... Novell may not have any desire to take over the actually business, but they could make a business from taking over the product and transitioning the customer base to their SuSE offering. In turn they could release the product [SCO Unix] source (as they would own it now) to the community. Linux developers could then benifit from any code that might be worth a damn within the product. I think it would be ironic that the very code SCO swears was stolen for the linux kernel, would be completely fair game for the kernel developers. I'm pretty sure the value of the SCO Unix code is damn close to zero. And actually porting any useful bits into Linux might be higher cost than it's worth.
There's a reason SCO stopped trying to make money off Unix products, and started suing everyone: their products sucked. They lacked the low cost, wide hardware support, and fast development pace of Linux and BSD. They lacked the advanced SMP, reputation, and integrated vendor support of Solaris and AIX.
Over the last few years, Linux and BSD (and even Solaris) have been improved and extended rapidly. But SCO's products have pretty much stood still. OpenServer had its last release over two years ago, Unixware three years ago!
Doesn't Facebook run PHP on Apache on Linux... I don't know the DB, but it sounds like it's basically a LAMP setup!
Is Microsoft going to pressure them to excise all that open-source junk from Facebook? And run it on some nice Windows server with IIS and ASP.NET and what not?
I save many of my text documents in.doc format. The reason? It "just works"... OpenOffice is truly amazing when it comes to importing and exporting text documents to MS Word's format. It gets references, fonts, formatting just right even with repeated import/export cycles. It even makes a heroic effort to translate or at least not permanently mangle OLE objects and Visual Basic scripts.
So, for any document that I'm going to have to share with others... I use.doc format. For my own personal documents I use ODF. I am a strong supporter of ODF, and I'll celebrate the day when we kiss.doc goodbye permanently. But for now, OpenOffice's import/export is *so good* and convenient, may as well use it:-)
It's a different story with presentations. OpenOffice does quite well with PowerPoint format, but loses some advanced animations and sometimes fudges drawings a bit. So I keep everything in ODF format, and only export to PPT if absolutely necessary.
... the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog [CC] for details." OMG!!!!!! The O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag is coming out!!! My friend Tiffany is, like, *totally* gonna freak when she hears about it.
Anyways, I have a question. I can't think of a single good reason to use Access (or Access-like databases). Can somebody tell me what sort of applications would actually call for a wretchedly limited application like that? Access *is* truly wretched as far as an actual DB backend. The early versions of MySQL were far more powerful and fast, for example. But the real killer feature of Access is the ability to create tables and interfaces to them graphically. It's actually very good at that, and I haven't seen a decent replacement for Linux. A non-technical person can sit down with Access and make, say, a database of their recipes, or book collection, or company purchase orders... and make a decent GUI to do CRUD on it.
For example, a few years ago my ex-girlfriend had to make a large database of English loanwords used in China for her undergrad thesis. I tried to get her to use MySQL, but the lack of any GUI at the time was a turnoff. She used MS Access successfully instead.
I hear that Kexi (KDE-based) is a very nice and rapidly improving Access replacement, but haven't tried it. Nothing like it for GNOME, AFAIK.
Well... I must be doing something wrong, cause I get way slower times on way newer systems. Ubuntu Feisty, 2.0ghz Turion 64 x2, 1gb RAM. It still takes TEN SECONDS to cold-start OO.o to a blank document, and about 3 for subsequent starts. And on my 2ghz Athlon 64 with only 512mb RAM, it takes about thirty seconds. It's ridiculous.
OO.o has truly amazingly good MS Office import/export... it even gets equations and PowerPoint animations right most of the time!! And it runs snappy with 100-page documents with complex formatting, way better than MS Word in that regard. But the OpenOffice UI is ugly--it looks bad under KDE, GNOME, Windows, *and* Mac OS... quite a feat. And it's a serious memory hog. Its templates, database, and some export filters depend on Java for no good reason other than Sun wants a little Java in everything.
