No, it says you must give one particular form of software (the source code) away free of any additional charges. The "free as in beer" thing is the source code The way you put it is "buy one get one free", which doesn't legitimately classify as "free as in beer". Your local supermarket does it and it's not because they want to give things away. The way I prefer to see it (in a similar wording) is "buy one get the blueprints free".
what you get is given by another actor given to advance their own (...) interests Again, the idea is to advance the community's interests, not a particular person's. The GPL is about collective freedom.
not a fundamental, inalienable right that isn't dependent on a license from someone else I think you are referring to "fundamental rights" as defined legally by e.g. a country's constitution; you certainly must be since you are connecting this with the necessity of a license, which is a legal tool. That's the wrong way to look at it. Laws are not the Absolute Truth.
The question is, do you think that using/modifying/redistributing software should be considered a fundamental right (possibly in connection with free speech itself, think non-disclosure agreements)? If so, well, too bad, most legal systems don't even mention such a thing. As a solution, you'll have to use some legal workaround, which in this case takes the form of a license.
where a power efficient, portable computer can be used How power-efficient are these old laptops really? For a start, they don't do frequency scaling like newer processors do. For example, my Core 2 Duo goes from 1.66 GHz all the way down to 100MHz when idle. That should save quite a bit of power by itself. And other components are probably better thought out now than they were then (power-wise at least).
The GPL does not say that you must give your software away free of charge, you can charge for it if you wish, so it's not "free as in beer" (although it usually is).
The idea is that free software gives you freedom to do whatever you want with it, as long as it remains free for others to do whatever they want with it. The target is collective freedom, which effectively limits individual freedom, and it's these limits that the license sets.
What you refer to as "free software" is "public domain software". If you release software to the public domain and the software is any good, chances are some corporation will appropriate it and impose their own license. Without a "thank you"... The GPL is far closer to most people's idea of "freedom" than public domain software.
...going to cope with this? They are going to change the front page to say
you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free (not as in speech) beer"
Your argument supports the GNU point of view. Chronologically, GNU was the existing (and incomplete) operating system, and along came Torvalds and created the "extremely vital set of components" you mention. Your argument can be taken even further: why should anyone refer to GNU as GNU/Linux?
Having said that, I'm not particularly in favour of either naming.
- GNU software is (usually) great, and I don't mind acknowledging that.
- But you could replace essentially all GNU components with other free components and still be running, say, Ubuntu. Not as easily with the kernel, though.
- That brings up the point of the ability of telling between GNU/Linux, GNU/[OpenSolaris kernel], GNU/[FreeBSD kernel], etc, and between GNU/Linux and the OS for an embedded device which uses the Linux kernel but none of the GNU parts.
-...
[/internal_debate]
In my opinion, just call it whatever you feel like calling it.
Funny. Just tried it and I can see the difference between #010101 and #020202 but not between #fefefe and #fdfdfd. I would have guessed it's dark colours that one can distinguish better, as in my case..
Interesting. Is the relative sensitivity (in ideal conditions, ignoring the details you mention above) anything close to logarithmic w.r.t. brightness? In such case it would be ideal to use floating-point numbers for pixel intensities, rather than integer steps. Pretty much, in many senses, like 32-bit floating-point audio.
They display only a portion of visible light, limited by the RGB color space. That's not cured by adding more bits to an RGB system. But anyway, would humans see a difference?
A lack of bit depth allows only 256 shades of gray. This can easily produce banding. This display has 10 bits per colour channel, which gets you 1024 shades of grey (well, yeah, 1022). Does anyone know how many shades of grey the human eye can distinguish?
Actually no, you're right. If you 'browse by rating' there are 7840 applications, 2461 of them rated 'garbage'.
The thing is they group different versions of the same program as one item in the lists, but they split the versions again in the by-rating listing if they are rated differently. That's the 6232 ~ 7840 difference. The 9774 must be all versions of all programs in the database.
Similar situation here. I kept my Windows partition since I didn't know if I would be able to replace FLStudio and Audition in linux, which I use to do home recordings (FLStudio to sequence drums, and recording done into Audition). So I tried a few linux apps.
Well, it turns out that audio in linux, on top of the jack daemon, rocks. The combination of Hydrogen + Ardour + Jamin makes FLStudio + Audition look like toys (Fisher-Price toys under XP). The collection of LADSPA plugins in the Ubuntu repositories is great. And my windows partition is no more..
Have a look at some linux sequencers, you may find one (LMMS?) that does FruityLoops' job just fine.. or better.
