But if, for example, Nvidia posted a Kernel source that they know works with the driver, along with a binary only driver, would that be ok?
Yes, because the Linux kernel is not GPL, it's a modified version of GPL done precisely to allow this kind of thing.
Re:Every single car has "brake on left, gas on rig
on
Jef Raskin Talks Skins
·
· Score: 2
Well, like somebody else said, and like countless people have pointed out, that's one of the most stupid arguments ever heard.
Just because somebody might choose stupidly, that's not a reason not to let them choose. Just because I can paint a fake door onto a house and cause confusion, we should forbid paint? That's the point of *customizability* you know, that if I rented a car with the pedals switched I would switch them back goddammit. Everyone is arguing how terrible customization is, just because if you customize it one way I can't customize it back? Sheesh.
I wish I had mod points. Thank you. Now here's my favourite quote from the article:
Jef: To customize is to introduce change. You lose some consistency with any interface change. But there's a more important point to be made. Preferences eat up resources. They make the software larger. They waste the time of the user in changing them. Of course, there are no really well-designed interfaces out there good enough to prove the point that you don't need preferences. Any programmers who want to help build one with me, drop me an e-mail.
Yes, well, DOS was very consistent, and it hardly ate any resources at all (by todays standard). Let's all switch to DOS. In fact, all this article is talking about is to limit the choices for the user. The second funny thing is that "any programmers" can help build the perfect interface... and of course he's the only one to know how. Looks more like a religious sect to me: Oh but there isn't any way of prooving it! You just have to beleive ME!
For an entirely different reason, I find the car analogy great. The article keeps going on and on about how horrible it is to switch environments when there are different skins. Then just look at how different cars are.
Yes the steering wheel is still there, and so on, but the "skin" on the dashboard is different and the buttons are often placed in different places. Some cars have digital speedometers, some have analogue ones. Ignition is in different places, geer shifts have different configurations.
All of these take some getting used to when getting into a new car, but it's part of the "charm". It's also one of the big factors when someone is buying a new car. Different people are comfortable with different things.
Of course, maybe it's more efficient to standardize everything: Let every computer, car, coffee machine, whatever else have the same "skin". And forbid background pictures for computers (and btw, show me one bozo who deliberately uses a picture of 10 overlapping windows as a background...) I would be bored outta my head.
Maybe we should just geneticly engineer everyone into one "male" or "female" character. That would be more efficient since noone would have a problem finding a partner when half of the population would be a "perfect partner", and noone has to be jealous of anyone whatsoever. The world would suck though. One people, one skin (ring any bells?)
Simply said: This interview rings the warning bells of what I value the most with free software: freedom of choice.
Uhm, just the same way you can make a commercial S/W in Windows without paying cash to Microsoft, i suppose? Yup, that's right...
So lemme get this straight: You want them to give their stuff to you so you can earn money off it? Nice business plan I guess, but if you think about it for a while I'm sure you'll see why it doesn't quite work the way you'd like it to.
Define "agreeing". If I first edit the installer to make the button say "I disagree", does that help me? Where does it state clicking a button in a computer program is agreeing to a legal contract? What if one person installs a program, and another person is the actual user?
Honestly now, if I released a program with a long long legal-mumbo-jump-like text saying "you have to pay me 25% of your salary every month you use this program", and then sue my users when they refuse to pay up... What would you say my chances of winning in court are?
Maybe thats a far-out example, but I think you see the point. It could just as easily say "We have the right to use any information as sent to us by this program in any way we see fit. Further the program may look at files on your disk." I could then enjoy the benefits of credit card information, selling email addresses for spam, and what-not.
Face the facts: People do not read legal mumbojumbo presented on a computer monitor when installing "Splatterfest XXI: The Massacre" to play. What if a video tape had the text on it "By pressing the play button on your video player, you agree to send $1000 to the maker of this movie." Is that a legal contract all of a sudden as well?
Now, maybe where you are corporations rule and buy their own laws left and right but that's not the way it is all over the globe. I have a feeling that in many countries the court would just say "if you want people to understand it then write so that they can."
Would you take a loan, buy insurance, rent an apartment or buy a book from Amazon without knowing the terms of the deal?
No, just like I wouldnt buy, say, Windows XP from Microsoft without knowing the terms of the deal. But I would read the books from Amazon without reading through the intro pages of copyright info, and I don't see why I should need to read 25 pages of EULA to read a book, or use a piece of computer software.
