My iPod has a custom connector and any kind of music I'll put on it (by using its proprietary cable to connect it to my PC) will NOT play unless I use Apple's proprietary application to load the songs.
I don't think so. Historically, motherboard manufacturers have always ignored Linux. See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened. That's because Linux users, even if many as an absolute number, are too few compared to the whole computer-using population. If installing Linux on commodity hardware becomes a lottery, which is clearly what Microsoft is aiming at, then the Linux community will shrink even more and potentially become irrelevant as, say, the Darwin community or the OpenSolaris one.
Until last month, the mobile i7-2600s were listed as supporting up to 8 GB on ark.intel.com. Now the specs on the site have changed, saying they support up to 16 GB. Perhaps they made a mistake when they first published the 8 GB limitation, as I don't think they're quietly releasing a new stepping of the hardware with new features without changing its model number.
As a owner of one of those CPU, I'm glad for that but I hope there isn't some other 8 GB limitation lurking either in the chipset or in the BIOS preventing me to upgrade to 16 GB in the future.
I used to build everything as a module, even stuff I would never need. The PC was a 266 MHz klamath P2 with 64 MB of RAM. And I kept it for a long time, even when most people had upgraded to Pentium IIIs or Pentium IVs. Perhaps I remember the experience of compiling P4-era kernels on a P2 machine.
I do remember that building the kernel wasn't particularly long, in comparison to building Qt or bootstrapping GCC (with all languages).
I just checked the official ark page for my SB processor and in fact now it says that 16 GB are supported ("depending on memory type"). It has been updated, it just said 8 GB before. Well, good news, thanks.
(16 GB is still the maximum amount of memory supported so I still think it's a big deal somehow;) ).
I guess this is just for doing a parallel build, isn't it? Building it with less parallelism will probably require less RAM (and understandably take longer).
I am aware of GCC eating gigabytes when doing some kind of optimisations; this already used to happen some time ago, so I'm not surprised that running 8 copies of GCC in parallel might make some pages hit the swap on a non-ninja workstation.
*If* this is the problem, then I don't see it as a immediate menace to the openness of Android. I remember when compiling the Linux kernel took hours on my Pentium 2. Compiling GCC or Qt still takes half a day on my Pentium IV. I don't expect anything different from a user-oriented machine.
I don't think "identifiable" means that. It most probably means that the site has to keep the "made-up name" together with the poster's IP address for a law-specified number of years, so the offended can track and can sue the poster instead of suing the site itself.
But the euro was also largely a success, and I don't think that the EU would be faring better now if the euro wasn't there. For people living in the less performing economies, the euro meant that their money didn't become trash every time the speculation attacked their weak currency. Economies like Germany got their advantage from the euro because it boosted their exports.
The establishment of stronger control mechanisms, which was supposed to happen shortly after the euro introduction, was opposed even by the French and the Germans themselves, who had to face the growing euro-skepticism deriving e.g. from the immigration problems.
Now, the european central bank still has indirect means to impose reforms in the weaker countries, though we still have to see if this will be enough. For example, they recently sent a "love letter" to Italy asking them to implement certain severe restructuring reforms, under the implicit threat that they would no longer finance their public spending if they didn't comply.
And if the EU does turn hostile to the US in some sort of bizarro-world, the US possesses capabilities to shoot them down. So it doesn't make a lot of sense along those lines.
They wouldn't even need to shoot down anything because Galileo, by request of the USA, uses different frequencies than GPS, so the USA can jam it on their territory (or elsewhere) without disrupting the correct operation of GPS.
EU citizens often get a negative view of the EU because national governments blame the EU for their own negligence. Inflation skyrockets? "It's the Euro's fault". They need to raise the minimum retirement age? "It's the EU that is asking this from us".
Also, nationalist movements gain consensus by opposing against yelding any sovereignty to the european institutions; this makes the EU weaker, which then allows themselves to point out the EU is just a bureaucratic superstructure with no decision power.
The nationalists whine against the EU when it's time for a state to offer its help to other countries in the union, and then whine again against the EU when it's time to get help from the union, and it doesn't arrive because the nationalists in the other states behave exactly in the same way as they did before (see what happens every time some states are hit by an immigration wave).
