The first bloody paragraph of Strunk and bloody White.
Yes, and that's only one of the many many things that misguided and horribly out-of-date book is wrong about.
This post by Prof. Arnold Zwicky (Linguistics, Stanford) only gives a hint of how much that little book is loathed by people who actually know something about language and style. Especially on the other side of the pond where many of its "rules" were never ever considered correct.
Strunk & White is to language as BASIC is to programming--you can learn something from it, but it's likely to cause damage that will take years to repair.
So what you're saying is you're an elitist that wishes everything was done via cryptic command line options that require years of study?
Never used Debian, have you? At least 95% of Ubuntu's easy "magical" configuration is inherited directly from Debian. The complaints about Debian that lead to the rise of Ubuntu were: too many confusing choices (Ubuntu avoids this by offering several pre-defined "flavors") and a too-long release cycle. Debian is not and has never been hard to configure--it simply offered little or no clue which of its thousands of packages you would want to install in the first place. (The Task manager now solves that problem in part, but that's a more recent development.)
A company called Lasermoon once got their flavor certified. I don't believe that Red Hat ever did so.
At the time, the biggest issue was a feature called STREAMS (all-caps), which Linus refused to include in the kernel, arguing that it was unnecessary for a system that came with source. Caldera (now SCO) acquired Lasermoon and included STREAMS in some of their versions of Linux, and was lobbying to have it included as a standard feature despite Linus's objections, but I don't believe that any flavor of STREAMS ever appeared in RH.
According to Wikipedia, STREAMS are now an optional feature in the latest Single Unix Spec (SUS), so a system like Linux (or BSD) that lacks STREAMS can now be certified as Unix(tm), but that was not always true, so for a long time, Linux did not "realize all the concepts and behaviors of real Unix," and the only reason it can now is because the definition was deliberately changed to allow it to be included.
As an ironic side note, the requirement for STREAMS seems to have been dropped at just about the same time (circa 2003) that Caldera morphed into a mad dog and began attacking the rest of the Linux community.
But if asked, the distributor must also provide the source code
No, distributors don't have to do anything. Manufacturers must provide the source (or an offer, valid for three years, to any third party to provide the source). Mere distributors are unaffected by the GPL.
A certain prominent North America Linux distributor (in the word of CentOS) used to not do this...
Most Linux manufacturers produce their own flavor (aka "distribution") of Linux, and its common to refer to them as "distributors" because they make "distributions", but it's the making—the copying and preparation of derivative works—that runs them into copyright/GPL territory; not the distribution! A pure distributor like Amazon (or, in this case, Microsoft) is acting outside the scope of copyright, and thus outside the scope of the GPL.
A different judge - one that can be bribed, but it may only take one that doesn't understand the concept of Open Source.
It's not a different judge. The previous UnXis deal was rejected by the same bankruptcy judge in DE that's being asked to look at this one. Furthermore, the reasons for rejecting the deal had (and have) nothing to do with Open Source, and everything to do with standard finances--something a bankruptcy judge generally has a decent grasp on.
In fact, almost nothing in any of TSCOG's cases (bankruptcy, Novell, IBM, RH, Autozone, etc.) hinges directly on anything to do with an understanding of Open Source. The only exception I can think of is some of IBM's counterclaims involving the GPL.
In an infinite universe, there are infinite habitable planets
Really? Even in an empty-but-infinite universe? How about an infinite universe that only has one habitable planet? Or twelve? Or nothing but blueberry preserves? In an infinite number of infinite universes, all these things must exist!:)
The current phrasing is awkward, but I don't believe there's anything ungrammatical about it--but then again, I'm not one of the idiots who believes that Strunk & White is a book on grammar.:)
Dubious that the release of a Windows-only plugin will have any direct effect on your system's ability to stream Netflix. As for indirect effects, if any, I think this should give you slightly less hope, as Netflix now has even less motivation to support a codec you can legally use (at least if you're in the US--I have no idea how this might impact Canadian Netflix users).
Actually, I had an uncle who was able to program his VCR. Not because he was technically minded (he wasn't), but because he was obsessive-compulsive, and the thought of missing an "important" TV show when he was out of town for some reason was more than he could handle. For the most part, though, the techies I knew didn't care enough about TV to bother to learn how to program their VCRs.
