Although the free software movement is all about "free as in speech", if the software is not "free as in beer" in one form or another (binaries or source) it is not considered free (and also a violation of the GNU license).
Since when? I can write GPLed software and sell the binaries and source if I want. There's nothing in the GPL to prevent me from doing that
actually, he said as long as *one* way of obtaining the source was free... for example, if you were selling binaries and source you would also need to provide a way to obtain said uncompiled source code by any possible method. (mailed on a disk, cd, printed on paper, internet, whatever works)
Hey guys lets all make a code fork of the Morpheus client!! Tit for tat! That way we can access the morpheus network and gnutella, and get rid of all the bullshit ads
I was a previous user of Morpheus and on installing the preview edition I was *NOT* presented with the GPL license, nor any information as to the source of their new modifications... It is only because of my previous knowledge and beta testing of Gnucleus that I recognized the panels and went... "heyyy"... further inspection of the website www.gnucleus.com revealed that they had recognized the swipe of code as well, and I fired an angry e-mail to Morpheus for not recognizing where their code was from and that they were in violation of the GPL. Then I headed to Slashdot to see if others had found out, and lo and behold this topic here... Interestingly enough my experience is a little different from the initial news bearer....
3rd Party Programmers are the MAIN Culprits
on
Dave Barry Does Windows
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
The main source of crashes and problems with Windows 2000 kernel based products are programmers doing device drivers who can't code their way out of a linked list, or those who base their products on inherently flawed programming languages such as Visual Basic.
Windows' failure to have a model that allows components to be replaced by enhanced/redesigned versions, like the VFS, kernel abstractions, and X Windows abstractions (XFree86 4 didn't break support for all applications because it has many new features) is what has "caused it to suck eggs". Windows should never have been divided into two seperate lines (NT and 9x), because it has caused nothing but headaches for people who desire a stable OS. (not releasing newer DirectX releases for NT users, etc) If Microsoft truly desired to use their market force in a positive manner, they should have radically redesigned Windows after 3.x and created emulators for 3.x and DOS apps on the new platform. (they did, afterall, have all the specs!).
The answer to why MS hasn't gotten a clue and written their OS like a cleverly packaged and beautified POSIX system is because they are infinitely greedy and lazy. They would rather create new slightly (making their own versions of Java?) or completely incompatible protocols (see the Kerberos article here on/.) , and APIs and get a stranglehold on any developers who invest more than a small amount of time or money into developing on that platform. (eg. why did D3D developers not port their games to other OS'? because they didn't know how to do the same tricks in OpenGL).
Your claim that a $300 console machine will be more powerful than a PC's graphics system is laughable. If you take any particular console system, and look at the graphics accelerators currently on the market on its release-- MAYBE, I mean MAYBE the console will stand up fairly well in comparison. But given a few months the PC world has rapidly passed it by and fillrate, and features of the PC gfx cards will blow the console out of the water.
Personally I'd rather look at games on my TNT2 Ultra, than on a PlayStation or Dreamcast or N64. PS2 looks nice, but again, NV 20 will blow it out of the water, and X-Box's NV 25 blows both out of the water. (in pixels/sec terms, and in features-- being able to do crazy amounts of multitexturing in fewer and fewer clock cycles, and accelerating math functions used in 3d programming (see PS2 coverage on Ars Technica)) All of which will be surpassed by the fast paced 3d accelerator world.
I also like the depth of PC games more than that of console games, on average. While I can't deny my urges to play fighting games on the console systems (something PC games lack are decent standard gamepads-- but then again the DC controller sucks for Capcom fighting games), I can't say there is much for an RPG fan to be played on the console systems. Console loyalists may be yelling "Final Fantasy" and "Dragon Quest", etc, right now but I would say that these are adventure games with RPG elements. (the same description could be applied to PlaneScape: Torment.. blah). When I mean real computer RPGs I mean things like the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Morrowind from Bethesda, and DW Bradley's Wizardry 8. Freedom to wander between tons of side quests, and avoid continuing main plotlines for extended periods of time, along with amazing flexibility to customize the character(s) you play as. Non-linear gameplay and finding best combinations of characters to beat the game are things that give these games replayability.
The console will NEVER EVER replace the PC. It might try to become REALLY similar to the PC (keyboard, mouse, etc), but the limitations caused by not being able to upgrade components, or not being able to use your own preferred ISP and method of connection (Dreamcast) will keep PC gamers on their PCs for a long while.
Don't get me wrong, I love consoles, but they are replaced every 5 years and the PC cycle is like every couple months (for gfx accelerators)
Someone was telling me today that the technology of the 3D accelerator market is rapidly outpacing the CPU market, and that NVidia said something to the effect of, "Moore's Law is for wimps".
