I agree. There's nothing more evil than buying an unprofitable company and breaking it up to make the pieces more useful than the sum. Shame on Apple. Oh wait...
When I was a Mac OS X user, I was glad that Apple deemphasized Java on their platform. As the Java-Cocoa bindings became deprecated and dusty, it was clear that their plan was to get people on board with Objective-C. It sucks for you who have invested in Java development, but as a user, I was happy that those fugly apps would be going away.
Actually, this seems to be the same exact issue with Flash. Seeing as how we have webkit, cups, bonjour, and gcd, it's clear that Apple isn't against all multiplatform, but they seem to have a problem with toolkits which create crap which is only as good as the crappiest device it aims to support. I guess I still don't have a problem with that.
Whatever happened to "presumed innocent until proven guilty"?
Has anyone else noticed that laws seem to be slowly changing to produce a presumption of guilt (requiring a proof of innocence) these days?
As usual, the media has portrayed this bill according to whatever political slant the news outlets see fit. In reality, the Arizona bill is not much different than the federal law on illegal immigration (which obviously just isn't enforced). In particular, more than a few pundits are trying to portray this law as giving law officers the power to go door-to-door in search of illegal aliens to bust. In actuality, there is no such powers, and officers may only ask for papers if there is an altercation. In that case, since officers usually ask to see ID's of any involved persons during any dispute on the street, nobody should have a problem with the Arizona law unless they're trying to make a big deal out of nothing. Clearly, the reason this law is getting so much negative attention is because it makes the President look bad to have states enact laws to enforce federal laws that aren't being enforced.
There are more points to the issue, though. The residents of Arizona overwhelmingly support it because the fact is (although many want to ignore this), illegal immigration is a big problem, economically and socially. As much as people like to avoid talking about this, a huge chunk of crime (especially violent crime) is caused by Spanish-speakers, many of whom are here illegally. I don't blame them! Or at least, I can see the problem they're in. Illegal immigration is akin to slavery, pure and simple. Humans deserve better, which is why this problem needs to be fixed. If nothing else, at least the Arizona law has made it an issue the federal government now wants to address.
The simplest thing we can do to fix this problem is to make it easier to immigrate here legally. Talking about amnesty or anything regarding what to do about illegals who are already here is like bailing water without stopping to fix the hole. If it's easy to immigrate here, more of those who would be illegals become tax-paying, fairly-payed citizens. Then we can work to help illegal aliens who are already here find their way to the back of the line. The longer we wait, the longer this modern form of slavery is going to continue.
What a waste of time. Just put/home on a magnetic disk and everything else on the SSD. This way, you can get away with a small (very affordable) SSD for your binaries, libraries, config files, and app data, and use tried and true magnetic for your important files. Your own personal files don't need to be on a super fast disk anyway because they don't get as much access as you would think, but your binaries and config files get accessed a lot (unless you have a lot of RAM to cache that, which I also recommend). I've been doing this for over a year and enjoying 10 second boots, and instant program access coldstarts (including openoffice and firefox).
I personally fit all my partitions except/home in only 12.7GB (the SSD is 30GB). Seriously, best upgrade ever. I will never put my root partition on a magnetic drive ever again.
Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but the most hyped desktop Linux distribution on the planet is indeed still in use.
Fixed that for you. Fedora claims about twice as many active users as Canonical does, and most people consider it to be a desktop Linux distro. Obviously differences in counting methods make it hard to tell with any certainty which one we can accurately call the most popular, but perhaps many of us can at least agree that Ubuntu is undoubtedly the most hyped Linux distro ever. I don't say that to denigrate Ubuntu; I think Canonical's marketing arm is doing fabulous work.
It's funny how when a FOSS project gets to a certain level of popularity (Firefox, Ubuntu) there seem to be a vocal group of people that try to tear them down.
That's kind of a pointless statement. There's also a vocal group of people who talk it up every chance they get and actively shut down anyone who points out that there might be room for improvement.
especially if it becomes a selling point for the Droid.
