Nvidia didn't opensource its driver core due to licensing issues, likewise kernel people disallow the use of DMA-BUF by nvidia-drivers due to once again licensing issues. I don't see why nvidia's licensing issues would inherently deserve more respect than those of kernel contributors like you seem to imply.
But don't worry. I'm sure they'll sort out the whole mess eventually.
But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general.
I've started with gentoo for this reason exactly. And then stuck with it. For some reason building everything from source seems to be a killer feature to me:P
Good enough? More like amazing! Where would you find enough honest humans to staff entire wikipedia? Making sentient androids seems more practical in comparison..
In a capitalist society, why should the creators of original work be the only ones not allowed to make any money from their labour?
I'm not against them making money from their labour, but 'selling' rights to copy works of art is just a scam. They should be paid for labour, not for copies, otherwise it's just yet another ponzi scheme because no real goods or services are exchanged.
Oh, and something like funding a movie through kickstarter is just returning to the concept of patronage, except that you're relying on thousands of people instead of just one.
Nope, can't agree here. The magic library updating spell is called "pkg-manager update" (or whatever you call the new thingy). The updates you get by default are the ones proposed by your repository lists, in order from highest priority to lowest. It should sound pretty familiar.
The difference is repos should only override the.so files a particular particular package uses in extreme cases (almost never), where they're willing to do the testing, and for some reason upstream reason isn't doing their job. The difference between "stable" and "experimental" versions of a distro should just be a flag the user provides the update tool, to guide it in how aggressively to update, not a whole separate version of a distro. This doesn't work today, simply because the various packages share the same.so files, and we can't afford to test all the combinations.
The thing is, I don't know of such a thing existing, so I'm not sure whether it's actually possible and whether there are some killer disadvantages of it. Sometimes an improvement in one place can make your life extremely hard in some other places.
Ideally, you could run Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 on the same Ubuntu install, and if you don't like PulseAudio, you just remove it and use ALSA. Nope. It doesn't work that way. All the major applications are linked to PulseAudio, and if you remove it, there goes your movie player music player, etc. In Ubuntu, it even removes "ubuntu-desktop". Good grief! So, what's wrong with letting users have the various packages recompiled for ALSA, and have an "Ubuntu-ALSLA" repo? The problem is it becomes an unrealistic nightmare of package management, simply because you can't have two versions of any.so file at the same time without renaming them. Not only that, but it takes a packaging guru to make this work, and packaging gurus are rare, and have better things to do than worry about a bunch of blind people who hate PulseAudio.
That can only be handled with source-based distro such as gentoo. There's no way you could provide.so files of all possible configurations that could be wanted by users on a binary distro. Sticking to some baseline is the only sane solution, no matter whether there is "pkg-manager update" or no. In fact I don't even have PA on my gentoo system though I could enable it if necessary and rebuild necessary packages with emerge --newuse...
However, none of this will happen. If it did, some web site would become the mains source for buying Linux commercial software like games, and the whole free software community that drives the broken GNU/Linux system of today would revolt. GNU/Linux is hostile towards binary compatibility on purpose.
Easier said than done. You could as well say "cast a library updating spell". Besides, security isn't the only reason to update, but could also be needed for fixing corner cases (which happen to actually affect you) and sometimes enabling new feature of a library(which you happen to require) is needed too. The disk space hardly ever was an issue for distros, definitely not a most important one.
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various.so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience,.so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most.so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem. My stupid Android phone forces every app to have it's own copy of every.so file, and my 32G of space doesn't seem to be filling up. Now, I'm not saying that getting all of this working, with the various sound drivers and incompatible binary interfaces is easy. However, it is doable, and not rocket science.
It's not only matter of disk space. Sharing.so files also allows distros to update them without touching all of the apps that use them. That's the reason why those techniques can only be auxiliary. Managing a set of.so files for each app independently can get very annoying and is the reason separate packages for libraries exist in the first place.
The reason not many games are opensource is that game developers habitually don't treat development seriously, thus don't care about harms of closed source. E.g. they're fine with shoveling out some crappy code and then basically abandoning it with only couple patches afterward.
Getting money merely for a license is the same as getting money for nothing once the costs have been recovered. And any way to get money for nothing is a gamebreaker IMO.
