afaik, every major distribution gives binaries away for free.
SuSe doesn't. The only SuSe 7 ISO is the evaluation version that runs straight off the CD. The only way to get the full distro is to buy the boxed version.
For example, if Shell Oil placed donation bins beside all the gas pumps, so rich people could help those less fortunate to have cheaper gas, that would be stupid
Not comparable, unless in your example Shell is allowing people to take gas for free and is simply recommending a donation.
I do think it's OK for RedHat and the likes to as for donations though, since they are providing a salary to many of the hackers that have made Linux what it is today.
Shell is providing the salaries of the engineers who develop better and more efficient oil drilling and refining processes that result in better fuel quality with less environmental impact from drilling. What's your point?
And don't think for a minute that Red Hat is the only distro paying the salaries of Free Software programmers. David Faure is paid by MandrakeSoft to work full-time on KDE. KDE founder Matthias Ettrich and khtml maintainer Lars Knoll both work for TrollTech. SuSe also pays the salaries of some developers.
Re:The Problem With Abbreviations ...
on
GPL FAQ
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· Score: 2
But it links to a discussion by Richard Stallman, where it's "Library GPL".
From that discussion:
Since the name "Library GPL" conveys the wrong idea about this question, we are planning to change the name to "Lesser GPL."
I got started with Mandrake. The distro I successfully used was Mandrake 7.0, and I was pleased enough with it that I went out and bought a boxed copy, even though I already had the CD from a Maximum Linux Magazine. It turned out to be a pretty good deal. Between the included PartitionMagic and BootMagic limited editions, the five e-books, the RPM'ed StarOffice 5.1 install, and the 400-page manual, I feel I got quite a bit for my money.
My point with that is that I think it should be encouraged that once people settle on a distribution that works right for them, that they go out and buy a boxed copy off the shelf. In most cases, what you get for your money is a lot more than what you get for the download time.
Second, I'd like to vent about the number one thing that irritated me about Mandrake: the ridiculous RPM dependencies. For example, a program I'm installing tells me it requires gtk+-1.2.6-14, where I have gtk+-1.2.6-12. Or another program requires some PDA-related package, where I don't have a PDA. Sure, I could just use --nodeps and it'll probably work, but I didn't know that at first and newbies won't either. Seeing those warning messages will only make them afraid that something might break if they don't get all of the required packages. And having to find and download those packages will only frustrate them. That's not newbie-friendly in my opinion. Serious improvements need to be made to RPM's dependency system in order to fix this, IMO.
I'm not qualified to question almost all of those - except USB. The iMac was not the major reason why USB took off. It was a somewhat significant reason, but I think the release of Win98 was a more important factor. Before Win98, there was no OS *on the shelves* that could handle USB. Only Win95 OSR2.1 could, but it was a crappy implementation and only available on new systems. PC ATX motherboards came with USB ports long before Win98. Intel had it in their chipsets in 1995. It just so happened that the release of the iMac wasn't very far off of Win98's release.
Development moves along as usual. A Quicktime component for OS9 is being worked on, test streaming servers are going up, and Winamp will include a Vorbis plugin in an upcoming version (probably the next version). You can snag a copy of the plugin here. I use it, and it's quite a bit better than the plugin at Vorbis.com.
Altera, maker of FPGA chips, calls their parallel cable used to interface with the programmer "ByteBlaster". With a name like that, you'd think that it's at least somewhat special, but where I work, we don't buy any - we roll our own using a 25-pin parallel connector, a 10-pin ribbon cable and a 74AC244 octal tri-state buffer/line driver. That's all it is.
We're talking about running Windows binaries here. Of course it'll be x86-only because that's what they were compiled for.
As for performance, a program under windows makes calls to the win32 library (.dll) files and the instructions are executed natively by an x86 processor. Under Linux, a program makes calls to the win32 library (Wine) and the instructions are executed natively on an x86 processor. Where does the wrapper come into play?
Actually, what I'm referring to is the lag that happens when you do a lot of scrolling at once with the smooth scrolling off (I would do ctrl-scroll, but that issue has already been mentioned). There's a limit to scrolling speed in IE for some reason, so when I scroll a couple of pages at once, it'll still be catching up after I stop turning the wheel. Netscape, Konq, and Mozilla don't have this problem.
