CSS isn't exactly DRM. It is used to encrypt content, but it isn't involved in this giant trust relationship between "authorized hardware" and software that is being pushed. DRM is the new CSS, but the old CSS is nothing like it. That said, I am happy to strip any DRM protections from media I buy so that I can watch it unhindered in any way I want. If they ever succeed in making a system where I can't do this, I simply won't buy any media that uses it.
In the third [screen]shot down, the windows stacked at a 3-D angle looks horrible.
Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was just a poor screenshot, but it almost looks like the window was bitmapped and rotated giving you that extremely granular look. SVG desktop anyone? This is one reason why I really like the idea of Cairo support being added to Gtk, even if there is a performance hit.
I would absolutely love to have an all Linux/Mac lab, but unfortunately there are still quite a few must have Windows programs for our work:
Unicorn (for FPLC control)
Chemstation (for HPLC and spectrophotometer control)
Dynafit (essential for almost any sort of kinetics experiment)
Origin (Matlab will work for most data analysis purposes, but Origin is nice for other things, and required for ITC)
Endnote (Yes, I prefer Latex, but everybody else uses Endnote)
SciFinder Scholar (Windows only, as far as I know)
ChemOffice
I would probably also have a hard time weening people from Office. It is still fairly ubiquitous for PowerPoint et al. OpenOffice would probably do the job, but it is hard to convince people, especially when you need things like Endnote and custom templates/macros.
Compare, say, setting up apache on a typical Linux distribution with configuring IIS on Windows.
I'm sorry, but that is just a bad example. First thing, I have setup Apache several times, and if you know the first thing about networking, it is pretty straightforward to read through the well-commented configuration file and fill in the blanks. Second, Apache is a server. It is not a desktop application that is going to configured and run by Joe Blow, and it shouldn't be. If you are going to allow people to connect to your machine and access stuff on your hard disk, you better know what the hell you are doing. IIS has a nice configuration gui, but that should be pretty insignificant to a server administrator, and it is probably pretty frustrating when it doesn't do what you need it to do.
A much better example would be to point out current problems with networking configuration. Networking on linux is very server oriented, with all connections being configured at boot and pretty much assumed to be static connections. It makes it hard to integrate network roaming, per-user configuration, and wifi access. Tools for the latter do exist, but they are a bit kludgy and difficult to get working properly. Thankfully, along with the general desktop push being made, this is being addressed. NetworkManager from Red Hat is shaping up pretty nicely, and I hope to see it setup in the desktop distributions soon.
Oh and GConf, in my opinion, is a very sensible way of handling configuration options. The database is an xml file, which is easy to access with a number of different tools, including your favorite text editor. It is fast, everything is in one place, it is easy to backup, and it doesn't get corrupted. Of course, it doesn't work for everything. I don't think Apache would be able to put it's configuration into a GConf node, but I don't think it has ever been tried either. You might be taking exception to gconf-editor, which does unfortunately resemble the Windows registry interface. I can't really think of a better way of presenting hundreds of configuration options to the user, though. They are fairly well organized, and there is a search facility to make it easy to find what you are looking for.
Just sneak into your local university library and get it off the computers there. Most universities have institutional subscriptions, so if you have a uni ip address you can access the article.
why is doing bad things more profitable than doing good things?
Because the people that stand to profit are greedy and selfish. It is more profitable in the short term to do bad things, but in the long term it will tank the company. The current business landscape encourages looking to short term gains at the expense of long term viability, which means a few people profit big and everybody else gets screwed (shareholders that don't pull out in time included). When people "check their morality at the door," this is what happens. Incentives designed to encourage certain behaviors from people assumed to be acting in a wholly self-centered way are not sufficient. If you want people to look at the bigger picture, they have to be forward thinking and care about other people and society as a whole. They can't just be chasing incentives.
I think really what we need to do is spread out the burden. All power generating facilities are going to cause environmental damage, but they are going to do it in different ways. Small perturbations aren't going to be as bad as large perturbations. So a few wind turbines will cause some noise pollution, but if you stick them out in the middle of Oklahoma and use them for that local area, it won't be such a big problem. You can setup a few solar plants, nuclear plants, coal plants, geothermal/aquathermal systems, etc...in different areas where geographically best suited. Then you don't have to worry about powering the entire world with aquathermal and causing changes in the ocean currents. Of course, multiple power-generating facilities results in a larger burden for the utility companies, especially since some methods are more expensive than others. So we probably won't see anything like that in my lifetime.
Ummm...you are contradicting yourself. The more free a market is, the fewer rules there are. In a completely free market, there are no rules. Aside from the usual "Thou shalt not steal," I consider those rules for society, not for markets. If you are trying to draw a distinction between rules made by governments to regulate markets and rules made by markets to regulate markets, I don't see the difference.
Sorry, your EDIT is wrong. You can see this by comparing the poor in societies with free markets to the poor in societies without free markets.
Nonsense. You are blithely ignoring hundreds of other variables in making such a comparison. The tremendous growth in world economies over the last century has been with pseudo-free markets, which says to me that the (mixed economy) system works. Drawing the conclusion that a "more free" market would result in even better growth is erroneous logic.
So you now claim the submitter knew that the term "free market" is not an oxymoron.
That's not what I said at all.
Don't worry, you'll understand it one day when you can't get a software job that pays and RMS controls everything that happens in your computer.
I obviously understand it quite a bit more than you do because you are making stuff up and being rude in an effort to defend your position. I disagree with you because I think you are wrong not because I am stupid. Deal with it. Look up the word "troll" in the dictionary.
This time I will say it as clearly is I can and then I'm going to give up. The GPL does not inhibit the free market process. Copyright inhibits the free market process. The licensing (not selling) of intellectual property is inherently not a free market system. The lock-in you refer to is what makes it not a free market system, and it has nothing to do with the GPL. You can be just as easily locked-in to, say, a proprietary database and be forced to pay non-negotiable exhorbitant prices to a company for licenses.
The term "free market" has a certain definition and I have explained why the market for GPL software is not a free market. If you didn't understand my explanation you should think harder (but be careful not to burst your brain) instead of whining "that's just your opinion i'm not listening la la la". And please look up the word oxymoron in a dictionary.