Don't know in the USA, but in my country eating while driving is of course prohibited; that doesn't apply to drive-throughs because in that case you're driving in a private road. And children in the back seat must be secured in safety seats. It's possible that a minority of people could relatively safely text (eat, watch tv, be drunk,...) while they drive very carefully, but then it's also possible that some children could drive a car better than many adults can, and it's not a reason to let children drive.
This doesn't fall in the "nanny state" category, as the State has all the rights to make laws that prevent people from putting other people's lives in danger. In particular, it should do so when a particular behaviour has been reckoned to be a major cause of death or injury of innocent people. It has nothing to do with alcohol prohibition: you don't directly become dangerous for other people by drinking; you do if you drink and then drive a car, and in fact driving while you're drunk is prohibited.
So, let's back up a bit here. What did 'smartphones' look like before the iPhone? Various screen sizes, clunky thinkness/form factor and a alpha numeric keyboard of some sort. We all know history, iPhone comes along, all touch based and it sets the precedent for things to come. Apple invented that. No one else did, especially not Samsung.
The full-touch design was first introduced by LG, with the LG Prada. So LG invented that. Apple must have copied it.
Then the iPod Touch follows about 8 months after. Note around this time, if you search everywhere on the web, for Samsung's tablets or anyone else's (like Archos, etc) all look like something between a Sony PSP and a Nokia 770. Yes, all rectangle, but just not the Apple glass touchscreen with a black bezel and metal band around the edge.
Archos tablets looked this way in 2008, two years before Apple introduced the iPad. Apple must have copied it.
Now, let's look at the packaging of a Galaxy Tab. White box, picture of device on it. Gee, where have I seen that? Open it up, same unpacking experience as the iPad/iPhone - device up front, other stuff underneath. Btw, Apple patented their packaging - all the way back in 2007!
Then they copied the Nokia packaging from 2006. My N73 comes in a package with device up front - with a nice "here's your N73" writing - and other stuff underneath.
search around the web a few weeks ago for the picture of the Samsung store. Look hard - pictures of Apple's app store and Safari icons on the wall. That's pretty blatant - even Microsoft doesn't do that
It's a shop-in-a-shop in a small city of Sicily. It's impossible to believe that Apple execs from South Korea have a say over what stickers the sicilian clerks attach to the walls of the shops they run. And even if they did, what would their plan be? Putting a Safari icon, amid hundreds of Android icons, attached on a wall to improve the sales of, say, the Nexus S because of the beauty of the Safari icon?
That may be true while they are in college or living in their mother's basement without a job, girlfriend,wife, and/or kids. But, as soon as real life intrudes, they will have better things to do than working on their own code. This is why so many projects on FreshMeat, SourceForge, etc turn into zombie projects with a growing list of bugs and feature requests, but with no code updates in the last few (or more) years.
Open source software isn't mostly written by geeks dwelling in their basement. The biggest contributors to the most successful open source projects are paid developers.
But even if we ignore this: there can be no shortage of geeks living in basements - it's a cycle, so those supposedly getting a life are replaced by new ones, who, thanks to the nature of open source code, can continue the existing projects instead of starting their own. Abandoned software projects are in no way specific to the FOSS world: there is far more closed software that dies because of obsolescence, or because the company that wrote it changed their focus to a new product, or went out of business, or because the ABIs that the software relied upon are no longer supported. If an open source project withers, it's only because too few people care for it.
Will Microsoft fix bugs in Adobe Reader if I report them, because Windows is closed-source?
They might, and give the result to Adobe.
They cannot, because Adobe Reader is not open source so Microsoft has no access to its source code.
But, more than likely, they will pressure Adobe to fix it. Most likely, Adobe will fix it because it is a bad reflection on THEIR product on which they make their living.
Which is what the linux kernel developers are doing here. And as you can see in the LKML, the virtualbox developers have responded.
Just look at video driver support built into Windows over the last 10 or 15 years. Drivers that were not initially available from either the manufacturer or Microsoft end up being built into Windows in later updates or releases. Many times, it involves device vendors that go out of business. And, of course, device vendors always include a driver for the current version of Windows because it has 90% of the home market.
Adding support for new hardware - they do it. But adding support for old hardware? It never happened in my life. Just a couple years ago I had to set aside a tv tuner because no 64-bit driver was ever produced for it. It still works under the latest version of Linux.
How can they fix bugs in those programs if they don't have access to their source code.