Now let's just look at it: Do you really expect people who think copy-and-paste is difficult to read and understand the EULAs? The paragraph quoted in the article probably sounds perfectly fine to Joe User... should I have to hire a lawyer to use Windows XP?
If you're seriously paranoid about it, get an old dot-matrix printer and hook it up as the logging output device. You'll have a logging device that nobody could alter no matter how compromised the system gets, without having to mount anything read-write.
The problem with WineX is that the code can't be incorporated back into Wine. And the problem with this is that since the code exists, there's no real motivation for most people to work on the same features again, especially since they've said they will contribute back once they get X subscriptions (dont remember the exact number).
Now that may or may not happen, and until it does, if it does, noone has any motivation to work on some parts of the wine project.
You can change it. First thing I did when they added the OSDN bar was to figure out where to remove it. It wasn't THAT hard. I prefer this kind of ads to the ones you're actually forced to watch.
"It totally corrupted my [operating system] and it's been very difficult to rebuild everything so that it works again," writes one ICE reader. Other problems reported include denied access to music, even though subscribers had paid, and downloaded songs not working properly.
Great. So instead of choosing to download a file on kazaa/gnutella/direct connect/etc and playing it in winamp, buying the CD if i like it, i should now first pay, then maybe find something interesting, download it if the systems work, listen to it if the systems work, and reinstall my system from scratch? No thanks.
Until they come up with a good, working alternative with a similar ease of use and stability, they wont get anywhere. Time to focus on the customers, instead of the bank accounts.
Furthermore, transparent concrete would allow for even more artistic placement of windows in modern architecture, since the window could be load-bearing.
Well, I dunno about you, but at least I like to be able to open a window once in a while. The transparency is not the only benefit of windows, so before they solve that issue I can't really see this as being used to replace windows in homes.
Just about every ISP worth the money you pay per month does this.
The problem, of course, is with the ISPs that aren't worth the money. Obviously, there are enough of them to create a problem. Where do you go if you're a l33t script kiddie and wanna sp3wf stuff on l33t IRC wars? You go to some ISP that isn't filtering, and end up being yet another problem host when the DDOS comes.
I'm not sure how many ISPs do filter
The previous sentance said you did know... make up your mind.
That wasn't really the point... if there IS a bug, the risk that you'll be the one and only (tm) to find it is quite small... and the chance that somebody who IS inclined to fix it has found it and done so... which means there's already a post somewhere about how to fix the problem.
In the same way that linuxdoc.org was not what was mentioned, google.com was... because there's alot of info that's not in the howto's and guides and stuff on linuxdoc, but on various message boards, mailing list archives, and web pages out there. This is the information that needs to be gathered. Linuxdoc is a great resource but doesn't reach all the way.
I dont know, I guess that depends on where you are as well. I'm not in the US, and here in Europe the majority of people seem to be genuinely interested in the studies, and not only in the grades.
And a question... what do you find more giving:
1. Teaching people who already know stuff about non-MS OSes.
2. Teaching people who don't know and could possibly be introduced to the free software "world".
You must prepfer 2, since you stopped teaching. Makes me wonder why... don't you want people to learn about *nix? Or would you rather just that somebody else did it? (dont take this as an insult, just meant as genuine interest)
Our support guy was saying that if it did not fix the problem the MS would send a tech out with a debug box? (a box that sits next to our server and traces every call), and send the results to the US for analysis - all for the $200. Now try and get that service from a guy at the end of IRC!
Well, you wont. You're in a quite much better situation trying to find somebody who knows something about the actual code that's causing the problem though.
Anyway, Leon organised a refund of the $200 support charge because it was deamed a 'bug'
... which would probably have been rather much easier to find if you'd been dealing with an open source system, since there's no need to deal with "debug boxes" or "sending a utility" to monitor thread creation. Basicly, you got your $200 back but you don't get your time back, and very likely your solving these problems didn't benefit anyone else with the same problem.
This doesn't mean I'm saying that there's nice and cozy quality support for linux systems; there isn't... just keep in mind that the amount of information that's freely available for a linux system is also much much greater. Since we haven't got anything to compare with it's hard to say, but maybe your problem would have been easier to solve, had it been a linux problem.
Depending on what people are included in the survey. I seem to remember a mistake done a long time ago in a survey done for the US Presidential elections... the result turned out to be wrong. Why? Because it was a phone survey, and thus only asked the kind of people who had phones (far from all at that time).