Not getting the point...let me simplify it for you. The "market" for GPL software is just as free as for proprietary software. That is, I own the copyright on the code and can therefore charge whatever I want for it. If somebody wants to negotiate a lower price, they have to find another implementation with the functionality they need somewhere offered at a different price (sometimes trivial, ex: a text editor, sometimes not so much, ex: an operating system). So in other words, it is not free, even by your definition. The supplier sets the price (in the case of GPL software the price is to release your own code), and the potential buyer either pays the price or goes elsewhere. There is no negotiation until there are sufficient alternative implementations that the buyer is not "locked-in" to one supplier.
Btw, oxymoron (n): conjoining contradictory terms (as in `deafening silence')
Another one would be "honest politician" which is kind of funny. The article poster believes "free market" is also a funny one, not because a free market cannot theoretically exist, but because they don't exist for various reasons.
The story was both off-topic and inflammatory. But not funny or satirical (look up the word satire in a dictionary).
How can a story be off-topic? It is the topic. Inflammatory...maybe. No more so than a snide comment about intelligent design, though. Funny is relative. I found it funny as did many other Slashdotters. You did not, so what.
satire (n): Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.
Added note: often used as a form of political commentary. See "Praise of Folly" by Erasmus or "Candide" by Voltaire.
Perhaps you need to go back and read the dictionary some more.
Slashdot rejects submissions frequently and without giving reasons
Rejecting a story for whatever reason, a dupe for example, is just that, rejecting a story. Rejecting a story because you don't agree with the political point of view of the poster is censorship. The article should have been rejected because it was a dupe, not because of a side comment by the poster.
markets which are more free produce more wealth for the participants
EDIT: markets which are more free produce more wealth for some of the participants
A truly free market is like a sport without any rules. The winners are the people with bigger bats. It encourages participation to an extent; there is more to gain for the people who succeed. But eventually it bottoms out as people realize they don't really want to lose their arms wrestling with the 800 lb. gorilla who, without any competition, suddenly has no incentive to be nice to anybody and starts running around burning houses down.
The FSF defines "free" as "free from anything that goes against Stallman's communist agenda".
Uh huh. Well, you are free to write your own implementation of that code "required for compatibility" making yourself free of the GPL. You are also free to buy a non-GPL license from the FSF. Sounds like a free market to me, by your definition. Oh wait, I get it, a free market is only "free" depending on the point of view of the observer. Sounds pretty oxymoronic to me.
And since when should the editors censor articles just because of a political, albeit satirical (*woosh*), comment?
Unhighlightable, unsearchable, undisplayable w/o flash. WTF are these guys thinking? Why don't you just make your web page one giant imagemap? That would allow custom typography w/o usability and give you that nice brochure look too.
He makes some good points, but he is kind of picking on OpenOffice which, though popular, is hardly the poster-child of Open Source. The code was a mess long before it became open source. It took a lot of work to get it to even compile after it was open sourced. It uses it's own set of widgets, storage database, and even build system (i.e: it doesn't follow the code reuse principles of most of the successful open source projects). It takes a long time to get up to speed with the code before you can even hope to do anything with it. All of those, I would say, contribute to the reasons why OpenOffice is not "supported by the community." But there are quite a few large and very successful open source projects that do work on the principles the author was trying to refute. Mozilla, Gnome/KDE, Inkscape, Gnumeric, Abiword, Linux, GCC, XOrg, Apache.... So I wouldn't walk around saying the open source model has failed just yet.
Yeah, right. The problem is the Helix player doesn't do the one thing linux people have been clamoring about for years: play Real files! You have to separately download Realplayer, which means going to their website, accepting their license, downloading a.bin file, blah blah blah (in other words, no apt-get install realplayer). It is the exact same issue as before. The player is fine, but the licensing crap is a pain. It's not like we didn't already have several media players that work just fine. We don't need another media player. We need something that plays Real files. And it's not even a matter of open-sourcing their codecs. All they need to do is provide a binary codec that will plug into gstreamer or something. Both Xine and MPlayer already support binary loading of codecs. They just don't do the real format very well, so a good binary Real codec would solve a lot of problems. But no, we can't do it the easy way....
Let's not confuse being introverted with being anti-social. The difference lies in the reason for being a quieter and more withdrawn person. If you hate people and are bitter towards all humanity, which leads to feelings of discomfort/awkwardness in social situations, and causes you to have a general attitude of "I don't want to talk to you, leave me alone with my computer," I would brand you anti-social. If you simply tend to be more pondering or analytical, a person who is comfortable in a social setting, but doesn't need/want to be the center of attention, then I would brand you introverted. You can also be a little of both, but I wouldn't equate "introverted person" with "shy person who doesn't like to be around people."
Thank you! Gosh, it's amazing how quickly people jump up and stereotype large groups of people based on their own prejudices. I run into a lot of anti-science sentiment, and most of it does not come from religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalism in the US is really just a noise machine. It does not represent a large part of the population, and it doesn't have as much influence as people would like to believe. The solution, in my opinion, is to actually try to address some of their concerns instead of just jumping up and saying "you're ignorant, you don't know what you are talking about." Nothing gets solved by constant bickering; there has to be some effort made towards discussion and compromise. I don't think the fundamentalists really want Genesis taught as a theory alongside evolution. What they want is for evolution to not be taught as a known fact...and they are right about that. Nothing in science is a known fact. Students need to be taught how science works (formulate a theory, gather evidence, accept/reject hypothesis, revise theory, wash/rinse/repeat). So simply saying "evolution is the currently accepted theory by the majority of the scientific community but, just like all science, there are alternative models supported by some groups of people," in a science class is perfectly acceptable to me, and I think it would be acceptable to the fundamentalists as well. I am much more worried about the anti-GMO propaganda machine that goes around trying to scare people by misinterpreting statistics and using inflammatory and misleading language like "frankenfoods" than I am about the religious factions that occassionaly poke their heads up and sqwak about the way evolution is taught in schools.
If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
If that happens, programs like OpenOffice will probably just do the same thing that web browsers do with html: incorporate workarounds that display the document the "Microsoft way." The advantage of an open format is that this is actually possible. Not so much if the format is closed.
