I think a basic GCC run and text editors would be fine on 256Mb. A browser like Firefox may well be a challenge though, but IIRC Opera still runs OK in such cramped conditions as long as you don't open too many windows at once.
I doubt C++ will be the language used in education though - it would be something like Python or what-ever replaces BASIC in the modern line up (i.e. the language in which it is quickest/easiest to get to "input name$: print "Hello " + name$").
If you have a task that requires much memory then the RPi probably isn't the right tool for the job. 256Mb might be pretty spacious for an embedded environment explicitly intended as such, but it is a bit camped for a general purpose Linux system so chose your configuration with consideration.
It'll depend what SD card you give it too - some write much faster than others, particularly when considering random access I/O loads like memory paging. Even the best SD card isn't going to be great for random access though as they are generally optimised for their most common use, storing images and videos for cameras and such (a predominantly sequential I/O load in either case). If you do need to swap you might find some USB drives perform better - I have one that can sustain ~17Mbyte/sec in sequential writing and I'm sure it'll best any SD card for random writes too (though I've not tested this - I don't use it in a way that needs much random access).
My RPi is on order, let's see how much I can push the little thing to do...
Nothing wrong with that. I'd probably buy from Amazon even if Amazon's prices are higher - given a choice between Amazon and some shady site, I'd go Amazon every time.
This is a problem I have with Amazon's saerch engine: I can't ask it to show me only stuff coming from Amazon itself. If I want to search everyone, I'll use a general search (like Google's currently is, but going by this story soon won't be). If I'm searching on your site Amazon, I'm searching for stuff you can sell me. If I wanted to by from someone entirely more random I'd search with Google/whatever or, gods forbid, eBay. Maybe some people find the current search useful, but please make "searching for products other people sell" optional because I don't find it useful (and you probably lose sales from me because I spot deals elsewhere while searching elsewhere).
But regardless of why everything else was on fire, the fact is that the 'hydrogen' was not.
But, if I'm understanding correctly, one of the reasons that the entire structure set ablaze so fast was because the hydrogen combusted in its entirety very quickly, transferring the heat of the reaction to almost the entire structure practically in an instant.
As you say a hydrogen based airship can be made safe with modern techniques, limiting the effect of any ignition that does occur and using better materials for the rest of the design too. But a different gas being used to impart lift would also have made the day very different.
RAID 5 and 6 do work fine for DBs, but performance on write heavy I/O patterns can be significantly lower than that experienced with RAID10. Of course an R6 array of four devices offers better redundancy/availability than R10 with the same devices (it can survive any one or two drive failure state, RAID10 will only survive 4 of the 6 two-drive failure states) so if you are not likely to be significantly affected by RAID6's write potential performance issue it might be the better choice. Swings and roundabouts.
the Hindenburg (and other airships of the time) were filled with Hydrogen
This is not generally true. All German airships were filled with that. Many American ones contained the inert (though more expensive) helium instead, but America pretty much had the monopoly on helium extraction/production and wouldn't let the Germans have any. The designers of the hydrogen lifted ships knew the dangers and tried (not entirely successfully of course) to mitigate them, but they didn't have much alternative at the time. The Hindenburg's spectacular end killed all public confidence in any airship design though, not just those with the fatally dangerous flaw of being floating bombs, so that part of the industry collapsed almost overnight.
If BT wants to move into my neighborhood (which seems unlikely) then why should my neighborhood pay _anything_ to bring their equipment up to my existing standards? As long as my neighborhood's standards are not designed to foster unfair competition, it is up to BT to conform with the existing code.
Likewise, why should BT bother extending their network into your area if they don't like your conditions? That is essentially what has happened here, and I'm sure BT/OpenReach don't really care. They would have fought the position because they have to: as an incumbent monopoly in certain respects they have provisioning targets set by the industry regulator, but working in that area might be more hassle than it is worth for them. It doesn't matter that the area is pretty rich in fact it makes the area less attractive as a business proposition - people in a million pound home will pay the same 50 quid/month that I pay to connect my hundred thousand pound flat and there are far less potential customers in a given area (a million pound home and its garden tends to take more room than my flat (unless you are in central London)). On top of BT/OR getting less income from areas like that, the nature of the area and how protective the people in it are of it means that working in the area is going to cost more to start with.
