True, but I think the point the parent (and others) is trying to make is that you can't trust somebody to follow the law. Yes, if they break the law, it is entirely their fault. But once the law is broken the damage is done. You can punish the offender, but you can't undo what has been done. So if you want to avoid damage to yourself and your property, you need to assume people won't follow the law and take the proper precautions.
Analagous situation: it is against the law to physically assault someone and take their wallet. Do you walk around in dark alleys, alone, and in the middle of night? Most will answer no. Not because it is their fault if they get mugged, but because they know they are putting themselves at risk of getting mugged. Societal laws help us live together by defining behavior that is socially acceptable. But your safety and well-being is not something you should entrust to the care of others.
There is work going into fully supporting the SVG spec (including animations), so that there can be SVG backgrounds, themes, and notifications. And with the Cairo backend, the desktop widgets themselves will be drawn using vector operations. The Cairo stuff will only support a subset of all SVG operations, but the most important stuff will be there.
That's why KDE's default menu is cluttered with a million apps that 90% of their audience will never use, why GNOME's is hardly better and why even Xfce is slower than Explorer.
When will X.org not require the user to edit a text file to configure it?
Ok, if that's your desktop linux experience, then you've either been living under a box for the last three years, or you haven't used linux for the last five. The only retort I will bother with...Ubuntu Hoary w/ Gnome 2.10. Very nice distro with an out of the box easy to use desktop. Or try Fedora Core 4. I hear that is pretty nice too.
How many of you reading this, when sending an email in Thunderbird actually changed the "from" field? Maybe ten out two hundred; everyone else just keeps it the same, week after week. So why the fuck is that option there?
Seriously, why does it matter? I've been using Thunderbird for quite a while, and that extra feature hasn't bothered me at all. Guess what? When I created my email account, I clicked through and answered all of the questions asked by the wizard, and suddenly everything worked perfectly. Changing the From: field may be a feature only 1% of all users use, but it doesn't affect my everyday use, so who cares if it is there?
Add to that there is a tendency in linux development to do things right rather than to do things quickly. Why don't we already have translucent windows? Because we are waiting for Cairo, Glitz, and proper compositing support. Why doesn't Gimp support 16-bit color? Because it is waiting for Gegl to be completed, and then it could have 24-bit color if it wanted. Why did Linus resist the preemptible kernel patch? He was concerned about it working cleanly and not causing problems with other components. It wasn't implemented until some other problems with kernel locks were fixed, even though it is pretty important for good desktop performance.
If you are a business trying to get a product out the door quickly, you are more inclined to cut corners and just code the features any way you can. There is not such market pressure with linux, though, so developers tend to take the time to implement new features cleanly and with an eye to the future. A lot of work has gone into librsvg and GtkCairo. The result? A fully SVG enabled Gnome desktop is just around the corner, and there won't be anything like it from the Microsoft and Apple camps for quite some time.
Yes, and nobody else seems to be picking up on this, but what the *fsck* is intelligence? Is it how much you have memorized? Is it how fast you can do mental math? Is it your ability to identify patterns? Is it your analytical ability (again how do you measure that)? Is it your abstract ability? Or is it just some bogus number cranked out by a standardized test full of a bunch of arbitrary nonsense? I doubt any modern test for intelligence would identify Einstein as a genius simply because the ability to do what Einstein did is not really quantifiable. IQ scores, like grades, just provide another number to separate people into bad vs. good groups, but are not actually linked to intellectual achievment.
Problem is, Debian as a distribution often tweaks the packages it distributes. If there are security patches or bugfixes in later versions that need to be backported, they will sometimes do that. If changes need to be made so the package compiles on all architectures, they will usually do that. In the case of packages like XFree86 (XOrg) and the linux kernel, they apply a standard set of patches that haven't been merged into the main tree (yet).
I don't know how strict the Firefox trademark is, but if it prevents Debian from doing things that Debian normally does to make sure things interoperate seamlessly in their distribution, then that can be a problem. It's not like they are trying to make changes to Gecko or the UI. They just tweak here and there as any distribution does.
I agree 100% I think people confuse bigotry with opinion. I prefer using linux over Windows, and I have good reasons for it. I don't care if other people use Windows, but I hate it, won't support it, and will try to convince people to switch if they aren't doing something that requires Windows (like gaming, or running some sort of niche third-party application).
Some people like to yammer about "using the best tool for the job", but your tools don't get better unless you try to make them better. If everybody had just thrown their hands up and said, "Yep, Windows is the best desktop OS. Who cares about MacOS or linux, just use Windows" the linux desktop would still be XFree86 3.3 w/ IceWM. Now the linux desktop is quite on par with the other offerings, minus a few places that need some polishing. Practicality is good, but ideology also has its place.
And let's not forget that the criteria for picking the best tool is different for different people. For example, for me the convenience of freely downloadable software packages with automatic dependency checking outweighs the detriment of limited hardware support.
Well, under a modern Windows OS all the user-specific settings *should* be in C:\Documents and Settings\, which is just as easy to back up and restore.
Uh huh, and have you tried this lately? I've been very painfully learning my way around the multiuser Windows world and have concluded that most software vendors just don't get it. They want to write user specific software settings right to the installation directory. You get mixed luck trying to save them in Documents and Settings where they belong.
Example: Endnote 8 (the latest version). After manually applying the Word plugins so that the toolbar shows up (installer is broken for multiple users), you might want to create a custom style. Well, change the style directory to your user profile and suddenly, whoops, can't access any of the system styles to base your custom style on.
