People have always traded music without permission. Before Napster (or MP3z on FTP and IRC) people dubbed their CDs to tape for their friends. Before CD people dubbed from tape to tape. Before tape people dubbed vinyl to reel. Heck, if you want an example of obvious "piracy" look no further than high-speed dubbing tape decks. What do you think they were used for! Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Napster and their ilk did little more than modernize a practise that is older than most of the people reading Slashdot.
With every technological improvement in music (eg, tape, CD, Napster) the music industry has bitched and moaned that it's going to destroy them, that they will sink into bankruptcy, and demanded that the government step in to protect their ancient business model from the evil music pirates! They are nothing more than luddites with money and power. I wonder how many years of progress we've lost.
The amazing thing is how intense the oils and flavorings are. All of the flavor heat in 550 gallons of hot salsa came from less than a half liter of capsicum resin.
Damn. Where can you buy this half-liter of capsicum resin? The Extra Hot salsa hasn't been doing it for me lately.
Lets not go overboard here, women in some countries still do not have the right to vote or have basic human rights.
The uproar from giving those same rights to animate/inanimate objects before humans opens the door to so many arguments it's not even funny.
So? Would you deny basic rights to a sentient creature in your country simply because completely different sentient creatures in another country don't have those rights?
That's a very strange way of seeing things. Almost like saying we can't feed the homeless in our country until we have fed all the starving people in other countries.
No, it's not racism to the same level as the KKK, or not getting a job based on the color of your skin, but in my opinion region lockouts tend to cause harm to citicens who live in one region, but hail from another. I guess that's where I make the determination that it is a form of racism.
But your example has nothing to do with race. All it demonstrates is that region coding is anti-immigration. You might call that xenophobic but it's not racist.
Here is a counter-example to prove that region coding isn't racist. White anglo-saxon New-Yorker working in Japan for a few months, buys a Japanese player while he is there, takes it back home to his New-York apartment and finds local discs won't play. He has been discriminated but not because of his race. The region coding didn't discriminate based on race, but purely based on location.
Second counter-example. Person born in the USA, raised in the USA, never left the USA for any reason, but whose parents were both Japanese. He's racially Japanese. He buys a USA player and... it works. No racial discrimination. It works for him exactly as it works for any white anglo-saxon USA citizen.
Region coding discriminates against you based upon where you live, not your race.
I run linux as my desktop at home, and I also run it at work in a scientific computing cluster.
I'd like to know what benefits I could expect from the new kernel in each area in which I use linux.
Desktop users will benefit from significantly faster and less "jerky" performance.
New sound (ALSA) and video (V4L2) subsystems with improved features and performance.
Much better USB and Firewire support.
Increased hardware support, especially in the areas of bluetooth and wireless.
Under-the-hood changes (threads, reentrancy, preemptiveness, scheduler, block I/O) means your applications should all run a bit faster.
Your scientific cluster applications probably won't see any benefit unless you're hitting hard limits on memory capacity or network performance. In my experience, scientific applications are all CPU bound anyway and could be running on DOS for all it matters.
I happen to think region encoding is discriminatory and racist
Racist?
Now, as for region encoding being discriminatory and/or racist:
Again, we'll use Japan as an example. A Japanese family moves to the U.S. in the mid-90's, before DVDs became main-stream. They buy a DVD player in the U.S. They get on Amazon Japan and purchase a Japanese DVD. DVD doesn't play on their U.S. player. They are prevented from viewing media in their native language unless they shell out the money to buy a second DVD player. Apparenly, no person living in region 1 (North America), in their right mind, would want to view material from other areas. Likewise, if I move to Japan, I can't play my DVDs there unless I bring my US player over.
And I can't plug my Australian electric shaver into an American outlet. Is the power company now racist?
his will force the Asian price up and/or the US price down, so in the end there is only one price for both markets
Actually there will still be two prices, though they will be closer than before. The difference in the prices will cover the cost of importing plus a small profit to the importer.
Free Trade doesn't magically make all prices equal around the world. You will always pay more for fresh fruit in Siberia than in Australia.