I suspect BT/OR is quite happy to be released from that bit of their regulatory responsibility. They've done their due diligence and the residents have forcibly opted out, they can now spend the resource working in a potentially more profitable area. Of course the residents are probably happy too, so this is a win-win situation. In fact the respective legal advisers are happy too no doubt. Win-win-win. If something bad happens with Virgin Media's fiber network in a few years time (if for instance they don't keep up with demand increases and the backbones get bogged down with more traffic than they were intended for) the residents may become less happy to have less choice or alternatives than they otherwise would have done.
I remember further back than that: building boot disks with different sets of the drivers/settings for the same sound card to enable different emulation modes for different software...
By my memory it was certainly an "almost solved" problem by Windows98, possibly in Windows95 too. While there were driver problems with some cards, multiple apps could play sound concurrently quite happily. IIRC sound mixing on Linux was quite a mess at that point and for some time onwards, and it wasn't driver issues it was problems with there being no consistent framework for apps to play sounds so everything did things slightly differently. You are probably right in that DirectX was one of the key drivers to creating that state of affairs in the Windows world, and the lack of any standard (or more precisely, the existence of several methods that didn't work well together) for a long time that caused a lot of the problems with that in Linux.
I'm currently running Avast as various testers found it to have the best detection rates of the common choices at the time (though it didn't have such a good repair rate IIRC). I've been telling people to use MSSE on low spec machines (like netbooks or just really old boxes) as it seems to test fairly well and last time I tried it (on a laptop that somehow got declared "Vista ready" despite only having 512Mb RAM) I found it to be noticeably less demanding on RAM and to have less detrimental effect on performance.
As MSSE is apparently going to be bundled with Windows 8, I wonder how the other vendors will react.
If I try access the national lottery website (presumably blocked as it is gambling) over Virgin Mobile's 3G/GPRS connection I get the "adult content" block page, which invites me to some soft porn and a betting site that happens to pay for a spot on that page. Like so: http://imgur.com/6iLPN
(that image mentions reddit, as I've lost the pre-edited screenshot and can't be bothered to take a new one, but it was the same page for any page that trips the adult content warning)
I have a pretty ordinary Debian Mint desktop, and I just tried playing a video in VLC and previewing music files with Nautilus at the same time. It worked fine - both played without missing a beat.
He was making reference to something that long ago was a significant issue. IIRC as late as the early 00's it was a problem - and while the sound system was maturing rapidly at that point there were a couple of solutions floating about and were not mutually compatible, not always stable, and none were particularly widely supported.
While Linux and other unix-a-likes were ahead of the game in server related areas for a long time; there are a lot of things in desktop environments that just work out of the box now and that we therefore take for granted that either did not work at all or did not work without much user effort five or ten years ago (when they were working well enough in the Windows desktop world).
I'm a Linux fan myself, but he does have a point: the threshold beyond which something constitutes and innovation rather than imitation seems a lower in one direction than the other. This might be completely unfair though: Linux (and xBSD and others) are community efforts without the money thrown at desktop use Windows sees (most of the investment made in Linux related areas by companies is still aimed at server environments not desktop ones (I'm not counting Android here as doesn't fit in either category IMO)).
There is a full team of people who go around the stadia and their local area putting stickers over all brand names. Even maker's names on toilet seats.
Here is what I personally don't get, maybe someone can explain it to me, but WTF was it with RMS and the TiVo? It was ONE device that had NO choice but to be made the way it was.
If it had not been TiVo it would have been something else. His problem was the use of GPLed software in that manner. While it wasn't found to break the letter of the license it broke the clearly stated spirit of the license, so that wording was updated in v3 to patch the hole.
Would he have been more happy if it had used WinCE?
Yes, basically. Or some form of BSD (the licenses used there would allow this sort of use IIRC). Or anything else not GPL licensed. They had those choices available to them.
RMS is an absolutist on this and similar matters (some would say extremist, but I feel that label to be rather too strong here): if you want to use Free, keep it Free with your use, otherwise use something else (paying for it if need be).
it just seems stupid to attack one specific corp
He wasn't going after one specific corp, just the first one that did it (visibly) first and shoring up the hole before others tried. Remember that TiVo could keep using GPLv2 software as they had already done, they'd just have to start maintaining by other means once later versions switched to GPLv3, so the switch to GPLv3 did not explicitly stop them distributing their product.
and make other businesses afraid of being next on RMS' shit list and all over a device that frankly could have been made no other way without only being sold at China Mart and other "pro piracy" hardware sites.