Since there is no program directory in linux (except for maybe/usr/share), software vendors have to write for a multiuser environment and correctly put user specific settings in/home. In the Windows world most software vendors are still living in 1998.
Well, it all comes down to how you measure faster and better, doesn't it? If a better chip is simply more Hz and a cheaper price tag, then x86 is clearly the winner. But there are a lot of other ways to measure chip performance: power consumption, heat produced (efficiency), size, latency, bus speed, registers, floating point, optimizations (or lack thereof). There are some things x86 is better at (namely gaming, although I suppose that can be argued). In other situations, ppc takes the lead, like heavy computation.
But this whole argument is pointless because we both know the reason Apple picked Intel. Not because x86 is a "better" architecture, but because it is good enough and it is cheaper. Hell, if Apple wanted real price/performance in desktop-like situations, they should have gone with AMD. This whole thing stinks of a stupid PHB decision that makes no technical sense whatsoever. I really believe Apple has blown their foot off this time.
I've had pretty good experiences with Ubuntu. Very easy to install without make the process completely useless (i.e: you can still partition your own disks if you want to, but you can also just let the installer do it automatically). If you aren't picky about how you like to set things up, just pop in the cd, hit next a few times, after the base image is copied let the computer reboot, and then come back in an hour or so to a fully functional desktop. It is all Gnome, which can be a disadvantage if you are used to KDE, but I imagine it would be better than switching to XP (shudder).
Well, it's not a driver per se. It is a ppd, which is needed to let the actual driver (usually postscript or pcl) know what the capabilities of the printer are (extra paper trays, duplexing, color, etc). You don't have to install a ppd, but you won't be able to use all of the features of your printer if you don't. I wonder why Apple doesn't just download the ppds as needed...probably for people who don't have Internet connections, but having all of them on your hard disk is quite a waste.
A lot of brilliant mathematical work is not patented. Do you think Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman would not have worked on this if it was not patentable? They even published it the year before applying for the patent. And they did not invent it out of nothing. It is not that different from the earlier Pohlig-Hellman private key algorithm.
I agree. A lot of people seem to miss this point: is there justification for patenting said "device?" A patent is not a reward for coming up with something neat. A patent is meant to be compensatory to a business (read: shareholders) for taking a significant risk (and incurring significant cost) to bring a product to market. Patents are very valid in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, where new drugs go through ten year development cycles before making it to market. In the software industry there is just no need. If your invention is new and brilliant, great, now you have a market advantage by being the first to get it out the door. With profit margins upwards of 50% in most cases (and >90% in a few), I simply can't see why patents are necessary to keep the industry alive.
How many people will install the web accelerator? How many computers will come with if preinstalled?
If the only people using the service are Joe Blow on a dial-up connection, then the sites they visit will be better represented. Say they check Fox News everyday. Well, a typical slashdotter might prefer any of the Google News sites (NY Times, BBC, CNN, etc...), but Fox News is going to get the PageRank. I don't know, it seems like they would have to weight the results carefully to keep an even distribution. Besides, you don't really want "most popular site takes all." I mean, say Fox News really was hit the most often. Should it really have a better PageRank than NYTimes just because it is more popular? It is the unpopular sites that need a search engine. Everybody already knows about the big ones.
The fact is that on any operating system when you have a single, important user who runs malicious code, it doesn't matter much whether they're root or not
If the purpose of the virus is to destroy your data, then you are right. There is no current mechanism available to prevent you (or a virus you run) from deleting your own data. But that is not the purpose of most viruses. Viruses are out there to propagate themselves. So they send themselves as email attachments, or they exploit networking vulnerabilities, or embed themselves in other programs, or they background themselves and chew away at your memory, or they log your keystrokes, or they intercept data passed between your computer and something else.... There are mechanisms in place to severely hamper all of these types of attacks IF you are not running as root. There is very little a virus cannot do if you are running as root. Running as a non-privileged user does not solve all security problems, but it is necessary for effective security measures to be taken. Running a firewall isn't a one stop security solution either, but it is an extra layer that makes your machine that much harder to exploit.
The organizations he mentions (Redhat and IBM) do not spend 99% of there time writing free software.
If you are a developer paid by RedHat to fix bugs in your software, then you are making a living writing free software. Can a business persist solely on selling software that people can get for free? No, of course not. If you want to pursue free software, then you have to also pursue a different business model. But it doesn't change the fact that you created something, and you are making money off of people using it. Only the method of distribution changes.
A competitor could take the code and sell it much cheaper, because they would have no expenses to recoup.
Well, no. You may be distributing the source, but you don't have to do it for free. People buy your application, but in addition to getting a precompiled binary they also get the source. And just as with a precompiled binary, there are distribution limits with the source. Including source, of course, makes it impossible to have copy protection or a proprietary data format/protocol. So if you're business is built around secrecy this won't work. But the fundamental interactions between consumer/producer don't change. Somebody pays for your software. You sell them ONE copy that they are free to use, but not free to redistribute. That is why it is important to distinguish between open and free+open software. If you assume only the latter then you are right, you cannot make a profit from just the software.
I think the point he was trying to make is that you CAN make a living writing free software, because you sell other things. You still spend 99% of your time writing the software, so you are making money from the software, even if you aren't selling it directly.