DeeK's law: 90% of all KDE users become rabid Konqueror evangelists. I should know. I used to be one. Konqueror is a damn good broswer, but I don't think it's a good thing to detract from Mozilla's impending thunder.
I may use and love Konqueror, but I still cheer for the Mozilla people because they're just a teeny bit more ambitious; as in, Mozilla runs on Unix, Windows, Mac, BeOS, and others. I still use Netscape 4.7x under Windows because I still prefer its "feel" over IE (Dear Microsoft: Fix the ****ing mouse wheel scolling!!), but it's getting outdated quickly, and I'm going to need something better for Windows. Mozilla and its derivatives (like K-meleon) are pretty much the only runners from the free software/open source community right now. I don't like the idea of Microsoft embracing and extending the web and convincing web designers that getting 90-95% of the potential market is good enough. We need a browser that runs on all platforms and is the most standards-compliant of all of them. That's why I can't help but cheer Mozilla on.
The funny thing is, IGN originally was a product of Imagine Media (IGN = Imagine Gaming Network), but is now with snowball.com. So what did Imagine replace IGN with? Daily Radar. Figures.
If someone keeps score for a sports event on their own, can they be prevented from publishing that information?
I would say a flat out no to that. The score of a baseball game, or a golf round, or whatever is a fact. That the New Jersey Devils beat the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight by a score of 6-5 is a fact. Thus it isn't copyrightable. There was a case recently over a pair of competing phone book companies where one apparently copied the other's number list, and the courts ruled that the actual list of phone numbers is a collection of facts and therefore can't be copyrighted. I'm just too lazy to go out and search for it.
A machine with no moving parts should never break,
What do you propose for data storage, then? There's no solid state storage medium that can even touch magnetic platters in terms of cost/GB. What about cooling? There's not many processors out there that don't require active cooling. Besides, even solid state parts are prone to wearout due mostly to thermal effects. Thermal expansion and contraction cycles as its load varies over time can wear out solder joints, and then there's stuff like electromigration down at the micron level. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
Plus utter confusion when the user notices that it doesn't totally wipe out his neighbor's 1.33GHz AMD, and actually loses in some tests. The salesman told him that more GHz is always better!
How can watermarking be covered as a "device that effectively controls access to a work"? According to the text of the DMCA,
''(B) a technological measure 'effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
If a watermark qualifies as an effective access control measure, then I would think that by that logic, any player that doesn't check for watermarks would be considered an access circumvention device and therefore illegal. Or would they be legal because they have a commercially significant purpose? This is confusing.
Installing KDE from source is pretty easy. First, I should tell you that it will run best if QT2 has been configured with -no-g++-exceptions, which I believe Slackware does. This basically will cut memory use and increase speed noticeably. That said...
Pick a mirror to download from, and get the packages from the stable/2.1.1/distribution/tar/generic/src/ directory. Installing KDE is done with the standard./configure, make, make install. Do kdesupport, then kdelibs, then kdebase, and everything else is optional and can be done in any order. KDE2 works best from its own directory like/usr/local/kde2 or/opt/kde2, so just make $KDEDIR the directory you want to install to and the scripts will use that. Once it's installed, "exec startkde" should go in your.xinitrc (or xdm, or whatever). And that's pretty much it.
Re:Mozilla vs. Konq, development time...
on
QT Mozilla Port
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· Score: 1
Er, no. If you go talk to the KDE guys they will inform you that it's a from-scratch browser with little outside code borrowing. It uses an HTML renderer called KHTML, not Gecko. It uses OpenSSL for crypto, not NSS. And so on.
1)Get DirectX support. I'm sorry, but the whole of the gaming worl uses it. If you don't support it, you are stuffed. Even consoles are getting it, like the XBox. Games that don't use it, such as WuakeIII, are very dificult to install.
There's already SDL, which has been getting some nice, positive feedback as a good, cross-platform multimedia API. Note that Win32 is one of those platforms. Oh, and the API has nothing to do with the install. If you've ever tried a Loki game installation, they're really smooth and easy. Unreal Tournament installed just fine on my system.
3)Get some bloody normal people to use the OS.
And one of the best ways to lure users is to get some games for it. Loki porting some Windows games to Linux is a step in that direction. Face it, the general public is not even going to consider Linux as their OS until there's a good selection of games for it.
It alkso needs new games, not 12 month old crap like what is being touted here.
