"Piracy" is "the taking of property from others on the open sea by open violence"
"Theft" is "the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same".
Copying, though it is sometimes illegal, very rarely qualifies as theft or piracy. There is no violence, there is no attempt to deprive the rightful owner of their property.
Copyright law serves to restrict the RIGHT to COPY to those that produce said intellectual property or use it in a FAIR way. It has nothing whatever to do with theft or piracy.
Yeah, but why would we use NUMA on a dual processor setup if we've got a 64 bit addressable memory space (only a small percentage of which is actually used)?
Use a second independant set of memory banks? Then how, in an multithreaded program, would two threads on two independant processors access the same structures on the the heap? What if the task switcher needs to change the processor a task is running on to balance the load? It seems to me what you're talking about is two seperate computers, not two processors operating in SMP.
That said, you did make one good point 'via hinders the opteron'. VIA has the quality control of a three-legged sock monkey. Due to my bad experiences with them (boards suddenly not working, weird card conflicts, IDE problems, hangs, etc), I'll never buy a board with a VIA chipset again. In each of these cases, buying a non-via board ended the problem forever. I'm VIA-free and proud of it!
Sco has demanded a fee from all Linux users for using their "IP". Of course copyright law gives them no right to do this, and they've yet to prove that any infringement has taken place. These facts cast their actions as extortion. They're commiting outright extortion against every Linux user. This is not just an attack on IBM, it's an attack on free software. Worse yet, it's an attempt at market manipulation to make a couple of their executives rich while the rest of the company will just be out of a job when the dust clears.
I think removing support from GCC is a good thing. It won't really harm most users, because SCO will maintain a patch, and ship their OS with GCC anyway. The only users affected will be those that want to upgrade GCC. This will discourage those that appreciate GCC and want to keep it up to date from choosing SCO as a platform. That's hitting SCO's bottom line, which is the right place to hit them. Let the executive stock options tank, then we'll see how much more they want to criminalize themselves.
> Except for the handful of losers with Intellivision's.
But the ColecoVision crowd was cool. Right? Right?
Re:This guy doesn't get it
on
Is Louder Better?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If it really is the artists that are making the decisions in this case, the bell tolls for them... Sorry, but Vapor Trails is the worst sounding album in their entire catalog. I played it a couple of times and coudn't stand it anymore. These guys used to know how to make a "loud jam" sound good.... witness 2112. Maybe the new digital equipment is getting in the way? If they recorded onto a wax cylinder it would have sounded better than "vapor trails".
>works thta have no value simply have no value - where is the need (or logic) in "preserving" them?
Well, they are a part of our history, for better or worse. They do represent milestones in an important industry of the twentieth century. The important thing is not whether something is useful now, but whether it was important, or changed the dynamics of the industry in some way.
I still think your definition of an OS is flawed, because the kernel does provide the services you mention. Userland programs and standard libraries only exist to make things easier. That said, if someone can tell me exactly what programs are part of the "Linux OS" under your definition and which are not, then it might make sense to give the package a name. Saying that there are a bunch of files called GNU/linux without even specifying exactly which files are included makes no sense at all.
According to the strict definition of an OS, the OS is the kernel, no more, no less. You can argue that the kernel is useless without some supporting software, but those programs are not then necessarily a part of the OS. For example, it's helpful to have a bootloader, but I can use any one of three on x86 (lilo, GRUB, and loadlin).. which one is part of GNU/Linux? Is IE necessarily part of Windows? You can't browse the web without it... or can you?
You could call a distribtion RMS/GNU/whatever, but the OS is just the kernel, which is just Linux.
the majority of the posts here are just flat missing the point. Many of you have portable MP3 players or just sit at your computer all the time, but the target audience has regular CD players. The reason you want lossless compression is so you can make your own CD that's the same quality you'd get in the store. Yes, MP3 at 320kbps is indistinguishable from CD.... But try burning that MP3 to an audio CD, then re-ripping to mp3, aac, etc... If you start with a perfect digital copy, the second generation is much, much better. This is because digital artifacts tend to multiply when re-encoding via lossy mechanisms. Ripability has become part of the value of a CD, so if you're actually selling CDs on line, it's a good idea to use losless compression for the initial format.
You obviously don't live in urban CA or the eastern seaboard. You can drive quite safely in mid-america and still get where you want to go. That isn't true for me, however.
