In my reading of the GPL, it has a few options for source redistribution. If they redistribute the source with the compiled binaries (e.g., on the imass itself), they do not need to redistribute the source otherwise. If they do not distribute the source on the same media, they must make the source available to all comers (and can charge a nominal fee)--even those who didn't buy it directly. I think there is a third option, where if they received a redistribution offer from another firm and they changed nothing, they don't need to do anything. (e.g., they can say "Its stock Red Hat--pick it up at redhat.com). So don't get in a huff if you say "gimme source" and they say "stickit".
AOL hasn't taken mozilla "closed source" yet, so why worry about Red Hat? In fact, they changed TO the GPL from their tri-licensing scheme, indicating they do understand the GPL and its advantages. Plus, AOL would get a much bigger advantage from hocking an open-source OS than an open source browser. Sure, Netscape has some enhancements over Mozilla, but I think that if AOLTW buys Red Hat, the open source community would have more serious worries than potential GPL violations.
The problem with your "nothing to see here" attitude is that you have to know its a problem in order to change the defaults. If nothing else, this story alerts/. windows users that someone may be tracking them, so that they can change the preferences. And, its ironic that Gates wants Microsoft to be synonymous with "Trustworthy", while at the same time stabbing his customers in the back. Sorry, but I won't trust them with my money or my information, when they are so eager to screw me over for control of my digital media (DRM is the apparent reason for these supercookies), to the point where they would let anybody out there track me.
Well, corporations have a habit of using the state's police to enforce their licenses (cf. Sklyarov, Johannsen, etc.) If you pull a gun on the FBI, even on your own property, they will kill you, and probably burn down your house too.
If you agree to this license, even if it is not legal, that has to be decided by the courts. So, when Borland Vice comes knocking, what do you do? Let them see your computer, or hire a lawyer? Since you forfeited your rights to certain types of trials, you will have to go to another judge to get to a court you may wish to be in. As we saw with Suse earlier, and Killustrator before that, and probably will see soon with Lindows, sometimes the cost of fighting it is not worthwhile. Luckily, 2600 and the EFF is willing to stand up to corporate bullies like this.
By your calculations, given that MS must be wholesaling the consoles to retailers for around $150-$200 (I'm sure someone here knows what wholesale is), they are probably losing $100 or more per console. That jives with what others here are saying. But, the money budgeted for hardware support is probably inversely proportional to their expenditures on the parts, and has nothing to do with how much they are making per console, because they aren't making money on the consoles. They may be willing to skimp on the quality of their parts and throw 50% of the saving at support. This appears to be the Palm/Handspring/cellphone model. But, they can't afford skimp too much, because of the bad rep they would get for producing a crappy console. This is more important in the console market than in the handheld market--for some reason, people expect their handhelds and cellphones to break when they drop them--they don't accept this for their consoles.
You can make your own damn debs Sure you can. You can also write your own damn applications in machine code, solder your own damn microprocessor together, and make your own damn electricity using your own damn dynamo. How many of these do you do?
or install non-debian debs.
As mentioned in above post, the leads down the path of dependency hell. My system has never run more smoothly since I hunted down and killed every progeny and ximian.deb, and I hope not to return to those days.
The consequence of a large, distributed, volunteer organization is certain drawbacks. Like, sometimes you have to wait for things to happen if you can't do it yourself, or don't want to, or don't want to pay some do it for you.
Well, debian's packaging system isn't going away anytime soon--they are committed to using alien to maintain compliance with the LSB here. But,.debs are not necessarily technically superior to.rpms either. However, there are probably two reasons why them may appear so:
1) APT (Advanced Package Tool). This is even available and usable on.rpm systems so its not much of an advantage. It does take care of some of the headaches of dependencies automatically, but is probably a only minor advantage of Debian's packaging system.
2) Debian's packaging policy and community structure. This is where Debian shines--because each individual maintainer only handles a handful of packages, and there is a strict policy for them to follow, the packages tend to work well together. It's not that.debs are superior to.rpms--if you try to use Ximian.debs, or had in the past used Stormix or Progeny.debs, you can run into rpm-like dependency hell quite easily. You even can run into trouble if you try to mix stable and unstable debian packages.