But regional coding exists to allow staggered releases.
That's one of the reasons but doesn't explain region coding on already released movies (eg, old movies or reprints)
Other reasons for region coding include artifical market zoning so they can extort more money out of the consumer, artifical trade barriers so importers can't compete, and the legal difficulties created by distribution rights. That last one is a doubled edged sword. The idea is that region codes allow the distributor to maintain control over their "turf". Unfortunately certain distributors will buy a movie and then decide it's not worth releasing in their region. Buena Vista Australia is currently doing exactly that for several Miyazaki films (eg, Princess Mononoke). The consumer loses, yet again.
Long term, I think, what Linus himself will be remembered for won't be the Linux kernel itself, but for how he managed the project. Hell, I personally know half a dozen people that could have done everything Linus did on the technical side of things, but I doubt any of them would have been the project manager he turned out to be.
Amen. What many fanboys don't seem to realise is that writing a UNIX-like kernel isn't beyond the abilities of any top-quality programmer. The unique characteristic of the UNIX kernel is that it's tiny so it can be implemented by 1 or 2 skilled people in a very short period of time. Thompson and Ritchie did it. Tanenbaum did it. Linus did it. Plus the UNIX kernel has over 30 years of documentation; it's not a secret and there's no new ground to forge. So writing the Linux kernel wasn't all too incredible. However attracting 1000s of developers, smoothing their ruffled feathers when egos came into conflict, coordinating everybody in a single direction... now that's an achievement that demands respect.
Though writing the Linux kernel is also very impressive:-)
The technical people at MSFT got into technology because they love it. MSFT really does tend to hire some of the best and the brightest.
Perhaps that's true, but I'm often reminded that "best and brightest" often goes hand in hand with "arrogant and condescending". In Microsoft's case this results in NIH-syndrome on a spectacular scale.
Society progresses quickly when people work as a team. Society is structured to permit teams to form. Science recognises the value of teamwork by incorporating it into the "rules" of science. But Microsoft isn't a team player. They want to do it all themselves. Yes, that demonstrates incredible intelligence, gumption, and skill... but it also demonstrates incredible arrogance and disregard for anybody and anything outside of Microsoft.
Have you seen the latest figures for desktop operating systems?
Yeah, and the IT market never shifts, and the top-dog never goes bankrupt before fading into obscurity.
Hey, while we're at it, can I get a copy of your house key? What do you mean, 'no'? Why not? Isn't restricting what people copy an inherent burden that is no longer workable in the information age?
If my house could be replicated at no expense or inconvenience to me then, sure, you can have a copy of my key with my best wishes to use that key to make as many copies of my house as you like.
Not that I agree with the parent, but Operatings Systems are a hell of a lot more interesting, and people tend to work on what interests them. Not only would Unix programmers be checking it out, so would the many more Windows programmers.
I would add that operating systems are a hell of a lot simpler than browsers. Mainly by virtue of there being 30+ years of research into writing operating systems.
Just skimming through the technologies in a modern browser - XML, HTML, CSS, ECMA, DOM, HTTP, TLS - is enough to make your brain hurt. Add to that the millions of little gotchas and it's no wonder it takes several 100 man years to write a decent browser, whereas a single talented person can write a workable operating system in just a few months.
Re:Where's the source?
on
Xandros version 2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not to worry and certainly nothing to be embarrassed about... the GPL is a lot less restrictive than it is made out to be. The key to a commercial distro is about the cherry on top, and not the two scoops of ice cream or the hot fudge.
I've always thought the commercial distro is more like the tables, chairs, bowls, spoons, napkins and the overworked waitress who cleans up after you.
Getting Linux without a distro is like putting your hands out and having a scoop of icecream dumped in your palms. It's messy, even if you did get the same icecream.
I was under the impression that if you created stuff with GPL software you have to make the source available... Am I wrong in thinking that this is required?
Yes, you are wrong. Stuff you created "with GPL software" is not required to be licensed under the GPL. Only derivative works that you distribute are required to be licensed under the GPL.
