They complied with a request from the OSS community, I don't see how that makes them try to squash OSS. If there's any squashing going on, it's one part of the OSS community against another.
The GPL is to blame. It's fundamentally incompatible with the app store's terms of service. The app store terms forbid you from sharing apps you downloaded from it, even if they are free. The GPL does not recognize pointing people to a free download on the app store as the re-distribution that it wants to enforce to be possible.
No, he's not trying to impose additional conditions. The GPL doesn't allow distribution under terms that are more restrictive than the GPL is. The app store terms of use are more restrictive, so apps affected by the GPL can not be distributed through it.
Well, that's what happened. The IP owner complained about the infringing app and Apple complied with the IP owner's request. There is really nothing else they could do, but this is slashdot, and things work differently here. And as for accommodating GPL apps... why the hell would you think Apple would go out of their way for an app that competes with their core business?
I got my degree years ago and laptop use was common then; almost all of us had laptops in front of us most of the time. Of course, I studied information technology, but still. I thought it was a great tool; a search engine can be a highly valuable complement to slides. Of course we also read our e-mail during boring lectures, or played GTA, but I don't really see that as the laptop's fault. Back in school I had no laptop, but still found something to do when a class was boring. As for distractions from other students, there were plenty but those were mostly the chatty ones making actual noise, as opposed to people playing games with headphones plugged in, who didn't bother me one bit.
Heh. I never thought exim was hard to configure. Some things are a lot easier in exim 4 than in postfix. On the other hand, I used to edit sendmail.cf without m4 back in the day and didn't think of that as particularly hard either.
Of course a Word document is better suited. So is anything else that preserves the text itself, as opposed to preserving its rendered form. HTML is pretty good for this too. With PDF it can be hard to even figure out where the next word in a sentence is. It doesn't have anything to do with proprietary or not, there are enough free or open formats that work, it's just that PDF is not one of them.
Sure, but the suspicious thing about this particular optimization is that adding a no-op statement that merely expresses something that is otherwise implicit (the return at the end of the function) disables it. This makes it look like they are optimizing for code that looks exactly like the source code of this function... which is not a very useful thing to do unless you want to cheat at a benchmark.
An X session has a tty because it's started on a real tty. A terminal will create a pseudo tty for everything that runs in it, and if you run make -j64 then make and all its child processes will share that pseudo tty. A GUI application launched from some X-based launcher will likely not end up with its own tty, but you could start it from a terminal to test if there is any effect.
What this patch does is, essentially, treat make -j64 in a shell as *one* job, not as 64 different jobs that are all equal to your one firefox/thunderbird/glxgears process. I don't think it's the next big thing. But it's certainly an improvement for a situation that is reasonably likely to occur on Linux, whether you know it or not (e.g. the automatic GUI update tool of your distro might really be running some scripts in a pseudo tty, and so on).
I don't get it. JRockit was always proprietary. Why should they make it free just because they have the good sense to consolidate their JVM projects into one?
The EU actually has a non-idiotic/recommendation/ for this, it's just not binding, i.e. member states don't have to implement it. The EU recommendation is similar to the actual UK legislation that basically allows taking pictures of anything that's directly visible from a public location. I.e. buildings on a road, even sculptures. Now I don't know the status of Stonehenge, maybe it's not considered a public location for some reason?
But I doubt it is really covered by/copyright/ of all things, since it's not an original work of the would-be copyright owner.
Most users don't *want* to stray from the party line or even realize that there is such a thing. They just want something that works. For normal people, Mac OS X gets that right most of the time, but not necessarily only because the UI is easy to use.
For example, my mother needs a web browser and something that gets her photos off her camera. She does use e-mail, but as far as I know, she only uses some web mail system. She has a Mac because she can go to a store, pick one up, and it just works and does everything she wants to do without her having to call her son about it. It's not so much that she thinks this wouldn't be possible with Linux, it's more that she doesn't even care and/or have a good idea of what Linux even is. She's not buying an operating system, she's buying a magical box that lets her access the web and that stores her photos. Even Windows would beat Linux if new Windows systems didn't come pre-loaded with so much crapware...
This may come as a surprise to you, but most people who buy computers want something that can run Word and is cheap. $50 less for a difference they won't notice is a very good deal.
You have point. Although if Apple can make devices now that aren't really much thicker than a sheet of glass (or are as thick as a sheet of glass, but smaller, like the iPod), then Microsoft should be able to do the same in three years:)
First, they don't actually ban other browsers. They only ban other engines. There are a number of third party browsers that use webkit.
Second, it's "then don't use Apple devices" because you apparently aren't in their target market. They are not marketing to people who want systems they can use the way they want. It's hard to understand for the typical slashdot crowd, but most people do not actually want five hundred computers in their home that they all have to maintain themselves. They want a certain type of functionality that just works.
