees that content discrimination is good, but there are far better ways to solve that than what the FCC is proposing.
Oh, I get it. So net neutrality is important because of some hypothetical situation you just made up that hasn't actually happened. Yes, I can certainly see how that is very important.
but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.
Maybe, but respect shouldn't come automatically with any acquired position (especially an elected position). Respect must be earned.
Reagan earned his respect. Arnold... well, I don't have a problem with referring to him as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger." He was a far better body-builder than he is a governor.
Effectively in this example, Comcast controls everything because the government can't keep it's hands off.
Which is precisely the point that seems to elude so many otherwise-smart people here. Net neutrality isn't regulation to fix the free market (which they presume has failed). Net neutrality is more regulation to fix the messed-up market caused by all the already-existing regulation and government-sponsored monopolies. Nobody knows how well a free ISP market would work since we've never had one, but I'm convinced that if there was a real demand for a neutral internet, a free market would bring up a new competitor to meet that demand while the others follow suit to remain relevant. That is what the free market does best.
On that same note, it's interesting to see how government always sells us more regulation. Pretend what we've got is a free market and attack it, trumpeting regulation as the answer. In reality, the markets that fail the worst are the most regulated (i.e. the healthcare market), yet we keep piling on even more regulation to try to fix the mess we've made.
Unless there is collusion between service providers causing the price to remain artificially high, there is nothing inherently wrong with the fact that internet is more expensive in the United States under free market conditions. As it happens, the price is higher than it should be because of grant money given to a few big companies by government. Because of the government-sponsored coercive monopolies, they don't spend their money on improving infrastructure. What a surprise; government is the problem again.
Of course, the other option is to socialize internet service, putting in wholly in the government's hands, like so many other countries which are able to offer cheap internet service. That's fine for other countries, but you could view this is un-American depending on whether you view internet service as a utility or a luxury. Regardless, there is nothing wrong with high prices for un-socialized internet service (the price will be whatever the market will bear), but there is something wrong with the current situation where the government is just interfering in the market.
You can go further:
tabs are a hack by applications to make up for the failure of the traditional WM model and it's inability to handle large numbers of windows.
Umm, not really. Tabs are based on the idea of "stacking" or grouping related "papers" together. That's perfectly natural on a real desk, unless you think you need to have every "open" paper on your desk to be visible.
The GP is correct. Titlebars are unnatural and just waste space, having no parallel to anything we might use when managing a real desk. Every function of the titlebar and window border can be accessed without actually interacting with them in any WM worth its salt. They do waste a lot of screen space. On the other hand, it's completely natural interacting with tabs with the mouse; they behave as we would expect, having used physical tabs to organize actual paper documents.
Now let's wait for the Apple fanboys who will see no wrong on Apple's part.
I don't see anyone saying that. On the contrary, just about every Apple story seems to be full of a ton of anger and vitriol, regardless of what the story is about. Maybe I don't see enough modded-down comments? Regardless, I'm sure that for every emotional fanboy there is at least one irrational hater and 50 million others who could hardly care less.
The only issue we have right now is that Global Warming doesn't have the same commitment the Y2K scare had, and Global Warming is not something that can be fixed by computer scientists alone.
There is also the pesky problem that there is no consensus on global warming. For some reason, proponents of the theory like to assume that the science is settled, perhaps so they can conveniently call anyone who might disagree a loony denier.
I think that's at least one other point where GW differs drastically from Y2K.
I know TRIM doesn't work yet in OS X but the drive seems to take care of itself just fine.
It probably is taking care of itself. Some OCZ drives, including the Vertex series, can have firmware which forgoes Trim support in favor of some form of garbage collecting.
That's been known for a while. The question is, why on Earth did they not test the phones properly? And by properly, I mean in real world circumstances.
They did have a long testing period, but apparently the only left-handed prototype tester lost his iPhone at a bar.
On my droid I can run SecondLife, Pandora, another radio station from anywhere, surf the web, and watch videos - all at the same time. All of these programs can take input or provide information at the same time. Nice try Apple.
I think you've hit on something important here and a reason why the iPhone does so well despite its obvious limitations: Average people don't care whether or not their phone can do all that at the same time because they would never use it like that. On the other hand, battery life is a concern shared by just about everyone. In other words, just about everybody nowadays is very aware of what the iPhone is and what it can and can't do, yet they still swamp Apple's servers on pre-release day. Given the popularity of their prior models alone, I take this to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't as important to most people as it apparently is to you.