Some selling point. Droid does(tm)... reduce your phone's battery life by 50% as Flash uses 10x more processing time than it should need to animate all those ads in your mobile browser.
It's time for Flash to just go away. It was a good idea, but Adobe has consistently proven over the past decade that they are incapable of putting out a secure, solid product anymore. It's a shame; they used to be good.
You could create a visualization similar to that for any moderately complex piece of software. I think other factors are more important when it comes to learning a new project than the size of the tree. If you're already intimately familiar with the language and general patterns used in the source, the rest is just getting adjusted to the style and becoming familiar with the architecture you need to be concerned about. To do that, you just gotta take the plunge and get your hands dirty. In any event, if the software is architected reasonably well, there shouldn't be any reason to be overwhelmed with the size of the tree.
Obviously it presumes GPLd code which isn't probably the case here.
What are you talking about? You seem to think that forking is a feature unique to the GPL. On the contrary, the more liberal licenses (BSD, MIT, et al.) provide the most freedom when it comes to forking--more freedom than people who choose the GPL are comfortable with, which is why the GPL even exists. Said more plainly, you can fork a BSD project and not even give your source changes back (shock, horror), and that's clearly not the case with the GPL.
Without arguing the merits of any particular open source license, you are probably under the impression that only GPL source code can be forked because you have bought into the baseless notion that corporations can take BSD-licensed code and make it proprietary. In fact, they can't. The only difference is with regard to source changes and binary distribution. If you release code under the BSD license, it's not like some company can come along and scoop it up, claiming exclusive ownership rights; it's already been release under the very open terms that the BSD license provides. Get it?
So Apple gets creative credit for the ideas of speculators? Too bad Apple wasn't listening more carefully - they'd have a better product.
The ironic thing is Apple is listening... to their actual target market. You know, regular people. People who don't care about "free" software ideals or DRM. Have you considered that perhaps the reason they didn't listen to you is because they are not and never will target people like you (a tiny minority of geeks) with a product like the iPad? You may not like the iPad (I certainly don't), but I realize they're not trying to cater to me. I also realize that the group of people they are trying to cater to is huge, so they will probably be quite successful.
As far as giving Apple credit, whether or not they invented the tablet or touch interfaces or wireless or anything like that is irrelevant. What they do is aim to get the tiniest details right; they really know their customers and make products to match them as perfectly as possible. There is no need to waste a single ounce of brain processing time worrying about how much credit Apple should take for the iPad or anything else they make. The whole industry builds off each participant, and they all try to make products to meet the needs and wants of the markets they're good at targeting. It's not any more complicated than that.
The GPL is not the only reason that Firefox would decline to place an encumbered technology in their browser. However, you are incorrect in stating that GPL2 would allow this. Under the terms of GPL2 section 7, the only allowable patent license would be one that licenses all GPL software used by anyone, because the patent license you take may not restrict any of the GPL terms - like modification, and of course you can modify any GPL program into another GPL program.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues),
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or
otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not
excuse you from the conditions of this License.
Irrelevant. Like any other license, the copyright holders retain every right that they don't explicitly give up in the license, meaning Mozilla is not under the same legal obligations regarding the code as everyone else is. I'm quite sure that the GPL does not explicitly state that copyright owners are under the same restrictions of distribution that their licensees are under; otherwise, dual-licensing a proprietary product and a GPL version would be impossible. There is nothing stopping Mozilla from including h.264 support in their binary releases; last I checked, they don't ship any GPL-only 3rd-party code (or without special provisions). And of course there is nothing stopping Mozilla from supporting every codec that the underlying operating system exports in their shared libraries.
I don't know whether or not Mozilla has "said again and again" that there is no way they can include h.264 support in Firefox, but they're simply wrong if they have. Woulda been great if Theora could have gained more traction earlier on so as to have been more competitive, but as far as mass adoption goes, its opportunity is long gone.