I'm not sure, but there are several settlements on the Dead Sea, and the answer is likely to be one of them (assuming the name "city" can accurately be applied to any of them.:)
(Yes, I understand the point you were trying to make, but this is slashdot, so I'd be falling down on the job if I didn't pick nits with your argument.)
Well, except for the people who use, e.g., E17 and/or the EFL on Mac. This is a cross-platform library and desktop, not something specific to Linux, so the original question ("why does Linux have...") makes no sense.
Ignoring that huge quibble, though, the answer is: because Linux is not trying to be a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather an available-in-many-sizes-to-fit-your-needs solution, which is something that a lot of us greatly prefer.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Did it take 10 years to "get it right", or did it merely take 10 years for the competition to blast by in terms of bloat and overhead, making E17 look better simply because it hasn't gotten worse anywhere nearly as quickly?:)
This is an honest question, as I haven't followed E development at all. I do basically agree with the conclusion--E17 once seemed huge, bloated and slow, and now it seems small, effective and fast. Clearly the devs were doing something right along the way, even if it was simply not adding new kitchen sinks every year or two.
And everyone does these version numbers differently.
Do they? "Everyone?" Really? I have thousands of packages available for my distro that all use more-or-less the same schema: major.minor.patch. I have to hunt long and hard to find exceptions. The fact that it's nearly mandatory for libraries to use this schema in order for so-versioning to work no doubt helps.
We should all find a standard we can agree on mostly
We've got that. Yes, "mostly" is an important word there, but it's enough that I think it can meaningfully be described as a de-facto standard. The GNU version of ls(1) even has a "-v" flag to sort files based on the standard versioning schema, i.e. foo1.3.2 sorts before foo1.12.1. (I just wish Apache would add that option.)
Anyone who goes for dates, though, should certainly use ISO 8601, which is a formally accepted international standard.
E17, which depends on these libraries, has been out for...how many years now? It's in wide use, and even has a specialized distro or two based on it. These may be v1.0 libraries, but that by no means indicates that they're "the first version". That's as silly a claim as the notion that v1.9 should be followed by v2.0 rather than by v1.10. The v1.0 appellation suggests that this is the first feature complete release, not the first version!
I don't know if you're joking or trolling, but the answers are: yes it's creationism and no it's not science. It is--and was labeled as such by a court--simply a renaming of Creationism to try to get around US laws against teaching Creationism as science. See, e.g., Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
This wouldn't fly in America, where using encryption is in and of itself often considered "probable cause".
Citation needed. Pretty much every company I or any of my friends in the industry has worked for in the last decade has used encryption, and, in particular, VPN, which is the specific form of encryption being discussed here.
Even if I were to accept what you probably meant (that private individuals using personal encryption technologies like PGP may be subject to arbitrary arrest), which I don't, that still wouldn't affect the fact that we're discussing corporations here, not individuals, and corporations in the US can pretty much get away with blatant murder in the streets in front of thousands of eye-witnesses without it being considered probable cause, as long as it has a positive effect on their bottom line. (It's the murders that don't lead directly to profit that are frowned upon!) Certainly a company using VPN, just like every other company in the country that uses computers, is not going to be an issue.
Volume 3's the good stuff! It's volume 2 I've never done more than skim. (Though I do have to admit that the analysis of balanced ternary in vol2 was fascinating, but not very practical in the real world where computers use binary.)
If microsoft was doing what google is attempting to do we would all be screaming bloody murder
When Microsoft releases their software for Linux under terms that allow it to be included in Debian, we'll be able to judge the truth of this claim. I'm not sure whether you're right or wrong, but I think hell is likely to freeze over before we'll ever find out!:)
Microsoft's history of backstabbing their partners and doing everything they can to lock in their users makes them a very different proposition from Google. I suspect that at least, some people would be shouting "it's a trap" if Microsoft did something similar. But there's a solid foundation for that fear with MS, and I'm not seeing any similar foundations for similar fears with Google. I may not trust them (Google) much, but I don't see any benefit to them to attempting to manipulate this format the way MS likely would (embrace, extend, extinguish). Nor has Google been running around shouting about various vague unspecified patents that the FLOSS community has supposedly been violating. Just about the opposite, in the case of VP8. Frankly, there are lots and lots of reasons for treating/viewing Google (or almost anyone else) differently from Microsoft. So, I have to conclude that you're either much more paranoid than I, or a troll.