There isn't any economic mechanism that'll prevent companies such as Microsoft from getting ludicrous rent even though they've recovered their costs long time ago.
Besides, artificial restrictions on copying make life harder for everyone in many ways that were already thoroughly elaborated.
Digital 'goods' essentially have marginal cost of zero, which pretty much turns them into money-making machine once the original cost of development is recovered. This is pretty much an economic game-breaker. Consistent enforcement will be extremely harmful to economy. Thankfully this is probably impossible.
All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.
They almost admitted that there's no difference between piracy(so-called 'theft') and lawful second-hand sales. This pretty much shows that games don't behave like physical property and 'intellectual property'/'theft' metaphor serves mostly to confuse.
Probably they just wanted to make the build process not require anything other than sh and make to be installed on end user's system, so they used m4 macro processor to generate shell scripts and Makefiles which can just be included in the tarball.
The messenger/last survivor of the massacre with his last gasp, says a bunch of nonsensical stuff, right before he dies. WTF? There's two fucking clerics in the party that can cast Heal in the middle of a battle. And now that the dude's dead, why can't my guys cast Raise Dead on him? Total crap.
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story. The more degrees of freedom you have, the harder it becomes to keep the story from breaking; and judging by the "how to make the players do what you want" -sections in some tabletop DM guides I've read, it seems that this phenomenom is not limited to the realm of computer RPGs.
No. The real problem is that game rules and scripts live in different worlds, use different rules. Basically the plot and the actual games have different assumptions about what player characters can and can not do. That is definitely inconsistent. I don't think reconciling plot and gameplay is that hard. There's absolutely no need to make one of characters to die to make a compelling story, especially if it takes place in the world where you resurrect people all the time. Just make up plots that make sense in the setting, do not blindly reuse cliches from stories set in RL.
C++ has the disadvantages of both C and object-orienting combined.
Wrong. C++ has advantages of both C and object-orienting combined. And some really nice libraries such as boost. That comes at a cost of pretty steep learning curve which IMO is worth it.
I was referring to spacesuit puncture, not ending up in vacuum without one:
Finally, posting to sci.space, Gregory Bennett discussed an actual space incident:
"Incidentally, we have had one experience with a suit puncture on the Shuttle flights. On STS-37, during one of my flight experiments, the palm restraint in one of the astronaut's gloves came loose and migrated until it punched a hole in the pressure bladder between his thumb and forefinger. It was not explosive decompression, just a little 1/8 inch hole, but it was exciting down here in the swamp because it was the first injury we've ever head from a suit incident. Amazingly, the astronaut in question didn't even know the puncture had occured; he was so hopped on adrenalin it wasn't until after he got back in that he even noticed there was a painful red mark on his hand. He figured his glove was chafing and didn't worry about it.... What happened: when the metal bar punctured the glove, the skin of the astronaut's hand partially sealed the opening. He bled into space, and at the same time his coagulating blood sealed the opening enough that the bar was retained inside the hole."
On the Moon the vacuum will be a major killer because an accident that on Earth leaves you with a minor wound will puncture your spacesuit and you'll be dead as a mummy before anyone can pull you to safety.
But talk to a gamer about classics like Fallout and his eyes will light up. Fallout is a $5 download from Gog.com. Ready to run on Vista and Win 7.
What about *real* classics that work only on DOS? Cross-platform emulator DOSBox(yet another program no one but a geek knows what it is:P) is a *lot* better for running such games than directly on Windows XP/Vista/7. I remember using it on winXP before switching to Gentoo as my main OS which has dosbox in its repo (just 'emerge dosbox').
that the government refused to support the "national software platform" but it still plans to stimulate development and use of FLOSS software. This is a point of view I personally agree with. Why reinvent the wheel once again when you can just pick a linux distro and tweak it according to your needs?:)
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But don't worry. I'm sure they'll sort out the whole mess eventually.
But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general.
I've started with gentoo for this reason exactly. And then stuck with it. For some reason building everything from source seems to be a killer feature to me :P
Good enough? More like amazing! Where would you find enough honest humans to staff entire wikipedia? Making sentient androids seems more practical in comparison..
In a capitalist society, why should the creators of original work be the only ones not allowed to make any money from their labour?
I'm not against them making money from their labour, but 'selling' rights to copy works of art is just a scam. They should be paid for labour, not for copies, otherwise it's just yet another ponzi scheme because no real goods or services are exchanged.