1. FCC regulations change. 2. Radio transmissions are tricky things. A Wifi producer might release a patch that provides greater range by constantly modulating the power levels, yet remaining within the FCC's guidelines. 3. It's about a lot more than power. You can accidently generate a massive amount of broadband radio noise if you're not careful. Basically, the software is playing HAM operator with the Wifi card in order to tune the best performance out of it without running afoul of regulations. That's a good use for software.
1. FCC regulations don't change that often. 2/3. You are arguing for a flexibility in the cards that is unneeded/unused. Vendors still want to release new cards to follow changing technology. Speaking of which, where were your simple firmware updates when WPA came out, and now WPA2? Why did I have to buy a new card to support it instead of just updating my driver? Despite the advantages of having a software driven card, vendors still sell hardware. They don't want to sell software, so they are never going to design their cards to be entirely software dependent. The issue now is the stuff that they chose to make software dependent. Your card pretty much operates at a constant power and frequency through its lifetime. Any code to modulate and regulate the transmitter is fairly constant and doesn't need to be in software. For bug fixes, do the same thing that the router people and controller card people have been doing for years: store the code in flashable firmware *on the card* and then post firmware updates on your website.
You're not listening
I know what you are saying. The problem I have is with this: Thus they licensed NOT OpenGL, but all kinds of bits and pieces of 3D trickery, microcode, and hardware design thats patented by someone else, produced by someone else. Most of the original patents on "3D trickery" were owned by SGI and purchased by NVidia. Along the way NVidia has improved the technology and filed for its own patents. NVidia owns all of the technology used to drive their cards. If somebody else was doing the innovating they wouldn't be at the top of their game. And, by the way, patented technology does NOT mean you can't show people the code. In fact it means quite the opposite. A patent enables you to release the design into the public so that everybody can see how it works without stealing your idea. Licensing code under an NDA only happens when a patent is not involved because that is the only way to protect it. If that is the situation NVidia is in, that seems pretty silly. Anything that is not patented NVidia is free to implement themselves, something they are quite capable of (it's just math, like you say). Considering how competitive the market is, it would be stupid for NVidia to rely on a 3rd party for something as important as the code to drive their card. Oh, and did you notice that NVidia calls their driver a "unified driver architecture." That is because they have managed to abstract all of their 3D trickery so that they can just slap a new card in with instructions for how to drive it and have it work without rewriting the entire driver. So if NVidia can't release the 3D code, why can't they release the specs for the card? You still haven't addressed that.
That's why there are full drivers for NVidia, right? No wait, there aren't.
That's why there are full drivers for WinModems, right? No wait, there aren't.
That's why there are full drivers for WiFi cards, right? No wait, there aren't.
The NVidia driver is a difficult issue. A lot of people are content with the binary drivers for now, but if NVidia stopped releasing them tomorrow, quite a few people would step up to the plate to write a new driver.
There is at least one open source driver for a Winmodem, the IBM Mwave. There wasn't a lot of work put into these because not very many people care about them.
There are quite a few drivers for wifi cards. See this.
BZZZT! This is due to GOOD hardware design. By moving many of the controls to the software logic, the chips can be made simpler and more flexible. New features can be added by simply upgrading the software rather than requiring the consumer to purchase a new card.
Ummm...we were talking about wireless cards. Of course updatable firmware is good in a general sense. In the case of the wifi cards, though, the transmitter power is set in software. There is absolutely no reason for this because the transmission strength is heavily regulated by the FCC. Open source drivers wouldn't be an issue for these cards if this had been done correctly. Now that it's done, though, the way to get around this is to distribute an open source driver with a closed firmware module. Unfortunately, due to stupid licensing issues, these firmwares are not redistributable and therefore a lot of distributions can't ship with them.
If you think it's JUST an OpenGL implementation, you need to do your homework!
I never said it was "just an OpenGl implementation." I said they licensed an OpenGl implementation from somebody that won't let them open the code (or so they say). Yeah, so the meat of the driver is a lot of complicated shit, so what. In the end you are defining an OpenGl API for the programmer to talk to the card, and telling the card how to execute those instructions. The point is anybody can do this if they have the specs for the card, which Nvidia won't release. There shouldn't, or rather doesn't have to, be any sort of intellectual property stuff to deal with.
You and many others severely underestimate the problems inherent in releasing them.
No, I just don't believe any of their excuses. A lot of hardware in linux gets supported by someone reverse-engineering the damn chip because they can't get the specs, and the driver ends up working as good as or better than anything that gets released by the vendor, if that ever happens. Of course that process is slow, so it would be better if they could follow a spec sheet. If they can't write an open source driver for whatever reason, they can at least release the specs so somebody else can do it. They aren't protecting their trade secrets better with closed drivers. The truth is, vendors won't do anything unless they are pressured into it. Broadcom wouldn't be releasing open source ethernet drivers if every other ethernet card manufacturer wasn't already. Same with the people that make ide controllers and and scsi controllers. Linux is an important enough market for them to properly support it. In Nvidia's case, there just isn't a better contender, so they can do whatever they want, which is why I am waiting to see what happens with the OpenGraphics Project.
Prior to that you had to develop your own damn hardware interfaces.
Yes, I know. I was around in the DOS days. It was a lot of work writing drivers for every graphics card you might ever want to support with your program. Nobody wants to return to those days. Drivers should be written once and included with the OS. The question is, who writes them? Somebody who knows the hardware with some understanding of the operating system, or somebody who know the operating system following a spec sheet. I vote for the latter because there are a lot more people capable of helping out in that area. The people who make the hardware are hardware guys. They don't care about the software and usually don't take the time to write a good driver. Trust me, Microsoft has the resources to write drivers for Windows. They just don't because they don't have to, and because they don't want to do the same thing the linux guys have to do, chase down vendors trying to get a spec sheets out of them. If the specs are open, nobody has to do any chasing, and there can be some collaboration in writing good drivers that can be easily ported to any operating system.
Two reasons, mainly.
1) Open source is not just a product. A major part of it is about ideology. A lot of people, myself included, believe that the openness of linux (and open source advocacy surrounding linux) is the reason it has been so successful. If you want a project where people just code and don't care, use one of the BSDs. Linus got a lot of shit for using Bitkeeper to manage the kernel. When he was forced away from it, he wrote a replacement in a month. If you're only looking at economies of scale, you might consider that a waste of a month that could have been spent on the kernel. But I consider that a huge win because now kernel development is not tied to a proprietary product, and we now have a good open source distributed revision tracking system.