For example you could write an application with Emacs, compile it with GCC, debug it with GDB, and sell it bundled with the same CD as Linux, and not give your source code away. Perfectly OK.
I looked at the site- they explain that some parts of xandros are GPL and some are not. But I could not find anywhere that explained what you need to do to get copies of the code for the parts that are under the GPL.
The GPL only requires source code to be made available on demand. Have you asked them?
Wouldn't it follow then that IBM is the only party that could be "punished" for distributing the trade secret.
Yes, 100% correct. End-users cannot be fined or forced to pay license fees for a trade secret that IBM leaked.
SCO is asserting other intellectual property rights (only in the media, at this stage) that they claim will allow them to charge license fees from end-users, eg. copyright infringement.
There was an article on Groklaw where an independent lawyer commented it was unusual (unprecedented?) for a company to attempt to charge a non-customer for anything other than patent infringement. SCO has no patents of relevance to Linux. He suggested that SCO has a difficult time ahead.
Actually, it's a hell of a lot easier to program for a library with well written docs than having to delve into the source code. If you have to read the source, it usually isn't a time-saver.
And it's easier again if you have both.
Especially when you're chasing an elusive memory leak. No source code = debugging hell.
There are recommendations to not format flash to ext3 because of frequent rewrites to the same sectors, which could cause the flash cells to end-of-life pretty quickly, but hard disks don't generally have that problem. (OTOH, neither do vfat systems...not sure about ext2.)
Your comment about ext3 (and ext2) is correct but VFAT is not immune to the frequent-rewrites problem. The FAT itself (basically a linked list stored as an array) will have frequent rewrites and there is no feature in VFAT to use alternate locations for the FAT. Also directory entries in VFAT will get frequent rewrites (especially the date fields). A flash-friendly filesystem needs to write to all "sectors" with equal frequency. VFAT does not do this.
Not that I think any of this matters. USB keys become obsolete faster than you can wear them out. 16MB keys are already useless and 32MB ones are quickly going that way. I've never seen either size (16MB or 32MB) wear out before being junked. People are buying 512MB keys now for only a few $100. By the time the 512MB keys wear out I fully expect to be buying 10GB keys. I think the "only 10,000 writes" problem is theoretical; it's not a problem in practise.
Though I suspect many USB keys rearrange their writes internally to prevent premature death. This probably means it doesn't matter what filesystem you use.
Clearly not everyone or even near a majority were zealots. But there certainly were a surprising number.
I suppose the reason I responded the first time and why I'm responding again is this use of the phrase "GPL zealots". I get the impression that it's implying anybody who is passionate about the GPL is also going to make unwarranted demands and will be offensive towards infringers, even when the infringement is accidental.
In my experience the people who are the most passionate about the GPL (eg, RMS, the FSF, Eben Moglen, GNU developers) are the least demanding and the least offensive. They are most certainly "zealots" in the sense that they have an enthusiastic devotion to explaining and defending the GPL. But I'm not convinced that the people you represent as "GPL Zealots" on that link are the same sort of people as RMS. Those people making demands are obviously ignorant of the GPL; a person who violates the GPL has merely violated a license and they are under no obligation to GPLify their own code.
I suppose what I'm saying isn't much. It's just that I'd like to see a distinction made between "naive and ignorant GPL zealots" and "intelligent and knowledgeable GPL zealots". It would seem you have a beef with the former group and I would agree with you that those kinds of people should shut their fool mouths. But painting all zealots with the same brush is unfair to all the knowledgeable and level-headed people who enjoy discussing and defending the GPL.
Methinks maybe the FUD people are spreading here about VMWare and its potential pricing hike after the buyout is all the more reason for people to look at Bochs.;-)
People should always have been looking at Bochs because Bochs is GPL and VMware is not. Freedom is important. Don't forget that.
However there are criticisms against Bochs as a practical replacement for VMWare.
