The original poster did, in fact, say "good software", in addition to saying "first-rate".
As for why one might dismiss an OS for containing a portion of closed-source code: for some people, it's an important moral issue. For others, they want to be able to see what's exactly going on *everywhere* -- having source to some bits isn't much good if you hit a severe bug that seems to be in the closed part. And, if you come to depend on some important closed code, you're always under the threat of having the rug pulled out from under you by new licensing, bankrupt companies, etc.
This can be debated endlessly, because both sides have merit.
PS: Sheesh, I'm not usually one to whine about moderation, but "off-topic" for responding directly to a question posed by a top-moderated post? *sigh*
Most (if not all) of those sites are just spitting up links to Linux news and articles elsewhere on the web. LWN has actual solid quality journalism, and they'll be hard to replace -- I don't think any of the sites you've listed fit the bill, even though they might be good in and of themselves.
Can they do that? I thought that a person could not place restrictions on the output of their program, unless it actually contained copyrighted parts of the generating program in the output.
I think it works by doing exactly that -- the required header files, etc. are distributed under the GPL. If you buy the commercial version, you get an alternate license.
1 foot divided by three: 4 inches. One mile divided by six: 880 feet.
63,360 is divisible by 35 numbers from the range 1-99; 100,000 is divisible by just 13 of those.
It's not so irrational after all -- much of the imperial system is based on highly-composite numbers, which are easy to split evenly many different ways. The metric system's attachment to the number 10 is very inconvenient when you want to divide something three ways.
Why the hell should it matter if the domain name is trademarked? Every letter of the alphabet is a registered trademark -- are those invalid in domain names? If the unix.org page says at the bottom "UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group (or whoever owns it today), who are not affliated with this site." that *ought* to be totally sufficient, in a sane world.
I worked at a medium-sized company that had free soft drinks in the fridge at all times, and had no problems keeping them stocked. $600 is a *lot* of cola in bulk -- they should probably skip the not-from-concentrate fruit juices and iced coffee and go with the budget stuff -- it can't possibly actually be that expensive. I mean, when you're paying your employees tens of thousands of dollars a year, you can afford a few cans of soda. Makes people happy, and keeps 'em dosed up on caffeine, which is good for productivity, especially for us ADD programmer types.
Sure. What's so wrong with that? Seems like advertising for something you believe in is objectively better than advertising for a large corporation for free.
July 2001 est. population density (people per sq/km of land):
Finland: 16.9 Sweden: 21.6 Japan: 415.0 US: 30.4
Of course, as you say, the density of major urban areas is in many ways more important than overall density. But it's still worth noting the difference in Japan -- I'd count a 13.7x difference as significant enough to have an effect.
Please, don't bug your vendor about this unless they don't provide a fix in a reasonable time. Any decent vendor is *already* working on a fix for this, and "passing the word on" a million times is just going to be annoying to their poor support folks.
Re:Wondering why NPR might do this?
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 2
Except not all browsers pass on the referrer. And what if I want to do something like 'wget' to pull down a particular file to listen to later?
If they don't want you linking directly to their audio files, why not just *say* that? "Please don't link directly to the media files on this site; instead, link to the parent web pages which contain them. Thank you."
Doesn't make it easy to organize and sync *my* music collection, at least not with the additional $1000 purchase of an Apple computer (and finding some space to put it). That's hardly high-value proposition.
As it is, I have a nice organizational scheme called "a directory tree" and a sync system called "rsync". It might be missing a few frills, but it's very quick, doesn't rely on anything special, and works perfectly well. If I wanted to do more sophisticated cataloging, it would be next to trivial to set up something with namazu. Unlike the iPod, the Toshiba device would fit right into this.
Of course, the ability to slip it into any computer (give or take) isn't the only advantage of having a removable drive -- as I'm sure dozens of people have pointed out by now, it makes it easy to upgrade as well.
With its rectangular shape, liquid crystal display and circular control panel, the Gigabeat bears a passing resemblance to Apple Inc.'s iPod....
Okay, I can see the "circular control panel" as an iPod reference, but come on -- rectangular shape? liquid crystal display?!? Those are hardly unique hallmarks of Apple design.
In any case, the removable PC Card hard drive makes this way more than an iPod clone. Who needs iTunes -- or any other special software?
Almost identical code, with some little bits of compatiblity wrappers. On Win32, *nix, BeOS, and OS X. My particular program (which you can download from my web site if you want) uses SDL, and if it did any networking, would use SDL_net. But there are several other good cross-platform libraries to choose from if you want, depending on your application -- my point isn't that I am so special in my ability to do this, but that it's not difficult for *anyone* to do.
Debug time might be faster, if you didn't have to spend so much time debugging Java quirks. My program uses SDL and does have a gui, although it doesn't use an external widget set (you can download it from my web site if you want). The fact that I can do it isn't really my point, though -- the fact is that it can be done without too much effort by anyone, since the core, difficult work has already been done.