That is where it falls down of course, but so does every other license commercial or otherwise - if you can't enforce the license in a territory people wanting to do something against the (letter of the) licence in that territory are at an advantage to those elsewhere. "Pro piracy" regimes are not a GPL specific problem and not really relevant here - you could just as easily state that VMWare's recent licensing model changes are an attack on compliant companies.
There are many people who think RMS is wrong on the matter, of course. Linus for instance still explicitly uses GPLv2 as evidenced by it being the license git is released under (the kernel is a different matter: that could not be switched even if he wanted because of how many contributions there have been where rights were not explicitly handed over to the project).
From a licensing perspective the problem with recent GCC versions for Apple is the anti-DRM clauses in GPLv3. Note that Git is explicitly GPLv2 licensed.
Of course the technical problems with some parts of GCC's design are undoubtedly significant too, though these are nothing to do with the GPL (v2 or v3) specifically. From what I've read there were deliberate design decisions that make it inconvenient for GCC to be used this way (some say this was deliberate rather than those decisions being made because they had benefits elsewhere, though without evidence to offer I'll not parrot that accusation).
He wasn't complaining about the GPL, he was stating (correctly) that it is one of the key reasons some groups choose not to use GCC, particularly GPL version 3 (note that FreeBSD has not used and of the recent GCC release specifically for that reason - they were fine using GPLv2).
It is a case of choosing the right tool for the job. Until recently their choice was to redefine the job (change the parts of their projects and licensing policy that GPLv3 conflicted with), keep the old tool (using older, GPLv2 licensed, releases of GCC only), or use something less stable/proven/compatible. They chose the middle option. Now option three is replaced by "use something else that is now stable/proven/compatible enough to be an alternative" they have taken that choice. Again this isn't complaining about GPLv3, it is simply refusing to use it because it is incompatible with some of their chosen goals.
I'm told there are technical reasons why Clang and the related tool chain are preferable to GCC in some circumstances too, though I'm out of the loop on that one so I don't know what they are or if they are significant to FreeBSD.
While his answer was rather terse and it would have helped to be less so (it made him appear to some, to you at least, like an anti-GPL troll), what you appear to have done in your response is set up a strawman to attack. This is the sort of thing that anti-GPL people (both within the open-source arena and external to it) will jump on as "proof" that GPL advocates are rabid loonies, so by defending the GPL in such a manner you may be harming the cause rather then helping it. You might want to be more careful not to come across that way (it may not have been you intention on this occasion, but it does seem that way by my reading).
Changing traffic lights is small fry. To even be permitted bid, potential host countries must enact laws to protect the commercial interests of the Olympics. I find it quite distasteful that we are paying billions (which could be much better used, especially in the current economic climate) to host their little jamboree and we bent over the barrel and let us dictate tweaks to part of our legal system.
Big companies like Apple and Google can do similar things of course: governments all over the world tweak employment and tax policies in order to make themselves more attractive ares to invest in, but the difference there is that (IMO at least) the benefits (employment and commercial investment momentum) are likely to hang around for a far longer term.
The bit that gets me riled is that to even be permitted to bid we had to create legislation protecting the commercial interests of the little jamboree we are funding this year.
Since I learned that I went from keeping my disinterest to myself and just not paying any attention to the proceedings to actively telling people that fact (people tend to either be shocked or simply refuse to believe it) and making sure I know who the sponsors are (aside from us tax payers that it) so when I have a choice between two products I pick the one that isn't involved in the thing.
(Petty, yes, but in the absence of decent victories to speak of I enjoy my petty little stabs.)
The ISP I currently use (AAISP) are certainly not blocking it (see http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/05/blocking-pirate-bay.html for a blog entry oin the subject from one of the ISP's senior people), and no doubt many of the smaller ISPs are not either.
As (IIRC) TPB no longer runs a tracker at all and merely holds metafiles listing other trackers and/or distributed tracker links, this menas that all you need to get around the block is to use a friend's connection by proxy to get the.torrent file: once you have that you can dwonload an upload with merry abandon. This means that the block is pretty much pointless: if someone knew enough to know TPB exists and has the small amount of knowledge needed to get and use a bittorrent client, then they are going to know how (or have a contact who can help them) to access TBP by proxy in this way. Or, for that matter, just find another source for torrent metafiles and tracker facilities.