I've got a viable business model. I spend a lot of money writing software that a bunch of people will pay a significantly smaller amount of money for. Then I sell it to them. I make money, they get the software without any one of them paying for all the development. I fail to see the problem.
You don't seem to be making a distinction between free, open, and free+open software. If this is your business model, you can use it with open as well as closed software.
Ok, laptops are trouble. Support is getting better, but it isn't quite seamless yet, so you still have to do some manual configuration. You will need to set HorizSync and VertRefresh settings for your lcd display in the Monitor section. For the widescreen mode, you will also need to add the 1680x1050 modelines to the Modes section, and the option UseModes "16:10" to the Monitor section. If you want to use an external monitor, you can use Nvidia's TwinView. There are a few good tutorials out there, just Google for them.
Yes, on start-up. I don't see any indication that it does this when a new monitor is detected.
Well, yes, you will have to somehow initiate a mode change on the xserver. It won't just know a new monitor has been connected. A simple CTRL+ALT+BACK is usually sufficient to kill the xserver and respawn GDM. A CTRL+ALT+PLUS/MINUS might work too. Once the new modelines are calculated you can switch to any supported mode using the Desktop Preferences|Screen Resolution utility. Those Fedora utilities will detect the display and write a new xorg.conf file for you, but they won't reinitialize the xserver.
If you are trying to setup an external monitor for your laptop, make sure you use the nvidia driver. Set the "UseEdidFreqs" "yes" option to have it detect external monitor freqs, and configure TwinView so you can switch back and forth between your external monitor and your internal lcd display.
They're not in the Fedora Core 3 menu, which (according to the Release Notes) has Gnome 2.8.
Fedora doesn't ship a default Gnome desktop. If you want to add the launchers yourself, the commands are gdmflexiserver and gdmflexiserver --xnest for spawning a new xserver either fullscreen or in a nested window.
I want to be able to plug in a new monitor and have X recognizes it.
For the most part this already works. A lot of distributions don't use it for some reason, but it does work. Edit your xorg.conf file and comment out all monitor specific settings such as HorizSync and VertRefresh. Start up the xserver and you will see it works just fine. I have run into one or two cases where the refresh rate had to be specified manually to get the right resolutions, but it usually "just works" without a hitch.
You can dynamically resize the screen to a limited extent
No, the xserver automatically calculates allowed resolutions from the modelines it detects from the monitor (and the capabilities of the video card). You just need a resolution switcher utility. Gnome has had one since 2.4 and I'm sure KDE has one too.
Also, why don't we have fast user switching?
We do. We have had it for years. Easy to use utilities haven't been perfected quite yet, but you can switch to another user without closing your current session. It is really just a subset of the functionality used to deliver your desktop over the internet to another computer (you are delivering it to the same computer instead of a different one). Don't know about KDE, but as of Gnome 2.6(?) go to System Tools|New Login or System Tools|New Login in a Nested Window. The former spawns a new xserver on another virtual terminal. The latter spawns it within a window using Xnest.
A justification open to abuse. People are creating rootkits, and stealing personal information. I'd be a fool to not capitalize on those actions.
That response makes absolutely no sense, so let me reiterate my point. People download music. That is, there is a demand for downloadable music. Now, are you going to sell them their downloadable music, or are you going to leave them to using other means? If the music industry decides to not sell downloadable music when DRM proves to be ineffective (and it will), they will only be shooting themselves in the foot.
From the standpoint of "benefits", there's effectively no diference between illegally downloading, and purchasing the product.
How do you come to this conclusion? When you buy something there are benefits of convenience, quality, support, dealing with a reputable vendor, etc.... The product may be the same, but there is the opportunity for added value, such as indexing services, concert ticket discounts, information about the artists, and bonus material that is not released elsewhere. Why do people buy Red Hat Linux when they can download it for free? Because Red Hat adds value to their product that people are willing to pay for and can't get anywhere else.
Why should I "convince you" that my product is desirable, when your actions send the clear message to me that it is indeed desirable?
That is exactly my point. Unhindered downloadable music is desired. So quit f**ing around and sell it. DRMed music is not desirable. Right now the only way that people can get unhindered music is from a P2P network where quality sucks and download times are abysmal. With the iTMS hack, people can *buy* quality music from a convenient store without the DRM. If you want me to buy the DRMed music, you are going to have to convince me in some way that the total of what you are offering (i.e: $0.99 price + DRM + AAC format + good bitrate + fast download) is better than getting it from a P2P network. Some people will think your offer is better, others will not. You can get more people to take your offer if you remove the DRM.
Under agreed upon social rules. Piracy is the absence of one party not playing by the rules.
No, piracy is a market reality. Companies have been dealing with the reality of piracy for a long time and still turning a profit. Rampant piracy is obviously bad, which is why federal enforcement agencies go after major infringers. But eliminating piracy altogether is impossible, and it is a waste of time to try. You are better off adding value to your product.
A civil crime. Plus you'll not going to advance anything by copying a design (patent), and marking up the cost.
Not sure what your point is here.
What the law protects isn't ideas themselves (nor is it what the founding fathers ment).
The founding fathers didn't have anything to say about intellectual property law. As for the rest, do you have any evidence of said scarcity? Or did you just copy that from a high school text book?
And letting people spread your content widely without compensation is wiser how?
Well, since people are already doing it, that is kind of a moot point. The question is, are you going to try to capitalize on it, or just ignore a potential market?