Despite these faults, I prefer OO.o to MS Office. I'd say it reached parity about a year ago. The word processor is faster with large documents than MS Word. The presentations lags powerpoint a bit in terms of graphical slickness, but is otherwise excellent. I don't use the OO.o spreadsheet program; I prefer Gnumeric, which is *extremely* fast, extremely reliable, integrates perfectly with my GNOME desktop, and generally kicks the crap out of Excel in my opinion.
I checked the USB 2.0 spec, and it actually only requires only twist per 60-80 mm... much less than Ethernet CAT 6! So my ugly home-made cable is actually within spec or nearly so;-)
Hehehe. You joke, but consumers are cheated by similar bullshit all the time. Look at the techno-babble used to sell overpriced USB cables at big-box stores!! They sell the USB cables for about $25 more than they're worth, so that they can mark down the inkjet printers a corresponding amount.
Here's a 6-foot USB cable costing $31 (!!!): from circuit city. It features:
24K gold-plated connectors: Corrosion-proof for improved conductivity. 20-gauge high-performance power wires ensure better data transmission. ... as if any of that mattered. ("Power wires improve better data transmission", WTF??!?!) Of course, you can get an indistinguishable cable for about $3 from any of dozens of reputable online-only shops, such as: here.
I keep around a few spare USB AB cables, which I give to friends and family when they tell me they're going to buy a new printer. I tell them to insist to the sales-person that they already have the proper cable. They save $25-30 and I get the smug feeling of sticking it to a dishonest industry... woohoo:-)
PS- The ironic part is that the USB connectors and cables are actually *specified* with extremely loose tolerances, so that cheap processes and materials can be used to manufacture them reliably. And since the USB protocol is *digital* and includes error-correction, cables have to be almost ludicrously bad for their quality to affect signaling. Case in point: I have a functioning home-made USB cable which I produced by splicing the wires from two cables together and wrapping them with electrical tape. This completely violates the USB spec, which requires that the data wires form a twisted pair with something like 5mm per twist. However, my ugly home-made cable transmits data from a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure at the same speed as a proper cable.
Forget about the extinction of human languages, none of us speak 'em anyway! Let's all take a moment to reflect on the shocking death of so many beloved programming languages...
When was the last time you came across BASIC in the wild? You know, 100 PRINT "HELLO" 200 GOTO 100? None of that mongrel "Visual" junk! How about Turbo Pascal? Or 68000 assembly language? To say nothing of rare species, like INTERCAL!
Heck, even a language that's near and dear to my Linux-geek heart is dying: Perl. The reason? Too ugly to reproduce, a situation that we here on Slashdot can all understand!! Perl may flash the $dollar $signs $all $$over $the{$place}, but let's face it... the ladies are going for Python these days. With its clean-cut good looks and plethora of web frameworks, Python is just irresistible. To say nothing of Ruby, Perl's one-time protégé which has now become the coolest kid in town.
Yes, folks, though it grieves me to say so, Perl is dying in my heart. The other day, I quietly shed a tear when I realized it was nothing more to me than a way to run one-liner regular expressions from the shell prompt:'(
What if 90% of the techs are male? Well, then we get 49% of 90% is 44.1%, and 35% of 10% is 3.5, so 47.1%. We still haven't got more than 50%.
You may be onto something there. Or, I've fallen asleep and cant to math anymore.:-P
That's just funny. Good catch.
Cheers Heh, yes you need some sleep:-) There's no way that the sleep-on-the-job fraction of the WHOLE exceeds the sleep-on-the-job fraction of ALL OF ITS PARTS.
I did read TFA:-) The article polled 5700 US workers, of whom only 163 were IT workers. TFA refers to them as IT workers and "techies" interchangeably. I agree that the terminology is confusing, but it's not my terminology, it's the article's.
According to a new online survey by Harris Interactive, more than half of IT workers say they've fallen asleep at work... Forty-nine percent of male techies say they've fallen asleep at work, while only 35 percent of women admitted doing so. Hmmm... less than half of male techs have fallen asleep at work, and less than half of female techs have fallen asleep at work.
And yet, somehow, more than half of all techs have fallen asleep at work. Gosh, that's interesting. Those non-male non-female techs sure must do a lot of sleeping on the job!