In america I find the fact they publish the names of sex offenders grotesque because rehabilitation and re-entering society to lead a normal life is impossible, this vigalante mob justice has never sat well with me.
That's now really what it's about. Personally, if I have small kids and I move into a new neighborhood, the lists are invaluable. It doesn't make rehabilitation impossible either because names expire from the lists, but of course (like any other felon), you have to be truthful to your would-be employers if they ask you. I have no problem with any of this.
The US won't nuke you unless you aren't in compliance with nuclear agreements. How many of our enemies *are* in compliance? Is the US in compliance? Who gets to determine who is in non-compliance anyway? Why should anyone believe the US wouldn't nuke someone it that it really wanted to anyway?
These are meaningless words from a belligerent rogue state.
The words are meaningless, but they give Obama's more liberal fans thrills up their legs.
Trust me, it's slow as balls EVERYWHERE. It sits there at "resolving host" for anywhere from 2-3 seconds to 60 seconds or more before I give up.
Well there's your problem, and it has nothing to do with Chrome. You've got a configuration issue, and it's probably related to ipv6. There's nothing Chrome can do if your DNS resolver is not acting correctly. In such cases, subtle differences between applications determine whether or not the particular problem you have is detectable or not. For everyone who doesn't have configuration problems, Chrome is faster than Firefox in just about every case. Sorry, that's just a fact. I love Firefox, too, but it really is quite bloated and slow. Step one in solving a problem is recognition of the problem.
To add to the situation, when searching google for "google is evil" the first few hits are about google's "do no evil" while on bing the first page hit (had videos hits at the top) is titled "Is Google evil?"
I do not presume that Google is being dishonest here.
That's because there is a lot more precedent for Microsoft being engaged in questionable activities than the same for Google. Sorry, but Microsoft has indeed earned its reputation, and you can't fault people for remembering the past and therefore presuming the worst.
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
There's no reason for a browser not to use any video format the OS has a codec for. As for what will/should be used (h.264 or theora), I'm not sure why we keep getting these articles as if this is still a war that is being waged. The war is over, h.264 is the winner.
Personally, it's hard for me to care less about any of this. Now that Slashdot has an Ubuntu icon, we need an Ubuntu section so I can opt out of it without opting out of Linux. I readily accept that Ubuntu is popular among Linux distros and that some or many people might care to read junk like this on Slashdot, but I really don't need blow-by-blow coverage of every little change they make to their distro.
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons. No one has ever said that the only way the climate can warm is due to humans burning fossil fuels. Deniers like to act as if AGW proponents have said that, however. 'Tis just a strawman.
Actually, that just points out the problem with AGW "science." There are so many variables, nobody really knows why the climate is changing. For now, it's a theory that "greenhouse gases" are causing a significant change in the climate. Another theory is sunspots. For all the tree-rings examined, the only thing we know is that the climate changes. We can't even agree on whether or not that is a bad thing. To me, a warmer planet sounds pretty good. As for sea levels, we also happen to know that it has been rising steadily for thousands of years (obviously at a slower rate today than for several years after the last ice age). Accounts will obviously vary from source to source, but it also doesn't look like there has been a significant increase in the rate of rising over the past centuries.
Most of us who get labeled "disbelievers" or "deniers" are simply opposed to massive, radical legislation surrounding something as murky as so-called "global warming" or climate change. Surprisingly, we don't even hate the planet or love pollution or big oil. But we also don't love the idea of setting up a fake market for the redistribution of wealth with questionable expected impact on the climate.
Slashdot Mirror
I just think it's time.
I agree. There's nothing more evil than buying an unprofitable company and breaking it up to make the pieces more useful than the sum. Shame on Apple. Oh wait...
Why do you have to insert logic and consistency into this debate?
When I was a Mac OS X user, I was glad that Apple deemphasized Java on their platform. As the Java-Cocoa bindings became deprecated and dusty, it was clear that their plan was to get people on board with Objective-C. It sucks for you who have invested in Java development, but as a user, I was happy that those fugly apps would be going away.