Bochs is a pure emulator (contrast with the virtualisation technique used by VMWare) which makes it ~ 100-200x slower. This is too slow for most people. Developers possibly prefer Bochs because it provides advanced CPU debugging and "instrumentation" plugins but I think they're in the minority. The majority of us just want to run Windows as a guest OS for the occasional legacy application.
Bochs emulation still isn't good enough for most purposes. It can run Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 but it doesn't have sufficiently accurate hardware (CPU?) emulation for Windows 2000 or XP. I have no doubt these will be supported in the near future - Bochs improves at a slow but steady rate - but at the moment it's not practical.
Of course, a point in Bochs favour is that it runs on any host architecture. You can run VMWare on x86 and... well that's it. Bochs runs on Sparc and PowerPC and dozens of others in addition to x86. This is because VMWare is virtualisation but Bochs is emulation.
Another point in Bochs favour is the ongoing effort to implement Dynamic Translation (DT). No fruit yet but projects like QEMU prove that the skilled developers are out there and are willing to write free DT software. DT is a non-virtualisation technique which should offer a 10-20x performance improvement on all host architectures. Unfortunately DT needs to be reimplemented for each host architecture but that might be acceptable. DT is what makes Virtual PC run Windows at an acceptable speed on the PowerPC architecture.
Yet another point in Bochs favour is Kevin's current work on Plex86 virtualisation. Yes, this currently only works for "modified" guest OS like the modified-Linux he demonstrated earlier this year. However Bochs now has Plex86 support; it can optionally (command-line option) pass code pages to Plex86 for virtualised execution. If Plex86 fails then Bochs retries the code page with its slower emulation code. So there is some promise that Bochs will soon get full virtualisation on the x86 host architecture.
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People have always traded music without permission. Before Napster (or MP3z on FTP and IRC) people dubbed their CDs to tape for their friends. Before CD people dubbed from tape to tape. Before tape people dubbed vinyl to reel. Heck, if you want an example of obvious "piracy" look no further than high-speed dubbing tape decks. What do you think they were used for! Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Napster and their ilk did little more than modernize a practise that is older than most of the people reading Slashdot.
With every technological improvement in music (eg, tape, CD, Napster) the music industry has bitched and moaned that it's going to destroy them, that they will sink into bankruptcy, and demanded that the government step in to protect their ancient business model from the evil music pirates! They are nothing more than luddites with money and power. I wonder how many years of progress we've lost.
In Australia our rednecks don't run around with guns; they're too busy running the government. The unkempt heathens with shotguns are called bogans.
Damn. Where can you buy this half-liter of capsicum resin? The Extra Hot salsa hasn't been doing it for me lately.
I think the most likely explanation is he has developed cataracts.
Strawman. Nobody was proposing that this particular robot be granted human rights. We are discussing a hypothetical sentient robot in the future.
So? Would you deny basic rights to a sentient creature in your country simply because completely different sentient creatures in another country don't have those rights?
That's a very strange way of seeing things. Almost like saying we can't feed the homeless in our country until we have fed all the starving people in other countries.
But your example has nothing to do with race. All it demonstrates is that region coding is anti-immigration. You might call that xenophobic but it's not racist.
Here is a counter-example to prove that region coding isn't racist. White anglo-saxon New-Yorker working in Japan for a few months, buys a Japanese player while he is there, takes it back home to his New-York apartment and finds local discs won't play. He has been discriminated but not because of his race. The region coding didn't discriminate based on race, but purely based on location.
Second counter-example. Person born in the USA, raised in the USA, never left the USA for any reason, but whose parents were both Japanese. He's racially Japanese. He buys a USA player and... it works. No racial discrimination. It works for him exactly as it works for any white anglo-saxon USA citizen.
Region coding discriminates against you based upon where you live, not your race.
Desktop users will benefit from significantly faster and less "jerky" performance.
New sound (ALSA) and video (V4L2) subsystems with improved features and performance.
Much better USB and Firewire support.
Increased hardware support, especially in the areas of bluetooth and wireless.
Under-the-hood changes (threads, reentrancy, preemptiveness, scheduler, block I/O) means your applications should all run a bit faster.