Is TPB really that relevant any more anyway? I've not been to any such site in many a moon so I might be completely out of touch, but I was under the impression that people were moving more towards private trackers and even ignoring that there are many small public trackers and aggregators available as alternatives. If my understanding is right and TBP is just a name that everyone knows rather than a site many people use, then this has as little effect as taking down napster: by the time it was taken down most people had other sources lined up anyway.
since otherwise the original programmer would likely have rewritten it using a more modern approach
There are several good counter arguments for that.
The program is most likely fifteen years or more old - the original programmer may have long since moved on and no longer programs, are has had a change of mind/heart over the whole future prediction thing. Heck maybe they managed to predict the lottery results, if so why would they now need to work on that astrology stuff now?
The programmer may have released it for free, or shareware and never go much response in terms of payments or support requests. They may not know that their little program was (and perhaps still is) a sleeper hit.
Perhaps the program's creator was a "futurologist" (or what-ever people like that are calling themselves this year because last year's term is already attracting unwanted bad press regarding fraud) and originally intended the program to drive business but instead found it drew people away (if you can DIY, why pay for someone else to interpret the results?) so the project was abandoned.
If someone is going through the hassle of getting an old 16-bit Windows app to run in a modern environment then there is definitely demand and even if there are only a few people with that high drive to use the calcs there are most likely a great many who would take a more casual interest and pay a few $ for a novelty app for their smartphone or tablet. Of course anyone wrting such an app would have to skirt a moral question: while you know 99.99% of the apps users will consider it an amusing little distraction for 30 seconds of their day and nothing more, someone somewhere will make drastic life-changing decisions for the worse based upon the results. Personally I'd file that under "no my problem, get that person to an institute stat", but other people would not and you may have trouble getting it into Apple's app store, amongst others, for that reason.
It is a while since I last used PHP in a shared environment, but last I heard mod_php could not impersonate the owner of the running script for security purpoeses, where running php in cgi or fastcgi modes does allow this option. This has security implications when not all the users on a server completely 1005 trust each other, and even if they do it prevents accidental escalation of bugs/problems in one user's code such that it affects other user's data.
Unless this deficiency in mod_php has been addressed, there are perfectly valid reasons to be running PHP in CGI (or preferably FastCGI) mode.
RAID 4 is the dedicated parity counterpart to RAID 5.
RAID 3 is striping with parity (and all parity information held on one device) though so you are not wrong in that fact. RAID 2 is also. R2 and R3 are the same as R4 but they work on individual bits or bytes where R4 works on blocks of bytes. Because of the performance characteristics of all modern drives (and old ones for that matter) R2 and R3 are not generally ever used.
Try "the daily politics". That is often no better than panto and they have the cheek to call it "in depth". Actually, I take that back, while panto has similar song and dance numbers I've known them be significantly more enlightening!
They have at least managed to resist the temptation of the pseudo-doc.
They do plenty of "docu-drama" stuff, which tries to both educate and entertain but manages to do neither well, and some of the proper documentary output has falling in quality over they years. Their overall output is significantly better then the commercial channels though, IMO.
The other channels all chased each other to the bottom seeking higher ratings (That reality crap is very popular, as are pseudo-docs like Ancient Aliens and Most Haunted) to keep the cash coming in.
Most of it isn't as popular as it seems, it is just rammed down your throat so much that you assume everyone is watching otherwise it would not justify the advertising budget. But with parts of the advertising industry suffering (and it not mattering on the BBC anyway as they are just plugging their own content and not competing against commercial interests for the air time used) that air time comes dirt cheap. But the shows don't have to be massively popular: they are incredibly cheap to make compared to just about every other variety of TV content so they pay their way with only a mediocre following. There are a few examples that draw in many many viewers of course, but the rest just potter along in the "meh" ratings category, using airtime that they'd otherwise have to make/license something more expensive to fill.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a basic GCC run and text editors would be fine on 256Mb. A browser like Firefox may well be a challenge though, but IIRC Opera still runs OK in such cramped conditions as long as you don't open too many windows at once.