It's not that it's not irrecovable in Germany (many other European countries are similar actually). You just can't, ever, re-assign copyright. So you can't technically put something in the public domain. Copyright always remains with you (the exception is that an employment agreement or contract can have the effect of assigning copyright to your employer, but that's not a transfer because in those cases it never lay with you in the first place).
What you can do is grant a perpetual unlimited license. A license can't be revoked once granted unless you put specific language in it that allows you to revoke it. CC-0 is so complicated in part because it covers several different cases that may occur in regional legislation, including this one - it has a fallback for when copyright can't be assigned away that grants everybody an automatic license.
Muro was just an example for the kind of content you can create without plugins.
My telephone runs flash, it's a Nokia N900. It also runs bash and openssh and lets me access GPS data from python and all that. Unfortunately it's a horrible telephone. As much as I'd like to think of myself as a FOSS geek, I think I'm getting too old for this kind of crap. My next telephone will be non-smart again.
Shame that everybody thinks (well, it's changing) that you have to have to install 5000 plugins before you can view all the ads on a web page. I prefer not having to do that, and my iPad runs deviantART muro better than Firefox on my desktop, so...
A large amount of malloc()/free() calls is something very typical of server applications that handle many concurrent requests. In this scenario, the problem is made worse by the locking used in many traditional implementations. Don't underestimate that.
This is becoming more and more of a problem in client applications as well. Thanks to object orientation, many modern applications are little more than endless streams of created and subsequently destroyed objects; and in many modern languages this happens implicitly all the time.
You do need them for theoretical computer science, and in turn, you need theoretical computer science to invent something new that you could program. Most programmers don't do theoretical work themselves, and most theoretical computer scientists don't finish their software;-) It's a completely different type of job.
I don't know, there are many multiplayer games that work without split screen. If a Mario title can do it then a dungeon crawler should be able to do it too.
CIV is only 4.5 years old though. It would be on my list as well, but Civ 5 is scheduled to come out right around CIV's 5th birthday, and knowing me I will probably switch to it then, as I have with every prior Civ title...:)
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They complied with a request from the OSS community, I don't see how that makes them try to squash OSS. If there's any squashing going on, it's one part of the OSS community against another.
The GPL is to blame. It's fundamentally incompatible with the app store's terms of service. The app store terms forbid you from sharing apps you downloaded from it, even if they are free. The GPL does not recognize pointing people to a free download on the app store as the re-distribution that it wants to enforce to be possible.
No, he's not trying to impose additional conditions. The GPL doesn't allow distribution under terms that are more restrictive than the GPL is. The app store terms of use are more restrictive, so apps affected by the GPL can not be distributed through it.
Well, that's what happened. The IP owner complained about the infringing app and Apple complied with the IP owner's request. There is really nothing else they could do, but this is slashdot, and things work differently here. And as for accommodating GPL apps... why the hell would you think Apple would go out of their way for an app that competes with their core business?
I got my degree years ago and laptop use was common then; almost all of us had laptops in front of us most of the time. Of course, I studied information technology, but still. I thought it was a great tool; a search engine can be a highly valuable complement to slides. Of course we also read our e-mail during boring lectures, or played GTA, but I don't really see that as the laptop's fault. Back in school I had no laptop, but still found something to do when a class was boring. As for distractions from other students, there were plenty but those were mostly the chatty ones making actual noise, as opposed to people playing games with headphones plugged in, who didn't bother me one bit.
Heh. I never thought exim was hard to configure. Some things are a lot easier in exim 4 than in postfix. On the other hand, I used to edit sendmail.cf without m4 back in the day and didn't think of that as particularly hard either.
Of course a Word document is better suited. So is anything else that preserves the text itself, as opposed to preserving its rendered form. HTML is pretty good for this too. With PDF it can be hard to even figure out where the next word in a sentence is. It doesn't have anything to do with proprietary or not, there are enough free or open formats that work, it's just that PDF is not one of them.
Since pirates aren't actually taking the product itself and are merely copying data, how are the artists being hurt, exactly?
Since perverts aren't actually screwing you yourself and are merely distributing photographs that show you naked, how are you being hurt, exactly?
Sure, but the suspicious thing about this particular optimization is that adding a no-op statement that merely expresses something that is otherwise implicit (the return at the end of the function) disables it. This makes it look like they are optimizing for code that looks exactly like the source code of this function... which is not a very useful thing to do unless you want to cheat at a benchmark.
An X session has a tty because it's started on a real tty.
A terminal will create a pseudo tty for everything that runs in it, and if you run make -j64 then make and all its child processes will share that pseudo tty.