This idea isn't new... Microsoft as long been trying to nip at the heels of IBM's midrange platforms. The system/38 shipped with a relational-only filesystem over 20 years ago. This filesystem is still alive in the AS/400 and iSeries systems. The advantages really are nice... merging the filesystem and the database, combined with a really smart optimizer, allow you to run a high performance database without having a DBA constantly monitor it. You end up with no tablespaces or any of the rest of the cruft that occurs when you try to build a database using files.
If it were just that, it might be laudable... but what MS is trying to do here is really more nefarious... MS is really trying to rid itself of all non-MS databases on Windows. This is the old IE vs Netscape trick. Why would you buy a real database when you're forced to buy SQL server anyway? Enough people might not know the difference
>Sometimes it seems like the IE team is really >just a department of the OS team, which is >something that MS could not legally admit from >what I understand.
Actually that would corroborate their arguments in the anti-trust case. Their whole point was that IE was part of the OS, and could not be removed. Their claims now that they can't even support their older OSes because of "new features" is just more of the same crap.
The CS majors out there all know that an OS has absolutely nothing to do with viewing web pages, but lawyers and judges don't know that. Anyway here's hoping that DRM recieves the same warm welcome that DIVX (the circuit city version) did.
agreed. Eclipse has powerful refactoring tools that really speed your development. Imagine being able to highlight a section of code and clicking "extract method" and having the IDE replace your code, now calling the method? Eclipse can do it... and it actually WORKS!
the iSeries has had the "single-level store" concept a la Plan 9 in working operation since 1985. Just thought I'd mention it since tens of thousands of people use it everyday and don't even realize the advanced technology under the hood.
You're right that the software is the key. My point was that there's even less variation in our "software" than in our genome. We're programmed to want to be individuals. Go up to Berkeley and watch all the kids with painful-looking piercings and you'll see what I mean. Do the piercings make them different? Or are they just sadly following their "be an individual" programming by mutilating themselves? You be the judge.
Individualism is really just part of the collective dogma of western culture. It's not a solid fact. The fact is that there are 4 billion so-called "individuals" on this planet. How different are these "individuals"? A very small part of our genetic makeup varies among each individual. I'd wager that if there were a way to compare thought patterns and beliefs, we'd find even less differences. It's too bad that because of this individualist indoctrinitation, people can't acknowledge that we're really the same. Instead, we try hard to find "differences" to distinguish ourselves and find reasons to fight about them.
If proper studies have been done that show that icons are more user friendly, then I'm afraid it's quite likely your preference for text is just part of your indoctrinated desire to be an individual.
People aren't different. Drugs do not support terrorism. Santa Claus isn't real.
This is one of the annoyances of open source... the tendency of developers to undergo major rewrites.
I've been following Enligtenment for some time, and the most annoying thing about it is that it undergoes a "major rewrite" nearly every major release. The new release always causes your current themes to break, and removes many of the features you were using.
Major re-writes are something developers like to do, but in the commercial sector their bosses won't let them. Why not? Most of the value of the re-write is in the developer's mind: they see the code, no the final product. There are three kinds of expenses to doing a re-write 1) the cost to actually implement the rewrite and 2) time cost to not market your products in a timely manner ad 3) loss of marketability due to feature loss and increased bug count. Even though it's free, the enlightenment project suffers from these costs.
Yes, I am a developer, and yes, I like to re-write. I'm just glad for my job's sake that my boss usually won't let me do it:)
You might if it meant you had to pay less for your downloads:) If the savings in server bandwidth were passed to the customer, I could see this working. Naturally the whole system is doomed to fail due to corporate ignorance, but there is potential in the concept.
You mean you never ran DOS 1.x on a 4.77 mhz 8088 processor? The 8086 was the first x86... it was released in 1978, with the mighty 8088 (actually a scaled down version of the 8086) released shortly thereafter.
What do you think about the new "test first" software development methodology? For those that haven't heard of it, it's a method wherein the test cases for a program are written, and no code is written that doesn't cause a failing test case to pass. All test cases are automated and run after every code change. Would you advocate this in an open-source project? This would mean every contributor would write test cases for each new feature, and add it to a project's common test case repository... What do you think?
Linux supporting both the desktop and the server is not a problem. In fact, it's a major advantage. The only reason anyone wants to run Windows on the server side is because administrators want the same interface as the desktop they're used to. Because of this simple fact, a large number of people are running Windows where a UNIX-like OS would be cheaper, faster, and more reliable. If linux supports both, and makes inroads on the desktop (big if), it will be more enticing as a server as well.
Slashdot Mirror
One nitpick in your comment...
>Piracy is the theft of information.
Looks like the MPAA's propoganda is working.