I doubt C++ will be the language used in education though - it would be something like Python or what-ever replaces BASIC in the modern line up (i.e. the language in which it is quickest/easiest to get to "input name$: print "Hello " + name$").
If you have a task that requires much memory then the RPi probably isn't the right tool for the job. 256Mb might be pretty spacious for an embedded environment explicitly intended as such, but it is a bit camped for a general purpose Linux system so chose your configuration with consideration.
It'll depend what SD card you give it too - some write much faster than others, particularly when considering random access I/O loads like memory paging. Even the best SD card isn't going to be great for random access though as they are generally optimised for their most common use, storing images and videos for cameras and such (a predominantly sequential I/O load in either case). If you do need to swap you might find some USB drives perform better - I have one that can sustain ~17Mbyte/sec in sequential writing and I'm sure it'll best any SD card for random writes too (though I've not tested this - I don't use it in a way that needs much random access).
My RPi is on order, let's see how much I can push the little thing to do...
Nothing wrong with that. I'd probably buy from Amazon even if Amazon's prices are higher - given a choice between Amazon and some shady site, I'd go Amazon every time.
This is a problem I have with Amazon's saerch engine: I can't ask it to show me only stuff coming from Amazon itself. If I want to search everyone, I'll use a general search (like Google's currently is, but going by this story soon won't be). If I'm searching on your site Amazon, I'm searching for stuff you can sell me. If I wanted to by from someone entirely more random I'd search with Google/whatever or, gods forbid, eBay. Maybe some people find the current search useful, but please make "searching for products other people sell" optional because I don't find it useful (and you probably lose sales from me because I spot deals elsewhere while searching elsewhere).
But regardless of why everything else was on fire, the fact is that the 'hydrogen' was not.
But, if I'm understanding correctly, one of the reasons that the entire structure set ablaze so fast was because the hydrogen combusted in its entirety very quickly, transferring the heat of the reaction to almost the entire structure practically in an instant.
As you say a hydrogen based airship can be made safe with modern techniques, limiting the effect of any ignition that does occur and using better materials for the rest of the design too. But a different gas being used to impart lift would also have made the day very different.
RAID 5 and 6 do work fine for DBs, but performance on write heavy I/O patterns can be significantly lower than that experienced with RAID10. Of course an R6 array of four devices offers better redundancy/availability than R10 with the same devices (it can survive any one or two drive failure state, RAID10 will only survive 4 of the 6 two-drive failure states) so if you are not likely to be significantly affected by RAID6's write potential performance issue it might be the better choice. Swings and roundabouts.
the Hindenburg (and other airships of the time) were filled with Hydrogen
This is not generally true. All German airships were filled with that. Many American ones contained the inert (though more expensive) helium instead, but America pretty much had the monopoly on helium extraction/production and wouldn't let the Germans have any. The designers of the hydrogen lifted ships knew the dangers and tried (not entirely successfully of course) to mitigate them, but they didn't have much alternative at the time. The Hindenburg's spectacular end killed all public confidence in any airship design though, not just those with the fatally dangerous flaw of being floating bombs, so that part of the industry collapsed almost overnight.
If BT wants to move into my neighborhood (which seems unlikely) then why should my neighborhood pay _anything_ to bring their equipment up to my existing standards? As long as my neighborhood's standards are not designed to foster unfair competition, it is up to BT to conform with the existing code.
Likewise, why should BT bother extending their network into your area if they don't like your conditions? That is essentially what has happened here, and I'm sure BT/OpenReach don't really care. They would have fought the position because they have to: as an incumbent monopoly in certain respects they have provisioning targets set by the industry regulator, but working in that area might be more hassle than it is worth for them. It doesn't matter that the area is pretty rich in fact it makes the area less attractive as a business proposition - people in a million pound home will pay the same 50 quid/month that I pay to connect my hundred thousand pound flat and there are far less potential customers in a given area (a million pound home and its garden tends to take more room than my flat (unless you are in central London)). On top of BT/OR getting less income from areas like that, the nature of the area and how protective the people in it are of it means that working in the area is going to cost more to start with.