Actually, this seems to be the same exact issue with Flash. Seeing as how we have webkit, cups, bonjour, and gcd, it's clear that Apple isn't against all multiplatform, but they seem to have a problem with toolkits which create crap which is only as good as the crappiest device it aims to support. I guess I still don't have a problem with that.
Whatever happened to "presumed innocent until proven guilty"?
Has anyone else noticed that laws seem to be slowly changing to produce a presumption of guilt (requiring a proof of innocence) these days?
As usual, the media has portrayed this bill according to whatever political slant the news outlets see fit. In reality, the Arizona bill is not much different than the federal law on illegal immigration (which obviously just isn't enforced). In particular, more than a few pundits are trying to portray this law as giving law officers the power to go door-to-door in search of illegal aliens to bust. In actuality, there is no such powers, and officers may only ask for papers if there is an altercation. In that case, since officers usually ask to see ID's of any involved persons during any dispute on the street, nobody should have a problem with the Arizona law unless they're trying to make a big deal out of nothing. Clearly, the reason this law is getting so much negative attention is because it makes the President look bad to have states enact laws to enforce federal laws that aren't being enforced.
There are more points to the issue, though. The residents of Arizona overwhelmingly support it because the fact is (although many want to ignore this), illegal immigration is a big problem, economically and socially. As much as people like to avoid talking about this, a huge chunk of crime (especially violent crime) is caused by Spanish-speakers, many of whom are here illegally. I don't blame them! Or at least, I can see the problem they're in. Illegal immigration is akin to slavery, pure and simple. Humans deserve better, which is why this problem needs to be fixed. If nothing else, at least the Arizona law has made it an issue the federal government now wants to address.
The simplest thing we can do to fix this problem is to make it easier to immigrate here legally. Talking about amnesty or anything regarding what to do about illegals who are already here is like bailing water without stopping to fix the hole. If it's easy to immigrate here, more of those who would be illegals become tax-paying, fairly-payed citizens. Then we can work to help illegal aliens who are already here find their way to the back of the line. The longer we wait, the longer this modern form of slavery is going to continue.
What a waste of time. Just put /home on a magnetic disk and everything else on the SSD. This way, you can get away with a small (very affordable) SSD for your binaries, libraries, config files, and app data, and use tried and true magnetic for your important files. Your own personal files don't need to be on a super fast disk anyway because they don't get as much access as you would think, but your binaries and config files get accessed a lot (unless you have a lot of RAM to cache that, which I also recommend). I've been doing this for over a year and enjoying 10 second boots, and instant program access coldstarts (including openoffice and firefox).
/home in only 12.7GB (the SSD is 30GB). Seriously, best upgrade ever. I will never put my root partition on a magnetic drive ever again.
I personally fit all my partitions except
Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but the most hyped desktop Linux distribution on the planet is indeed still in use.
Fixed that for you. Fedora claims about twice as many active users as Canonical does, and most people consider it to be a desktop Linux distro. Obviously differences in counting methods make it hard to tell with any certainty which one we can accurately call the most popular, but perhaps many of us can at least agree that Ubuntu is undoubtedly the most hyped Linux distro ever. I don't say that to denigrate Ubuntu; I think Canonical's marketing arm is doing fabulous work.
It's funny how when a FOSS project gets to a certain level of popularity (Firefox, Ubuntu) there seem to be a vocal group of people that try to tear them down.
That's kind of a pointless statement. There's also a vocal group of people who talk it up every chance they get and actively shut down anyone who points out that there might be room for improvement.
especially if it becomes a selling point for the Droid.
Some selling point. Droid does(tm)... reduce your phone's battery life by 50% as Flash uses 10x more processing time than it should need to animate all those ads in your mobile browser.
It's time for Flash to just go away. It was a good idea, but Adobe has consistently proven over the past decade that they are incapable of putting out a secure, solid product anymore. It's a shame; they used to be good.