BTW- the Voodoo 5 is just die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 3 technology, which is die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 2 tech, which is die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 1 tech. (*GRIN*GRIN*) See John Carmack's comments on their fabled T-Buffer (simply an accumulation buffer that can be done on any modern gfx card). I believe their FSAA acceleration gimmick is the first real innovation they've had in years. I think game developers would prefer that they spent more money on better drivers, T&L acceleration (next year will be the year of the T&L and AGP, as games will be beginning to take advantage of it), wider bus to memory, and more efficient multitexturing. Simply put, given a competent programmer making a new game-- the GeForce 1 & 2 blow the V5 series out of the water in quantity of features that the developer can use to make his game look prettier without taking too big of FPS hits. The V5 will have to use raw fillrate and offload the rest to the CPU to accomplish the same.
I believe the point he's trying to make is that for those people who have ever considered running Linux, more and more bases being covered by Linux and Windows begins to look less and less appealing due to BSoDs and other stupid Windows tricks.
Dreamcast + keyboard + mouse + Quake III -- All demonstrated at E3, and it looked dern pretty! 4 player split screen on one machine, and 8 players online. (assuming you're hosting it on a DC, and not connecting elsewhere... in that case it's limited by the server)
Of course, he isn't forcing anyone to do anything. He'd need an army to back up his movement. (sound familiar?)
I think it's absurd of you to stick words in Mr. Stallman's mouth. He is saying that he would rather use crappy free software than good commercial software, every single time and he discourages people from using any commercial styled license instead of the GPL. He would prefer that people have no FREEDOM of license choice.
I got news for everyone tho... your BIOS code ain't free folks. Go home and cry about it now...
Something that many people overlook in investigating their download speeds and ping times is that backbones of the internet that your packets are traveling across affect it greatly. If your provider's connections link to a particular backbone that is saturated in areas, or dropping packets to certain destinations, your overall access times will be much slower to those places. Hopefully, this invention can be implemented in such things as Internet2 and other projects underway like IPV6, and the gaming protocol (the name fails me at the moment) will help alleviate the horrible ping times that gamers receive to far-away places. The world will be a better place when the only barrier for playing games is the language!:)
More important than LSB, I believe all Linux distributions should adopt and adhere to the FHS 2.0 spec. Nothing irritates me more than seeing tons of X application binaries floating around in/usr/bin.
Why not install the new toy to/usr/local tree, or/opt or something, so that it's easy to wipe off your system if you don't like it? You don't *have* to make your system messy as hell. A little organization can save you some time in the long run.
All this complaining about nothing at all.
If you want slackware binaries, go to Linux Mafia (www.linuxmafia.org) and download from their package center. They have tons of popular software packages pre-compiled and ready to install using pkgtool.
The thing that pisses me off about Slashdot is how many people say things without using their brains first.
god i hate dselect. when i tried debian for a little while, the thing that sucked most was telling that bastard little program to shove it with it's recommendations and restrictions. if debian wants to succeed, they need to replace that P.O.S. interface and get a real package installation tool.
How is this zealotry? Demanding quality from your software isn't a big thing. Choose whatever works best for you. Abide by the licenses and you're welcome to browse with whatever you want.
I personally have been using IE since 4 came out, because of Netscape's ancient rendering and network code. It botches up a lot more CSS1 than IE does as well.
Mozilla seems to be the salvation on the horizon. If they can work out the bugs and have a way for me to customize it in a fashion that will let me find my favorites/bookmarks quickly then I will forget Internet Exploder. (which incidentally crashes less frequently on my system than Nutscrape) The M13 build looks to be relatively stable, although there are several visual glitches and missing features. This seems to be alpha quality-- and that's a good indicator that things *are* progressing. Mozilla looks to have all the features that Internet Explorer has at the moment, it just needs a little time to shake out some bugs.
Now only if someone would get a clue and make a multiplatform opensource mailer that supports IMAP, POP3 and uses account profiles to manage separate identities per user. I have four POP3 accounts and two IMAP's and several mailing lists that only accept mail from certain addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the free software movement is all about "free as in speech", if the software is not "free as in beer" in one form or another (binaries or source) it is not considered free (and also a violation of the GNU license).