Oh, and something like funding a movie through kickstarter is just returning to the concept of patronage, except that you're relying on thousands of people instead of just one.
You make that sound like a bad thing.
Nope, can't agree here. The magic library updating spell is called "pkg-manager update" (or whatever you call the new thingy). The updates you get by default are the ones proposed by your repository lists, in order from highest priority to lowest. It should sound pretty familiar.
The difference is repos should only override the .so files a particular particular package uses in extreme cases (almost never), where they're willing to do the testing, and for some reason upstream reason isn't doing their job. The difference between "stable" and "experimental" versions of a distro should just be a flag the user provides the update tool, to guide it in how aggressively to update, not a whole separate version of a distro. This doesn't work today, simply because the various packages share the same .so files, and we can't afford to test all the combinations.
The thing is, I don't know of such a thing existing, so I'm not sure whether it's actually possible and whether there are some killer disadvantages of it. Sometimes an improvement in one place can make your life extremely hard in some other places.
Ideally, you could run Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 on the same Ubuntu install, and if you don't like PulseAudio, you just remove it and use ALSA. Nope. It doesn't work that way. All the major applications are linked to PulseAudio, and if you remove it, there goes your movie player music player, etc. In Ubuntu, it even removes "ubuntu-desktop". Good grief! So, what's wrong with letting users have the various packages recompiled for ALSA, and have an "Ubuntu-ALSLA" repo? The problem is it becomes an unrealistic nightmare of package management, simply because you can't have two versions of any .so file at the same time without renaming them. Not only that, but it takes a packaging guru to make this work, and packaging gurus are rare, and have better things to do than worry about a bunch of blind people who hate PulseAudio.
That can only be handled with source-based distro such as gentoo. There's no way you could provide .so files of all possible configurations that could be wanted by users on a binary distro. Sticking to some baseline is the only sane solution, no matter whether there is "pkg-manager update" or no. In fact I don't even have PA on my gentoo system though I could enable it if necessary and rebuild necessary packages with emerge --newuse ...
However, none of this will happen. If it did, some web site would become the mains source for buying Linux commercial software like games, and the whole free software community that drives the broken GNU/Linux system of today would revolt. GNU/Linux is hostile towards binary compatibility on purpose.
I wouldn't say so. They just use whatever works. There are efforts such as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
At least you don't need platform abstraction layers targeting several totally different apis.
Easier said than done. You could as well say "cast a library updating spell". Besides, security isn't the only reason to update, but could also be needed for fixing corner cases (which happen to actually affect you) and sometimes enabling new feature of a library(which you happen to require) is needed too. The disk space hardly ever was an issue for distros, definitely not a most important one.
Agreed. So don't do that. Instead, use the Zero Install techniques, both the one's they've implemented, and the ones they wish they had time for. I run $100K software packages on Linux boxes from Cadence and Mentor. The exact same executables run on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. The way they accomplish this is statically linking all the way down to the linux kernel interface (maybe they link to libc - not sure). Now doing that would be bad in general, but if you instead run chrooted in a jail, like recently has been done in Ubuntu, and use hard-links to share the various .so files, you can get disk utilization under control. In my experience, .so files don't fill up much disk anyway, so if I have 2 or 3 versions of most .so files, shared across the various apps that use them, it should not be a big problem. My stupid Android phone forces every app to have it's own copy of every .so file, and my 32G of space doesn't seem to be filling up. Now, I'm not saying that getting all of this working, with the various sound drivers and incompatible binary interfaces is easy. However, it is doable, and not rocket science.
It's not only matter of disk space. Sharing .so files also allows distros to update them without touching all of the apps that use them. That's the reason why those techniques can only be auxiliary. Managing a set of .so files for each app independently can get very annoying and is the reason separate packages for libraries exist in the first place.
So what? MS office sucks too, especially when exchanging documents among several versions of office, yet that doesn't seem to hold back windows much..
It seems to work fine for Battle for Wesnoth.
The reason not many games are opensource is that game developers habitually don't treat development seriously, thus don't care about harms of closed source. E.g. they're fine with shoveling out some crappy code and then basically abandoning it with only couple patches afterward.