Frankly, I think Microsoft shouldn't stop at abandoning Vista. Microsoft should abandon Windows. I realized the other day that the only Windows program I actually prefer to the Linux equivalent is PowerPoint.
But I may be in a minority here. I can barely keep myself from tearing my hair off every time I sit down in front of a Windows box.
What, no Bash shell??? No Firefox installed by default??? Where's python??? Where's xchat??? Where's apt-get... I don't want to sit around clicking on installers all day!!?!? ARGHGHGH.
I fail to see that as a valid rebuttal to this guys complaints. I have a sansa and am very thankfull it has Universal mass storage support. I dont have to install a single driver on anything i plug it into, and it can refresh its library itself, meaning all i have to do is copy and paste and the player, no third party app, does all the work.
You got it. UMS support is great. I can write a shell script to transfer music onto and off of my Sansa the way I want it. I can drag and drop from the Desktop. If a friend copies a song onto my player, I'm actually able to copy it *off* onto my home computer. I have more choices than just iTunes or GtkPod for music management.
In Australia i listen to a radio station called Triple J a lot. They have upcomming bands and no ads, as they are run by the government broadcasting system. i use my sansa to record the songs i like and record the names of the songs, that way i can find new bands. I also hate the term "Podcast". Its just an audio stream, it didn't need a new name The term "podcast" bugs me too, because it doesn't really have anything to do with iPods in particular. Nor is it much like broadcasting, since the audio is pre-recorded then distributed, rather than streamed live.
On the other hand, there is no other good term for such a thing. Hrmmm...
Cheerful today, aren't we:-)
the fact that you can't just copy MP3 files on and off from the command line,
Why do you care? I care because it's the most convenient way for me to get music on and off my player! I decide what I want to listen to for the next couple of days and just do "cp coolmusic/*/mnt/mp3player" or whatever. Easy! And with a standard USB Mass Storage interface, practically any Music Manager software can access songs directly off of the player... no need to use a specific program.
the stupid clicky noise,
You can turn it off, stupid. Good to know.
the easily-scratched screen cover,
I have a 6 month old Nano which has never seen a protective sleeve. It has zero scratches on its screen, despite sometimes being carried loose in a pocket with my cellphone. Lucky you! My girlfriend, who is meticulous and careful with all of her possessions, has a regular iPod which she keeps in a protective sleeve when working out, but despite that it's very scratched up after about one year.
the lack of FM radio which every other player has,
Why do you care? Honestly, what is left worth listening to on FM radio? Most things which I'm actually interested in listening to on radio are better in podcast form, anyways (no ads). I listen to news and classical music on NPR (public radio, if you're not from the USA) *all the time*. I probably listen to it more than I do stored music files! Podcasting doesn't work if you want to hear the latest news or weather.
It's not so constructive of you to dismiss useful features with, "Why do you care?" Well, I do care about those features... and since Apple players don't offer those features, while nearly every other brand does, I take my dollar elsewhere.
Okay, sure, but the data I gave show the highest optimization that ACTUALLY COMPUTES THE RESULT... I could have trivially made it not optimize out the function by having main() return x.
If you have any definitive way to convince me that this is not going to happen by all means go on and reassure me - but please spare me an endless debate about how GPL means freedom, apple trees beyond a fenced wall etc. Certainly a healthy skepticism of the FSF's intentions is a good idea. But the ability to fork is one of the *critical features* of open source software that keeps licensors in line.
For example, if you think the GPLv3 is too onerous... then you fork the last GPLv2 version of whatever program you want. If enough people agree with you, they'll abandon the FSF and jump into your project. If you're okay with the GPLv3, but it turns out that the GPLv4 requires you to give your unborn children to Richard Stallman, then no problem! Just fork the last GPLv3 version of some GNU program and you're good to go?