Your scientific cluster applications probably won't see any benefit unless you're hitting hard limits on memory capacity or network performance. In my experience, scientific applications are all CPU bound anyway and could be running on DOS for all it matters.
More accurate information at Wonderful World of Linux 2.6.
Racist?
And I can't plug my Australian electric shaver into an American outlet. Is the power company now racist?
You're a fruitcake. It's not racist!
Actually there will still be two prices, though they will be closer than before. The difference in the prices will cover the cost of importing plus a small profit to the importer.
Free Trade doesn't magically make all prices equal around the world. You will always pay more for fresh fruit in Siberia than in Australia.
That's one of the reasons but doesn't explain region coding on already released movies (eg, old movies or reprints)
Other reasons for region coding include artifical market zoning so they can extort more money out of the consumer, artifical trade barriers so importers can't compete, and the legal difficulties created by distribution rights. That last one is a doubled edged sword. The idea is that region codes allow the distributor to maintain control over their "turf". Unfortunately certain distributors will buy a movie and then decide it's not worth releasing in their region. Buena Vista Australia is currently doing exactly that for several Miyazaki films (eg, Princess Mononoke). The consumer loses, yet again.
Amen. What many fanboys don't seem to realise is that writing a UNIX-like kernel isn't beyond the abilities of any top-quality programmer. The unique characteristic of the UNIX kernel is that it's tiny so it can be implemented by 1 or 2 skilled people in a very short period of time. Thompson and Ritchie did it. Tanenbaum did it. Linus did it. Plus the UNIX kernel has over 30 years of documentation; it's not a secret and there's no new ground to forge. So writing the Linux kernel wasn't all too incredible. However attracting 1000s of developers, smoothing their ruffled feathers when egos came into conflict, coordinating everybody in a single direction... now that's an achievement that demands respect.
Though writing the Linux kernel is also very impressive :-)
Perhaps that's true, but I'm often reminded that "best and brightest" often goes hand in hand with "arrogant and condescending". In Microsoft's case this results in NIH-syndrome on a spectacular scale.
Society progresses quickly when people work as a team. Society is structured to permit teams to form. Science recognises the value of teamwork by incorporating it into the "rules" of science. But Microsoft isn't a team player. They want to do it all themselves. Yes, that demonstrates incredible intelligence, gumption, and skill... but it also demonstrates incredible arrogance and disregard for anybody and anything outside of Microsoft.
Microsoft could do with a little humility.
I laughed at people like you who thought the Start Button was Microsoft's original idea.
Gee... doesn't it look exactly like the Apple Menu except on the bottom instead of the top.
Yeah, and the IT market never shifts, and the top-dog never goes bankrupt before fading into obscurity.
If my house could be replicated at no expense or inconvenience to me then, sure, you can have a copy of my key with my best wishes to use that key to make as many copies of my house as you like.
I would add that operating systems are a hell of a lot simpler than browsers. Mainly by virtue of there being 30+ years of research into writing operating systems.
Just skimming through the technologies in a modern browser - XML, HTML, CSS, ECMA, DOM, HTTP, TLS - is enough to make your brain hurt. Add to that the millions of little gotchas and it's no wonder it takes several 100 man years to write a decent browser, whereas a single talented person can write a workable operating system in just a few months.
I've always thought the commercial distro is more like the tables, chairs, bowls, spoons, napkins and the overworked waitress who cleans up after you.
Getting Linux without a distro is like putting your hands out and having a scoop of icecream dumped in your palms. It's messy, even if you did get the same icecream.
Yes, you are wrong. Stuff you created "with GPL software" is not required to be licensed under the GPL. Only derivative works that you distribute are required to be licensed under the GPL.
For example you could write an application with Emacs, compile it with GCC, debug it with GDB, and sell it bundled with the same CD as Linux, and not give your source code away. Perfectly OK.
The GPL only requires source code to be made available on demand. Have you asked them?
Yes, 100% correct. End-users cannot be fined or forced to pay license fees for a trade secret that IBM leaked.