What they can do is to add "application compatibility patches" to Windows to avoid breaking popular applications when they release a new version of Windows.
So, explain again why users should use FLOSS instead closed-source when they have "better things to work on than someone else's code" and can buy something that works?
Users should use FLOSS instead of closed-sourced code becase FLOSS developers haven't "better things to do than working on their own code" so users can have something that works for free. And unlike the case of closed code, users can fix it themselves if they have the ability to do so.
Will Microsoft fix bugs in Adobe Reader if I report them, because Windows is closed-source? Will Microsoft develop a driver for my video card if it isn't supported in this version of Windows, because it's closed-source? In fact, being open vs. closed source is completely orthogonal to the problem.
Except for the fact that, for political reasons, if there's somebody who is actually more likely to work on someone else's code, it's the FLOSS developers.
I think it's the virtualbox developers who prefer to keep their driver out-of-tree, so they can change their userspace API at will on new releases of virtualbox.
You haven't read TFA, you have no idea of what you're talking about, and whoever modded you up hasn't either.
This is not about the kernel developers refusing to support their users, this is about the kernel developers discriminating bug reports coming from the users of virtualbox, which a different product and is completely outside their control (in fact, it's partly commercial).
The open vs. closed debate has nothing to do with this story. To make an example in the closed world you declare to love, it's exactly just like Porton Antivirus users reporting bugs to Microsoft when they encounter crashes caused by Porton Antivirus. Microsoft will, more or less gently, instruct the users to report the bugs to Porton. At least in this case, the bug reports are publicly accessible to virtualbox developers thanks to the openness of FLOSS.
In fact, I saw an exchange exactly like this regarding a very popular e-book reader/conversion program. Some user asked why the top and bottom page margin settings were ignored when converting to PDF format, and the response was that no one cares about PDF format, and the person should grab the source and fix it himself.
It must have been your bad day. It happens. My more specific experience with the linux kernel developers, is that I reported a regression in the support for some hardware of mine (an old card that probably "not many care about" besides me), and I received an email with a patch correcting the problem in the very same day. And I didn't pay a dime for that.
Also, I have to disagree with the calling it "tainted crap." That's just unfair and unprofessional
The flag TAINT_CRAP is applied even to the kernel's own in-tree drivers while they are staging. It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek rather than professional, probably due to the contribution of people who still develop the linux kernel for fun rather than professional involvement.
And I think they're creating a new OUT_OF_TREE flag to replace TAINT_CRAP for the specific case of Virtualbox and other independently developed drivers.
The web, originated by public research and based upon open standards, is a demonstration of the fact that patents are harmful in this context. The web has probably created more jobs and business opportunities than any patented technology ever has. And it has improved our lives in a way that was unimaginable even to those who invented it.
All of this wouldn't have happened if the web was patented itself, or based upon patented standards.
The examples are countless: open standards gave us email, closed standards gave us SMS, EMS and MMS.
Open standards gave us a packet-switched network where you can toss packets to the opposite side of the world just by paying the people who maintain the wires, while closed standards gave us ATM and the likes, where the service providers decide what services you can use or offer, and for which you pay depending on who you want to communicate with, on where he is, on what service you are requesting to use, on how long you'll be using it... Guess what model has more potential to generate more development?
Slashdot Mirror
My iPod has a custom connector and any kind of music I'll put on it (by using its proprietary cable to connect it to my PC) will NOT play unless I use Apple's proprietary application to load the songs.
I don't think so. Historically, motherboard manufacturers have always ignored Linux. See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened. That's because Linux users, even if many as an absolute number, are too few compared to the whole computer-using population. If installing Linux on commodity hardware becomes a lottery, which is clearly what Microsoft is aiming at, then the Linux community will shrink even more and potentially become irrelevant as, say, the Darwin community or the OpenSolaris one.
Patents give advantage to some, and damage everyone. (cit.)
Ask your motherboard manufacturer.
As a owner of one of those CPU, I'm glad for that but I hope there isn't some other 8 GB limitation lurking either in the chipset or in the BIOS preventing me to upgrade to 16 GB in the future.
I do remember that building the kernel wasn't particularly long, in comparison to building Qt or bootstrapping GCC (with all languages).
(16 GB is still the maximum amount of memory supported so I still think it's a big deal somehow ;) ).