... for example, if you were selling binaries and source you would also need to provide a way to obtain said uncompiled source code by any possible method. (mailed on a disk, cd, printed on paper, internet, whatever works)
Since when? I can write GPLed software and sell the binaries and source if I want. There's nothing in the GPL to prevent me from doing that
actually, he said as long as *one* way of obtaining the source was free
I think journalistic integrity has been on the way down in even "legitmate [sic]" newspapers.. (look at the coverage of mitnick in the new york times)
sober up and come back
Hey guys lets all make a code fork of the Morpheus client!! Tit for tat!
That way we can access the morpheus network and gnutella, and get rid of all the bullshit ads
yeah but not the source of morpheus... remember the whole "viral" license hubbub people made about the GPL?
I was a previous user of Morpheus and on installing the preview edition I was *NOT* presented with the GPL license, nor any information as to the source of their new modifications... It is only because of my previous knowledge and beta testing of Gnucleus that I recognized the panels and went... "heyyy"... further inspection of the website www.gnucleus.com revealed that they had recognized the swipe of code as well, and I fired an angry e-mail to Morpheus for not recognizing where their code was from and that they were in violation of the GPL. Then I headed to Slashdot to see if others had found out, and lo and behold this topic here... Interestingly enough my experience is a little different from the initial news bearer....
*COUGH* GPL software is free...
The main source of crashes and problems with Windows 2000 kernel based products are programmers doing device drivers who can't code their way out of a linked list, or those who base their products on inherently flawed programming languages such as Visual Basic.
Windows' failure to have a model that allows components to be replaced by enhanced/redesigned versions, like the VFS, kernel abstractions, and X Windows abstractions (XFree86 4 didn't break support for all applications because it has many new features) is what has "caused it to suck eggs". Windows should never have been divided into two seperate lines (NT and 9x), because it has caused nothing but headaches for people who desire a stable OS. (not releasing newer DirectX releases for NT users, etc) If Microsoft truly desired to use their market force in a positive manner, they should have radically redesigned Windows after 3.x and created emulators for 3.x and DOS apps on the new platform. (they did, afterall, have all the specs!).
/.) , and APIs and get a stranglehold on any developers who invest more than a small amount of time or money into developing on that platform. (eg. why did D3D developers not port their games to other OS'? because they didn't know how to do the same tricks in OpenGL).
The answer to why MS hasn't gotten a clue and written their OS like a cleverly packaged and beautified POSIX system is because they are infinitely greedy and lazy. They would rather create new slightly (making their own versions of Java?) or completely incompatible protocols (see the Kerberos article here on
Your claim that a $300 console machine will be more powerful than a PC's graphics system is laughable. If you take any particular console system, and look at the graphics accelerators currently on the market on its release-- MAYBE, I mean MAYBE the console will stand up fairly well in comparison. But given a few months the PC world has rapidly passed it by and fillrate, and features of the PC gfx cards will blow the console out of the water.
Personally I'd rather look at games on my TNT2 Ultra, than on a PlayStation or Dreamcast or N64. PS2 looks nice, but again, NV 20 will blow it out of the water, and X-Box's NV 25 blows both out of the water. (in pixels/sec terms, and in features-- being able to do crazy amounts of multitexturing in fewer and fewer clock cycles, and accelerating math functions used in 3d programming (see PS2 coverage on Ars Technica)) All of which will be surpassed by the fast paced 3d accelerator world.
I also like the depth of PC games more than that of console games, on average. While I can't deny my urges to play fighting games on the console systems (something PC games lack are decent standard gamepads-- but then again the DC controller sucks for Capcom fighting games), I can't say there is much for an RPG fan to be played on the console systems. Console loyalists may be yelling "Final Fantasy" and "Dragon Quest", etc, right now but I would say that these are adventure games with RPG elements. (the same description could be applied to PlaneScape: Torment.. blah). When I mean real computer RPGs I mean things like the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Morrowind from Bethesda, and DW Bradley's Wizardry 8. Freedom to wander between tons of side quests, and avoid continuing main plotlines for extended periods of time, along with amazing flexibility to customize the character(s) you play as. Non-linear gameplay and finding best combinations of characters to beat the game are things that give these games replayability.
The console will NEVER EVER replace the PC. It might try to become REALLY similar to the PC (keyboard, mouse, etc), but the limitations caused by not being able to upgrade components, or not being able to use your own preferred ISP and method of connection (Dreamcast) will keep PC gamers on their PCs for a long while.
Don't get me wrong, I love consoles, but they are replaced every 5 years and the PC cycle is like every couple months (for gfx accelerators)
Someone was telling me today that the technology of the 3D accelerator market is rapidly outpacing the CPU market, and that NVidia said something to the effect of, "Moore's Law is for wimps".