Well in this day and age of "flexible ethics", most would rather take the "less legal routes", than the much higher route of "not buying". Or to put it another way, if being good was easy, there wouldn't be evil.
There is no "flexible ethics" here. This is a purely amoral argument. If you have a product in demand (i.e: you provide a valuable service) people will pay for it. If you do things to constantly piss off your customers (price fixing, restrictive usage, vendor lock-in), or your service isn't worth the price you charge for it, people won't buy it. And if they can get said product by a different means (cheaper/better vendor, overseas imitation, free download) they will. They aren't going to deprive themselves of a product just because it is "ethical." I'm not going to pay for Natural Spring Water if I can go out to a natural spring and get it myself. You are going to have to do something to convince me that your product is better than what I can get for free if you want me to pay for it.
The problem is that piracy is the wholesale distribution of free "goods", and no one can make a profit competing with a free version of themselves.
Do you have any evidence of this? I can buy a dvd, rip it to mpeg, and give it to my friends. I can buy a cd, rip it to flac, and give it to my friends. I can buy a book, photocopy some useful pages, and give it to my friends. This is sharing, but it isn't "wholesale piracy", and it doesn't take a huge cut out of the already massive profits of the entertainment industry. Now if I were to rip some songs and post them on a website for free download, that is a different story (and fairly persecutable, in my opinion). And in the case of the iTMS workaround, you still end up *paying for the music*. It is not a free way of getting music. It just strips out the DRM that people find annoying. If free music is what they wanted, they would have tried to crack Apple's servers and stick all of the files on a P2P network.
Companies compete with free (or cheaper) versions of their products all of the time. It is what a free market is all about. You can't give everybody a monopoly on their market just because you don't think it is fair for a company to have to deal with competition.
A poor justification for crimminal acts, and much open for abuse.
Copyright infringement is not a criminal act. The point is, if you are going to go into business, you need to be prepared for market realities. If you are going to make shoes for $2 and sell them with the Nike logo for $100, that is great for making a profit. But if somebody turn around takes the exact same shoe design and sells it for $50, you need to be prepared for that. The law can do some things (such as not allowing them to use the Nike logo), but it is ultimately up to you to convince people to buy your product instead of going elsewhere. The law can only temporarily put artificial restrictions on supply. It is not a sustainable business model to rely on such laws for a long period of time.
What if the alternative is not being able to download legally at all?
Well, that's where market pressures come in. The music industry would be pretty foolish to ignore a high demand for downloadable music. Part of the challenge of business is to figure out how to sell something to customers at a profit, and it isn't always an easy thing. If you piss of your customers with DRM, they won't buy it (or resort to less legal routes). There is no moral argument here, this is simply a market reality. If you don't have a business model that allows for a certain amount of free redistribution of goods (or, analagously, the production of cheap rip-offs in other sectors), you won't make a profit. Nothing about business is easy or a sure thing.
I suppose publish or perish might have something to do with it. But, seriously, try teaching a course on something you really care about sometime. Then try to find a book for it. Sure, if it is freshman physics or calculus, there are tons out there. But what about biochemistry? I have never seen a biochemistry book cover material that I want to teach, the way I want to teach it. If you get one of the books out there already published for the pre-med students, you might be able to assign relevant reading from one or two chapters. But most of the time, if you want a good books for your course, you have to write it yourself.
Well now, you bring up a lot of good points. But I think the crux of the matter is, we as a society should invest resources into the preservation of our culture. Sure, to some extent, culture just happens. But it also disappears when neglected. One method of preserving our culture is as you describe: treat creative works as property so that it can be traded in an economy where property flows from person to person. Then a person who creates can trade those creations for food/clothes/shelter. That is one model and it has proven to work fairly well over the last century or two given certain creator/investor relationships and market realities. But it is not the perfect or only solution. I think current market realities and attitudes are forcing us to consider the flaws of this system and to propose alternatives.
I think most people agree the modifications being proposed by the "creative industry"--to lock things down as tightly as possible until you have to pay a dime for every written word because you have no other choice--are not really good revisions. But, unfortunately, such things do not really get debated. Decisions are just made and people are left hanging. I think there are other alternatives that would work better with the current flow of ideas (digital, Internet, etc), but we will probably never see these alternatives. Partly because some people blindly support something because it has "always been this way" (and by always, I mean within the last century or so). And partly because other people are driven by greed and profit, and it is not in their best interest to adopt a new system of exchange.
Very good statement. However, I do believe the debate really is about whether people have the right to apply certain copyright restrictions. It is not really about respecting another's choice. I could (hypothetically) choose to claim as my property anything that crosses the boundaries of my estate. But the law won't let me because that is an unreasonable and unjust claim.
Now the law does say I have the right to copyright certain things which has led to this disagreement. I agree that this "civil disobedience" is a bit immature and deconstructive. But when such things are not debated openly and publicly, and when decisions are made behind closed doors by people with money and influence, what are (normal) people supposed to do? And I mean in an idealogical sense. If all they wanted was music, you are right, there are other avenues. But if they want the free flow of ideas, buying from another vendor only skirts the problem. It doesn't resolve it.
*Just as a side note, this is a very old argument (of which you are probably aware). Roots can be traced back to at least the Peasant Rebellion of the 13th century, when the German peasantry objected to the idea of nobles taking over common land. They responded in the only way they could. They refused the order despite it being the law of the land.*
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True, but I think the point the parent (and others) is trying to make is that you can't trust somebody to follow the law. Yes, if they break the law, it is entirely their fault. But once the law is broken the damage is done. You can punish the offender, but you can't undo what has been done. So if you want to avoid damage to yourself and your property, you need to assume people won't follow the law and take the proper precautions.