But Guile didn't really yell "Sonic Boom". At that sample rate it sounded more like "Phonic Poo". You'll have to wait for an article about phonic poo to repost your comment.
That depends on the application. For embarrassingly-parallel tasks, such as some weather prediction methods, it's all about the processing power.
I do fairly-embarrassingly-parallel stochastic electronic structure simulations, and most of the time (except during set-up) I wouldn't care if the nodes were interconnected using dial-up modems. What matters in this case is having powerful and/or plentiful CPUs.
Yeah, but that's what the 160 EB in 2006 is supposed to mean too. The extrapolation from there should match theirs.
The only way this could be is if the 18-month cycle applies to the storage per device, and there's an additional increase in the number of devices produced so that it doubles every 10.6 months. Which, well, I don't quite believe.
Spinning disk storage seems to double almost yearly these days
That still gives 1 YB by 2019..
if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storage
Yeah, that might be it. But to me it seems more likely that the article meant something other than the "yotta" preffix
how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)
Yobibyte, officially. It's 1 YiB = 1.208 YB, see the wikipedia link. They're still close enough in relative terms to use interchangeably when referring to orders of magnitude, but the absolute difference is a few everything-humanity-has-ever-stored units.
According to wikipedia, the total computer storage in 2006 was estimated to be 160 EB. According to the article, storage doubles every 18 months (at best).
So to get a 1 YB of total storage, one would have to multiply the capacity in 2006 by 6250. The number of times you have to double the capacity is then log2(6250) = 12.6. Given 18-month cycles, this takes 18.9 years. So 1 YB will come in 2025, not in 2011.
Yeah, I was thinking of trying that, it's a good test for wine. I know it's gonna crash on me (even cygwin breaks under wine), but hey, other people play solitaire, I try dumb things out.
UAC is not a bad idea. True, they could have gone the gksudo way and allow a window of time before asking for permission again. And then they could ask for a password instead of getting people in the habit of clicking away past warning windows. But still, it's not a bad thing.
They also had to stop programs from storing settings and user stuff under the write-restricted "Program Files" folder.
Now, annoying users intentionally to exert pressure on software vendors is just twisted.
UNIX/Linux users may want to have a little thought about what things would be like without the SUID facility ('ping', anyone?), and, on the other hand, the security implications of SUID. I was shocked when I read the example at page 249 of the UNIX Haters' Handbook, which illustrates the problem of blindly trusting your PATH with a simple example in which you can trick your system administrator into providing you with a root shell binary. Tried it. It works.
Not that this has prevented me from ditching Windows Vista in favour of Ubuntu on my laptop (desktop to follow when Ubuntu 8.04 is released).
God knows I installed on that notebook each and every Anti-Spyware, Antivirus, Anti-everything in order to get rid of it.
Not at the same time, I hope. I'm not trying to sound smart: I've seen Windows PCs with two simultaneously-installed antivirus programs, hugely slowing down the machine and blocking each other's real-time scanner. Seen this twice in the last month, to be exact.
My suggestion is: get a linux liveCD (e.g. Ubuntu), start it, download and install Avast! antivirus (linux version, clearly), update its database, and scan the Windows drive.
How can a single "task" (whatever that means) get processed faster than the speed of light? ??? Bad posing. Signals travel at a speed. Instructions get processed at a rate. Apples are not aranges.
The limit would apply if signals within the CPU were travelling the length of a human finger, but that is not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, do you think that using/modifying/redistributing software should be considered a fundamental right (possibly in connection with free speech itself, think non-disclosure agreements)? If so, well, too bad, most legal systems don't even mention such a thing. As a solution, you'll have to use some legal workaround, which in this case takes the form of a license.
The GPL does not say that you must give your software away free of charge, you can charge for it if you wish, so it's not "free as in beer" (although it usually is).
The idea is that free software gives you freedom to do whatever you want with it, as long as it remains free for others to do whatever they want with it. The target is collective freedom, which effectively limits individual freedom, and it's these limits that the license sets.
What you refer to as "free software" is "public domain software". If you release software to the public domain and the software is any good, chances are some corporation will appropriate it and impose their own license. Without a "thank you"... The GPL is far closer to most people's idea of "freedom" than public domain software.
Having said that, I'm not particularly in favour of either naming.
[/internal_debate]
In my opinion, just call it whatever you feel like calling it.
I like to call it GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv . FreeCiv is clearly at the core of it all.
Funny. Just tried it and I can see the difference between #010101 and #020202 but not between #fefefe and #fdfdfd. I would have guessed it's dark colours that one can distinguish better, as in my case..