2) Providing a stable ABI for driver development puts a major burden on the kernel developers. They would have to maintain an API *and* an ABI. In order to maintain the ABI, they don't have the same freedom to make modifications when and where needed. The result, cruft build-up in Windows style. Want to try out a new scheduler algorithm to improve desktop latency, too bad, breaks the ABI. There is also the matter of being able to debug the kernel around binary drivers. Yes, it can be done, but it is harder and the kernel developers don't want to do it. I don't blame them. I would rather be working on improving the acpi implementation.
And what do we get for going to the trouble to make binary driver development easy anyway? A bunch of buggy, kernel breaking, half-assed drivers from companies that don't really give a rip about linux (see ATI/Nvidia) *and* yet another excuse to not release the specs for the hardware so that open source drivers can be written. Do you really want that just so you can use the crappy Winmodem you bought at Circuit City? A lot of hardware is supported on linux by open source drivers. Just do a little research before buying; support the companies that aid open driver development and ignore companies that don't. Then maybe we actually will have a lot of quality open source drivers out there.
1) It's against the law to provide methods for tampering with the equipment. (e.g. Wifi cards.)
This is due to bad hardware design. They are building the functionality of the chip into software instead of on the chip itself. This necessitates a closed source driver. If they built a fixed transmitter power into the chip, this wouldn't be a problem. But they don't...why not? My guess is they are trying to save money somehow.
2) Much of the code and/or hardware design is licensed from other parties, and they can't get permission to open it.
If you are referring to NVidia's licensed OpenGL implementation, the solution is to use an open source implementation, such as Mesa. Or to write your own code. Or to get the open source community to write it for you by releasing hardware specs (and they will because a lot of people are interested in open source NVidia drivers, but reverse-engineering is quite a task for a device that complicated). Not sure about the hardware design aspect, but I kind of doubt an intellectual property agreement would prevent a company from releasing an interface specification. There is nothing to gain by that.
3) The ever important Time to Market consideration would be quashed if manufacturers had to wait for the driver to enter the tree then get distributed to the major Linux distros before releasing their hardware.
Why would they wait until a driver is available? Just hand out the specs, the driver will get written. If they really care about a driver being available (i.e: they consider the linux platform more than a niche market), then they can write an open source driver. It doesn't take long to get a driver accepted into the main tree, and that doesn't even have to happen to get distributions to ship it. It's a lot easier to get a linux distribution to ship a driver than Microsoft.
In the long term, driver code has precisely zero value to the OSS community.
Freedom to modify the kernel when it is necessary is of huge value to the community. Supporting and maintaining a static ABI is a pain and will ensure cruft build-up in the kernel. Nevermind the fact that a lot of hardware vendors don't actually support NDIS to begin with. You know those wireless drivers that came with your card that you had to load separately in Windows, and they have their own little control panel? Not NDIS. If you use the NDIS driver shipped with Windows you don't get all of the functionality because the standard doesn't support it.
Seriously, vendors can offload a lot of work and we can get higher quality drivers (on all platforms) if they would just release the specs. Why won't they do it? My theory is that, like the music industry, they are just ignoring a new opportunity that requires them to change the way they do things. Vendors are refusing to release specs because drivers have always been proprietary. That is all. There is no real substantial reason. The closed file formats people at least have vendor lock-in going for them. There is no competitive advantage to having a closed source driver.
There is support in the kernel for every major class of hardware out there. Ethernet drivers, wireless drivers, sound drivers, usb drivers, scsi drivers, sata drivers, you name it, it is there. The notable exception is hardware accelerated 3D graphics, which Nvidia gets away with because they have no competition (ATI support is much worse in linux). Hopefully something happens with the OpenGraphics Project sometime to help fix this. Will it be a top of the line card...no. But then why does it matter. Linux isn't used for serious gaming.
There is an absence of drivers for individual devices within a hardware class. Who cares? Buy supported hardware. It's not like it is few and far between. For any collection of ethernet cards, 1 in 50 might not be supported in linux. It really isn't that hard to grab the supported card off the shelf at Best Buy. I've been buying hardware for linux for years, including motherboards with funky chipsets, latest and greatest add-on cards, usb devices, wireless devices. I've never had trouble getting that hardware to work.
You say more hardware would work with linux if there was a stable binary interface. I don't agree because:
1) A lot of hardware vendors don't care about linux period. It is much easier to convince them to release specs so that we can do the work than it is to convince them to spend money to support a negligble market. If they are going to be difficult about the specs, chances are they are going to be difficult about a binary driver as well.
2) If they do agree to make a binary driver, they aren't going to put a lot of effort into it. It will probably be buggy. It might break subsystems in the kernel. It won't support every configuration/architecture. Just look at the ATI/NVidia situation. Sure, they threw a bone to their linux *customers*, but they dug it out of the dumpster and didn't wash it off.
3) Many distibutions will not be able to ship the drivers out of the box due to licensing issues. You will have to manually download the drivers and edit your configuration files by hand. NVidia has been fairly good about this, but wireless vendors that require firmware to be loaded have not.
So, I'll wait for the open source drivers. If a vendor doesn't deliver, I'll pick someone else.
Instead, we get reverse-"engineered" (i.e. hacked-together) drivers made by people doing their best to get devices working with no real understanding of how the device works.
As opposed to hardware engineers writing code for a kernel they know nothing about? I would much rather a kernel hacker writing a driver off of a spec sheet over an engineer copying a device driver template and sticking in the appropriate bits. In the absence of a good spec sheet, I'll take reverse-engineered drivers any day. They may not support all of the features, but they are usually better quality than a lot of closed source binary drivers. Just look through the Alsa project. The Soundblaster Live driver is a good example. Creative released one of their own (open source even, I believe), but it blew compared to the one written by the Alsa hackers.
The solution for vendors not wanting to support multiple kernels is to open source their drivers. Once it is in the kernel, the maintenance is taken care of by somebody else. There really is no reason to not open source a driver. The PHB's are just stuck in a rut..."It has to be closed source because...intellecutal property...trade secrets...err, it's mine."