Analagous situation: it is against the law to physically assault someone and take their wallet. Do you walk around in dark alleys, alone, and in the middle of night? Most will answer no. Not because it is their fault if they get mugged, but because they know they are putting themselves at risk of getting mugged. Societal laws help us live together by defining behavior that is socially acceptable. But your safety and well-being is not something you should entrust to the care of others.
There is work going into fully supporting the SVG spec (including animations), so that there can be SVG backgrounds, themes, and notifications. And with the Cairo backend, the desktop widgets themselves will be drawn using vector operations. The Cairo stuff will only support a subset of all SVG operations, but the most important stuff will be there.
That's why KDE's default menu is cluttered with a million apps that 90% of their audience will never use, why GNOME's is hardly better and why even Xfce is slower than Explorer.
When will X.org not require the user to edit a text file to configure it?
Ok, if that's your desktop linux experience, then you've either been living under a box for the last three years, or you haven't used linux for the last five. The only retort I will bother with...Ubuntu Hoary w/ Gnome 2.10. Very nice distro with an out of the box easy to use desktop. Or try Fedora Core 4. I hear that is pretty nice too.
How many of you reading this, when sending an email in Thunderbird actually changed the "from" field? Maybe ten out two hundred; everyone else just keeps it the same, week after week. So why the fuck is that option there?
Seriously, why does it matter? I've been using Thunderbird for quite a while, and that extra feature hasn't bothered me at all. Guess what? When I created my email account, I clicked through and answered all of the questions asked by the wizard, and suddenly everything worked perfectly. Changing the From: field may be a feature only 1% of all users use, but it doesn't affect my everyday use, so who cares if it is there?
Add to that there is a tendency in linux development to do things right rather than to do things quickly. Why don't we already have translucent windows? Because we are waiting for Cairo, Glitz, and proper compositing support. Why doesn't Gimp support 16-bit color? Because it is waiting for Gegl to be completed, and then it could have 24-bit color if it wanted. Why did Linus resist the preemptible kernel patch? He was concerned about it working cleanly and not causing problems with other components. It wasn't implemented until some other problems with kernel locks were fixed, even though it is pretty important for good desktop performance.
If you are a business trying to get a product out the door quickly, you are more inclined to cut corners and just code the features any way you can. There is not such market pressure with linux, though, so developers tend to take the time to implement new features cleanly and with an eye to the future. A lot of work has gone into librsvg and GtkCairo. The result? A fully SVG enabled Gnome desktop is just around the corner, and there won't be anything like it from the Microsoft and Apple camps for quite some time.
Yes, and nobody else seems to be picking up on this, but what the *fsck* is intelligence? Is it how much you have memorized? Is it how fast you can do mental math? Is it your ability to identify patterns? Is it your analytical ability (again how do you measure that)? Is it your abstract ability? Or is it just some bogus number cranked out by a standardized test full of a bunch of arbitrary nonsense? I doubt any modern test for intelligence would identify Einstein as a genius simply because the ability to do what Einstein did is not really quantifiable. IQ scores, like grades, just provide another number to separate people into bad vs. good groups, but are not actually linked to intellectual achievment.
Problem is, Debian as a distribution often tweaks the packages it distributes. If there are security patches or bugfixes in later versions that need to be backported, they will sometimes do that. If changes need to be made so the package compiles on all architectures, they will usually do that. In the case of packages like XFree86 (XOrg) and the linux kernel, they apply a standard set of patches that haven't been merged into the main tree (yet).
I don't know how strict the Firefox trademark is, but if it prevents Debian from doing things that Debian normally does to make sure things interoperate seamlessly in their distribution, then that can be a problem. It's not like they are trying to make changes to Gecko or the UI. They just tweak here and there as any distribution does.
I agree 100% I think people confuse bigotry with opinion. I prefer using linux over Windows, and I have good reasons for it. I don't care if other people use Windows, but I hate it, won't support it, and will try to convince people to switch if they aren't doing something that requires Windows (like gaming, or running some sort of niche third-party application).
Some people like to yammer about "using the best tool for the job", but your tools don't get better unless you try to make them better. If everybody had just thrown their hands up and said, "Yep, Windows is the best desktop OS. Who cares about MacOS or linux, just use Windows" the linux desktop would still be XFree86 3.3 w/ IceWM. Now the linux desktop is quite on par with the other offerings, minus a few places that need some polishing. Practicality is good, but ideology also has its place.
And let's not forget that the criteria for picking the best tool is different for different people. For example, for me the convenience of freely downloadable software packages with automatic dependency checking outweighs the detriment of limited hardware support.
Well, under a modern Windows OS all the user-specific settings *should* be in C:\Documents and Settings\, which is just as easy to back up and restore.
/usr/share), software vendors have to write for a multiuser environment and correctly put user specific settings in /home. In the Windows world most software vendors are still living in 1998.
Uh huh, and have you tried this lately? I've been very painfully learning my way around the multiuser Windows world and have concluded that most software vendors just don't get it. They want to write user specific software settings right to the installation directory. You get mixed luck trying to save them in Documents and Settings where they belong.