Pre-emptive multitasking means that the kernel (technically, the scheduler) decides when a process runs and when it yields; the process has no control.
As long as we're being technical, that last bit isn't completely accurate. Even processes in a preemptive multitasking environment can also choose to yield the rest of the time given them by the scheduler. That alone ought to bring significant battery savings when running apps which run in a tight loop but aren't needing to utilize all the processing time, like games. I assume Apple has performed some tests to make sure their multitasking limitations are justified in reducing battery drain, unless that wasn't the reason for the limitations...
I don't have an iPhone, and I'm not about to buy this one either, but what makes it "interesting" to me is the front-facing camera, a feature not seen on many (any?) widely used phones in the US. They didn't invent mobile video conferencing, but you can be sure that they will be responsible for making it usable and more widely used.
I had to look up what Camfrog is, although having software on my phone to display 100 webcams at once isn't really something that interests me anyway. Thanks for the reference, though.
BSD is actually less restrictive. While it requires attribution, it doesn't require that derivative work be released under BSD, while GPL requires that derivative work maintain the GPL license.
I don't believe this is true of the GPL. If you modify GPL code or make a derivative work thereof, you are the copyright holder of your changes. AFAIK, your modifications just need to be licensed under some GPL-compatible license, at least as far as the distribution restrictions of the GPL apply. So your modifications don't necessarily have to be licensed under the exact terms and conditions of the GPL, just a compatible license.
Of course, the common thing to do to keep things simple is to release your changes with the same license as the original work, but that's not a requirement. Anyway, I believe you're correct about the BSD license being less restrictive than the GPL, but keep in mind that GPL proponents have a different and equally valid viewpoint on what constitutes as a restriction.
Awesome! Now the compilation process can spend 80% of its time repeatedly linking virtual tables and getting confused over pure virtuals, instead of spending 5% of its time running through the symbol table and 95% compiling. Remember, building i.e. X11 invokes gcc hundreds or thousands of times, once for each C file (and it invokes the C preprocessor too, and all kinds of other shit from the toolchain, once for each included file each time it's included).
What does any of that have to do with the language the compiler is written in? It's not like the compiler is being recompiled every time you build X11. If you're trying to make the point that programs written in C++ are considerably slower than those written in C, you've still got some explaining to do.
'Linux is open source and we feel good about it,' said one employee. 'Microsoft we don't feel so good about.'
However, they feel pretty good about a closed-source implementation of an open source operating system on locked-in hardware? This sounds rather flamebaity and very light on facts.
I think you've missed something. Read the sentence; they look at open source as a benefit and they feel good about it (Linux). That doesn't mean that the fact that Linux is open source is the only or even the biggest reason they like it. Obviously they also feel good about Mac OS X despite the fact that it's not 100% open source. Get it?
Corporations choose what makes sense to increase their bottom line. To that end, they think Linux makes sense. The fact that Linux is open source is just icing on the cake.
Truly. It definitely is possible to write software that is featureful and fast. You just have to write it correctly. And let's face it, Firefox is not written correctly. It's nice that people are sticking up for their favorite browser, but let's not be in denial about what a bloated mess Firefox has become.
For instance, a person could find out information about their vehicle's maintenance needs through the Android phone.
Is that really the best use-case you can come up with? The only time I care about my car's maintenance needs are when I'm actually driving it. The 'check engine' light is annoying enough, I certainly don't want it to push notifications to my phone!
Then let the market decide. GP was right. It is all about locking the developers in, making them choose between creating software for Apple, or all of the other platforms. It's a despicable business practice and as a hobbyist developer I will not have my toolset dictated to me so long as the end result runs natively on the device.
The market is deciding. As a player in the market, Apple has decided to try to derail Flash adoption for the reasons Apple listed in Jobs's letter. As much as that may suck to you personally, or anyone else who misses Flash on their Apple devices, you'll have to at least agree with Apple that Flash is a proprietary system that should be avoided in the face of open web standards.
As another player in the market, if you actually disagree with Apple concerning Flash, you have the choice to not only not buy their devices but to also support alternatives. Simple.
So standards on the web should be free, but its ok to have proprietary lock in for the iPhone?
Correct. There is nothing wrong with proprietary lock-in. It may be a consideration in a market abuse investigation, but apart from that, the only thing you can do is to choose not to buy their stuff. Clearly Apple is not the only player in the mobile phone market (by far), so we obviously aren't looking at an antitrust situation. So if you don't like what Apple offers, don't buy it. Meanwhile, other people will decide they like Apple's goods and they will buy. Simple.