Getting money merely for a license is the same as getting money for nothing once the costs have been recovered. And any way to get money for nothing is a gamebreaker IMO. There isn't any economic mechanism that'll prevent companies such as Microsoft from getting ludicrous rent even though they've recovered their costs long time ago. Besides, artificial restrictions on copying make life harder for everyone in many ways that were already thoroughly elaborated.
Digital 'goods' essentially have marginal cost of zero, which pretty much turns them into money-making machine once the original cost of development is recovered. This is pretty much an economic game-breaker. Consistent enforcement will be extremely harmful to economy. Thankfully this is probably impossible.
You're overestimating the importance of CEOs.
All knowledge required to build nuclear weapons is already freely available, e.g. in physics textbooks. If they can't use it then no scientist would be able to help them. It's strictly an engineering challenge nowadays.
Probably this game was meant as an insult to old duke fans implying that they have no place in the New Era of Casual Gaming.
They almost admitted that there's no difference between piracy(so-called 'theft') and lawful second-hand sales. This pretty much shows that games don't behave like physical property and 'intellectual property'/'theft' metaphor serves mostly to confuse.
That option isn't really useful. That only makes life harder for users, forcing them to use a disassembler to extract the source :P
Probably they just wanted to make the build process not require anything other than sh and make to be installed on end user's system, so they used m4 macro processor to generate shell scripts and Makefiles which can just be included in the tarball.
You can't heal or revive him for the same reason you can't simply use Phoenix Down on Aeris, or why using nuke-level summoning magic in the middle of a city doesn't leave it a smoking ruin: you are acting out a pre-scripted story. The more degrees of freedom you have, the harder it becomes to keep the story from breaking; and judging by the "how to make the players do what you want" -sections in some tabletop DM guides I've read, it seems that this phenomenom is not limited to the realm of computer RPGs.
No. The real problem is that game rules and scripts live in different worlds, use different rules. Basically the plot and the actual games have different assumptions about what player characters can and can not do. That is definitely inconsistent. I don't think reconciling plot and gameplay is that hard. There's absolutely no need to make one of characters to die to make a compelling story, especially if it takes place in the world where you resurrect people all the time. Just make up plots that make sense in the setting, do not blindly reuse cliches from stories set in RL.
C++ has the disadvantages of both C and object-orienting combined.
Wrong. C++ has advantages of both C and object-orienting combined. And some really nice libraries such as boost. That comes at a cost of pretty steep learning curve which IMO is worth it.
Finally, posting to sci.space, Gregory Bennett discussed an actual space incident: "Incidentally, we have had one experience with a suit puncture on the Shuttle flights. On STS-37, during one of my flight experiments, the palm restraint in one of the astronaut's gloves came loose and migrated until it punched a hole in the pressure bladder between his thumb and forefinger. It was not explosive decompression, just a little 1/8 inch hole, but it was exciting down here in the swamp because it was the first injury we've ever head from a suit incident. Amazingly, the astronaut in question didn't even know the puncture had occured; he was so hopped on adrenalin it wasn't until after he got back in that he even noticed there was a painful red mark on his hand. He figured his glove was chafing and didn't worry about it.... What happened: when the metal bar punctured the glove, the skin of the astronaut's hand partially sealed the opening. He bled into space, and at the same time his coagulating blood sealed the opening enough that the bar was retained inside the hole."
On the Moon the vacuum will be a major killer because an accident that on Earth leaves you with a minor wound will puncture your spacesuit and you'll be dead as a mummy before anyone can pull you to safety.
Spacesuit puncture is not nearly as dangerous as you think
But talk to a gamer about classics like Fallout and his eyes will light up. Fallout is a $5 download from Gog.com. Ready to run on Vista and Win 7.
What about *real* classics that work only on DOS? Cross-platform emulator DOSBox(yet another program no one but a geek knows what it is :P) is a *lot* better for running such games than directly on Windows XP/Vista/7. I remember using it on winXP before switching to Gentoo as my main OS which has dosbox in its repo (just 'emerge dosbox').
Google is trying to figure out the best way to do Chrome for Linux,
Google isn't trying very hard considering that they chose GTK as widget toolkit to use with linux version of chrome.
that the government refused to support the "national software platform" but it still plans to stimulate development and use of FLOSS software. This is a point of view I personally agree with. Why reinvent the wheel once again when you can just pick a linux distro and tweak it according to your needs? :)