Example: Endnote 8 (the latest version). After manually applying the Word plugins so that the toolbar shows up (installer is broken for multiple users), you might want to create a custom style. Well, change the style directory to your user profile and suddenly, whoops, can't access any of the system styles to base your custom style on.
Since there is no program directory in linux (except for maybe
Well, it all comes down to how you measure faster and better, doesn't it? If a better chip is simply more Hz and a cheaper price tag, then x86 is clearly the winner. But there are a lot of other ways to measure chip performance: power consumption, heat produced (efficiency), size, latency, bus speed, registers, floating point, optimizations (or lack thereof). There are some things x86 is better at (namely gaming, although I suppose that can be argued). In other situations, ppc takes the lead, like heavy computation.
But this whole argument is pointless because we both know the reason Apple picked Intel. Not because x86 is a "better" architecture, but because it is good enough and it is cheaper. Hell, if Apple wanted real price/performance in desktop-like situations, they should have gone with AMD. This whole thing stinks of a stupid PHB decision that makes no technical sense whatsoever. I really believe Apple has blown their foot off this time.
I've had pretty good experiences with Ubuntu. Very easy to install without make the process completely useless (i.e: you can still partition your own disks if you want to, but you can also just let the installer do it automatically). If you aren't picky about how you like to set things up, just pop in the cd, hit next a few times, after the base image is copied let the computer reboot, and then come back in an hour or so to a fully functional desktop. It is all Gnome, which can be a disadvantage if you are used to KDE, but I imagine it would be better than switching to XP (shudder).
Well, it's not a driver per se. It is a ppd, which is needed to let the actual driver (usually postscript or pcl) know what the capabilities of the printer are (extra paper trays, duplexing, color, etc). You don't have to install a ppd, but you won't be able to use all of the features of your printer if you don't. I wonder why Apple doesn't just download the ppds as needed...probably for people who don't have Internet connections, but having all of them on your hard disk is quite a waste.
A lot of brilliant mathematical work is not patented. Do you think Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman would not have worked on this if it was not patentable? They even published it the year before applying for the patent. And they did not invent it out of nothing. It is not that different from the earlier Pohlig-Hellman private key algorithm.
I agree. A lot of people seem to miss this point: is there justification for patenting said "device?" A patent is not a reward for coming up with something neat. A patent is meant to be compensatory to a business (read: shareholders) for taking a significant risk (and incurring significant cost) to bring a product to market. Patents are very valid in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, where new drugs go through ten year development cycles before making it to market. In the software industry there is just no need. If your invention is new and brilliant, great, now you have a market advantage by being the first to get it out the door. With profit margins upwards of 50% in most cases (and >90% in a few), I simply can't see why patents are necessary to keep the industry alive.
But...how good of a sample will it be?
How many people will install the web accelerator? How many computers will come with if preinstalled?
If the only people using the service are Joe Blow on a dial-up connection, then the sites they visit will be better represented. Say they check Fox News everyday. Well, a typical slashdotter might prefer any of the Google News sites (NY Times, BBC, CNN, etc...), but Fox News is going to get the PageRank. I don't know, it seems like they would have to weight the results carefully to keep an even distribution. Besides, you don't really want "most popular site takes all." I mean, say Fox News really was hit the most often. Should it really have a better PageRank than NYTimes just because it is more popular? It is the unpopular sites that need a search engine. Everybody already knows about the big ones.
The fact is that on any operating system when you have a single, important user who runs malicious code, it doesn't matter much whether they're root or not
If the purpose of the virus is to destroy your data, then you are right. There is no current mechanism available to prevent you (or a virus you run) from deleting your own data. But that is not the purpose of most viruses. Viruses are out there to propagate themselves. So they send themselves as email attachments, or they exploit networking vulnerabilities, or embed themselves in other programs, or they background themselves and chew away at your memory, or they log your keystrokes, or they intercept data passed between your computer and something else.... There are mechanisms in place to severely hamper all of these types of attacks IF you are not running as root. There is very little a virus cannot do if you are running as root. Running as a non-privileged user does not solve all security problems, but it is necessary for effective security measures to be taken. Running a firewall isn't a one stop security solution either, but it is an extra layer that makes your machine that much harder to exploit.
The organizations he mentions (Redhat and IBM) do not spend 99% of there time writing free software.
If you are a developer paid by RedHat to fix bugs in your software, then you are making a living writing free software. Can a business persist solely on selling software that people can get for free? No, of course not. If you want to pursue free software, then you have to also pursue a different business model. But it doesn't change the fact that you created something, and you are making money off of people using it. Only the method of distribution changes.
A competitor could take the code and sell it much cheaper, because they would have no expenses to recoup.
Well, no. You may be distributing the source, but you don't have to do it for free. People buy your application, but in addition to getting a precompiled binary they also get the source. And just as with a precompiled binary, there are distribution limits with the source. Including source, of course, makes it impossible to have copy protection or a proprietary data format/protocol. So if you're business is built around secrecy this won't work. But the fundamental interactions between consumer/producer don't change. Somebody pays for your software. You sell them ONE copy that they are free to use, but not free to redistribute. That is why it is important to distinguish between open and free+open software. If you assume only the latter then you are right, you cannot make a profit from just the software.
I think the point he was trying to make is that you CAN make a living writing free software, because you sell other things. You still spend 99% of your time writing the software, so you are making money from the software, even if you aren't selling it directly.