SCO is asserting other intellectual property rights (only in the media, at this stage) that they claim will allow them to charge license fees from end-users, eg. copyright infringement.
There was an article on Groklaw where an independent lawyer commented it was unusual (unprecedented?) for a company to attempt to charge a non-customer for anything other than patent infringement. SCO has no patents of relevance to Linux. He suggested that SCO has a difficult time ahead.
I don't think you're stupid :-) It's a Simpsons reference. It wasn't supposed to taken seriously.
Dah, he's from Ca-na-da, so they think he's slow... ehh!
And it's easier again if you have both.
Especially when you're chasing an elusive memory leak. No source code = debugging hell.
Your comment about ext3 (and ext2) is correct but VFAT is not immune to the frequent-rewrites problem. The FAT itself (basically a linked list stored as an array) will have frequent rewrites and there is no feature in VFAT to use alternate locations for the FAT. Also directory entries in VFAT will get frequent rewrites (especially the date fields). A flash-friendly filesystem needs to write to all "sectors" with equal frequency. VFAT does not do this.
Not that I think any of this matters. USB keys become obsolete faster than you can wear them out. 16MB keys are already useless and 32MB ones are quickly going that way. I've never seen either size (16MB or 32MB) wear out before being junked. People are buying 512MB keys now for only a few $100. By the time the 512MB keys wear out I fully expect to be buying 10GB keys. I think the "only 10,000 writes" problem is theoretical; it's not a problem in practise.
Though I suspect many USB keys rearrange their writes internally to prevent premature death. This probably means it doesn't matter what filesystem you use.
I suppose the reason I responded the first time and why I'm responding again is this use of the phrase "GPL zealots". I get the impression that it's implying anybody who is passionate about the GPL is also going to make unwarranted demands and will be offensive towards infringers, even when the infringement is accidental.
In my experience the people who are the most passionate about the GPL (eg, RMS, the FSF, Eben Moglen, GNU developers) are the least demanding and the least offensive. They are most certainly "zealots" in the sense that they have an enthusiastic devotion to explaining and defending the GPL. But I'm not convinced that the people you represent as "GPL Zealots" on that link are the same sort of people as RMS. Those people making demands are obviously ignorant of the GPL; a person who violates the GPL has merely violated a license and they are under no obligation to GPLify their own code.
I suppose what I'm saying isn't much. It's just that I'd like to see a distinction made between "naive and ignorant GPL zealots" and "intelligent and knowledgeable GPL zealots". It would seem you have a beef with the former group and I would agree with you that those kinds of people should shut their fool mouths. But painting all zealots with the same brush is unfair to all the knowledgeable and level-headed people who enjoy discussing and defending the GPL.
People should always have been looking at Bochs because Bochs is GPL and VMware is not. Freedom is important. Don't forget that.
However there are criticisms against Bochs as a practical replacement for VMWare.
Of course, a point in Bochs favour is that it runs on any host architecture. You can run VMWare on x86 and... well that's it. Bochs runs on Sparc and PowerPC and dozens of others in addition to x86. This is because VMWare is virtualisation but Bochs is emulation.
Another point in Bochs favour is the ongoing effort to implement Dynamic Translation (DT). No fruit yet but projects like QEMU prove that the skilled developers are out there and are willing to write free DT software. DT is a non-virtualisation technique which should offer a 10-20x performance improvement on all host architectures. Unfortunately DT needs to be reimplemented for each host architecture but that might be acceptable. DT is what makes Virtual PC run Windows at an acceptable speed on the PowerPC architecture.
Yet another point in Bochs favour is Kevin's current work on Plex86 virtualisation. Yes, this currently only works for "modified" guest OS like the modified-Linux he demonstrated earlier this year. However Bochs now has Plex86 support; it can optionally (command-line option) pass code pages to Plex86 for virtualised execution. If Plex86 fails then Bochs retries the code page with its slower emulation code. So there is some promise that Bochs will soon get full virtualisation on the x86 host architecture.