Having Flash on the iPhone might be a false choice, but I don't honestly see what leg Apple has to stand on with this issue.
The leg they have to stand on is the iPhone ecosystem, including the App Store and the device itself, is not a web standard to which all browsers and devices must comply. As far as I know, Apple never claimed to be anti-proprietary, just pro-"open web standards."
Many will take my previous statement and try to argue that Apple's h.264 support is a contradiction, but let's get real. H.264 won long before it was a contender for the standard HTML5 video format. It's a shame that Theora wasn't very competitive back when h.264 was being used in embedded applications and major video sites were choosing video codecs, but that's history and the present is the present.
It's all about keep selling high markup iDevices. To achieve that they need to make sure to have a lock-in.
Not really. Their "iDevices" (the iPod and iPhone) are actually quite successful despite Apple having no access to locked-in customers. Before the iPod, Apple didn't have any small electronics in the market to speak of. Again, the iPhone comes out with an entirely new operating system, and they didn't even plan to make it programmable. Other players in the market did enjoy varying amounts of lock-in when Apple entered the mobile phone market, and they've lost some customers to Apple. To say that Apple needs lock-in to sell devices is a little naive. This is not to say that Apple does not use some forms of lock-in to retain customers, but it clearly isn't something they need.
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You mean something like this? <quote>Like thus</quote>
No, that's wrong. You need <pre> to do it!
Yes, and I've got OpenGL 3.2 support with the nvidia linux drivers, but those are obviously proprietary. The GP was most definitely referring to Mesa, the open source implementation, which still targets OpenGL 2.1.
I don't think it's much of a problem. No GL developer doing serious work is going to be using a software implementation anyway. It's nice that Mesa is there as a backup, but it's certainly not the end of the world if it is several versions behind. The software implementation just isn't up to the task of running anything but the most simple GL programs, even with a fast CPU, so anyone running GL apps are definitely going to be using their video cards' implementation which will definitely be newer than OpenGL 2.1.
Besides, I don't even think Microsoft's software implementation is as new as OpenGL 2.1, so it's not like that's necessarily a base configuration developers are using.
How did government control of the postal service mean more freedom of information (getting a letter from A to B in less than several months!)? How did government control of highways mean more freedom of movement (Fewer highway robbers and turnpike toll bandits)? How did government control/regulation of telegraph, radio, television, telephones mean more freedom of information? NN is not about "make content fair", it's about "make queuing/lining up for service fair"
+5 Interesting? There must be a lot of koolaid-drinking moderators because your use of logical fallacy is not exactly subtle. You made a list of things you think the government has succeeded at in an attempt to make it seem obvious that the government would also be good at regulating the internet, but that is not at all obvious. One could counter with a lengthy list of government regulatory failures; see the problem?
Nobody agrees that content discrimination is good, but there are far better ways to solve that than what the FCC is proposing.
THAT is why net neutrality is important.
Oh, I get it. So net neutrality is important because of some hypothetical situation you just made up that hasn't actually happened. Yes, I can certainly see how that is very important.
but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.
Maybe, but respect shouldn't come automatically with any acquired position (especially an elected position). Respect must be earned.
Reagan earned his respect. Arnold... well, I don't have a problem with referring to him as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger." He was a far better body-builder than he is a governor.
Effectively in this example, Comcast controls everything because the government can't keep it's hands off.
Which is precisely the point that seems to elude so many otherwise-smart people here. Net neutrality isn't regulation to fix the free market (which they presume has failed). Net neutrality is more regulation to fix the messed-up market caused by all the already-existing regulation and government-sponsored monopolies. Nobody knows how well a free ISP market would work since we've never had one, but I'm convinced that if there was a real demand for a neutral internet, a free market would bring up a new competitor to meet that demand while the others follow suit to remain relevant. That is what the free market does best.
On that same note, it's interesting to see how government always sells us more regulation. Pretend what we've got is a free market and attack it, trumpeting regulation as the answer. In reality, the markets that fail the worst are the most regulated (i.e. the healthcare market), yet we keep piling on even more regulation to try to fix the mess we've made.
Unless there is collusion between service providers causing the price to remain artificially high, there is nothing inherently wrong with the fact that internet is more expensive in the United States under free market conditions. As it happens, the price is higher than it should be because of grant money given to a few big companies by government. Because of the government-sponsored coercive monopolies, they don't spend their money on improving infrastructure. What a surprise; government is the problem again.