Have any of you guys ever looked at a picture of the Linux kernel?
You could create a visualization similar to that for any moderately complex piece of software. I think other factors are more important when it comes to learning a new project than the size of the tree. If you're already intimately familiar with the language and general patterns used in the source, the rest is just getting adjusted to the style and becoming familiar with the architecture you need to be concerned about. To do that, you just gotta take the plunge and get your hands dirty. In any event, if the software is architected reasonably well, there shouldn't be any reason to be overwhelmed with the size of the tree.
Obviously it presumes GPLd code which isn't probably the case here.
What are you talking about? You seem to think that forking is a feature unique to the GPL. On the contrary, the more liberal licenses (BSD, MIT, et al.) provide the most freedom when it comes to forking--more freedom than people who choose the GPL are comfortable with, which is why the GPL even exists. Said more plainly, you can fork a BSD project and not even give your source changes back (shock, horror), and that's clearly not the case with the GPL.
Without arguing the merits of any particular open source license, you are probably under the impression that only GPL source code can be forked because you have bought into the baseless notion that corporations can take BSD-licensed code and make it proprietary. In fact, they can't. The only difference is with regard to source changes and binary distribution. If you release code under the BSD license, it's not like some company can come along and scoop it up, claiming exclusive ownership rights; it's already been release under the very open terms that the BSD license provides. Get it?
So Apple gets creative credit for the ideas of speculators? Too bad Apple wasn't listening more carefully - they'd have a better product.
The ironic thing is Apple is listening... to their actual target market. You know, regular people. People who don't care about "free" software ideals or DRM. Have you considered that perhaps the reason they didn't listen to you is because they are not and never will target people like you (a tiny minority of geeks) with a product like the iPad? You may not like the iPad (I certainly don't), but I realize they're not trying to cater to me. I also realize that the group of people they are trying to cater to is huge, so they will probably be quite successful.
As far as giving Apple credit, whether or not they invented the tablet or touch interfaces or wireless or anything like that is irrelevant. What they do is aim to get the tiniest details right; they really know their customers and make products to match them as perfectly as possible. There is no need to waste a single ounce of brain processing time worrying about how much credit Apple should take for the iPad or anything else they make. The whole industry builds off each participant, and they all try to make products to meet the needs and wants of the markets they're good at targeting. It's not any more complicated than that.
The GPL is not the only reason that Firefox would decline to place an encumbered technology in their browser. However, you are incorrect in stating that GPL2 would allow this. Under the terms of GPL2 section 7, the only allowable patent license would be one that licenses all GPL software used by anyone, because the patent license you take may not restrict any of the GPL terms - like modification, and of course you can modify any GPL program into another GPL program.
Irrelevant. Like any other license, the copyright holders retain every right that they don't explicitly give up in the license, meaning Mozilla is not under the same legal obligations regarding the code as everyone else is. I'm quite sure that the GPL does not explicitly state that copyright owners are under the same restrictions of distribution that their licensees are under; otherwise, dual-licensing a proprietary product and a GPL version would be impossible. There is nothing stopping Mozilla from including h.264 support in their binary releases; last I checked, they don't ship any GPL-only 3rd-party code (or without special provisions). And of course there is nothing stopping Mozilla from supporting every codec that the underlying operating system exports in their shared libraries.
I don't know whether or not Mozilla has "said again and again" that there is no way they can include h.264 support in Firefox, but they're simply wrong if they have. Woulda been great if Theora could have gained more traction earlier on so as to have been more competitive, but as far as mass adoption goes, its opportunity is long gone.
In america I find the fact they publish the names of sex offenders grotesque because rehabilitation and re-entering society to lead a normal life is impossible, this vigalante mob justice has never sat well with me.
That's now really what it's about. Personally, if I have small kids and I move into a new neighborhood, the lists are invaluable. It doesn't make rehabilitation impossible either because names expire from the lists, but of course (like any other felon), you have to be truthful to your would-be employers if they ask you. I have no problem with any of this.