I am aware of GCC eating gigabytes when doing some kind of optimisations; this already used to happen some time ago, so I'm not surprised that running 8 copies of GCC in parallel might make some pages hit the swap on a non-ninja workstation.
*If* this is the problem, then I don't see it as a immediate menace to the openness of Android. I remember when compiling the Linux kernel took hours on my Pentium 2. Compiling GCC or Qt still takes half a day on my Pentium IV. I don't expect anything different from a user-oriented machine.
-- A pissed Android user who just bought a € 1.000 laptop maxing out at 8 GB
16 GB of RAM is an awful lot of it, by today's standards.
I don't think "identifiable" means that. It most probably means that the site has to keep the "made-up name" together with the poster's IP address for a law-specified number of years, so the offended can track and can sue the poster instead of suing the site itself.
The establishment of stronger control mechanisms, which was supposed to happen shortly after the euro introduction, was opposed even by the French and the Germans themselves, who had to face the growing euro-skepticism deriving e.g. from the immigration problems.
Now, the european central bank still has indirect means to impose reforms in the weaker countries, though we still have to see if this will be enough. For example, they recently sent a "love letter" to Italy asking them to implement certain severe restructuring reforms, under the implicit threat that they would no longer finance their public spending if they didn't comply.
And if the EU does turn hostile to the US in some sort of bizarro-world, the US possesses capabilities to shoot them down. So it doesn't make a lot of sense along those lines.
They wouldn't even need to shoot down anything because Galileo, by request of the USA, uses different frequencies than GPS, so the USA can jam it on their territory (or elsewhere) without disrupting the correct operation of GPS.
Also, nationalist movements gain consensus by opposing against yelding any sovereignty to the european institutions; this makes the EU weaker, which then allows themselves to point out the EU is just a bureaucratic superstructure with no decision power.
The nationalists whine against the EU when it's time for a state to offer its help to other countries in the union, and then whine again against the EU when it's time to get help from the union, and it doesn't arrive because the nationalists in the other states behave exactly in the same way as they did before (see what happens every time some states are hit by an immigration wave).
This doesn't fall in the "nanny state" category, as the State has all the rights to make laws that prevent people from putting other people's lives in danger. In particular, it should do so when a particular behaviour has been reckoned to be a major cause of death or injury of innocent people. It has nothing to do with alcohol prohibition: you don't directly become dangerous for other people by drinking; you do if you drink and then drive a car, and in fact driving while you're drunk is prohibited.
So, let's back up a bit here. What did 'smartphones' look like before the iPhone? Various screen sizes, clunky thinkness/form factor and a alpha numeric keyboard of some sort. We all know history, iPhone comes along, all touch based and it sets the precedent for things to come. Apple invented that. No one else did, especially not Samsung.
The full-touch design was first introduced by LG, with the LG Prada. So LG invented that. Apple must have copied it.
Then the iPod Touch follows about 8 months after. Note around this time, if you search everywhere on the web, for Samsung's tablets or anyone else's (like Archos, etc) all look like something between a Sony PSP and a Nokia 770. Yes, all rectangle, but just not the Apple glass touchscreen with a black bezel and metal band around the edge.
Archos tablets looked this way in 2008, two years before Apple introduced the iPad. Apple must have copied it.
Now, let's look at the packaging of a Galaxy Tab. White box, picture of device on it. Gee, where have I seen that? Open it up, same unpacking experience as the iPad/iPhone - device up front, other stuff underneath. Btw, Apple patented their packaging - all the way back in 2007!
Then they copied the Nokia packaging from 2006. My N73 comes in a package with device up front - with a nice "here's your N73" writing - and other stuff underneath.
search around the web a few weeks ago for the picture of the Samsung store. Look hard - pictures of Apple's app store and Safari icons on the wall. That's pretty blatant - even Microsoft doesn't do that
It's a shop-in-a-shop in a small city of Sicily. It's impossible to believe that Apple execs from South Korea have a say over what stickers the sicilian clerks attach to the walls of the shops they run. And even if they did, what would their plan be? Putting a Safari icon, amid hundreds of Android icons, attached on a wall to improve the sales of, say, the Nexus S because of the beauty of the Safari icon?
That may be true while they are in college or living in their mother's basement without a job, girlfriend,wife, and/or kids. But, as soon as real life intrudes, they will have better things to do than working on their own code. This is why so many projects on FreshMeat, SourceForge, etc turn into zombie projects with a growing list of bugs and feature requests, but with no code updates in the last few (or more) years.