What might be more interesting to contemplate is: what would happen if Novell or Oracle tried something similar. I suspect that would lead to a fair amount of justified paranoia, and shouts of "it's a trap"--but nowhere near as many as if it were Microsoft--and a fair amount of heated debate on the topic. However, Novell is mostly mistrusted because of their ties to MS, so really, the interesting case, IMO, would be Oracle.
For now, though, I'm just happy that there's finally at least one video format I can legally run on my machine without using the bloody flash player, which has been my only way to play videos at all up till now. I'm not too worried about Google's current control, because it depends on the good will of the community, which is perfectly able to take over and fork in extremis--see Xorg/Xfree86, EGCS/GCC, and arguably, MariaDB/MySQL and OOo/LIbreOffice.
Really? Prove it! We know that H.264 is patent encumbered. It is plausible to think that VP8 might be as well, but there's no actual evidence, and a company that is famous for its search technology claims to have found nothing. Who should I trust: some random slashdotter or the best searchers on the planet?:p
In any case, it's just as plausible that H.264 has unknown stealth patents lurking to bite the unwary as it is that VP8 does. So there's no obvious advantage to either one there. And both formats have huge money behind them. Google may not be offering direct indemnification (though neither is MPEGLA), but I don't think there's any question that a direct threat to VP8 would bring the full force of their legal department. Just as a direct threat to H.264 would bring the full force of the MPEGLA members' legal departments.
From my point of view (as a mostly disinterested/uninterested 3rd party observer), VP8 looks a lot safer. Plus, its supported by my OS vendors, unlike H.264. I'll start worrying about VP8 soon after Debian does, and not one minute before.
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The first bloody paragraph of Strunk and bloody White.
Yes, and that's only one of the many many things that misguided and horribly out-of-date book is wrong about.
This post by Prof. Arnold Zwicky (Linguistics, Stanford) only gives a hint of how much that little book is loathed by people who actually know something about language and style. Especially on the other side of the pond where many of its "rules" were never ever considered correct.
Strunk & White is to language as BASIC is to programming--you can learn something from it, but it's likely to cause damage that will take years to repair.
Sparc, but thanks for asking. :)
So what you're saying is you're an elitist that wishes everything was done via cryptic command line options that require years of study?
Never used Debian, have you? At least 95% of Ubuntu's easy "magical" configuration is inherited directly from Debian. The complaints about Debian that lead to the rise of Ubuntu were: too many confusing choices (Ubuntu avoids this by offering several pre-defined "flavors") and a too-long release cycle. Debian is not and has never been hard to configure--it simply offered little or no clue which of its thousands of packages you would want to install in the first place. (The Task manager now solves that problem in part, but that's a more recent development.)
I believe Red Hat has done that in the past
A company called Lasermoon once got their flavor certified. I don't believe that Red Hat ever did so.
At the time, the biggest issue was a feature called STREAMS (all-caps), which Linus refused to include in the kernel, arguing that it was unnecessary for a system that came with source. Caldera (now SCO) acquired Lasermoon and included STREAMS in some of their versions of Linux, and was lobbying to have it included as a standard feature despite Linus's objections, but I don't believe that any flavor of STREAMS ever appeared in RH.
According to Wikipedia, STREAMS are now an optional feature in the latest Single Unix Spec (SUS), so a system like Linux (or BSD) that lacks STREAMS can now be certified as Unix(tm), but that was not always true, so for a long time, Linux did not "realize all the concepts and behaviors of real Unix," and the only reason it can now is because the definition was deliberately changed to allow it to be included.
As an ironic side note, the requirement for STREAMS seems to have been dropped at just about the same time (circa 2003) that Caldera morphed into a mad dog and began attacking the rest of the Linux community.
But if asked, the distributor must also provide the source code
No, distributors don't have to do anything. Manufacturers must provide the source (or an offer, valid for three years, to any third party to provide the source). Mere distributors are unaffected by the GPL.
A certain prominent North America Linux distributor (in the word of CentOS) used to not do this...
Most Linux manufacturers produce their own flavor (aka "distribution") of Linux, and its common to refer to them as "distributors" because they make "distributions", but it's the making—the copying and preparation of derivative works—that runs them into copyright/GPL territory; not the distribution! A pure distributor like Amazon (or, in this case, Microsoft) is acting outside the scope of copyright, and thus outside the scope of the GPL.