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CSS isn't exactly DRM. It is used to encrypt content, but it isn't involved in this giant trust relationship between "authorized hardware" and software that is being pushed. DRM is the new CSS, but the old CSS is nothing like it. That said, I am happy to strip any DRM protections from media I buy so that I can watch it unhindered in any way I want. If they ever succeed in making a system where I can't do this, I simply won't buy any media that uses it.
In the third [screen]shot down, the windows stacked at a 3-D angle looks horrible.
Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was just a poor screenshot, but it almost looks like the window was bitmapped and rotated giving you that extremely granular look. SVG desktop anyone? This is one reason why I really like the idea of Cairo support being added to Gtk, even if there is a performance hit.
I would absolutely love to have an all Linux/Mac lab, but unfortunately there are still quite a few must have Windows programs for our work:
Unicorn (for FPLC control)
Chemstation (for HPLC and spectrophotometer control)
Dynafit (essential for almost any sort of kinetics experiment)
Origin (Matlab will work for most data analysis purposes, but Origin is nice for other things, and required for ITC)
Endnote (Yes, I prefer Latex, but everybody else uses Endnote)
SciFinder Scholar (Windows only, as far as I know)
ChemOffice
I would probably also have a hard time weening people from Office. It is still fairly ubiquitous for PowerPoint et al. OpenOffice would probably do the job, but it is hard to convince people, especially when you need things like Endnote and custom templates/macros.
Compare, say, setting up apache on a typical Linux distribution with configuring IIS on Windows.
I'm sorry, but that is just a bad example. First thing, I have setup Apache several times, and if you know the first thing about networking, it is pretty straightforward to read through the well-commented configuration file and fill in the blanks. Second, Apache is a server. It is not a desktop application that is going to configured and run by Joe Blow, and it shouldn't be. If you are going to allow people to connect to your machine and access stuff on your hard disk, you better know what the hell you are doing. IIS has a nice configuration gui, but that should be pretty insignificant to a server administrator, and it is probably pretty frustrating when it doesn't do what you need it to do.
A much better example would be to point out current problems with networking configuration. Networking on linux is very server oriented, with all connections being configured at boot and pretty much assumed to be static connections. It makes it hard to integrate network roaming, per-user configuration, and wifi access. Tools for the latter do exist, but they are a bit kludgy and difficult to get working properly. Thankfully, along with the general desktop push being made, this is being addressed. NetworkManager from Red Hat is shaping up pretty nicely, and I hope to see it setup in the desktop distributions soon.
Oh and GConf, in my opinion, is a very sensible way of handling configuration options. The database is an xml file, which is easy to access with a number of different tools, including your favorite text editor. It is fast, everything is in one place, it is easy to backup, and it doesn't get corrupted. Of course, it doesn't work for everything. I don't think Apache would be able to put it's configuration into a GConf node, but I don't think it has ever been tried either. You might be taking exception to gconf-editor, which does unfortunately resemble the Windows registry interface. I can't really think of a better way of presenting hundreds of configuration options to the user, though. They are fairly well organized, and there is a search facility to make it easy to find what you are looking for.
but there's still a morally offensive (to some, at least) supposition there: Not all men are created equal.
I would argue that not all men are created the same, but that has little or nothing to do with equality, however you choose to define it.
Just sneak into your local university library and get it off the computers there. Most universities have institutional subscriptions, so if you have a uni ip address you can access the article.
why is doing bad things more profitable than doing good things?
Because the people that stand to profit are greedy and selfish. It is more profitable in the short term to do bad things, but in the long term it will tank the company. The current business landscape encourages looking to short term gains at the expense of long term viability, which means a few people profit big and everybody else gets screwed (shareholders that don't pull out in time included). When people "check their morality at the door," this is what happens. Incentives designed to encourage certain behaviors from people assumed to be acting in a wholly self-centered way are not sufficient. If you want people to look at the bigger picture, they have to be forward thinking and care about other people and society as a whole. They can't just be chasing incentives.
I think really what we need to do is spread out the burden. All power generating facilities are going to cause environmental damage, but they are going to do it in different ways. Small perturbations aren't going to be as bad as large perturbations. So a few wind turbines will cause some noise pollution, but if you stick them out in the middle of Oklahoma and use them for that local area, it won't be such a big problem. You can setup a few solar plants, nuclear plants, coal plants, geothermal/aquathermal systems, etc...in different areas where geographically best suited. Then you don't have to worry about powering the entire world with aquathermal and causing changes in the ocean currents. Of course, multiple power-generating facilities results in a larger burden for the utility companies, especially since some methods are more expensive than others. So we probably won't see anything like that in my lifetime.
Ummm...you are contradicting yourself. The more free a market is, the fewer rules there are. In a completely free market, there are no rules. Aside from the usual "Thou shalt not steal," I consider those rules for society, not for markets. If you are trying to draw a distinction between rules made by governments to regulate markets and rules made by markets to regulate markets, I don't see the difference.
Sorry, your EDIT is wrong. You can see this by comparing the poor in societies with free markets to the poor in societies without free markets.
Nonsense. You are blithely ignoring hundreds of other variables in making such a comparison. The tremendous growth in world economies over the last century has been with pseudo-free markets, which says to me that the (mixed economy) system works. Drawing the conclusion that a "more free" market would result in even better growth is erroneous logic.
So you now claim the submitter knew that the term "free market" is not an oxymoron.
That's not what I said at all.
Don't worry, you'll understand it one day when you can't get a software job that pays and RMS controls everything that happens in your computer.
I obviously understand it quite a bit more than you do because you are making stuff up and being rude in an effort to defend your position. I disagree with you because I think you are wrong not because I am stupid. Deal with it. Look up the word "troll" in the dictionary.
This time I will say it as clearly is I can and then I'm going to give up. The GPL does not inhibit the free market process. Copyright inhibits the free market process. The licensing (not selling) of intellectual property is inherently not a free market system. The lock-in you refer to is what makes it not a free market system, and it has nothing to do with the GPL. You can be just as easily locked-in to, say, a proprietary database and be forced to pay non-negotiable exhorbitant prices to a company for licenses.
The term "free market" has a certain definition and I have explained why the market for GPL software is not a free market. If you didn't understand my explanation you should think harder (but be careful not to burst your brain) instead of whining "that's just your opinion i'm not listening la la la". And please look up the word oxymoron in a dictionary.