Neither game is crap, and only one of them is as old as you say. Tribes 2 has only been out for Windows for what, 1-2 weeks, tops?
HardOCP did a comparison between the GF2 and the GF3. Of particular note are the benchmarks of DroneZ, an upcoming OpenGL-based game that has special modes optimized for the GF3's features. Using the generic settings, the GF3 was about 15-25% faster. But with the extra GF3 stuff enabled, the GF3 was faster by a factor of between two and four. Remeber that this is with an OpenGL benchmark, not D3D, so don't start worrying that nVidia is ignoring OGL. I imagine that John Carmack will be taking advantage of this kind of stuff in DOOM3, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a giant pile of letters with the hand of a guy buried beneath them trying to claw up to the top?
SuSe doesn't. The only SuSe 7 ISO is the evaluation version that runs straight off the CD. The only way to get the full distro is to buy the boxed version.
Not comparable, unless in your example Shell is allowing people to take gas for free and is simply recommending a donation.
I do think it's OK for RedHat and the likes to as for donations though, since they are providing a salary to many of the hackers that have made Linux what it is today.
Shell is providing the salaries of the engineers who develop better and more efficient oil drilling and refining processes that result in better fuel quality with less environmental impact from drilling. What's your point?
And don't think for a minute that Red Hat is the only distro paying the salaries of Free Software programmers. David Faure is paid by MandrakeSoft to work full-time on KDE. KDE founder Matthias Ettrich and khtml maintainer Lars Knoll both work for TrollTech. SuSe also pays the salaries of some developers.
From that discussion:
Since the name "Library GPL" conveys the wrong idea about this question, we are planning to change the name to "Lesser GPL."
Um, read my post. The connectors were on the ATX motherboard panels long before Win98.
I got started with Mandrake. The distro I successfully used was Mandrake 7.0, and I was pleased enough with it that I went out and bought a boxed copy, even though I already had the CD from a Maximum Linux Magazine. It turned out to be a pretty good deal. Between the included PartitionMagic and BootMagic limited editions, the five e-books, the RPM'ed StarOffice 5.1 install, and the 400-page manual, I feel I got quite a bit for my money.
My point with that is that I think it should be encouraged that once people settle on a distribution that works right for them, that they go out and buy a boxed copy off the shelf. In most cases, what you get for your money is a lot more than what you get for the download time.
Second, I'd like to vent about the number one thing that irritated me about Mandrake: the ridiculous RPM dependencies. For example, a program I'm installing tells me it requires gtk+-1.2.6-14, where I have gtk+-1.2.6-12. Or another program requires some PDA-related package, where I don't have a PDA. Sure, I could just use --nodeps and it'll probably work, but I didn't know that at first and newbies won't either. Seeing those warning messages will only make them afraid that something might break if they don't get all of the required packages. And having to find and download those packages will only frustrate them. That's not newbie-friendly in my opinion. Serious improvements need to be made to RPM's dependency system in order to fix this, IMO.
I'm not qualified to question almost all of those - except USB. The iMac was not the major reason why USB took off. It was a somewhat significant reason, but I think the release of Win98 was a more important factor. Before Win98, there was no OS *on the shelves* that could handle USB. Only Win95 OSR2.1 could, but it was a crappy implementation and only available on new systems. PC ATX motherboards came with USB ports long before Win98. Intel had it in their chipsets in 1995. It just so happened that the release of the iMac wasn't very far off of Win98's release.
Development moves along as usual. A Quicktime component for OS9 is being worked on, test streaming servers are going up, and Winamp will include a Vorbis plugin in an upcoming version (probably the next version). You can snag a copy of the plugin here. I use it, and it's quite a bit better than the plugin at Vorbis.com.
Altera, maker of FPGA chips, calls their parallel cable used to interface with the programmer "ByteBlaster". With a name like that, you'd think that it's at least somewhat special, but where I work, we don't buy any - we roll our own using a 25-pin parallel connector, a 10-pin ribbon cable and a 74AC244 octal tri-state buffer/line driver. That's all it is.
Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.
We're talking about running Windows binaries here. Of course it'll be x86-only because that's what they were compiled for.
As for performance, a program under windows makes calls to the win32 library (.dll) files and the instructions are executed natively by an x86 processor. Under Linux, a program makes calls to the win32 library (Wine) and the instructions are executed natively on an x86 processor. Where does the wrapper come into play?