Is this "threat of forking" really plausible? Sure is! When XFree86 switched its licensing terms to something that many developers and users didn't like, besides a few other disagreements, the developers abandoned XFree86 en masse and the X.org foundation invited them in. Within a few months, X.org was the standard and XFree86 is irrelevant today (partial history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.org#History)
Are your worries about the FSF reasonable TODAY? I don't really think so. A lot of *non-FSF* projects have switched enthusiastically to the GPLv3. Most notable is Samba, which is used by hundreds (thousands?) of companies as a better-than-Windows replacement for Microsoft print servers and networked file sharing. Even those prominent developers who are critical of GPLv3, such as Linus Torvalds, have criticized the license on the basis of WHAT IT ACTUALLY LIMITS (e.g. Tivoization), not by warning darkly about nefarious future intentions of the FSF.
Not really. FSF has shown beyond reasonable doubt that they will change the terms of their license according to their whim and to suit their agenda without any regard whatsoever to their user and developer base, at the drop of a hat and without listening to valid criticism. I have no doubt they will do it again. In their power-hungry madness they will try to force their users into complete slavery, and I believe GCC will be one of the first instruments to their supposed rise to world domination - only it will bring about their destruction when everybody but the most foaming-at-the-mouth-zealots moves on to serious OSs and lets FSF and their EFFing lackeys dwindle away into irrelevance.
Aplogies for the tone of utter disgust and somewhat unexplainable epic. The first is inspired by your reference to Stallman. The second, I just felt like trying on for size. Now you're just trolling, but I'll bite.
Since when has the FSF ever changed their license(s) "at the drop of a hat". The GPLv3 drafting and commenting process lasted over a year! And they definitely *listened* to "their user and developer base", even inviting them to leave critical annotations to the GPLv3 draft text. Whether they responded fully is another matter, but on many issues I believe they clearly did, such as the issue of clarifying requirements to distribute encryption keys (some worried that a strict reading of the original text might require devs to distribute personal passwords, for example).
And furthermore, the GPL has *always* granted users the freedom to fork the software, and ignore the FSF. Don't like where the FSF is taking Emacs? Fork it! Don't like where the FSF is taking GCC? Fork it! Et cetera. You may not receive any love letters from Richard Stallman for doing so, but the FSF has clearly provided a legal framework in which you're well within your rights to fork their software and avoid their oversight, as long as you abide by the license terms. I consider that a sign of great and deep integrity, and it remains unchanged with the GPLv3.
Yeah, I tend to agree. The physical user interface is very nice and convenient, and the software interface is very responsive.
On the other hand, I hate everything else about the iPod: iTunes, the fact that you can't just copy MP3 files on and off from the command line, the stupid clicky noise, the hard-to-replace battery, the easily-scratched screen cover, the lack of FM radio which every other player has, the high prices
I'm told the Rockbox firmware fixes all the iPod's problems except the battery and high prices, which are still sticking points for me. I have a Sansa E130 which cost 1/2 what the cheapest iPod Shuffle does... except mine has a screen, uses a standard battery, has an FM radio, can expand memory with SD cards, and you can just copy MP3 files on and off. While the user interface is GOOD overall, the menu button is placed poorly, and the response to the arrows/scroll wheel is sluggish... unlike the iPod.
For all it's much vaunted optimisation, I've rarely seen GCC get more than a 10% speedup going from -O0 to -O3. You must have only used x86... where the processor HARDWARE does a lot of work to predict branches, speculatively execute code, execute variable numbers of instructions per clock, etc. In the RISC world, nearly all the optimization comes from the compiler. For example, let me try compiling this simple loop using GCC 4.0.3 for the original MIPS instruction set:
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int i,x=0;
for (i=0; i<100; i++)
x+=i; }
With no optimization (-O0), the loop body contains 14 instructions, including two load-from-memory operations and two possible branches on each iteration. With highest optimization (-O3), the loop body takes only 2 instructions, with both variables stored in registers. Also, the code SIZE is reduced, allowing more code to fit in cache, which is often small in the embedded systems where MIPS processors are most used today. Since each instruction takes one cycle (assuming no cache miss), the optimized version will run 7 times faster than the unoptimized version.