But, all this comes at a price. debian's packagers are volunteers, and so you sometimes have to wait until the volunteer is good and ready to get the packaged software you want. For example, the new control panel and XST upgrades took a couple month's to appear, and there has recently been a little trouble with KDE--the package management changed hands. At least with a commercial system, you (hopefully) have better guarantees about package availability.
OO programming is not just about modeling the problem well, which in and of itself is enough to recommend the approach to an engineer. It also addresses the very difficult task of generating and maintaining a large software project in a form that a human can understand. For many small tasks, the extra overhead involved might not be worth the extra effort required if you are not already comfortable with the OO metaphor.
Yeah....there will come a time, probably within our lives (maybe 20 years), when a $200 hard drive will be able to hold every movie, song, and book ever created. How do you fill that one up? Well, when they get that big, there might not be enough of a market for that much storage so the price will go up. But...
(For the pedantic, my argument rests on the fact that in 1992, a 100 megabyte HD cost about $200, and today, a 100 gigabyte HD costs about the same (give or take). At the same rate, we'll have 100,000 gigabyte in ten years, and 100,000,000 gigabyte in 20. Physics blah blah blah.)
At DVD-size of ~2.5 gigabytes per movie, uncompressed music at about 40 mb/song, and books at (generously) 20mb/pdf-book, this makes (in 20 years):
400,000 movies, -or-
2.5 billion (10^9) uncompressed songs
5 billion books.
(Please don't flame me if my math is wrong--just correct me politely). Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years, most people are still using 56k dialup and 4 gb? DVDs. Again, I ask you, how are you gonna fill up that disk?
But, I'm not good at predicting the future of hard drive storage. In 1989, I had a big argument with a buddy about hard drives. My contention was that nobody would be able to use more than 30 (well, maybe 40) megabytes of hard drive space.
This rant is totally reasonable. My question is--who can I pay for supporting Abiword? Let's say I'm a business, and want a Free word processor, and Abiword fits the bill perfectly. But, I know that my secretaries will need some questions answered. And occasionally, I might need a feature implemented (e.g., I'll need some document conversion done for my old dos-based word processor WinWord) Let's say I'm willing to pay for this. Who will take my money, and enter into this contract? Dom? Ximian? Who?
Your error comes in thinking that there is an average./ reader. By averaging all the diverse opinions and experiences into a single person, you might find hypocrisy, because hypocrisy is when a single person feigns to be something they are not, or says one thing and does another. This doesn't apply to groups where one subset of people believes one thing and a second believes another. Its like saying congress is hypocritical because some representatives are conservative and others are liberal.
It is no great feat to observe that in any sufficiently large and diverse group of people (e.g., the slashdot readership), there will be different experiences, opinions, and stories. Isn't it possible that in the/. readership, there are enlightenment fans, there are OSX fans, there are XP fans, and there are those who think flashy gimmicky interfaces are stupid? No hypocrisy there.
I don't know if it was networked, but I used to play a great civ-like game called "Lords of Conquest". on the apple ][ in the mid 80s. I downloaded an emulator and found a copy on an abandonware site, and it was nearly as much fun as I remember.
Re:I need this like I need colonic irrigation
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
I wouldn't count on the bottleneck coming from the Gecko engine. In my experience, and from the reports of others, Gecko is fast and pretty complete. Its the UI that Gecko renders itself in Mozilla that can make it a bit sluggish, at least in Linux. I have found that if you use the classic ui without the shiny colors, things can speed up a bit. However, this is all predicated on having enough RAM. Mozilla (and Gecko) might work really fast with 256 mb of ram, but become numbingly slow when forced to work with 64 mb. This is probably more important than CPU speed.
What will the kids run? What educational software is there for Linux? I mean REALLY? Sure, there is some, but it's not even close to what is available for Windows.