Open source software isn't mostly written by geeks dwelling in their basement. The biggest contributors to the most successful open source projects are paid developers.
But even if we ignore this: there can be no shortage of geeks living in basements - it's a cycle, so those supposedly getting a life are replaced by new ones, who, thanks to the nature of open source code, can continue the existing projects instead of starting their own. Abandoned software projects are in no way specific to the FOSS world: there is far more closed software that dies because of obsolescence, or because the company that wrote it changed their focus to a new product, or went out of business, or because the ABIs that the software relied upon are no longer supported. If an open source project withers, it's only because too few people care for it.
Will Microsoft fix bugs in Adobe Reader if I report them, because Windows is closed-source?
They might, and give the result to Adobe.
They cannot, because Adobe Reader is not open source so Microsoft has no access to its source code.
But, more than likely, they will pressure Adobe to fix it. Most likely, Adobe will fix it because it is a bad reflection on THEIR product on which they make their living.
Which is what the linux kernel developers are doing here. And as you can see in the LKML, the virtualbox developers have responded.
Just look at video driver support built into Windows over the last 10 or 15 years. Drivers that were not initially available from either the manufacturer or Microsoft end up being built into Windows in later updates or releases. Many times, it involves device vendors that go out of business. And, of course, device vendors always include a driver for the current version of Windows because it has 90% of the home market.
Adding support for new hardware - they do it. But adding support for old hardware? It never happened in my life. Just a couple years ago I had to set aside a tv tuner because no 64-bit driver was ever produced for it. It still works under the latest version of Linux.
What they can do is to add "application compatibility patches" to Windows to avoid breaking popular applications when they release a new version of Windows.
So, explain again why users should use FLOSS instead closed-source when they have "better things to work on than someone else's code" and can buy something that works?
Users should use FLOSS instead of closed-sourced code becase FLOSS developers haven't "better things to do than working on their own code" so users can have something that works for free. And unlike the case of closed code, users can fix it themselves if they have the ability to do so.
Will Microsoft fix bugs in Adobe Reader if I report them, because Windows is closed-source? Will Microsoft develop a driver for my video card if it isn't supported in this version of Windows, because it's closed-source? In fact, being open vs. closed source is completely orthogonal to the problem.
Except for the fact that, for political reasons, if there's somebody who is actually more likely to work on someone else's code, it's the FLOSS developers.
I think it's the virtualbox developers who prefer to keep their driver out-of-tree, so they can change their userspace API at will on new releases of virtualbox.
This is not about the kernel developers refusing to support their users, this is about the kernel developers discriminating bug reports coming from the users of virtualbox, which a different product and is completely outside their control (in fact, it's partly commercial).
The open vs. closed debate has nothing to do with this story. To make an example in the closed world you declare to love, it's exactly just like Porton Antivirus users reporting bugs to Microsoft when they encounter crashes caused by Porton Antivirus. Microsoft will, more or less gently, instruct the users to report the bugs to Porton. At least in this case, the bug reports are publicly accessible to virtualbox developers thanks to the openness of FLOSS.
It must have been your bad day. It happens. My more specific experience with the linux kernel developers, is that I reported a regression in the support for some hardware of mine (an old card that probably "not many care about" besides me), and I received an email with a patch correcting the problem in the very same day. And I didn't pay a dime for that.
Also, I have to disagree with the calling it "tainted crap." That's just unfair and unprofessional
The flag TAINT_CRAP is applied even to the kernel's own in-tree drivers while they are staging. It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek rather than professional, probably due to the contribution of people who still develop the linux kernel for fun rather than professional involvement.
And I think they're creating a new OUT_OF_TREE flag to replace TAINT_CRAP for the specific case of Virtualbox and other independently developed drivers.
I must be getting very old.
The examples are countless: open standards gave us email, closed standards gave us SMS, EMS and MMS. Open standards gave us a packet-switched network where you can toss packets to the opposite side of the world just by paying the people who maintain the wires, while closed standards gave us ATM and the likes, where the service providers decide what services you can use or offer, and for which you pay depending on who you want to communicate with, on where he is, on what service you are requesting to use, on how long you'll be using it... Guess what model has more potential to generate more development?