Obviously, this is a somewhat contrived example, but the point is that optimization is crucial on RISC hardware where the processor itself is simple and doesn't try to do too much fancy run-time work to speed up the code. And frankly, the more I learn about RISC, the more I wish we were all running MIPS boxes... the basic philosophy is "don't do anything in the hardware that could be done just as well in the compiler." This leads to extremely simple processor designs (=> higher potential speed and lower cost), better real-time performance, fewer quirks, and more problems pushed into the software arena where they are easier to work on.
- it is better than GCC. If this is the case, then its too bad the GNU folk cannot benefit from whatever it has that GCC doesn't. Not like they'll admit it's superiority I'd presume.
Actually... the BSD license is GPLv2 or GPLv3-compatible, because it doesn't impose any restrictions beyond those included in GPLv2 or GPLv3. So BSD code can be incorporated into a GPL program (Theo de Radt's recent rants notwithstanding).
Not really; you already have the sun and intel compilers for Linux (I've been told that the intel compiler has even been tweaked so you can build a bzImage with it).
But you're still stuck with using glibc if you want to be able to compile anything. You do have different libcs floating around, uclibc, etc; but they're all gnu and they're all meant for embedded market. I doubt you'd be able to recompile the linux kernel with any of them. No no no. Repeat after me: "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL". You can use the GPL license (yes, even the latest GPLv3) without accepting any oversight or political interference by the Free Software Foundation / GNU project. Just ask Linus Torvalds. He freely admits that choosing GPLv2 for Linux was the best choice he ever made, but the Linux project is not controlled by the FSF in any way, and in fact Linus disagrees with them on nearly all current issues of software politics:-)
Slashdot Mirror
... Novell may not have any desire to take over the actually business, but they could make a business from taking over the product and transitioning the customer base to their SuSE offering. In turn they could release the product [SCO Unix] source (as they would own it now) to the community. Linux developers could then benifit from any code that might be worth a damn within the product. I think it would be ironic that the very code SCO swears was stolen for the linux kernel, would be completely fair game for the kernel developers. I'm pretty sure the value of the SCO Unix code is damn close to zero. And actually porting any useful bits into Linux might be higher cost than it's worth.There's a reason SCO stopped trying to make money off Unix products, and started suing everyone: their products sucked. They lacked the low cost, wide hardware support, and fast development pace of Linux and BSD. They lacked the advanced SMP, reputation, and integrated vendor support of Solaris and AIX.
Over the last few years, Linux and BSD (and even Solaris) have been improved and extended rapidly. But SCO's products have pretty much stood still. OpenServer had its last release over two years ago, Unixware three years ago!
Doesn't Facebook run PHP on Apache on Linux... I don't know the DB, but it sounds like it's basically a LAMP setup!
:-P
Is Microsoft going to pressure them to excise all that open-source junk from Facebook? And run it on some nice Windows server with IIS and ASP.NET and what not?
Just as they did with Hotmail! Microsoft spent years and $ migrating Hotmail from FreeBSD/Solaris to Windows 2000
I save many of my text documents in .doc format. The reason? It "just works" ... OpenOffice is truly amazing when it comes to importing and exporting text documents to MS Word's format. It gets references, fonts, formatting just right even with repeated import/export cycles. It even makes a heroic effort to translate or at least not permanently mangle OLE objects and Visual Basic scripts.
.doc format. For my own personal documents I use ODF. I am a strong supporter of ODF, and I'll celebrate the day when we kiss .doc goodbye permanently. But for now, OpenOffice's import/export is *so good* and convenient, may as well use it :-)
So, for any document that I'm going to have to share with others... I use
It's a different story with presentations. OpenOffice does quite well with PowerPoint format, but loses some advanced animations and sometimes fudges drawings a bit. So I keep everything in ODF format, and only export to PPT if absolutely necessary.
... the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog [CC] for details." OMG!!!!!! The O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag is coming out!!! My friend Tiffany is, like, *totally* gonna freak when she hears about it.For example, a few years ago my ex-girlfriend had to make a large database of English loanwords used in China for her undergrad thesis. I tried to get her to use MySQL, but the lack of any GUI at the time was a turnoff. She used MS Access successfully instead.