I've been hearing this argument since the 80s, except then the status quo was the Apple II and the scary technical alternative was the PC. Then, 'everything' schools ran worked on their 10-year-old Apple 2s, and there was nothing running on Windows 3.1 or DOS that they were interested in. In reality, 'everything' was "The Oregon Trail", "Print Shop", and some crappy home-made software written in Basic. Now, the same attitude exists about Windows. What is all this 'educational' software, anyways? The crap book publishers "give" away to entice administrators to buy their book? The question isn't "what will the kids run if they have to use Linux", but "What are they running now that they need windows for?"
Technically, the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use of code. You can charge whatever you want, if someone is willing to pay for it. The thing that it requires if that if those people ask you for your source code, you have to give it, for some fair price. Consequently, it discourages commercial use, and prevents closed-source use.
The problem is that here on/., you have to be very careful about precisely what terms you use, especially with respect to licenses, or someone will jump down you throat. I've had people jump down my throat before because I said the QT open license (i.e., the gpl) prohibits proprietary software. ("Does not...you can write proprietary software that's open source").
Lisp is commonly used by AI researchers, more in the 80s than it is today. Prolog is as well, and was the basis for 'Expert' systems that were in vogue a dozen years ago. Aside from the facts that it is fairly easy to implement prolog in lisp, and they are both used by people who are consider AI researchers, they are very different.
From a naive perspective, lisp is just a programming language that you can tell what to do and it does it. Prolog doesn't seem to actually do anything--You just tell it information and it somehow knows the answer.
I went to Netledger to check it out. After wading through a ton of cookies I noticed I cute little graph that shows the "Average ROI is 1700%". The funny part is that 40% of their customers aren't on the graph, meaning they have an ROI less than 100%, meaning, some might conclude, that a substantial proportion of their customers are being tricked into buying something that is hurting their bottom line. I guess that slipped by the marketing department.
Slashdot Mirror
In my reading of the GPL, it has a few options for source redistribution. If they redistribute the source with the compiled binaries (e.g., on the imass itself), they do not need to redistribute the source otherwise. If they do not distribute the source on the same media, they must make the source available to all comers (and can charge a nominal fee)--even those who didn't buy it directly. I think there is a third option, where if they received a redistribution offer from another firm and they changed nothing, they don't need to do anything. (e.g., they can say "Its stock Red Hat--pick it up at redhat.com). So don't get in a huff if you say "gimme source" and they say "stickit".
AOL hasn't taken mozilla "closed source" yet, so why worry about Red Hat? In fact, they changed TO the GPL from their tri-licensing scheme, indicating they do understand the GPL and its advantages. Plus, AOL would get a much bigger advantage from hocking an open-source OS than an open source browser. Sure, Netscape has some enhancements over Mozilla, but I think that if AOLTW buys Red Hat, the open source community would have more serious worries than potential GPL violations.
The problem with your "nothing to see here" attitude is that you have to know its a problem in order to change the defaults. If nothing else, this story alerts /. windows users that someone may be tracking them, so that they can change the preferences. And, its ironic that Gates wants Microsoft to be synonymous with "Trustworthy", while at the same time stabbing his customers in the back. Sorry, but I won't trust them with my money or my information, when they are so eager to screw me over for control of my digital media (DRM is the apparent reason for these supercookies), to the point where they would let anybody out there track me.
Well, corporations have a habit of using the state's police to enforce their licenses (cf. Sklyarov, Johannsen, etc.) If you pull a gun on the FBI, even on your own property, they will kill you, and probably burn down your house too.
If you agree to this license, even if it is not legal, that has to be decided by the courts. So, when Borland Vice comes knocking, what do you do? Let them see your computer, or hire a lawyer? Since you forfeited your rights to certain types of trials, you will have to go to another judge to get to a court you may wish to be in. As we saw with Suse earlier, and Killustrator before that, and probably will see soon with Lindows, sometimes the cost of fighting it is not worthwhile. Luckily, 2600 and the EFF is willing to stand up to corporate bullies like this.