A GUI application launched from some X-based launcher will likely not end up with its own tty, but you could start it from a terminal to test if there is any effect.
What this patch does is, essentially, treat make -j64 in a shell as *one* job, not as 64 different jobs that are all equal to your one firefox/thunderbird/glxgears process. I don't think it's the next big thing. But it's certainly an improvement for a situation that is reasonably likely to occur on Linux, whether you know it or not (e.g. the automatic GUI update tool of your distro might really be running some scripts in a pseudo tty, and so on).
I don't get it. JRockit was always proprietary. Why should they make it free just because they have the good sense to consolidate their JVM projects into one?
The EU actually has a non-idiotic /recommendation/ for this, it's just not binding, i.e. member states don't have to implement it. The EU recommendation is similar to the actual UK legislation that basically allows taking pictures of anything that's directly visible from a public location. I.e. buildings on a road, even sculptures. Now I don't know the status of Stonehenge, maybe it's not considered a public location for some reason?
But I doubt it is really covered by /copyright/ of all things, since it's not an original work of the would-be copyright owner.
I'm not UK legal folk, but there is this: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/62
Most users don't *want* to stray from the party line or even realize that there is such a thing. They just want something that works. For normal people, Mac OS X gets that right most of the time, but not necessarily only because the UI is easy to use.
For example, my mother needs a web browser and something that gets her photos off her camera. She does use e-mail, but as far as I know, she only uses some web mail system. She has a Mac because she can go to a store, pick one up, and it just works and does everything she wants to do without her having to call her son about it. It's not so much that she thinks this wouldn't be possible with Linux, it's more that she doesn't even care and/or have a good idea of what Linux even is. She's not buying an operating system, she's buying a magical box that lets her access the web and that stores her photos. Even Windows would beat Linux if new Windows systems didn't come pre-loaded with so much crapware...
This may come as a surprise to you, but most people who buy computers want something that can run Word and is cheap. $50 less for a difference they won't notice is a very good deal.
You have point. Although if Apple can make devices now that aren't really much thicker than a sheet of glass (or are as thick as a sheet of glass, but smaller, like the iPod), then Microsoft should be able to do the same in three years :)
First, they don't actually ban other browsers. They only ban other engines. There are a number of third party browsers that use webkit.
Second, it's "then don't use Apple devices" because you apparently aren't in their target market. They are not marketing to people who want systems they can use the way they want. It's hard to understand for the typical slashdot crowd, but most people do not actually want five hundred computers in their home that they all have to maintain themselves. They want a certain type of functionality that just works.
It's not that it's not irrecovable in Germany (many other European countries are similar actually). You just can't, ever, re-assign copyright. So you can't technically put something in the public domain. Copyright always remains with you (the exception is that an employment agreement or contract can have the effect of assigning copyright to your employer, but that's not a transfer because in those cases it never lay with you in the first place).
What you can do is grant a perpetual unlimited license. A license can't be revoked once granted unless you put specific language in it that allows you to revoke it. CC-0 is so complicated in part because it covers several different cases that may occur in regional legislation, including this one - it has a fallback for when copyright can't be assigned away that grants everybody an automatic license.
Muro was just an example for the kind of content you can create without plugins.
My telephone runs flash, it's a Nokia N900. It also runs bash and openssh and lets me access GPS data from python and all that. Unfortunately it's a horrible telephone. As much as I'd like to think of myself as a FOSS geek, I think I'm getting too old for this kind of crap. My next telephone will be non-smart again.
Shame that everybody thinks (well, it's changing) that you have to have to install 5000 plugins before you can view all the ads on a web page. I prefer not having to do that, and my iPad runs deviantART muro better than Firefox on my desktop, so...
A large amount of malloc()/free() calls is something very typical of server applications that handle many concurrent requests. In this scenario, the problem is made worse by the locking used in many traditional implementations. Don't underestimate that.
This is becoming more and more of a problem in client applications as well. Thanks to object orientation, many modern applications are little more than endless streams of created and subsequently destroyed objects; and in many modern languages this happens implicitly all the time.
...it's still there if you use this link: http://xkcd.com/unixkcd/
You don't need math skills for programming work.
You do need them for theoretical computer science, and in turn, you need theoretical computer science to invent something new that you could program. Most programmers don't do theoretical work themselves, and most theoretical computer scientists don't finish their software ;-) It's a completely different type of job.
I don't know, there are many multiplayer games that work without split screen. If a Mario title can do it then a dungeon crawler should be able to do it too.
CIV is only 4.5 years old though. It would be on my list as well, but Civ 5 is scheduled to come out right around CIV's 5th birthday, and knowing me I will probably switch to it then, as I have with every prior Civ title... :)