I hear that Kexi (KDE-based) is a very nice and rapidly improving Access replacement, but haven't tried it. Nothing like it for GNOME, AFAIK.
Well... I must be doing something wrong, cause I get way slower times on way newer systems. Ubuntu Feisty, 2.0ghz Turion 64 x2, 1gb RAM. It still takes TEN SECONDS to cold-start OO.o to a blank document, and about 3 for subsequent starts. And on my 2ghz Athlon 64 with only 512mb RAM, it takes about thirty seconds. It's ridiculous.
OO.o has truly amazingly good MS Office import/export... it even gets equations and PowerPoint animations right most of the time!! And it runs snappy with 100-page documents with complex formatting, way better than MS Word in that regard. But the OpenOffice UI is ugly--it looks bad under KDE, GNOME, Windows, *and* Mac OS... quite a feat. And it's a serious memory hog. Its templates, database, and some export filters depend on Java for no good reason other than Sun wants a little Java in everything.
Despite these faults, I prefer OO.o to MS Office. I'd say it reached parity about a year ago. The word processor is faster with large documents than MS Word. The presentations lags powerpoint a bit in terms of graphical slickness, but is otherwise excellent. I don't use the OO.o spreadsheet program; I prefer Gnumeric, which is *extremely* fast, extremely reliable, integrates perfectly with my GNOME desktop, and generally kicks the crap out of Excel in my opinion.
I checked the USB 2.0 spec, and it actually only requires only twist per 60-80 mm... much less than Ethernet CAT 6! So my ugly home-made cable is actually within spec or nearly so ;-)
Here's a 6-foot USB cable costing $31 (!!!): from circuit city. It features: 24K gold-plated connectors: Corrosion-proof for improved conductivity. 20-gauge high-performance power wires ensure better data transmission. ... as if any of that mattered. ("Power wires improve better data transmission", WTF??!?!) Of course, you can get an indistinguishable cable for about $3 from any of dozens of reputable online-only shops, such as: here.
I keep around a few spare USB AB cables, which I give to friends and family when they tell me they're going to buy a new printer. I tell them to insist to the sales-person that they already have the proper cable. They save $25-30 and I get the smug feeling of sticking it to a dishonest industry... woohoo
PS- The ironic part is that the USB connectors and cables are actually *specified* with extremely loose tolerances, so that cheap processes and materials can be used to manufacture them reliably. And since the USB protocol is *digital* and includes error-correction, cables have to be almost ludicrously bad for their quality to affect signaling. Case in point: I have a functioning home-made USB cable which I produced by splicing the wires from two cables together and wrapping them with electrical tape. This completely violates the USB spec, which requires that the data wires form a twisted pair with something like 5mm per twist. However, my ugly home-made cable transmits data from a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure at the same speed as a proper cable.
Forget about the extinction of human languages, none of us speak 'em anyway! Let's all take a moment to reflect on the shocking death of so many beloved programming languages...
:'(
When was the last time you came across BASIC in the wild? You know, 100 PRINT "HELLO" 200 GOTO 100? None of that mongrel "Visual" junk! How about Turbo Pascal? Or 68000 assembly language? To say nothing of rare species, like INTERCAL!
Heck, even a language that's near and dear to my Linux-geek heart is dying: Perl. The reason? Too ugly to reproduce, a situation that we here on Slashdot can all understand!! Perl may flash the $dollar $signs $all $$over $the{$place}, but let's face it... the ladies are going for Python these days. With its clean-cut good looks and plethora of web frameworks, Python is just irresistible. To say nothing of Ruby, Perl's one-time protégé which has now become the coolest kid in town.
Yes, folks, though it grieves me to say so, Perl is dying in my heart. The other day, I quietly shed a tear when I realized it was nothing more to me than a way to run one-liner regular expressions from the shell prompt
Now *THAT* I can agree with! I'm in a physics lab, possibly the only work environment more male-skewed than IT?