By your calculations, given that MS must be wholesaling the consoles to retailers for around $150-$200 (I'm sure someone here knows what wholesale is), they are probably losing $100 or more per console. That jives with what others here are saying. But, the money budgeted for hardware support is probably inversely proportional to their expenditures on the parts, and has nothing to do with how much they are making per console, because they aren't making money on the consoles. They may be willing to skimp on the quality of their parts and throw 50% of the saving at support. This appears to be the Palm/Handspring/cellphone model. But, they can't afford skimp too much, because of the bad rep they would get for producing a crappy console. This is more important in the console market than in the handheld market--for some reason, people expect their handhelds and cellphones to break when they drop them--they don't accept this for their consoles.
You can make your own damn debs
.deb, and I hope not to return to those days.
Sure you can. You can also write your own damn applications in machine code, solder your own damn microprocessor together, and make your own damn electricity using your own damn dynamo. How many of these do you do?
or install non-debian debs.
As mentioned in above post, the leads down the path of dependency hell. My system has never run more smoothly since I hunted down and killed every progeny and ximian
The consequence of a large, distributed, volunteer organization is certain drawbacks. Like, sometimes you have to wait for things to happen if you can't do it yourself, or don't want to, or don't want to pay some do it for you.
Deeeuuuuurrrhhrrrr!
Ok, I'll concede that point.
Well, debian's packaging system isn't going away anytime soon--they are committed to using alien to maintain compliance with the LSB here. But, .debs are not necessarily technically superior to .rpms either. However, there are probably two reasons why them may appear so:
.rpm systems so its not much of an advantage. It does take care of some of the headaches of dependencies automatically, but is probably a only minor advantage of Debian's packaging system.
.debs are superior to .rpms--if you try to use Ximian .debs, or had in the past used Stormix or Progeny .debs, you can run into rpm-like dependency hell quite easily. You even can run into trouble if you try to mix stable and unstable debian packages.
1) APT (Advanced Package Tool). This is even available and usable on
2) Debian's packaging policy and community structure. This is where Debian shines--because each individual maintainer only handles a handful of packages, and there is a strict policy for them to follow, the packages tend to work well together. It's not that
But, all this comes at a price. debian's packagers are volunteers, and so you sometimes have to wait until the volunteer is good and ready to get the packaged software you want. For example, the new control panel and XST upgrades took a couple month's to appear, and there has recently been a little trouble with KDE--the package management changed hands. At least with a commercial system, you (hopefully) have better guarantees about package availability.
OO programming is not just about modeling the problem well, which in and of itself is enough to recommend the approach to an engineer. It also addresses the very difficult task of generating and maintaining a large software project in a form that a human can understand. For many small tasks, the extra overhead involved might not be worth the extra effort required if you are not already comfortable with the OO metaphor.
Yeah....there will come a time, probably within our lives (maybe 20 years), when a $200 hard drive will be able to hold every movie, song, and book ever created. How do you fill that one up? Well, when they get that big, there might not be enough of a market for that much storage so the price will go up. But...
(For the pedantic, my argument rests on the fact that in 1992, a 100 megabyte HD cost about $200, and today, a 100 gigabyte HD costs about the same (give or take). At the same rate, we'll have 100,000 gigabyte in ten years, and 100,000,000 gigabyte in 20. Physics blah blah blah.)
At DVD-size of ~2.5 gigabytes per movie, uncompressed music at about 40 mb/song, and books at (generously) 20mb/pdf-book, this makes (in 20 years):
400,000 movies, -or-
2.5 billion (10^9) uncompressed songs
5 billion books.
(Please don't flame me if my math is wrong--just correct me politely). Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years, most people are still using 56k dialup and 4 gb? DVDs. Again, I ask you, how are you gonna fill up that disk?
But, I'm not good at predicting the future of hard drive storage. In 1989, I had a big argument with a buddy about hard drives. My contention was that nobody would be able to use more than 30 (well, maybe 40) megabytes of hard drive space.
If Debian has a problem with one of my documents, they're free to rewrite it from scratch.
This appears to be exactly what they're doing.
This was all hypothetical. And winword was a dos-based word processor that got packaged in a department-store computer I got in about 1988.
This rant is totally reasonable. My question is--who can I pay for supporting Abiword? Let's say I'm a business, and want a Free word processor, and Abiword fits the bill perfectly. But, I know that my secretaries will need some questions answered. And occasionally, I might need a feature implemented (e.g., I'll need some document conversion done for my old dos-based word processor WinWord) Let's say I'm willing to pay for this. Who will take my money, and enter into this contract? Dom? Ximian? Who?