I suspect BT/OR is quite happy to be released from that bit of their regulatory responsibility. They've done their due diligence and the residents have forcibly opted out, they can now spend the resource working in a potentially more profitable area. Of course the residents are probably happy too, so this is a win-win situation. In fact the respective legal advisers are happy too no doubt. Win-win-win. If something bad happens with Virgin Media's fiber network in a few years time (if for instance they don't keep up with demand increases and the backbones get bogged down with more traffic than they were intended for) the residents may become less happy to have less choice or alternatives than they otherwise would have done.
The traffic pattern is the symptom of the media industry's core problem.
The overall quality of output has now fallen to such a low, that more and more of it isn't even worth steeling any more.
Impersonating the feds is a higher offense than just nicking stuff, including data, unless the stuff/data is of "national security" importance.
I remember further back than that: building boot disks with different sets of the drivers/settings for the same sound card to enable different emulation modes for different software...
By my memory it was certainly an "almost solved" problem by Windows98, possibly in Windows95 too. While there were driver problems with some cards, multiple apps could play sound concurrently quite happily. IIRC sound mixing on Linux was quite a mess at that point and for some time onwards, and it wasn't driver issues it was problems with there being no consistent framework for apps to play sounds so everything did things slightly differently. You are probably right in that DirectX was one of the key drivers to creating that state of affairs in the Windows world, and the lack of any standard (or more precisely, the existence of several methods that didn't work well together) for a long time that caused a lot of the problems with that in Linux.
I'm currently running Avast as various testers found it to have the best detection rates of the common choices at the time (though it didn't have such a good repair rate IIRC). I've been telling people to use MSSE on low spec machines (like netbooks or just really old boxes) as it seems to test fairly well and last time I tried it (on a laptop that somehow got declared "Vista ready" despite only having 512Mb RAM) I found it to be noticeably less demanding on RAM and to have less detrimental effect on performance.
As MSSE is apparently going to be bundled with Windows 8, I wonder how the other vendors will react.
If I try access the national lottery website (presumably blocked as it is gambling) over Virgin Mobile's 3G/GPRS connection I get the "adult content" block page, which invites me to some soft porn and a betting site that happens to pay for a spot on that page. Like so: http://imgur.com/6iLPN
(that image mentions reddit, as I've lost the pre-edited screenshot and can't be bothered to take a new one, but it was the same page for any page that trips the adult content warning)
I have a pretty ordinary Debian Mint desktop, and I just tried playing a video in VLC and previewing music files with Nautilus at the same time. It worked fine - both played without missing a beat.
He was making reference to something that long ago was a significant issue. IIRC as late as the early 00's it was a problem - and while the sound system was maturing rapidly at that point there were a couple of solutions floating about and were not mutually compatible, not always stable, and none were particularly widely supported.
While Linux and other unix-a-likes were ahead of the game in server related areas for a long time; there are a lot of things in desktop environments that just work out of the box now and that we therefore take for granted that either did not work at all or did not work without much user effort five or ten years ago (when they were working well enough in the Windows desktop world).
I'm a Linux fan myself, but he does have a point: the threshold beyond which something constitutes and innovation rather than imitation seems a lower in one direction than the other. This might be completely unfair though: Linux (and xBSD and others) are community efforts without the money thrown at desktop use Windows sees (most of the investment made in Linux related areas by companies is still aimed at server environments not desktop ones (I'm not counting Android here as doesn't fit in either category IMO)).
The Olympics has all the same.
There is a full team of people who go around the stadia and their local area putting stickers over all brand names. Even maker's names on toilet seats.
Here is what I personally don't get, maybe someone can explain it to me, but WTF was it with RMS and the TiVo? It was ONE device that had NO choice but to be made the way it was.
If it had not been TiVo it would have been something else. His problem was the use of GPLed software in that manner. While it wasn't found to break the letter of the license it broke the clearly stated spirit of the license, so that wording was updated in v3 to patch the hole.
Would he have been more happy if it had used WinCE?
Yes, basically. Or some form of BSD (the licenses used there would allow this sort of use IIRC). Or anything else not GPL licensed. They had those choices available to them.
RMS is an absolutist on this and similar matters (some would say extremist, but I feel that label to be rather too strong here): if you want to use Free, keep it Free with your use, otherwise use something else (paying for it if need be).
it just seems stupid to attack one specific corp
He wasn't going after one specific corp, just the first one that did it (visibly) first and shoring up the hole before others tried. Remember that TiVo could keep using GPLv2 software as they had already done, they'd just have to start maintaining by other means once later versions switched to GPLv3, so the switch to GPLv3 did not explicitly stop them distributing their product.
and make other businesses afraid of being next on RMS' shit list and all over a device that frankly could have been made no other way without only being sold at China Mart and other "pro piracy" hardware sites.