.
.
What if 90% of the techs are male? Well, then we get 49% of 90% is 44.1%, and 35% of 10% is 3.5, so 47.1%. We still haven't got more than 50%.
You may be onto something there. Or, I've fallen asleep and cant to math anymore.
That's just funny. Good catch.
Cheers Heh, yes you need some sleep
I did read TFA :-) The article polled 5700 US workers, of whom only 163 were IT workers. TFA refers to them as IT workers and "techies" interchangeably. I agree that the terminology is confusing, but it's not my terminology, it's the article's.
And yet, somehow, more than half of all techs have fallen asleep at work. Gosh, that's interesting. Those non-male non-female techs sure must do a lot of sleeping on the job!
Frankly, I think Microsoft shouldn't stop at abandoning Vista. Microsoft should abandon Windows. I realized the other day that the only Windows program I actually prefer to the Linux equivalent is PowerPoint.
But I may be in a minority here. I can barely keep myself from tearing my hair off every time I sit down in front of a Windows box.
What, no Bash shell??? No Firefox installed by default??? Where's python??? Where's xchat??? Where's apt-get... I don't want to sit around clicking on installers all day!!?!? ARGHGHGH.
That'll get your laptop back, AND get you some satisfaction.
You got it. UMS support is great. I can write a shell script to transfer music onto and off of my Sansa the way I want it. I can drag and drop from the Desktop. If a friend copies a song onto my player, I'm actually able to copy it *off* onto my home computer. I have more choices than just iTunes or GtkPod for music management. In Australia i listen to a radio station called Triple J a lot. They have upcomming bands and no ads, as they are run by the government broadcasting system. i use my sansa to record the songs i like and record the names of the songs, that way i can find new bands. I also hate the term "Podcast". Its just an audio stream, it didn't need a new name The term "podcast" bugs me too, because it doesn't really have anything to do with iPods in particular. Nor is it much like broadcasting, since the audio is pre-recorded then distributed, rather than streamed live.I fail to see that as a valid rebuttal to this guys complaints. I have a sansa and am very thankfull it has Universal mass storage support. I dont have to install a single driver on anything i plug it into, and it can refresh its library itself, meaning all i have to do is copy and paste and the player, no third party app, does all the work.
On the other hand, there is no other good term for such a thing. Hrmmm...
Why do you care? I care because it's the most convenient way for me to get music on and off my player! I decide what I want to listen to for the next couple of days and just do "cp coolmusic/*
You can turn it off, stupid. Good to know. the easily-scratched screen cover,
I have a 6 month old Nano which has never seen a protective sleeve. It has zero scratches on its screen, despite sometimes being carried loose in a pocket with my cellphone. Lucky you! My girlfriend, who is meticulous and careful with all of her possessions, has a regular iPod which she keeps in a protective sleeve when working out, but despite that it's very scratched up after about one year. the lack of FM radio which every other player has,
Why do you care? Honestly, what is left worth listening to on FM radio? Most things which I'm actually interested in listening to on radio are better in podcast form, anyways (no ads). I listen to news and classical music on NPR (public radio, if you're not from the USA) *all the time*. I probably listen to it more than I do stored music files! Podcasting doesn't work if you want to hear the latest news or weather.
It's not so constructive of you to dismiss useful features with, "Why do you care?" Well, I do care about those features... and since Apple players don't offer those features, while nearly every other brand does, I take my dollar elsewhere.
Okay, sure, but the data I gave show the highest optimization that ACTUALLY COMPUTES THE RESULT... I could have trivially made it not optimize out the function by having main() return x.
For example, if you think the GPLv3 is too onerous... then you fork the last GPLv2 version of whatever program you want. If enough people agree with you, they'll abandon the FSF and jump into your project. If you're okay with the GPLv3, but it turns out that the GPLv4 requires you to give your unborn children to Richard Stallman, then no problem! Just fork the last GPLv3 version of some GNU program and you're good to go?