BTW- the Voodoo 5 is just die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 3 technology, which is die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 2 tech, which is die shrunk and overclocked Voodoo 1 tech. (*GRIN*GRIN*) See John Carmack's comments on their fabled T-Buffer (simply an accumulation buffer that can be done on any modern gfx card). I believe their FSAA acceleration gimmick is the first real innovation they've had in years. I think game developers would prefer that they spent more money on better drivers, T&L acceleration (next year will be the year of the T&L and AGP, as games will be beginning to take advantage of it), wider bus to memory, and more efficient multitexturing. Simply put, given a competent programmer making a new game-- the GeForce 1 & 2 blow the V5 series out of the water in quantity of features that the developer can use to make his game look prettier without taking too big of FPS hits. The V5 will have to use raw fillrate and offload the rest to the CPU to accomplish the same.
Ok, this post is too long. G'night.
I believe the point he's trying to make is that for those people who have ever considered running Linux, more and more bases being covered by Linux and Windows begins to look less and less appealing due to BSoDs and other stupid Windows tricks.
Dreamcast + keyboard + mouse + Quake III -- All demonstrated at E3, and it looked dern pretty!
4 player split screen on one machine, and 8 players online. (assuming you're hosting it on a DC, and not connecting elsewhere... in that case it's limited by the server)
Its a feature, not a bug!
Of course, he isn't forcing anyone to do anything. He'd need an army to back up his movement. (sound familiar?)
I think it's absurd of you to stick words in Mr. Stallman's mouth. He is saying that he would rather use crappy free software than good commercial software, every single time and he discourages people from using any commercial styled license instead of the GPL. He would prefer that people have no FREEDOM of license choice.
I got news for everyone tho... your BIOS code ain't free folks. Go home and cry about it now...
dude
your website owns, Jeff K!
(hi Lowtax!)
Something that many people overlook in investigating their download speeds and ping times is that backbones of the internet that your packets are traveling across affect it greatly. If your provider's connections link to a particular backbone that is saturated in areas, or dropping packets to certain destinations, your overall access times will be much slower to those places. Hopefully, this invention can be implemented in such things as Internet2 and other projects underway like IPV6, and the gaming protocol (the name fails me at the moment) will help alleviate the horrible ping times that gamers receive to far-away places. The world will be a better place when the only barrier for playing games is the language! :)
More important than LSB, I believe all Linux distributions should adopt and adhere to the FHS 2.0 spec. Nothing irritates me more than seeing tons of X application binaries floating around in /usr/bin.
=)
"I'm no zealot, man. I use what works, and what has games."
No wonder you're bitter. Mac and Linux have shit for games.
Why not install the new toy to /usr/local tree, or /opt or something, so that it's easy to wipe off your system if you don't like it? You don't *have* to make your system messy as hell. A little organization can save you some time in the long run.
All this complaining about nothing at all.
If you want slackware binaries, go to Linux Mafia (www.linuxmafia.org) and download from their package center. They have tons of popular software packages pre-compiled and ready to install using pkgtool.
The thing that pisses me off about Slashdot is how many people say things without using their brains first.
god i hate dselect.
when i tried debian for a little while, the thing that sucked most was telling that bastard little program to shove it with it's recommendations and restrictions. if debian wants to succeed, they need to replace that P.O.S. interface and get a real package installation tool.
It's so they can bloat their package numbers to sound all impressive. :P
How is this zealotry? Demanding quality from your software isn't a big thing. Choose whatever works best for you. Abide by the licenses and you're welcome to browse with whatever you want.
I personally have been using IE since 4 came out, because of Netscape's ancient rendering and network code. It botches up a lot more CSS1 than IE does as well.
Mozilla seems to be the salvation on the horizon. If they can work out the bugs and have a way for me to customize it in a fashion that will let me find my favorites/bookmarks quickly then I will forget Internet Exploder. (which incidentally crashes less frequently on my system than Nutscrape) The M13 build looks to be relatively stable, although there are several visual glitches and missing features. This seems to be alpha quality-- and that's a good indicator that things *are* progressing. Mozilla looks to have all the features that Internet Explorer has at the moment, it just needs a little time to shake out some bugs.
Now only if someone would get a clue and make a multiplatform opensource mailer that supports IMAP, POP3 and uses account profiles to manage separate identities per user. I have four POP3 accounts and two IMAP's and several mailing lists that only accept mail from certain addresses.
-- Synic
The second distro would be Enoch.
The l0pht and cDc people live in the same city. The l0pht people live in the same building. :)
(as far I as I remember)
This info is on their web page.
www.l0pht.org i think.
Welcome to planet earth.
It's not just slashdot you're describing....