That is where it falls down of course, but so does every other license commercial or otherwise - if you can't enforce the license in a territory people wanting to do something against the (letter of the) licence in that territory are at an advantage to those elsewhere. "Pro piracy" regimes are not a GPL specific problem and not really relevant here - you could just as easily state that VMWare's recent licensing model changes are an attack on compliant companies.
There are many people who think RMS is wrong on the matter, of course. Linus for instance still explicitly uses GPLv2 as evidenced by it being the license git is released under (the kernel is a different matter: that could not be switched even if he wanted because of how many contributions there have been where rights were not explicitly handed over to the project).
From a licensing perspective the problem with recent GCC versions for Apple is the anti-DRM clauses in GPLv3. Note that Git is explicitly GPLv2 licensed.
Of course the technical problems with some parts of GCC's design are undoubtedly significant too, though these are nothing to do with the GPL (v2 or v3) specifically. From what I've read there were deliberate design decisions that make it inconvenient for GCC to be used this way (some say this was deliberate rather than those decisions being made because they had benefits elsewhere, though without evidence to offer I'll not parrot that accusation).
Complaining about the GPL
He wasn't complaining about the GPL, he was stating (correctly) that it is one of the key reasons some groups choose not to use GCC, particularly GPL version 3 (note that FreeBSD has not used and of the recent GCC release specifically for that reason - they were fine using GPLv2).
It is a case of choosing the right tool for the job. Until recently their choice was to redefine the job (change the parts of their projects and licensing policy that GPLv3 conflicted with), keep the old tool (using older, GPLv2 licensed, releases of GCC only), or use something less stable/proven/compatible. They chose the middle option. Now option three is replaced by "use something else that is now stable/proven/compatible enough to be an alternative" they have taken that choice. Again this isn't complaining about GPLv3, it is simply refusing to use it because it is incompatible with some of their chosen goals.
I'm told there are technical reasons why Clang and the related tool chain are preferable to GCC in some circumstances too, though I'm out of the loop on that one so I don't know what they are or if they are significant to FreeBSD.
While his answer was rather terse and it would have helped to be less so (it made him appear to some, to you at least, like an anti-GPL troll), what you appear to have done in your response is set up a strawman to attack. This is the sort of thing that anti-GPL people (both within the open-source arena and external to it) will jump on as "proof" that GPL advocates are rabid loonies, so by defending the GPL in such a manner you may be harming the cause rather then helping it. You might want to be more careful not to come across that way (it may not have been you intention on this occasion, but it does seem that way by my reading).
Changing traffic lights is small fry. To even be permitted bid, potential host countries must enact laws to protect the commercial interests of the Olympics. I find it quite distasteful that we are paying billions (which could be much better used, especially in the current economic climate) to host their little jamboree and we bent over the barrel and let us dictate tweaks to part of our legal system.
Big companies like Apple and Google can do similar things of course: governments all over the world tweak employment and tax policies in order to make themselves more attractive ares to invest in, but the difference there is that (IMO at least) the benefits (employment and commercial investment momentum) are likely to hang around for a far longer term.
The bit that gets me riled is that to even be permitted to bid we had to create legislation protecting the commercial interests of the little jamboree we are funding this year.
Since I learned that I went from keeping my disinterest to myself and just not paying any attention to the proceedings to actively telling people that fact (people tend to either be shocked or simply refuse to believe it) and making sure I know who the sponsors are (aside from us tax payers that it) so when I have a choice between two products I pick the one that isn't involved in the thing.
(Petty, yes, but in the absence of decent victories to speak of I enjoy my petty little stabs.)
Only the larger ISPs are blocking it, it seems.
.torrent file: once you have that you can dwonload an upload with merry abandon. This means that the block is pretty much pointless: if someone knew enough to know TPB exists and has the small amount of knowledge needed to get and use a bittorrent client, then they are going to know how (or have a contact who can help them) to access TBP by proxy in this way. Or, for that matter, just find another source for torrent metafiles and tracker facilities.