Not getting the point...let me simplify it for you. The "market" for GPL software is just as free as for proprietary software. That is, I own the copyright on the code and can therefore charge whatever I want for it. If somebody wants to negotiate a lower price, they have to find another implementation with the functionality they need somewhere offered at a different price (sometimes trivial, ex: a text editor, sometimes not so much, ex: an operating system). So in other words, it is not free, even by your definition. The supplier sets the price (in the case of GPL software the price is to release your own code), and the potential buyer either pays the price or goes elsewhere. There is no negotiation until there are sufficient alternative implementations that the buyer is not "locked-in" to one supplier.
Btw, oxymoron (n): conjoining contradictory terms (as in `deafening silence')
Another one would be "honest politician" which is kind of funny. The article poster believes "free market" is also a funny one, not because a free market cannot theoretically exist, but because they don't exist for various reasons.
The story was both off-topic and inflammatory. But not funny or satirical (look up the word satire in a dictionary).
How can a story be off-topic? It is the topic. Inflammatory...maybe. No more so than a snide comment about intelligent design, though. Funny is relative. I found it funny as did many other Slashdotters. You did not, so what.
satire (n): Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity.
Added note: often used as a form of political commentary. See "Praise of Folly" by Erasmus or "Candide" by Voltaire.
Perhaps you need to go back and read the dictionary some more.
Slashdot rejects submissions frequently and without giving reasons
Rejecting a story for whatever reason, a dupe for example, is just that, rejecting a story. Rejecting a story because you don't agree with the political point of view of the poster is censorship. The article should have been rejected because it was a dupe, not because of a side comment by the poster.
markets which are more free produce more wealth for the participants
EDIT: markets which are more free produce more wealth for some of the participants
A truly free market is like a sport without any rules. The winners are the people with bigger bats. It encourages participation to an extent; there is more to gain for the people who succeed. But eventually it bottoms out as people realize they don't really want to lose their arms wrestling with the 800 lb. gorilla who, without any competition, suddenly has no incentive to be nice to anybody and starts running around burning houses down.
The FSF defines "free" as "free from anything that goes against Stallman's communist agenda".
Uh huh. Well, you are free to write your own implementation of that code "required for compatibility" making yourself free of the GPL. You are also free to buy a non-GPL license from the FSF. Sounds like a free market to me, by your definition. Oh wait, I get it, a free market is only "free" depending on the point of view of the observer. Sounds pretty oxymoronic to me.
And since when should the editors censor articles just because of a political, albeit satirical (*woosh*), comment?
Unhighlightable, unsearchable, undisplayable w/o flash. WTF are these guys thinking? Why don't you just make your web page one giant imagemap? That would allow custom typography w/o usability and give you that nice brochure look too.
He makes some good points, but he is kind of picking on OpenOffice which, though popular, is hardly the poster-child of Open Source. The code was a mess long before it became open source. It took a lot of work to get it to even compile after it was open sourced. It uses it's own set of widgets, storage database, and even build system (i.e: it doesn't follow the code reuse principles of most of the successful open source projects). It takes a long time to get up to speed with the code before you can even hope to do anything with it. All of those, I would say, contribute to the reasons why OpenOffice is not "supported by the community." But there are quite a few large and very successful open source projects that do work on the principles the author was trying to refute. Mozilla, Gnome/KDE, Inkscape, Gnumeric, Abiword, Linux, GCC, XOrg, Apache.... So I wouldn't walk around saying the open source model has failed just yet.
Yeah, right. The problem is the Helix player doesn't do the one thing linux people have been clamoring about for years: play Real files! You have to separately download Realplayer, which means going to their website, accepting their license, downloading a .bin file, blah blah blah (in other words, no apt-get install realplayer). It is the exact same issue as before. The player is fine, but the licensing crap is a pain. It's not like we didn't already have several media players that work just fine. We don't need another media player. We need something that plays Real files. And it's not even a matter of open-sourcing their codecs. All they need to do is provide a binary codec that will plug into gstreamer or something. Both Xine and MPlayer already support binary loading of codecs. They just don't do the real format very well, so a good binary Real codec would solve a lot of problems. But no, we can't do it the easy way....
Let's not confuse being introverted with being anti-social. The difference lies in the reason for being a quieter and more withdrawn person. If you hate people and are bitter towards all humanity, which leads to feelings of discomfort/awkwardness in social situations, and causes you to have a general attitude of "I don't want to talk to you, leave me alone with my computer," I would brand you anti-social. If you simply tend to be more pondering or analytical, a person who is comfortable in a social setting, but doesn't need/want to be the center of attention, then I would brand you introverted. You can also be a little of both, but I wouldn't equate "introverted person" with "shy person who doesn't like to be around people."
Thank you! Gosh, it's amazing how quickly people jump up and stereotype large groups of people based on their own prejudices. I run into a lot of anti-science sentiment, and most of it does not come from religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalism in the US is really just a noise machine. It does not represent a large part of the population, and it doesn't have as much influence as people would like to believe. The solution, in my opinion, is to actually try to address some of their concerns instead of just jumping up and saying "you're ignorant, you don't know what you are talking about." Nothing gets solved by constant bickering; there has to be some effort made towards discussion and compromise. I don't think the fundamentalists really want Genesis taught as a theory alongside evolution. What they want is for evolution to not be taught as a known fact...and they are right about that. Nothing in science is a known fact. Students need to be taught how science works (formulate a theory, gather evidence, accept/reject hypothesis, revise theory, wash/rinse/repeat). So simply saying "evolution is the currently accepted theory by the majority of the scientific community but, just like all science, there are alternative models supported by some groups of people," in a science class is perfectly acceptable to me, and I think it would be acceptable to the fundamentalists as well. I am much more worried about the anti-GMO propaganda machine that goes around trying to scare people by misinterpreting statistics and using inflammatory and misleading language like "frankenfoods" than I am about the religious factions that occassionaly poke their heads up and sqwak about the way evolution is taught in schools.
If you layout a document in a certain manner in Office, and it displays differently in a different client, then clearly the other client must be "wrong".
If that happens, programs like OpenOffice will probably just do the same thing that web browsers do with html: incorporate workarounds that display the document the "Microsoft way." The advantage of an open format is that this is actually possible. Not so much if the format is closed.