Actually, what I'm referring to is the lag that happens when you do a lot of scrolling at once with the smooth scrolling off (I would do ctrl-scroll, but that issue has already been mentioned). There's a limit to scrolling speed in IE for some reason, so when I scroll a couple of pages at once, it'll still be catching up after I stop turning the wheel. Netscape, Konq, and Mozilla don't have this problem.
I may use and love Konqueror, but I still cheer for the Mozilla people because they're just a teeny bit more ambitious; as in, Mozilla runs on Unix, Windows, Mac, BeOS, and others. I still use Netscape 4.7x under Windows because I still prefer its "feel" over IE (Dear Microsoft: Fix the ****ing mouse wheel scolling!!), but it's getting outdated quickly, and I'm going to need something better for Windows. Mozilla and its derivatives (like K-meleon) are pretty much the only runners from the free software/open source community right now. I don't like the idea of Microsoft embracing and extending the web and convincing web designers that getting 90-95% of the potential market is good enough. We need a browser that runs on all platforms and is the most standards-compliant of all of them. That's why I can't help but cheer Mozilla on.
The funny thing is, IGN originally was a product of Imagine Media (IGN = Imagine Gaming Network), but is now with snowball.com. So what did Imagine replace IGN with? Daily Radar. Figures.
I would say a flat out no to that. The score of a baseball game, or a golf round, or whatever is a fact. That the New Jersey Devils beat the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight by a score of 6-5 is a fact. Thus it isn't copyrightable. There was a case recently over a pair of competing phone book companies where one apparently copied the other's number list, and the courts ruled that the actual list of phone numbers is a collection of facts and therefore can't be copyrighted. I'm just too lazy to go out and search for it.
What do you propose for data storage, then? There's no solid state storage medium that can even touch magnetic platters in terms of cost/GB. What about cooling? There's not many processors out there that don't require active cooling. Besides, even solid state parts are prone to wearout due mostly to thermal effects. Thermal expansion and contraction cycles as its load varies over time can wear out solder joints, and then there's stuff like electromigration down at the micron level. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
Plus utter confusion when the user notices that it doesn't totally wipe out his neighbor's 1.33GHz AMD, and actually loses in some tests. The salesman told him that more GHz is always better!
Pick a mirror to download from, and get the packages from the stable/2.1.1/distribution/tar/generic/src/ directory. Installing KDE is done with the standard ./configure, make, make install. Do kdesupport, then kdelibs, then kdebase, and everything else is optional and can be done in any order. KDE2 works best from its own directory like /usr/local/kde2 or /opt/kde2, so just make $KDEDIR the directory you want to install to and the scripts will use that. Once it's installed, "exec startkde" should go in your .xinitrc (or xdm, or whatever). And that's pretty much it.
Er, no. If you go talk to the KDE guys they will inform you that it's a from-scratch browser with little outside code borrowing. It uses an HTML renderer called KHTML, not Gecko. It uses OpenSSL for crypto, not NSS. And so on.
I'd hate to have your job.
There's already SDL, which has been getting some nice, positive feedback as a good, cross-platform multimedia API. Note that Win32 is one of those platforms. Oh, and the API has nothing to do with the install. If you've ever tried a Loki game installation, they're really smooth and easy. Unreal Tournament installed just fine on my system.
3)Get some bloody normal people to use the OS.
And one of the best ways to lure users is to get some games for it. Loki porting some Windows games to Linux is a step in that direction. Face it, the general public is not even going to consider Linux as their OS until there's a good selection of games for it.
It alkso needs new games, not 12 month old crap like what is being touted here.
Neither game is crap, and only one of them is as old as you say. Tribes 2 has only been out for Windows for what, 1-2 weeks, tops?
...and it doesn't seem to want to learn that my name isn't Dave.
HardOCP did a comparison between the GF2 and the GF3. Of particular note are the benchmarks of DroneZ, an upcoming OpenGL-based game that has special modes optimized for the GF3's features. Using the generic settings, the GF3 was about 15-25% faster. But with the extra GF3 stuff enabled, the GF3 was faster by a factor of between two and four. Remeber that this is with an OpenGL benchmark, not D3D, so don't start worrying that nVidia is ignoring OGL. I imagine that John Carmack will be taking advantage of this kind of stuff in DOOM3, as well.
That was my pathetic attempt at a thinly veiled ESR reference. Reference: The Cathedral and the Bazaar