I've got a viable business model. I spend a lot of money writing software that a bunch of people will pay a significantly smaller amount of money for. Then I sell it to them. I make money, they get the software without any one of them paying for all the development. I fail to see the problem.
You don't seem to be making a distinction between free, open, and free+open software. If this is your business model, you can use it with open as well as closed software.
This is a Presario R3000 laptop
Ok, laptops are trouble. Support is getting better, but it isn't quite seamless yet, so you still have to do some manual configuration. You will need to set HorizSync and VertRefresh settings for your lcd display in the Monitor section. For the widescreen mode, you will also need to add the 1680x1050 modelines to the Modes section, and the option UseModes "16:10" to the Monitor section. If you want to use an external monitor, you can use Nvidia's TwinView. There are a few good tutorials out there, just Google for them.
Yes, on start-up. I don't see any indication that it does this when a new monitor is detected.
Well, yes, you will have to somehow initiate a mode change on the xserver. It won't just know a new monitor has been connected. A simple CTRL+ALT+BACK is usually sufficient to kill the xserver and respawn GDM. A CTRL+ALT+PLUS/MINUS might work too. Once the new modelines are calculated you can switch to any supported mode using the Desktop Preferences|Screen Resolution utility. Those Fedora utilities will detect the display and write a new xorg.conf file for you, but they won't reinitialize the xserver.
If you are trying to setup an external monitor for your laptop, make sure you use the nvidia driver. Set the "UseEdidFreqs" "yes" option to have it detect external monitor freqs, and configure TwinView so you can switch back and forth between your external monitor and your internal lcd display.
They're not in the Fedora Core 3 menu, which (according to the Release Notes) has Gnome 2.8.
Fedora doesn't ship a default Gnome desktop. If you want to add the launchers yourself, the commands are gdmflexiserver and gdmflexiserver --xnest for spawning a new xserver either fullscreen or in a nested window.
I want to be able to plug in a new monitor and have X recognizes it.
For the most part this already works. A lot of distributions don't use it for some reason, but it does work. Edit your xorg.conf file and comment out all monitor specific settings such as HorizSync and VertRefresh. Start up the xserver and you will see it works just fine. I have run into one or two cases where the refresh rate had to be specified manually to get the right resolutions, but it usually "just works" without a hitch.
You can dynamically resize the screen to a limited extent
No, the xserver automatically calculates allowed resolutions from the modelines it detects from the monitor (and the capabilities of the video card). You just need a resolution switcher utility. Gnome has had one since 2.4 and I'm sure KDE has one too.
Also, why don't we have fast user switching?
We do. We have had it for years. Easy to use utilities haven't been perfected quite yet, but you can switch to another user without closing your current session. It is really just a subset of the functionality used to deliver your desktop over the internet to another computer (you are delivering it to the same computer instead of a different one). Don't know about KDE, but as of Gnome 2.6(?) go to System Tools|New Login or System Tools|New Login in a Nested Window. The former spawns a new xserver on another virtual terminal. The latter spawns it within a window using Xnest.
A justification open to abuse. People are creating rootkits, and stealing personal information. I'd be a fool to not capitalize on those actions.
That response makes absolutely no sense, so let me reiterate my point. People download music. That is, there is a demand for downloadable music. Now, are you going to sell them their downloadable music, or are you going to leave them to using other means? If the music industry decides to not sell downloadable music when DRM proves to be ineffective (and it will), they will only be shooting themselves in the foot.
From the standpoint of "benefits", there's effectively no diference between illegally downloading, and purchasing the product.
How do you come to this conclusion? When you buy something there are benefits of convenience, quality, support, dealing with a reputable vendor, etc.... The product may be the same, but there is the opportunity for added value, such as indexing services, concert ticket discounts, information about the artists, and bonus material that is not released elsewhere. Why do people buy Red Hat Linux when they can download it for free? Because Red Hat adds value to their product that people are willing to pay for and can't get anywhere else.
Why should I "convince you" that my product is desirable, when your actions send the clear message to me that it is indeed desirable?
That is exactly my point. Unhindered downloadable music is desired. So quit f**ing around and sell it. DRMed music is not desirable. Right now the only way that people can get unhindered music is from a P2P network where quality sucks and download times are abysmal. With the iTMS hack, people can *buy* quality music from a convenient store without the DRM. If you want me to buy the DRMed music, you are going to have to convince me in some way that the total of what you are offering (i.e: $0.99 price + DRM + AAC format + good bitrate + fast download) is better than getting it from a P2P network. Some people will think your offer is better, others will not. You can get more people to take your offer if you remove the DRM.
Under agreed upon social rules. Piracy is the absence of one party not playing by the rules.
No, piracy is a market reality. Companies have been dealing with the reality of piracy for a long time and still turning a profit. Rampant piracy is obviously bad, which is why federal enforcement agencies go after major infringers. But eliminating piracy altogether is impossible, and it is a waste of time to try. You are better off adding value to your product.
A civil crime. Plus you'll not going to advance anything by copying a design (patent), and marking up the cost.
Not sure what your point is here.
What the law protects isn't ideas themselves (nor is it what the founding fathers ment).
The founding fathers didn't have anything to say about intellectual property law. As for the rest, do you have any evidence of said scarcity? Or did you just copy that from a high school text book?
And letting people spread your content widely without compensation is wiser how?
Well, since people are already doing it, that is kind of a moot point. The question is, are you going to try to capitalize on it, or just ignore a potential market?