1. FCC regulations change.
2. Radio transmissions are tricky things. A Wifi producer might release a patch that provides greater range by constantly modulating the power levels, yet remaining within the FCC's guidelines.
3. It's about a lot more than power. You can accidently generate a massive amount of broadband radio noise if you're not careful. Basically, the software is playing HAM operator with the Wifi card in order to tune the best performance out of it without running afoul of regulations. That's a good use for software.
1. FCC regulations don't change that often.
2/3. You are arguing for a flexibility in the cards that is unneeded/unused. Vendors still want to release new cards to follow changing technology. Speaking of which, where were your simple firmware updates when WPA came out, and now WPA2? Why did I have to buy a new card to support it instead of just updating my driver? Despite the advantages of having a software driven card, vendors still sell hardware. They don't want to sell software, so they are never going to design their cards to be entirely software dependent. The issue now is the stuff that they chose to make software dependent. Your card pretty much operates at a constant power and frequency through its lifetime. Any code to modulate and regulate the transmitter is fairly constant and doesn't need to be in software. For bug fixes, do the same thing that the router people and controller card people have been doing for years: store the code in flashable firmware *on the card* and then post firmware updates on your website.
You're
not
listening
I know what you are saying. The problem I have is with this: Thus they licensed NOT OpenGL, but all kinds of bits and pieces of 3D trickery, microcode, and hardware design thats patented by someone else, produced by someone else. Most of the original patents on "3D trickery" were owned by SGI and purchased by NVidia. Along the way NVidia has improved the technology and filed for its own patents. NVidia owns all of the technology used to drive their cards. If somebody else was doing the innovating they wouldn't be at the top of their game. And, by the way, patented technology does NOT mean you can't show people the code. In fact it means quite the opposite. A patent enables you to release the design into the public so that everybody can see how it works without stealing your idea. Licensing code under an NDA only happens when a patent is not involved because that is the only way to protect it. If that is the situation NVidia is in, that seems pretty silly. Anything that is not patented NVidia is free to implement themselves, something they are quite capable of (it's just math, like you say). Considering how competitive the market is, it would be stupid for NVidia to rely on a 3rd party for something as important as the code to drive their card. Oh, and did you notice that NVidia calls their driver a "unified driver architecture." That is because they have managed to abstract all of their 3D trickery so that they can just slap a new card in with instructions for how to drive it and have it work without rewriting the entire driver. So if NVidia can't release the 3D code, why can't they release the specs for the card? You still haven't addressed that.
That's why there are full drivers for NVidia, right? No wait, there aren't.
That's why there are full drivers for WinModems, right? No wait, there aren't.
That's why there are full drivers for WiFi cards, right? No wait, there aren't.
The NVidia driver is a difficult issue. A lot of people are content with the binary drivers for now, but if NVidia stopped releasing them tomorrow, quite a few people would step up to the plate to write a new driver.
There is at least one open source driver for a Winmodem, the IBM Mwave. There wasn't a lot of work put into these because not very many people care about them.
There are quite a few drivers for wifi cards. See this.
BZZZT! This is due to GOOD hardware design. By moving many of the controls to the software logic, the chips can be made simpler and more flexible. New features can be added by simply upgrading the software rather than requiring the consumer to purchase a new card.
Ummm...we were talking about wireless cards. Of course updatable firmware is good in a general sense. In the case of the wifi cards, though, the transmitter power is set in software. There is absolutely no reason for this because the transmission strength is heavily regulated by the FCC. Open source drivers wouldn't be an issue for these cards if this had been done correctly. Now that it's done, though, the way to get around this is to distribute an open source driver with a closed firmware module. Unfortunately, due to stupid licensing issues, these firmwares are not redistributable and therefore a lot of distributions can't ship with them.
If you think it's JUST an OpenGL implementation, you need to do your homework!
I never said it was "just an OpenGl implementation." I said they licensed an OpenGl implementation from somebody that won't let them open the code (or so they say). Yeah, so the meat of the driver is a lot of complicated shit, so what. In the end you are defining an OpenGl API for the programmer to talk to the card, and telling the card how to execute those instructions. The point is anybody can do this if they have the specs for the card, which Nvidia won't release. There shouldn't, or rather doesn't have to, be any sort of intellectual property stuff to deal with.
You and many others severely underestimate the problems inherent in releasing them.
No, I just don't believe any of their excuses. A lot of hardware in linux gets supported by someone reverse-engineering the damn chip because they can't get the specs, and the driver ends up working as good as or better than anything that gets released by the vendor, if that ever happens. Of course that process is slow, so it would be better if they could follow a spec sheet. If they can't write an open source driver for whatever reason, they can at least release the specs so somebody else can do it. They aren't protecting their trade secrets better with closed drivers. The truth is, vendors won't do anything unless they are pressured into it. Broadcom wouldn't be releasing open source ethernet drivers if every other ethernet card manufacturer wasn't already. Same with the people that make ide controllers and and scsi controllers. Linux is an important enough market for them to properly support it. In Nvidia's case, there just isn't a better contender, so they can do whatever they want, which is why I am waiting to see what happens with the OpenGraphics Project.
Prior to that you had to develop your own damn hardware interfaces.
Yes, I know. I was around in the DOS days. It was a lot of work writing drivers for every graphics card you might ever want to support with your program. Nobody wants to return to those days. Drivers should be written once and included with the OS. The question is, who writes them? Somebody who knows the hardware with some understanding of the operating system, or somebody who know the operating system following a spec sheet. I vote for the latter because there are a lot more people capable of helping out in that area. The people who make the hardware are hardware guys. They don't care about the software and usually don't take the time to write a good driver. Trust me, Microsoft has the resources to write drivers for Windows. They just don't because they don't have to, and because they don't want to do the same thing the linux guys have to do, chase down vendors trying to get a spec sheets out of them. If the specs are open, nobody has to do any chasing, and there can be some collaboration in writing good drivers that can be easily ported to any operating system.
And just why shouldn't we allow for both?
Two reasons, mainly.
1) Open source is not just a product. A major part of it is about ideology. A lot of people, myself included, believe that the openness of linux (and open source advocacy surrounding linux) is the reason it has been so successful. If you want a project where people just code and don't care, use one of the BSDs. Linus got a lot of shit for using Bitkeeper to manage the kernel. When he was forced away from it, he wrote a replacement in a month. If you're only looking at economies of scale, you might consider that a waste of a month that could have been spent on the kernel. But I consider that a huge win because now kernel development is not tied to a proprietary product, and we now have a good open source distributed revision tracking system.