Dangit. Try to post a witty retort and I make a stupid error. Serves me right.
Don't you mean:
/* Accepted */
int min_value, max_value;
minvalue = 2;
max_value = min_value + 2;
Yeah, but the whole stock market was down today on news of consumer confidence or something.
Your error comes in thinking that there is an average ./ reader. By averaging all the diverse opinions and experiences into a single person, you might find hypocrisy, because hypocrisy is when a single person feigns to be something they are not, or says one thing and does another. This doesn't apply to groups where one subset of people believes one thing and a second believes another. Its like saying congress is hypocritical because some representatives are conservative and others are liberal.
/. readership, there are enlightenment fans, there are OSX fans, there are XP fans, and there are those who think flashy gimmicky interfaces are stupid? No hypocrisy there.
It is no great feat to observe that in any sufficiently large and diverse group of people (e.g., the slashdot readership), there will be different experiences, opinions, and stories. Isn't it possible that in the
I don't know if it was networked, but I used to play a great civ-like game called "Lords of Conquest". on the apple ][ in the mid 80s. I downloaded an emulator and found a copy on an abandonware site, and it was nearly as much fun as I remember.
I wouldn't count on the bottleneck coming from the Gecko engine. In my experience, and from the reports of others, Gecko is fast and pretty complete. Its the UI that Gecko renders itself in Mozilla that can make it a bit sluggish, at least in Linux. I have found that if you use the classic ui without the shiny colors, things can speed up a bit. However, this is all predicated on having enough RAM. Mozilla (and Gecko) might work really fast with 256 mb of ram, but become numbingly slow when forced to work with 64 mb. This is probably more important than CPU speed.
What will the kids run? What educational software is there for Linux? I mean REALLY? Sure, there is some, but it's not even close to what is available for Windows.
I've been hearing this argument since the 80s, except then the status quo was the Apple II and the scary technical alternative was the PC. Then, 'everything' schools ran worked on their 10-year-old Apple 2s, and there was nothing running on Windows 3.1 or DOS that they were interested in. In reality, 'everything' was "The Oregon Trail", "Print Shop", and some crappy home-made software written in Basic. Now, the same attitude exists about Windows. What is all this 'educational' software, anyways? The crap book publishers "give" away to entice administrators to buy their book? The question isn't "what will the kids run if they have to use Linux", but "What are they running now that they need windows for?"
Unless the FSF is going to fund an open alternative to Source Forge they should get off their high horse.
As stated in the article, Savannah is such an alternative supported by thy FSF.
Technically, the GPL doesn't prohibit commercial use of code. You can charge whatever you want, if someone is willing to pay for it. The thing that it requires if that if those people ask you for your source code, you have to give it, for some fair price. Consequently, it discourages commercial use, and prevents closed-source use.
/., you have to be very careful about precisely what terms you use, especially with respect to licenses, or someone will jump down you throat. I've had people jump down my throat before because I said the QT open license (i.e., the gpl) prohibits proprietary software. ("Does not...you can write proprietary software that's open source").
The problem is that here on
Lisp is commonly used by AI researchers, more in the 80s than it is today. Prolog is as well, and was the basis for 'Expert' systems that were in vogue a dozen years ago. Aside from the facts that it is fairly easy to implement prolog in lisp, and they are both used by people who are consider AI researchers, they are very different.
From a naive perspective, lisp is just a programming language that you can tell what to do and it does it. Prolog doesn't seem to actually do anything--You just tell it information and it somehow knows the answer.
Maybe its an automated database query that checks to see if the story has been posted already.
I went to Netledger to check it out. After wading through a ton of cookies I noticed I cute little graph that shows the "Average ROI is 1700%". The funny part is that 40% of their customers aren't on the graph, meaning they have an ROI less than 100%, meaning, some might conclude, that a substantial proportion of their customers are being tricked into buying something that is hurting their bottom line. I guess that slipped by the marketing department.
Not that I believe the graph that much, anyway.