Now, the "total" amounr internet users is so vastly much more that the confidence interval wont be that tight anyway.
As a side note, from the linked page:
Netscape Versions
but really slowed down when I had MS Word 97, Netscape and an MP3 player running at the same time.
[...]
Emacs, Netscape 4.7x, XMMS could co-exist peacefully
Ok. No matter how we all love it (ergh..), please do not compare Emacs to MS Word. It's simply not the same type of application. We could spend a day or two discussing whether or not they're comparable in "heaviness", but I think that'd be rather useless.
Try the same system with Staroffice, KOffice or ABIWord or whatever. Otherwize we can go compare my system running Mozilla with a Windows system running windows help... it's simply not comparable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because the Linux kernel is not GPL, it's a modified version of GPL done precisely to allow this kind of thing.
Just because somebody might choose stupidly, that's not a reason not to let them choose. Just because I can paint a fake door onto a house and cause confusion, we should forbid paint? That's the point of *customizability* you know, that if I rented a car with the pedals switched I would switch them back goddammit. Everyone is arguing how terrible customization is, just because if you customize it one way I can't customize it back? Sheesh.
Jef: To customize is to introduce change. You lose some consistency with any interface change. But there's a more important point to be made. Preferences eat up resources. They make the software larger. They waste the time of the user in changing them. Of course, there are no really well-designed interfaces out there good enough to prove the point that you don't need preferences. Any programmers who want to help build one with me, drop me an e-mail.
Yes, well, DOS was very consistent, and it hardly ate any resources at all (by todays standard). Let's all switch to DOS. In fact, all this article is talking about is to limit the choices for the user. The second funny thing is that "any programmers" can help build the perfect interface... and of course he's the only one to know how. Looks more like a religious sect to me: Oh but there isn't any way of prooving it! You just have to beleive ME!
For an entirely different reason, I find the car analogy great. The article keeps going on and on about how horrible it is to switch environments when there are different skins. Then just look at how different cars are.
Yes the steering wheel is still there, and so on, but the "skin" on the dashboard is different and the buttons are often placed in different places. Some cars have digital speedometers, some have analogue ones. Ignition is in different places, geer shifts have different configurations.
All of these take some getting used to when getting into a new car, but it's part of the "charm". It's also one of the big factors when someone is buying a new car. Different people are comfortable with different things.
Of course, maybe it's more efficient to standardize everything: Let every computer, car, coffee machine, whatever else have the same "skin". And forbid background pictures for computers (and btw, show me one bozo who deliberately uses a picture of 10 overlapping windows as a background...) I would be bored outta my head.
Maybe we should just geneticly engineer everyone into one "male" or "female" character. That would be more efficient since noone would have a problem finding a partner when half of the population would be a "perfect partner", and noone has to be jealous of anyone whatsoever. The world would suck though. One people, one skin (ring any bells?)
Simply said: This interview rings the warning bells of what I value the most with free software: freedom of choice.
So lemme get this straight: You want them to give their stuff to you so you can earn money off it? Nice business plan I guess, but if you think about it for a while I'm sure you'll see why it doesn't quite work the way you'd like it to.
Honestly now, if I released a program with a long long legal-mumbo-jump-like text saying "you have to pay me 25% of your salary every month you use this program", and then sue my users when they refuse to pay up... What would you say my chances of winning in court are?
Maybe thats a far-out example, but I think you see the point. It could just as easily say "We have the right to use any information as sent to us by this program in any way we see fit. Further the program may look at files on your disk." I could then enjoy the benefits of credit card information, selling email addresses for spam, and what-not.
Face the facts: People do not read legal mumbojumbo presented on a computer monitor when installing "Splatterfest XXI: The Massacre" to play. What if a video tape had the text on it "By pressing the play button on your video player, you agree to send $1000 to the maker of this movie." Is that a legal contract all of a sudden as well?
Now, maybe where you are corporations rule and buy their own laws left and right but that's not the way it is all over the globe. I have a feeling that in many countries the court would just say "if you want people to understand it then write so that they can."
No, just like I wouldnt buy, say, Windows XP from Microsoft without knowing the terms of the deal. But I would read the books from Amazon without reading through the intro pages of copyright info, and I don't see why I should need to read 25 pages of EULA to read a book, or use a piece of computer software.