Well in this day and age of "flexible ethics", most would rather take the "less legal routes", than the much higher route of "not buying". Or to put it another way, if being good was easy, there wouldn't be evil.
There is no "flexible ethics" here. This is a purely amoral argument. If you have a product in demand (i.e: you provide a valuable service) people will pay for it. If you do things to constantly piss off your customers (price fixing, restrictive usage, vendor lock-in), or your service isn't worth the price you charge for it, people won't buy it. And if they can get said product by a different means (cheaper/better vendor, overseas imitation, free download) they will. They aren't going to deprive themselves of a product just because it is "ethical." I'm not going to pay for Natural Spring Water if I can go out to a natural spring and get it myself. You are going to have to do something to convince me that your product is better than what I can get for free if you want me to pay for it.
The problem is that piracy is the wholesale distribution of free "goods", and no one can make a profit competing with a free version of themselves.
Do you have any evidence of this? I can buy a dvd, rip it to mpeg, and give it to my friends. I can buy a cd, rip it to flac, and give it to my friends. I can buy a book, photocopy some useful pages, and give it to my friends. This is sharing, but it isn't "wholesale piracy", and it doesn't take a huge cut out of the already massive profits of the entertainment industry. Now if I were to rip some songs and post them on a website for free download, that is a different story (and fairly persecutable, in my opinion). And in the case of the iTMS workaround, you still end up *paying for the music*. It is not a free way of getting music. It just strips out the DRM that people find annoying. If free music is what they wanted, they would have tried to crack Apple's servers and stick all of the files on a P2P network.
Companies compete with free (or cheaper) versions of their products all of the time. It is what a free market is all about. You can't give everybody a monopoly on their market just because you don't think it is fair for a company to have to deal with competition.
A poor justification for crimminal acts, and much open for abuse.
Copyright infringement is not a criminal act. The point is, if you are going to go into business, you need to be prepared for market realities. If you are going to make shoes for $2 and sell them with the Nike logo for $100, that is great for making a profit. But if somebody turn around takes the exact same shoe design and sells it for $50, you need to be prepared for that. The law can do some things (such as not allowing them to use the Nike logo), but it is ultimately up to you to convince people to buy your product instead of going elsewhere. The law can only temporarily put artificial restrictions on supply. It is not a sustainable business model to rely on such laws for a long period of time.
What if the alternative is not being able to download legally at all?
Well, that's where market pressures come in. The music industry would be pretty foolish to ignore a high demand for downloadable music. Part of the challenge of business is to figure out how to sell something to customers at a profit, and it isn't always an easy thing. If you piss of your customers with DRM, they won't buy it (or resort to less legal routes). There is no moral argument here, this is simply a market reality. If you don't have a business model that allows for a certain amount of free redistribution of goods (or, analagously, the production of cheap rip-offs in other sectors), you won't make a profit. Nothing about business is easy or a sure thing.
I suppose publish or perish might have something to do with it. But, seriously, try teaching a course on something you really care about sometime. Then try to find a book for it. Sure, if it is freshman physics or calculus, there are tons out there. But what about biochemistry? I have never seen a biochemistry book cover material that I want to teach, the way I want to teach it. If you get one of the books out there already published for the pre-med students, you might be able to assign relevant reading from one or two chapters. But most of the time, if you want a good books for your course, you have to write it yourself.
Well now, you bring up a lot of good points. But I think the crux of the matter is, we as a society should invest resources into the preservation of our culture. Sure, to some extent, culture just happens. But it also disappears when neglected. One method of preserving our culture is as you describe: treat creative works as property so that it can be traded in an economy where property flows from person to person. Then a person who creates can trade those creations for food/clothes/shelter. That is one model and it has proven to work fairly well over the last century or two given certain creator/investor relationships and market realities. But it is not the perfect or only solution. I think current market realities and attitudes are forcing us to consider the flaws of this system and to propose alternatives.
I think most people agree the modifications being proposed by the "creative industry"--to lock things down as tightly as possible until you have to pay a dime for every written word because you have no other choice--are not really good revisions. But, unfortunately, such things do not really get debated. Decisions are just made and people are left hanging. I think there are other alternatives that would work better with the current flow of ideas (digital, Internet, etc), but we will probably never see these alternatives. Partly because some people blindly support something because it has "always been this way" (and by always, I mean within the last century or so). And partly because other people are driven by greed and profit, and it is not in their best interest to adopt a new system of exchange.
Very good statement. However, I do believe the debate really is about whether people have the right to apply certain copyright restrictions. It is not really about respecting another's choice. I could (hypothetically) choose to claim as my property anything that crosses the boundaries of my estate. But the law won't let me because that is an unreasonable and unjust claim.
Now the law does say I have the right to copyright certain things which has led to this disagreement. I agree that this "civil disobedience" is a bit immature and deconstructive. But when such things are not debated openly and publicly, and when decisions are made behind closed doors by people with money and influence, what are (normal) people supposed to do? And I mean in an idealogical sense. If all they wanted was music, you are right, there are other avenues. But if they want the free flow of ideas, buying from another vendor only skirts the problem. It doesn't resolve it.
*Just as a side note, this is a very old argument (of which you are probably aware). Roots can be traced back to at least the Peasant Rebellion of the 13th century, when the German peasantry objected to the idea of nobles taking over common land. They responded in the only way they could. They refused the order despite it being the law of the land.*
Wow, very nice! Thanks for the info.