37% of reported statistics are obviously fake, the other 73% manage to get by without the audience noticing.
And collectively, they gave 110%, something that only sports teams had previously managed! :)
Unfortunately, the only device I own that is able to stream Netflix is a old PS3, which I bought in part because it had the Other OS option.
A different judge - one that can be bribed, but it may only take one that doesn't understand the concept of Open Source.
It's not a different judge. The previous UnXis deal was rejected by the same bankruptcy judge in DE that's being asked to look at this one. Furthermore, the reasons for rejecting the deal had (and have) nothing to do with Open Source, and everything to do with standard finances--something a bankruptcy judge generally has a decent grasp on.
In fact, almost nothing in any of TSCOG's cases (bankruptcy, Novell, IBM, RH, Autozone, etc.) hinges directly on anything to do with an understanding of Open Source. The only exception I can think of is some of IBM's counterclaims involving the GPL.
In an infinite universe, there are infinite habitable planets
Really? Even in an empty-but-infinite universe? How about an infinite universe that only has one habitable planet? Or twelve? Or nothing but blueberry preserves? In an infinite number of infinite universes, all these things must exist! :)
The current phrasing is awkward, but I don't believe there's anything ungrammatical about it--but then again, I'm not one of the idiots who believes that Strunk & White is a book on grammar. :)
Dubious that the release of a Windows-only plugin will have any direct effect on your system's ability to stream Netflix. As for indirect effects, if any, I think this should give you slightly less hope, as Netflix now has even less motivation to support a codec you can legally use (at least if you're in the US--I have no idea how this might impact Canadian Netflix users).
Couldn't program your VCR, eh?
Was there someone who could?
Actually, I had an uncle who was able to program his VCR. Not because he was technically minded (he wasn't), but because he was obsessive-compulsive, and the thought of missing an "important" TV show when he was out of town for some reason was more than he could handle. For the most part, though, the techies I knew didn't care enough about TV to bother to learn how to program their VCRs.
Which city is closest to the center of the Earth?
I'm not sure, but there are several settlements on the Dead Sea, and the answer is likely to be one of them (assuming the name "city" can accurately be applied to any of them. :)
(Yes, I understand the point you were trying to make, but this is slashdot, so I'd be falling down on the job if I didn't pick nits with your argument.)
Hah. I once found a very short piece of Postscript which ray-traced a reflective sphere on a chess board.
Sounds like the one published by the ACM here. A boggling 762 bytes of PS.
I mean, on a Mac you use Cocoa
Well, except for the people who use, e.g., E17 and/or the EFL on Mac. This is a cross-platform library and desktop, not something specific to Linux, so the original question ("why does Linux have...") makes no sense.
Ignoring that huge quibble, though, the answer is: because Linux is not trying to be a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather an available-in-many-sizes-to-fit-your-needs solution, which is something that a lot of us greatly prefer.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Did it take 10 years to "get it right", or did it merely take 10 years for the competition to blast by in terms of bloat and overhead, making E17 look better simply because it hasn't gotten worse anywhere nearly as quickly? :)
This is an honest question, as I haven't followed E development at all. I do basically agree with the conclusion--E17 once seemed huge, bloated and slow, and now it seems small, effective and fast. Clearly the devs were doing something right along the way, even if it was simply not adding new kitchen sinks every year or two.
And everyone does these version numbers differently.
Do they? "Everyone?" Really? I have thousands of packages available for my distro that all use more-or-less the same schema: major.minor.patch. I have to hunt long and hard to find exceptions. The fact that it's nearly mandatory for libraries to use this schema in order for so-versioning to work no doubt helps.
We should all find a standard we can agree on mostly
We've got that. Yes, "mostly" is an important word there, but it's enough that I think it can meaningfully be described as a de-facto standard. The GNU version of ls(1) even has a "-v" flag to sort files based on the standard versioning schema, i.e. foo1.3.2 sorts before foo1.12.1. (I just wish Apache would add that option.)
Anyone who goes for dates, though, should certainly use ISO 8601, which is a formally accepted international standard.