"Piracy" is "the taking of property from others on the open sea by open violence"
"Theft" is "the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same".
Copying, though it is sometimes illegal, very rarely qualifies as theft or piracy. There is no violence, there is no attempt to deprive the rightful owner of their property.
Copyright law serves to restrict the RIGHT to COPY to those that produce said intellectual property or use it in a FAIR way. It has nothing whatever to do with theft or piracy.
Thanks for your time.
>one word: edlin
Just when I was beginning to forget. It's all coming back!
Yeah, but why would we use NUMA on a dual processor setup if we've got a 64 bit addressable memory space (only a small percentage of which is actually used)?
Use a second independant set of memory banks? Then how, in an multithreaded program, would two threads on two independant processors access the same structures on the the heap? What if the task switcher needs to change the processor a task is running on to balance the load? It seems to me what you're talking about is two seperate computers, not two processors operating in SMP.
That said, you did make one good point 'via hinders the opteron'. VIA has the quality control of a three-legged sock monkey. Due to my bad experiences with them (boards suddenly not working, weird card conflicts, IDE problems, hangs, etc), I'll never buy a board with a VIA chipset again. In each of these cases, buying a non-via board ended the problem forever. I'm VIA-free and proud of it!
correction...
Sco has demanded a fee from all Linux users for using their "IP". Of course copyright law gives them no right to do this, and they've yet to prove that any infringement has taken place. These facts cast their actions as extortion. They're commiting outright extortion against every Linux user. This is not just an attack on IBM, it's an attack on free software. Worse yet, it's an attempt at market manipulation to make a couple of their executives rich while the rest of the company will just be out of a job when the dust clears.
I think removing support from GCC is a good thing. It won't really harm most users, because SCO will maintain a patch, and ship their OS with GCC anyway. The only users affected will be those that want to upgrade GCC. This will discourage those that appreciate GCC and want to keep it up to date from choosing SCO as a platform. That's hitting SCO's bottom line, which is the right place to hit them. Let the executive stock options tank, then we'll see how much more they want to criminalize themselves.
> Except for the handful of losers with Intellivision's.
But the ColecoVision crowd was cool. Right? Right?
If it really is the artists that are making the decisions in this case, the bell tolls for them... Sorry, but Vapor Trails is the worst sounding album in their entire catalog. I played it a couple of times and coudn't stand it anymore. These guys used to know how to make a "loud jam" sound good.... witness 2112. Maybe the new digital equipment is getting in the way? If they recorded onto a wax cylinder it would have sounded better than "vapor trails".
>works thta have no value simply have no value - where is the need (or logic) in "preserving" them?
Well, they are a part of our history, for better or worse. They do represent milestones in an important industry of the twentieth century. The important thing is not whether something is useful now, but whether it was important, or changed the dynamics of the industry in some way.
I still think your definition of an OS is flawed, because the kernel does provide the services you mention. Userland programs and standard libraries only exist to make things easier. That said, if someone can tell me exactly what programs are part of the "Linux OS" under your definition and which are not, then it might make sense to give the package a name. Saying that there are a bunch of files called GNU/linux without even specifying exactly which files are included makes no sense at all.
According to the strict definition of an OS, the OS is the kernel, no more, no less. You can argue that the kernel is useless without some supporting software, but those programs are not then necessarily a part of the OS. For example, it's helpful to have a bootloader, but I can use any one of three on x86 (lilo, GRUB, and loadlin).. which one is part of GNU/Linux? Is IE necessarily part of Windows? You can't browse the web without it... or can you?
You could call a distribtion RMS/GNU/whatever, but the OS is just the kernel, which is just Linux.
the majority of the posts here are just flat missing the point. Many of you have portable MP3 players or just sit at your computer all the time, but the target audience has regular CD players. The reason you want lossless compression is so you can make your own CD that's the same quality you'd get in the store. Yes, MP3 at 320kbps is indistinguishable from CD.... But try burning that MP3 to an audio CD, then re-ripping to mp3, aac, etc... If you start with a perfect digital copy, the second generation is much, much better. This is because digital artifacts tend to multiply when re-encoding via lossy mechanisms. Ripability has become part of the value of a CD, so if you're actually selling CDs on line, it's a good idea to use losless compression for the initial format.
You obviously don't live in urban CA or the eastern seaboard. You can drive quite safely in mid-america and still get where you want to go. That isn't true for me, however.