Of course, the other option is to socialize internet service, putting in wholly in the government's hands, like so many other countries which are able to offer cheap internet service. That's fine for other countries, but you could view this is un-American depending on whether you view internet service as a utility or a luxury. Regardless, there is nothing wrong with high prices for un-socialized internet service (the price will be whatever the market will bear), but there is something wrong with the current situation where the government is just interfering in the market.
You can go further: tabs are a hack by applications to make up for the failure of the traditional WM model and it's inability to handle large numbers of windows.
Umm, not really. Tabs are based on the idea of "stacking" or grouping related "papers" together. That's perfectly natural on a real desk, unless you think you need to have every "open" paper on your desk to be visible.
The GP is correct. Titlebars are unnatural and just waste space, having no parallel to anything we might use when managing a real desk. Every function of the titlebar and window border can be accessed without actually interacting with them in any WM worth its salt. They do waste a lot of screen space. On the other hand, it's completely natural interacting with tabs with the mouse; they behave as we would expect, having used physical tabs to organize actual paper documents.
Now let's wait for the Apple fanboys who will see no wrong on Apple's part.
I don't see anyone saying that. On the contrary, just about every Apple story seems to be full of a ton of anger and vitriol, regardless of what the story is about. Maybe I don't see enough modded-down comments? Regardless, I'm sure that for every emotional fanboy there is at least one irrational hater and 50 million others who could hardly care less.
The only issue we have right now is that Global Warming doesn't have the same commitment the Y2K scare had, and Global Warming is not something that can be fixed by computer scientists alone.
There is also the pesky problem that there is no consensus on global warming. For some reason, proponents of the theory like to assume that the science is settled, perhaps so they can conveniently call anyone who might disagree a loony denier.
I think that's at least one other point where GW differs drastically from Y2K.
I know TRIM doesn't work yet in OS X but the drive seems to take care of itself just fine.
It probably is taking care of itself. Some OCZ drives, including the Vertex series, can have firmware which forgoes Trim support in favor of some form of garbage collecting.
That's been known for a while. The question is, why on Earth did they not test the phones properly? And by properly, I mean in real world circumstances.
They did have a long testing period, but apparently the only left-handed prototype tester lost his iPhone at a bar.
On my droid I can run SecondLife, Pandora, another radio station from anywhere, surf the web, and watch videos - all at the same time. All of these programs can take input or provide information at the same time. Nice try Apple.
I think you've hit on something important here and a reason why the iPhone does so well despite its obvious limitations: Average people don't care whether or not their phone can do all that at the same time because they would never use it like that. On the other hand, battery life is a concern shared by just about everyone. In other words, just about everybody nowadays is very aware of what the iPhone is and what it can and can't do, yet they still swamp Apple's servers on pre-release day. Given the popularity of their prior models alone, I take this to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't as important to most people as it apparently is to you.
Pre-emptive multitasking means that the kernel (technically, the scheduler) decides when a process runs and when it yields; the process has no control.
As long as we're being technical, that last bit isn't completely accurate. Even processes in a preemptive multitasking environment can also choose to yield the rest of the time given them by the scheduler. That alone ought to bring significant battery savings when running apps which run in a tight loop but aren't needing to utilize all the processing time, like games. I assume Apple has performed some tests to make sure their multitasking limitations are justified in reducing battery drain, unless that wasn't the reason for the limitations...
I don't have an iPhone, and I'm not about to buy this one either, but what makes it "interesting" to me is the front-facing camera, a feature not seen on many (any?) widely used phones in the US. They didn't invent mobile video conferencing, but you can be sure that they will be responsible for making it usable and more widely used.
I had to look up what Camfrog is, although having software on my phone to display 100 webcams at once isn't really something that interests me anyway. Thanks for the reference, though.
This story was posted before the "one more thing" was mentioned, and it's one of the more interesting features: mobile video conferencing!
BSD is actually less restrictive. While it requires attribution, it doesn't require that derivative work be released under BSD, while GPL requires that derivative work maintain the GPL license.
I don't believe this is true of the GPL. If you modify GPL code or make a derivative work thereof, you are the copyright holder of your changes. AFAIK, your modifications just need to be licensed under some GPL-compatible license, at least as far as the distribution restrictions of the GPL apply. So your modifications don't necessarily have to be licensed under the exact terms and conditions of the GPL, just a compatible license.