E17, which depends on these libraries, has been out for...how many years now? It's in wide use, and even has a specialized distro or two based on it. These may be v1.0 libraries, but that by no means indicates that they're "the first version". That's as silly a claim as the notion that v1.9 should be followed by v2.0 rather than by v1.10. The v1.0 appellation suggests that this is the first feature complete release, not the first version!
I don't know if you're joking or trolling, but the answers are: yes it's creationism and no it's not science. It is--and was labeled as such by a court--simply a renaming of Creationism to try to get around US laws against teaching Creationism as science. See, e.g., Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
This wouldn't fly in America, where using encryption is in and of itself often considered "probable cause".
Citation needed. Pretty much every company I or any of my friends in the industry has worked for in the last decade has used encryption, and, in particular, VPN, which is the specific form of encryption being discussed here.
Even if I were to accept what you probably meant (that private individuals using personal encryption technologies like PGP may be subject to arbitrary arrest), which I don't, that still wouldn't affect the fact that we're discussing corporations here, not individuals, and corporations in the US can pretty much get away with blatant murder in the streets in front of thousands of eye-witnesses without it being considered probable cause, as long as it has a positive effect on their bottom line. (It's the murders that don't lead directly to profit that are frowned upon!) Certainly a company using VPN, just like every other company in the country that uses computers, is not going to be an issue.
Volume 3's the good stuff! It's volume 2 I've never done more than skim. (Though I do have to admit that the analysis of balanced ternary in vol2 was fascinating, but not very practical in the real world where computers use binary.)
If microsoft was doing what google is attempting to do we would all be screaming bloody murder
When Microsoft releases their software for Linux under terms that allow it to be included in Debian, we'll be able to judge the truth of this claim. I'm not sure whether you're right or wrong, but I think hell is likely to freeze over before we'll ever find out! :)
Microsoft's history of backstabbing their partners and doing everything they can to lock in their users makes them a very different proposition from Google. I suspect that at least, some people would be shouting "it's a trap" if Microsoft did something similar. But there's a solid foundation for that fear with MS, and I'm not seeing any similar foundations for similar fears with Google. I may not trust them (Google) much, but I don't see any benefit to them to attempting to manipulate this format the way MS likely would (embrace, extend, extinguish). Nor has Google been running around shouting about various vague unspecified patents that the FLOSS community has supposedly been violating. Just about the opposite, in the case of VP8. Frankly, there are lots and lots of reasons for treating/viewing Google (or almost anyone else) differently from Microsoft. So, I have to conclude that you're either much more paranoid than I, or a troll.
What might be more interesting to contemplate is: what would happen if Novell or Oracle tried something similar. I suspect that would lead to a fair amount of justified paranoia, and shouts of "it's a trap"--but nowhere near as many as if it were Microsoft--and a fair amount of heated debate on the topic. However, Novell is mostly mistrusted because of their ties to MS, so really, the interesting case, IMO, would be Oracle.
For now, though, I'm just happy that there's finally at least one video format I can legally run on my machine without using the bloody flash player, which has been my only way to play videos at all up till now. I'm not too worried about Google's current control, because it depends on the good will of the community, which is perfectly able to take over and fork in extremis--see Xorg/Xfree86, EGCS/GCC, and arguably, MariaDB/MySQL and OOo/LIbreOffice.
When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant.
Which may be why Wikipedia has an article on them: MUD.
Yeah, too bad they don't have an article like Rogue (computer game) or Roguelike. Those bastards! :)
The thing is, VP8 is patent encumbered too.
Really? Prove it! We know that H.264 is patent encumbered. It is plausible to think that VP8 might be as well, but there's no actual evidence, and a company that is famous for its search technology claims to have found nothing. Who should I trust: some random slashdotter or the best searchers on the planet? :p
In any case, it's just as plausible that H.264 has unknown stealth patents lurking to bite the unwary as it is that VP8 does. So there's no obvious advantage to either one there. And both formats have huge money behind them. Google may not be offering direct indemnification (though neither is MPEGLA), but I don't think there's any question that a direct threat to VP8 would bring the full force of their legal department. Just as a direct threat to H.264 would bring the full force of the MPEGLA members' legal departments.
From my point of view (as a mostly disinterested/uninterested 3rd party observer), VP8 looks a lot safer. Plus, its supported by my OS vendors, unlike H.264. I'll start worrying about VP8 soon after Debian does, and not one minute before.