This idea isn't new... Microsoft as long been trying to nip at the heels of IBM's midrange platforms. The system/38 shipped with a relational-only filesystem over 20 years ago. This filesystem is still alive in the AS/400 and iSeries systems. The advantages really are nice... merging the filesystem and the database, combined with a really smart optimizer, allow you to run a high performance database without having a DBA constantly monitor it. You end up with no tablespaces or any of the rest of the cruft that occurs when you try to build a database using files.
If it were just that, it might be laudable... but what MS is trying to do here is really more nefarious... MS is really trying to rid itself of all non-MS databases on Windows. This is the old IE vs Netscape trick. Why would you buy a real database when you're forced to buy SQL server anyway? Enough people might not know the difference
>Sometimes it seems like the IE team is really >just a department of the OS team, which is >something that MS could not legally admit from >what I understand.
Actually that would corroborate their arguments in the anti-trust case. Their whole point was that IE was part of the OS, and could not be removed. Their claims now that they can't even support their older OSes because of "new features" is just more of the same crap.
The CS majors out there all know that an OS has absolutely nothing to do with viewing web pages, but lawyers and judges don't know that. Anyway here's hoping that DRM recieves the same warm welcome that DIVX (the circuit city version) did.
agreed. Eclipse has powerful refactoring tools that really speed your development. Imagine being able to highlight a section of code and clicking "extract method" and having the IDE replace your code, now calling the method? Eclipse can do it... and it actually WORKS!
and you can tell by looking at the address... one would suspect a postal worker would be able to read those.
the iSeries has had the "single-level store" concept a la Plan 9 in working operation since 1985. Just thought I'd mention it since tens of thousands of people use it everyday and don't even realize the advanced technology under the hood.
this could bring a whole new meaning to the linux-coffee HOWTO!
You're right that the software is the key. My point was that there's even less variation in our "software" than in our genome. We're programmed to want to be individuals. Go up to Berkeley and watch all the kids with painful-looking piercings and you'll see what I mean. Do the piercings make them different? Or are they just sadly following their "be an individual" programming by mutilating themselves? You be the judge.
people are different.
Individualism is really just part of the collective dogma of western culture. It's not a solid fact. The fact is that there are 4 billion so-called "individuals" on this planet. How different are these "individuals"? A very small part of our genetic makeup varies among each individual. I'd wager that if there were a way to compare thought patterns and beliefs, we'd find even less differences. It's too bad that because of this individualist indoctrinitation, people can't acknowledge that we're really the same. Instead, we try hard to find "differences" to distinguish ourselves and find reasons to fight about them.
If proper studies have been done that show that icons are more user friendly, then I'm afraid it's quite likely your preference for text is just part of your indoctrinated desire to be an individual.
People aren't different. Drugs do not support terrorism. Santa Claus isn't real.
This is one of the annoyances of open source... the tendency of developers to undergo major rewrites.
:)
I've been following Enligtenment for some time, and the most annoying thing about it is that it undergoes a "major rewrite" nearly every major release. The new release always causes your current themes to break, and removes many of the features you were using.
Major re-writes are something developers like to do, but in the commercial sector their bosses won't let them. Why not? Most of the value of the re-write is in the developer's mind: they see the code, no the final product. There are three kinds of expenses to doing a re-write 1) the cost to actually implement the rewrite and 2) time cost to not market your products in a timely manner ad 3) loss of marketability due to feature loss and increased bug count. Even though it's free, the enlightenment project suffers from these costs.
Yes, I am a developer, and yes, I like to re-write. I'm just glad for my job's sake that my boss usually won't let me do it
You might if it meant you had to pay less for your downloads :) If the savings in server bandwidth were passed to the customer, I could see this working. Naturally the whole system is doomed to fail due to corporate ignorance, but there is potential in the concept.
You mean you never ran DOS 1.x on a 4.77 mhz 8088 processor? The 8086 was the first x86... it was released in 1978, with the mighty 8088 (actually a scaled down version of the 8086) released shortly thereafter.
What do you think about the new "test first" software development methodology? For those that haven't heard of it, it's a method wherein the test cases for a program are written, and no code is written that doesn't cause a failing test case to pass. All test cases are automated and run after every code change. Would you advocate this in an open-source project? This would mean every contributor would write test cases for each new feature, and add it to a project's common test case repository... What do you think?
Linux supporting both the desktop and the server is not a problem. In fact, it's a major advantage. The only reason anyone wants to run Windows on the server side is because administrators want the same interface as the desktop they're used to. Because of this simple fact, a large number of people are running Windows where a UNIX-like OS would be cheaper, faster, and more reliable. If linux supports both, and makes inroads on the desktop (big if), it will be more enticing as a server as well.