Interesting. Is the relative sensitivity (in ideal conditions, ignoring the details you mention above) anything close to logarithmic w.r.t. brightness? In such case it would be ideal to use floating-point numbers for pixel intensities, rather than integer steps. Pretty much, in many senses, like 32-bit floating-point audio.
Isn't that in Orwell's 1984? Kids raised into state fanatism, reporting on their neighbours, and eventually on their parents.. nice..
After all, we're not that far from that type of society.
I didn't just say what I just said.
Actually no, you're right. If you 'browse by rating' there are 7840 applications, 2461 of them rated 'garbage'.
The thing is they group different versions of the same program as one item in the lists, but they split the versions again in the by-rating listing if they are rated differently. That's the 6232 ~ 7840 difference. The 9774 must be all versions of all programs in the database.
The 9774 includes all tested apps, whether working or not. There must be 3532 'garbage'-rated programs, I guess.
Similar situation here. I kept my Windows partition since I didn't know if I would be able to replace FLStudio and Audition in linux, which I use to do home recordings (FLStudio to sequence drums, and recording done into Audition). So I tried a few linux apps.
Well, it turns out that audio in linux, on top of the jack daemon, rocks. The combination of Hydrogen + Ardour + Jamin makes FLStudio + Audition look like toys (Fisher-Price toys under XP). The collection of LADSPA plugins in the Ubuntu repositories is great. And my windows partition is no more..
Have a look at some linux sequencers, you may find one (LMMS?) that does FruityLoops' job just fine.. or better.
But Guile didn't really yell "Sonic Boom". At that sample rate it sounded more like "Phonic Poo". You'll have to wait for an article about phonic poo to repost your comment.
That depends on the application. For embarrassingly-parallel tasks, such as some weather prediction methods, it's all about the processing power.
I do fairly-embarrassingly-parallel stochastic electronic structure simulations, and most of the time (except during set-up) I wouldn't care if the nodes were interconnected using dial-up modems. What matters in this case is having powerful and/or plentiful CPUs.
Spot the irony:
Bragador (1036480) to astrashe (7452): You must be new here...Yeah, but that's what the 160 EB in 2006 is supposed to mean too. The extrapolation from there should match theirs.
The only way this could be is if the 18-month cycle applies to the storage per device, and there's an additional increase in the number of devices produced so that it doubles every 10.6 months. Which, well, I don't quite believe.
That still gives 1 YB by 2019..
if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storageYeah, that might be it. But to me it seems more likely that the article meant something other than the "yotta" preffix
how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)Yobibyte, officially. It's 1 YiB = 1.208 YB, see the wikipedia link. They're still close enough in relative terms to use interchangeably when referring to orders of magnitude, but the absolute difference is a few everything-humanity-has-ever-stored units.
According to wikipedia, the total computer storage in 2006 was estimated to be 160 EB. According to the article, storage doubles every 18 months (at best).
So to get a 1 YB of total storage, one would have to multiply the capacity in 2006 by 6250. The number of times you have to double the capacity is then log2(6250) = 12.6. Given 18-month cycles, this takes 18.9 years. So 1 YB will come in 2025, not in 2011.
Or am I missing something?
Yeah, I was thinking of trying that, it's a good test for wine. I know it's gonna crash on me (even cygwin breaks under wine), but hey, other people play solitaire, I try dumb things out.
UAC is not a bad idea. True, they could have gone the gksudo way and allow a window of time before asking for permission again. And then they could ask for a password instead of getting people in the habit of clicking away past warning windows. But still, it's not a bad thing.
They also had to stop programs from storing settings and user stuff under the write-restricted "Program Files" folder.
Now, annoying users intentionally to exert pressure on software vendors is just twisted.
UNIX/Linux users may want to have a little thought about what things would be like without the SUID facility ('ping', anyone?), and, on the other hand, the security implications of SUID. I was shocked when I read the example at page 249 of the UNIX Haters' Handbook, which illustrates the problem of blindly trusting your PATH with a simple example in which you can trick your system administrator into providing you with a root shell binary. Tried it. It works.
Not that this has prevented me from ditching Windows Vista in favour of Ubuntu on my laptop (desktop to follow when Ubuntu 8.04 is released).
Not at the same time, I hope. I'm not trying to sound smart: I've seen Windows PCs with two simultaneously-installed antivirus programs, hugely slowing down the machine and blocking each other's real-time scanner. Seen this twice in the last month, to be exact.
My suggestion is: get a linux liveCD (e.g. Ubuntu), start it, download and install Avast! antivirus (linux version, clearly), update its database, and scan the Windows drive.