The ISP I currently use (AAISP) are certainly not blocking it (see http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/05/blocking-pirate-bay.html for a blog entry oin the subject from one of the ISP's senior people), and no doubt many of the smaller ISPs are not either.
As (IIRC) TPB no longer runs a tracker at all and merely holds metafiles listing other trackers and/or distributed tracker links, this menas that all you need to get around the block is to use a friend's connection by proxy to get the
Is TPB really that relevant any more anyway? I've not been to any such site in many a moon so I might be completely out of touch, but I was under the impression that people were moving more towards private trackers and even ignoring that there are many small public trackers and aggregators available as alternatives. If my understanding is right and TBP is just a name that everyone knows rather than a site many people use, then this has as little effect as taking down napster: by the time it was taken down most people had other sources lined up anyway.
Off topic: while I'm linking to RevK, you might find his attitude and actions towards telemarketting amusing: http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/07/what-moron.html
There are several good counter arguments for that.
The program is most likely fifteen years or more old - the original programmer may have long since moved on and no longer programs, are has had a change of mind/heart over the whole future prediction thing. Heck maybe they managed to predict the lottery results, if so why would they now need to work on that astrology stuff now?
The programmer may have released it for free, or shareware and never go much response in terms of payments or support requests. They may not know that their little program was (and perhaps still is) a sleeper hit.
Perhaps the program's creator was a "futurologist" (or what-ever people like that are calling themselves this year because last year's term is already attracting unwanted bad press regarding fraud) and originally intended the program to drive business but instead found it drew people away (if you can DIY, why pay for someone else to interpret the results?) so the project was abandoned.
If someone is going through the hassle of getting an old 16-bit Windows app to run in a modern environment then there is definitely demand and even if there are only a few people with that high drive to use the calcs there are most likely a great many who would take a more casual interest and pay a few $ for a novelty app for their smartphone or tablet. Of course anyone wrting such an app would have to skirt a moral question: while you know 99.99% of the apps users will consider it an amusing little distraction for 30 seconds of their day and nothing more, someone somewhere will make drastic life-changing decisions for the worse based upon the results. Personally I'd file that under "no my problem, get that person to an institute stat", but other people would not and you may have trouble getting it into Apple's app store, amongst others, for that reason.
It is a while since I last used PHP in a shared environment, but last I heard mod_php could not impersonate the owner of the running script for security purpoeses, where running php in cgi or fastcgi modes does allow this option. This has security implications when not all the users on a server completely 1005 trust each other, and even if they do it prevents accidental escalation of bugs/problems in one user's code such that it affects other user's data.
Unless this deficiency in mod_php has been addressed, there are perfectly valid reasons to be running PHP in CGI (or preferably FastCGI) mode.
RAID 4 is the dedicated parity counterpart to RAID 5.
RAID 3 is striping with parity (and all parity information held on one device) though so you are not wrong in that fact. RAID 2 is also. R2 and R3 are the same as R4 but they work on individual bits or bytes where R4 works on blocks of bytes. Because of the performance characteristics of all modern drives (and old ones for that matter) R2 and R3 are not generally ever used.
I'd say panorama counts as a pseudo-doc
Try "the daily politics". That is often no better than panto and they have the cheek to call it "in depth". Actually, I take that back, while panto has similar song and dance numbers I've known them be significantly more enlightening!
They have at least managed to resist the temptation of the pseudo-doc.
They do plenty of "docu-drama" stuff, which tries to both educate and entertain but manages to do neither well, and some of the proper documentary output has falling in quality over they years. Their overall output is significantly better then the commercial channels though, IMO.
The other channels all chased each other to the bottom seeking higher ratings (That reality crap is very popular, as are pseudo-docs like Ancient Aliens and Most Haunted) to keep the cash coming in.
Most of it isn't as popular as it seems, it is just rammed down your throat so much that you assume everyone is watching otherwise it would not justify the advertising budget. But with parts of the advertising industry suffering (and it not mattering on the BBC anyway as they are just plugging their own content and not competing against commercial interests for the air time used) that air time comes dirt cheap. But the shows don't have to be massively popular: they are incredibly cheap to make compared to just about every other variety of TV content so they pay their way with only a mediocre following. There are a few examples that draw in many many viewers of course, but the rest just potter along in the "meh" ratings category, using airtime that they'd otherwise have to make/license something more expensive to fill.