2) Providing a stable ABI for driver development puts a major burden on the kernel developers. They would have to maintain an API *and* an ABI. In order to maintain the ABI, they don't have the same freedom to make modifications when and where needed. The result, cruft build-up in Windows style. Want to try out a new scheduler algorithm to improve desktop latency, too bad, breaks the ABI. There is also the matter of being able to debug the kernel around binary drivers. Yes, it can be done, but it is harder and the kernel developers don't want to do it. I don't blame them. I would rather be working on improving the acpi implementation.
And what do we get for going to the trouble to make binary driver development easy anyway? A bunch of buggy, kernel breaking, half-assed drivers from companies that don't really give a rip about linux (see ATI/Nvidia) *and* yet another excuse to not release the specs for the hardware so that open source drivers can be written. Do you really want that just so you can use the crappy Winmodem you bought at Circuit City? A lot of hardware is supported on linux by open source drivers. Just do a little research before buying; support the companies that aid open driver development and ignore companies that don't. Then maybe we actually will have a lot of quality open source drivers out there.
1) It's against the law to provide methods for tampering with the equipment. (e.g. Wifi cards.)
This is due to bad hardware design. They are building the functionality of the chip into software instead of on the chip itself. This necessitates a closed source driver. If they built a fixed transmitter power into the chip, this wouldn't be a problem. But they don't...why not? My guess is they are trying to save money somehow.
2) Much of the code and/or hardware design is licensed from other parties, and they can't get permission to open it.
If you are referring to NVidia's licensed OpenGL implementation, the solution is to use an open source implementation, such as Mesa. Or to write your own code. Or to get the open source community to write it for you by releasing hardware specs (and they will because a lot of people are interested in open source NVidia drivers, but reverse-engineering is quite a task for a device that complicated). Not sure about the hardware design aspect, but I kind of doubt an intellectual property agreement would prevent a company from releasing an interface specification. There is nothing to gain by that.
3) The ever important Time to Market consideration would be quashed if manufacturers had to wait for the driver to enter the tree then get distributed to the major Linux distros before releasing their hardware.
Why would they wait until a driver is available? Just hand out the specs, the driver will get written. If they really care about a driver being available (i.e: they consider the linux platform more than a niche market), then they can write an open source driver. It doesn't take long to get a driver accepted into the main tree, and that doesn't even have to happen to get distributions to ship it. It's a lot easier to get a linux distribution to ship a driver than Microsoft.
In the long term, driver code has precisely zero value to the OSS community.
Freedom to modify the kernel when it is necessary is of huge value to the community. Supporting and maintaining a static ABI is a pain and will ensure cruft build-up in the kernel. Nevermind the fact that a lot of hardware vendors don't actually support NDIS to begin with. You know those wireless drivers that came with your card that you had to load separately in Windows, and they have their own little control panel? Not NDIS. If you use the NDIS driver shipped with Windows you don't get all of the functionality because the standard doesn't support it.
Seriously, vendors can offload a lot of work and we can get higher quality drivers (on all platforms) if they would just release the specs. Why won't they do it? My theory is that, like the music industry, they are just ignoring a new opportunity that requires them to change the way they do things. Vendors are refusing to release specs because drivers have always been proprietary. That is all. There is no real substantial reason. The closed file formats people at least have vendor lock-in going for them. There is no competitive advantage to having a closed source driver.
There is support in the kernel for every major class of hardware out there. Ethernet drivers, wireless drivers, sound drivers, usb drivers, scsi drivers, sata drivers, you name it, it is there. The notable exception is hardware accelerated 3D graphics, which Nvidia gets away with because they have no competition (ATI support is much worse in linux). Hopefully something happens with the OpenGraphics Project sometime to help fix this. Will it be a top of the line card...no. But then why does it matter. Linux isn't used for serious gaming.
There is an absence of drivers for individual devices within a hardware class. Who cares? Buy supported hardware. It's not like it is few and far between. For any collection of ethernet cards, 1 in 50 might not be supported in linux. It really isn't that hard to grab the supported card off the shelf at Best Buy. I've been buying hardware for linux for years, including motherboards with funky chipsets, latest and greatest add-on cards, usb devices, wireless devices. I've never had trouble getting that hardware to work.
You say more hardware would work with linux if there was a stable binary interface. I don't agree because:
1) A lot of hardware vendors don't care about linux period. It is much easier to convince them to release specs so that we can do the work than it is to convince them to spend money to support a negligble market. If they are going to be difficult about the specs, chances are they are going to be difficult about a binary driver as well.
2) If they do agree to make a binary driver, they aren't going to put a lot of effort into it. It will probably be buggy. It might break subsystems in the kernel. It won't support every configuration/architecture. Just look at the ATI/NVidia situation. Sure, they threw a bone to their linux *customers*, but they dug it out of the dumpster and didn't wash it off.
3) Many distibutions will not be able to ship the drivers out of the box due to licensing issues. You will have to manually download the drivers and edit your configuration files by hand. NVidia has been fairly good about this, but wireless vendors that require firmware to be loaded have not.
So, I'll wait for the open source drivers. If a vendor doesn't deliver, I'll pick someone else.
Instead, we get reverse-"engineered" (i.e. hacked-together) drivers made by people doing their best to get devices working with no real understanding of how the device works.
."
As opposed to hardware engineers writing code for a kernel they know nothing about? I would much rather a kernel hacker writing a driver off of a spec sheet over an engineer copying a device driver template and sticking in the appropriate bits. In the absence of a good spec sheet, I'll take reverse-engineered drivers any day. They may not support all of the features, but they are usually better quality than a lot of closed source binary drivers. Just look through the Alsa project. The Soundblaster Live driver is a good example. Creative released one of their own (open source even, I believe), but it blew compared to the one written by the Alsa hackers.
The solution for vendors not wanting to support multiple kernels is to open source their drivers. Once it is in the kernel, the maintenance is taken care of by somebody else. There really is no reason to not open source a driver. The PHB's are just stuck in a rut..."It has to be closed source because...intellecutal property...trade secrets...err, it's mine