Of course, the common thing to do to keep things simple is to release your changes with the same license as the original work, but that's not a requirement. Anyway, I believe you're correct about the BSD license being less restrictive than the GPL, but keep in mind that GPL proponents have a different and equally valid viewpoint on what constitutes as a restriction.
Awesome! Now the compilation process can spend 80% of its time repeatedly linking virtual tables and getting confused over pure virtuals, instead of spending 5% of its time running through the symbol table and 95% compiling. Remember, building i.e. X11 invokes gcc hundreds or thousands of times, once for each C file (and it invokes the C preprocessor too, and all kinds of other shit from the toolchain, once for each included file each time it's included).
What does any of that have to do with the language the compiler is written in? It's not like the compiler is being recompiled every time you build X11. If you're trying to make the point that programs written in C++ are considerably slower than those written in C, you've still got some explaining to do.
'Linux is open source and we feel good about it,' said one employee. 'Microsoft we don't feel so good about.' However, they feel pretty good about a closed-source implementation of an open source operating system on locked-in hardware? This sounds rather flamebaity and very light on facts.
I think you've missed something. Read the sentence; they look at open source as a benefit and they feel good about it (Linux). That doesn't mean that the fact that Linux is open source is the only or even the biggest reason they like it. Obviously they also feel good about Mac OS X despite the fact that it's not 100% open source. Get it?
Corporations choose what makes sense to increase their bottom line. To that end, they think Linux makes sense. The fact that Linux is open source is just icing on the cake.
OpenBSD like anything else has its flaws: namely a insular and hostile user community and theocratic leader with a vision.
I see what you did there.
Truly. It definitely is possible to write software that is featureful and fast. You just have to write it correctly. And let's face it, Firefox is not written correctly. It's nice that people are sticking up for their favorite browser, but let's not be in denial about what a bloated mess Firefox has become.
For instance, a person could find out information about their vehicle's maintenance needs through the Android phone.
Is that really the best use-case you can come up with? The only time I care about my car's maintenance needs are when I'm actually driving it. The 'check engine' light is annoying enough, I certainly don't want it to push notifications to my phone!
Then let the market decide. GP was right. It is all about locking the developers in, making them choose between creating software for Apple, or all of the other platforms. It's a despicable business practice and as a hobbyist developer I will not have my toolset dictated to me so long as the end result runs natively on the device.
The market is deciding. As a player in the market, Apple has decided to try to derail Flash adoption for the reasons Apple listed in Jobs's letter. As much as that may suck to you personally, or anyone else who misses Flash on their Apple devices, you'll have to at least agree with Apple that Flash is a proprietary system that should be avoided in the face of open web standards.
As another player in the market, if you actually disagree with Apple concerning Flash, you have the choice to not only not buy their devices but to also support alternatives. Simple.
So standards on the web should be free, but its ok to have proprietary lock in for the iPhone?
Correct. There is nothing wrong with proprietary lock-in. It may be a consideration in a market abuse investigation, but apart from that, the only thing you can do is to choose not to buy their stuff. Clearly Apple is not the only player in the mobile phone market (by far), so we obviously aren't looking at an antitrust situation. So if you don't like what Apple offers, don't buy it. Meanwhile, other people will decide they like Apple's goods and they will buy. Simple.
Having Flash on the iPhone might be a false choice, but I don't honestly see what leg Apple has to stand on with this issue.
The leg they have to stand on is the iPhone ecosystem, including the App Store and the device itself, is not a web standard to which all browsers and devices must comply. As far as I know, Apple never claimed to be anti-proprietary, just pro-"open web standards."
Many will take my previous statement and try to argue that Apple's h.264 support is a contradiction, but let's get real. H.264 won long before it was a contender for the standard HTML5 video format. It's a shame that Theora wasn't very competitive back when h.264 was being used in embedded applications and major video sites were choosing video codecs, but that's history and the present is the present.
It's all about keep selling high markup iDevices. To achieve that they need to make sure to have a lock-in.
Not really. Their "iDevices" (the iPod and iPhone) are actually quite successful despite Apple having no access to locked-in customers. Before the iPod, Apple didn't have any small electronics in the market to speak of. Again, the iPhone comes out with an entirely new operating system, and they didn't even plan to make it programmable. Other players in the market did enjoy varying amounts of lock-in when Apple entered the mobile phone market, and they've lost some customers to Apple. To say that Apple needs lock-in to sell devices is a little naive. This is not to say that Apple does not use some forms of lock-in to retain customers, but it clearly isn't something they need.