The US won't nuke you unless you aren't in compliance with nuclear agreements. How many of our enemies *are* in compliance? Is the US in compliance? Who gets to determine who is in non-compliance anyway? Why should anyone believe the US wouldn't nuke someone it that it really wanted to anyway?
These are meaningless words from a belligerent rogue state.
The words are meaningless, but they give Obama's more liberal fans thrills up their legs.
Cigs are one of those things where if I have them, that's great...if I don't, I'm not going to go out of my way to get more.
Yet, you regularly buy them. That's an act of going out of your way to have them.
Apple is a pretty evil company. I know... -1 troll
Actually, playing on the anti-Apple sentiment gets you on the fast track to +5 Insightful.
The US' legal system follows the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
Exactly; like Bernard Madoff. Oh wait... If he made the rules, he probably would have exempted himself from a life sentence.
Trust me, it's slow as balls EVERYWHERE. It sits there at "resolving host" for anywhere from 2-3 seconds to 60 seconds or more before I give up.
Well there's your problem, and it has nothing to do with Chrome. You've got a configuration issue, and it's probably related to ipv6. There's nothing Chrome can do if your DNS resolver is not acting correctly. In such cases, subtle differences between applications determine whether or not the particular problem you have is detectable or not. For everyone who doesn't have configuration problems, Chrome is faster than Firefox in just about every case. Sorry, that's just a fact. I love Firefox, too, but it really is quite bloated and slow. Step one in solving a problem is recognition of the problem.
To add to the situation, when searching google for "google is evil" the first few hits are about google's "do no evil" while on bing the first page hit (had videos hits at the top) is titled "Is Google evil?" I do not presume that Google is being dishonest here.
That's because there is a lot more precedent for Microsoft being engaged in questionable activities than the same for Google. Sorry, but Microsoft has indeed earned its reputation, and you can't fault people for remembering the past and therefore presuming the worst.
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
There's no reason for a browser not to use any video format the OS has a codec for. As for what will/should be used (h.264 or theora), I'm not sure why we keep getting these articles as if this is still a war that is being waged. The war is over, h.264 is the winner.
"MSNBC is offering a good article..."
You lost me there.
Personally, it's hard for me to care less about any of this. Now that Slashdot has an Ubuntu icon, we need an Ubuntu section so I can opt out of it without opting out of Linux. I readily accept that Ubuntu is popular among Linux distros and that some or many people might care to read junk like this on Slashdot, but I really don't need blow-by-blow coverage of every little change they make to their distro.
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons. No one has ever said that the only way the climate can warm is due to humans burning fossil fuels. Deniers like to act as if AGW proponents have said that, however. 'Tis just a strawman.
Actually, that just points out the problem with AGW "science." There are so many variables, nobody really knows why the climate is changing. For now, it's a theory that "greenhouse gases" are causing a significant change in the climate. Another theory is sunspots. For all the tree-rings examined, the only thing we know is that the climate changes. We can't even agree on whether or not that is a bad thing. To me, a warmer planet sounds pretty good. As for sea levels, we also happen to know that it has been rising steadily for thousands of years (obviously at a slower rate today than for several years after the last ice age). Accounts will obviously vary from source to source, but it also doesn't look like there has been a significant increase in the rate of rising over the past centuries.
Most of us who get labeled "disbelievers" or "deniers" are simply opposed to massive, radical legislation surrounding something as murky as so-called "global warming" or climate change. Surprisingly, we don't even hate the planet or love pollution or big oil. But we also don't love the idea of setting up a fake market for the redistribution of wealth with questionable expected impact on the climate.
Well, that's almost Flamebait..like saying 'Canada is part of the USA' IMHO.
It isn't?
The same release window as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7.
On the other hand, Vista provided negative value to users, and many paid hundreds for the privilege. Maybe that evens it out.