Now let's just look at it: Do you really expect people who think copy-and-paste is difficult to read and understand the EULAs? The paragraph quoted in the article probably sounds perfectly fine to Joe User... should I have to hire a lawyer to use Windows XP?
If you're seriously paranoid about it, get an old dot-matrix printer and hook it up as the logging output device. You'll have a logging device that nobody could alter no matter how compromised the system gets, without having to mount anything read-write.
Now that may or may not happen, and until it does, if it does, noone has any motivation to work on some parts of the wine project.
You can change it. First thing I did when they added the OSDN bar was to figure out where to remove it. It wasn't THAT hard. I prefer this kind of ads to the ones you're actually forced to watch.
Great. So instead of choosing to download a file on kazaa/gnutella/direct connect/etc and playing it in winamp, buying the CD if i like it, i should now first pay, then maybe find something interesting, download it if the systems work, listen to it if the systems work, and reinstall my system from scratch? No thanks.
Until they come up with a good, working alternative with a similar ease of use and stability, they wont get anywhere. Time to focus on the customers, instead of the bank accounts.
Well, I dunno about you, but at least I like to be able to open a window once in a while. The transparency is not the only benefit of windows, so before they solve that issue I can't really see this as being used to replace windows in homes.
That would be the most ethical solution.
Yes of course. Free software is all about choice I heard... as long as you make the right choices, right?
The problem, of course, is with the ISPs that aren't worth the money. Obviously, there are enough of them to create a problem. Where do you go if you're a l33t script kiddie and wanna sp3wf stuff on l33t IRC wars? You go to some ISP that isn't filtering, and end up being yet another problem host when the DDOS comes.
I'm not sure how many ISPs do filter
The previous sentance said you did know... make up your mind.
And then... maybe it really should be destroyed.
Yes, this seems like a very good idea. I'm very much looking forwards to a completely different the same thing.
Win* == Unix? Wow, how misinformed can you be...?
That wasn't really the point... if there IS a bug, the risk that you'll be the one and only (tm) to find it is quite small... and the chance that somebody who IS inclined to fix it has found it and done so... which means there's already a post somewhere about how to fix the problem.
In the same way that linuxdoc.org was not what was mentioned, google.com was... because there's alot of info that's not in the howto's and guides and stuff on linuxdoc, but on various message boards, mailing list archives, and web pages out there. This is the information that needs to be gathered. Linuxdoc is a great resource but doesn't reach all the way.
And a question... what do you find more giving:
1. Teaching people who already know stuff about non-MS OSes.
2. Teaching people who don't know and could possibly be introduced to the free software "world".
You must prepfer 2, since you stopped teaching. Makes me wonder why... don't you want people to learn about *nix? Or would you rather just that somebody else did it? (dont take this as an insult, just meant as genuine interest)
Our support guy was saying that if it did not fix the problem the MS would send a tech out with a debug box? (a box that sits next to our server and traces every call), and send the results to the US for analysis - all for the $200. Now try and get that service from a guy at the end of IRC!
Well, you wont. You're in a quite much better situation trying to find somebody who knows something about the actual code that's causing the problem though.
Anyway, Leon organised a refund of the $200 support charge because it was deamed a 'bug'
This doesn't mean I'm saying that there's nice and cozy quality support for linux systems; there isn't... just keep in mind that the amount of information that's freely available for a linux system is also much much greater. Since we haven't got anything to compare with it's hard to say, but maybe your problem would have been easier to solve, had it been a linux problem.
Learn to read, and then use the skill to read the comments to the post before posting something like this. For instance,
Here
Great... one dead link, the other one links to page 2 of the article. Have you /. editors ever considered checking your links before posting a story?
Now, the "total" amounr internet users is so vastly much more that the confidence interval wont be that tight anyway.
As a side note, from the linked page:
Netscape Versions
Version Netscape Hosts %
1. v4.5+ 1092 71.3
2. v5 174 11.4
Netscape 5? 11% ? I wonder who those people are...
Always question your sources.
[...]
Emacs, Netscape 4.7x, XMMS could co-exist peacefully
Ok. No matter how we all love it (ergh..), please do not compare Emacs to MS Word. It's simply not the same type of application. We could spend a day or two discussing whether or not they're comparable in "heaviness", but I think that'd be rather useless.
Try the same system with Staroffice, KOffice or ABIWord or whatever. Otherwize we can go compare my system running Mozilla with a Windows system running windows help... it's simply not comparable.