Is this "threat of forking" really plausible? Sure is! When XFree86 switched its licensing terms to something that many developers and users didn't like, besides a few other disagreements, the developers abandoned XFree86 en masse and the X.org foundation invited them in. Within a few months, X.org was the standard and XFree86 is irrelevant today (partial history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.org#History)
Are your worries about the FSF reasonable TODAY? I don't really think so. A lot of *non-FSF* projects have switched enthusiastically to the GPLv3. Most notable is Samba, which is used by hundreds (thousands?) of companies as a better-than-Windows replacement for Microsoft print servers and networked file sharing. Even those prominent developers who are critical of GPLv3, such as Linus Torvalds, have criticized the license on the basis of WHAT IT ACTUALLY LIMITS (e.g. Tivoization), not by warning darkly about nefarious future intentions of the FSF.
Aplogies for the tone of utter disgust and somewhat unexplainable epic. The first is inspired by your reference to Stallman. The second, I just felt like trying on for size. Now you're just trolling, but I'll bite.
Since when has the FSF ever changed their license(s) "at the drop of a hat". The GPLv3 drafting and commenting process lasted over a year! And they definitely *listened* to "their user and developer base", even inviting them to leave critical annotations to the GPLv3 draft text. Whether they responded fully is another matter, but on many issues I believe they clearly did, such as the issue of clarifying requirements to distribute encryption keys (some worried that a strict reading of the original text might require devs to distribute personal passwords, for example).
And furthermore, the GPL has *always* granted users the freedom to fork the software, and ignore the FSF. Don't like where the FSF is taking Emacs? Fork it! Don't like where the FSF is taking GCC? Fork it! Et cetera. You may not receive any love letters from Richard Stallman for doing so, but the FSF has clearly provided a legal framework in which you're well within your rights to fork their software and avoid their oversight, as long as you abide by the license terms. I consider that a sign of great and deep integrity, and it remains unchanged with the GPLv3.
Yeah, I tend to agree. The physical user interface is very nice and convenient, and the software interface is very responsive.
On the other hand, I hate everything else about the iPod:
iTunes,
the fact that you can't just copy MP3 files on and off from the command line,
the stupid clicky noise,
the hard-to-replace battery,
the easily-scratched screen cover,
the lack of FM radio which every other player has,
the high prices
I'm told the Rockbox firmware fixes all the iPod's problems except the battery and high prices, which are still sticking points for me. I have a Sansa E130 which cost 1/2 what the cheapest iPod Shuffle does... except mine has a screen, uses a standard battery, has an FM radio, can expand memory with SD cards, and you can just copy MP3 files on and off. While the user interface is GOOD overall, the menu button is placed poorly, and the response to the arrows/scroll wheel is sluggish... unlike the iPod.
Obviously, this is a somewhat contrived example, but the point is that optimization is crucial on RISC hardware where the processor itself is simple and doesn't try to do too much fancy run-time work to speed up the code. And frankly, the more I learn about RISC, the more I wish we were all running MIPS boxes... the basic philosophy is "don't do anything in the hardware that could be done just as well in the compiler." This leads to extremely simple processor designs (=> higher potential speed and lower cost), better real-time performance, fewer quirks, and more problems pushed into the software arena where they are easier to work on.
Actually... the BSD license is GPLv2 or GPLv3-compatible, because it doesn't impose any restrictions beyond those included in GPLv2 or GPLv3. So BSD code can be incorporated into a GPL program (Theo de Radt's recent rants notwithstanding).
But you're still stuck with using glibc if you want to be able to compile anything. You do have different libcs floating around, uclibc, etc; but they're all gnu and they're all meant for embedded market. I doubt you'd be able to recompile the linux kernel with any of them. No no no. Repeat after me: "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL" "GNU != GPL". You can use the GPL license (yes, even the latest GPLv3) without accepting any oversight or political interference by the Free Software Foundation / GNU project. Just ask Linus Torvalds. He freely admits that choosing GPLv2 for Linux was the best choice he ever made, but the Linux project is not controlled by the FSF in any way, and in fact Linus disagrees with them on nearly all current issues of software politics