I *do* write applications for Windows, Linux, and Solaris, all at the same time. And people use them. What language? C. No sharp, not even any plus plusses. (Although I could do that too if I wanted to.) What's the big deal?
I'm not sure your Unix analogy holds. cp is pretty slow on some media -- and mv doesn't move change the original bits at all if it can help it -- it just changes metadata. If it can't do that, then it exactly does a cp and unlinks (i.e. rms the original after.
Are you sure about that? If the numbers reported in the second article are correct, the "teleportation" does in fact happen at faster than light speed -- see this comment.
Yeah I thought that was pretty funny too. I think the reporter is wrong, though -- the spooky part is that it happens *faster* than the speed of light. I'm pretty sure about this, in fact, because there's a famous Einstein line about "spooky action at a distance" referring to faster-than-light quantum effects, which I'm pretty sure the scientists quoted would be aware of.
That being the case, everyone here is totally missing the point. And in fact, the reporters who wrote the linked-to story missed it to, despite this quote:
"The applications of teleportation for computers and communications over the next decade are very exciting," [Dr. Ping Koy Lam] said.
The bits about teleporting solid objects (including humans) were just humoring the reporter -- sort of like the whole "could this experiment destroy the universe" thing surrounding supercolliders. The true interesting practical application of this is FTL communication -- vital for any space missions going much further than, say, Mars -- and pretty handy even if you're only that far away.
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
Let me clarify: it makes it easier to maintain packages with multiple patches (and multiple sources -- you seem to have ignored that), because your final source package includes both the original source + RH (or whatever) patches and perhaps source + your own patches and source -- all separated neatly. In your scenario, where are you keeping *your* patch? How do you give it to other people?
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, rpms can depend on files and/or packages. Either way.
But as for switching RPM-based distros to dpkg: RPM doesn't map 1-1 with dpkg. I don't want to get into a big relgious war (although, that's pretty much this whole story...), but one thing I find technically superior is the ease with which an RPM can incorporate multiple sources and multiple patches -- this means it's very easy to take a Red Hat package, which contains pristine, original source + patches, and add my own local patches leaving the RH patches in their own "pristine" state. This is harder to do in dpkg -- requires some slight-of-hand at least.
Re:Binary Distros Are Dead
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Distros like Debian GNU/Linux and Red Hat Linux don't take a while to release (to take your example) the very latest XFree86 4.x because of some inherent slowness in putting together binary packages. It takes time because they test new releases before dumping them out there.
I'm also skeptical about your casual benchmarks. On Red Hat Linux, for example, key system elements like the kernel and glibc *are* selected based on your particular CPU. Almost everything else is compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 -- that is, optimized for i686 but still able to run on older systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the most fun playing NWN with people I already know, but actually, I've also had really good luck just going online and connecting basically at random to an interesting looking server, meeting some folks, and dungeon-crawling a bit. There's also a few decent sites (Neverwinter Connections, for example) geared towards getting like-minded people together for games, and that seems to work pretty well.
Have you played with the toolkit at all, or at least downloaded a few modules? This is a game whose potential won't be realized all at once.
The original poster did, in fact, say "good software", in addition to saying "first-rate".
As for why one might dismiss an OS for containing a portion of closed-source code: for some people, it's an important moral issue. For others, they want to be able to see what's exactly going on *everywhere* -- having source to some bits isn't much good if you hit a severe bug that seems to be in the closed part. And, if you come to depend on some important closed code, you're always under the threat of having the rug pulled out from under you by new licensing, bankrupt companies, etc.
This can be debated endlessly, because both sides have merit.
PS: Sheesh, I'm not usually one to whine about moderation, but "off-topic" for responding directly to a question posed by a top-moderated post? *sigh*
You might not care, but to some people, being "good" isn't good enough. They want to have the source code to the programs on which they depend.
You might not agree with this, but it's a pretty decent "why" for many.
Most (if not all) of those sites are just spitting up links to Linux news and articles elsewhere on the web. LWN has actual solid quality journalism, and they'll be hard to replace -- I don't think any of the sites you've listed fit the bill, even though they might be good in and of themselves.
Can they do that? I thought that a person could not place restrictions on the output of their program, unless it actually contained copyrighted parts of the generating program in the output.
I think it works by doing exactly that -- the required header files, etc. are distributed under the GPL. If you buy the commercial version, you get an alternate license.
Ah yes, an Ebay-like site: the pinnacle of human culture.
1 foot divided by three: 4 inches.
One mile divided by six: 880 feet.
63,360 is divisible by 35 numbers from the range 1-99; 100,000 is divisible by just 13 of those.
It's not so irrational after all -- much of the imperial system is based on highly-composite numbers, which are easy to split evenly many different ways. The metric system's attachment to the number 10 is very inconvenient when you want to divide something three ways.
Why the hell should it matter if the domain name is trademarked? Every letter of the alphabet is a registered trademark -- are those invalid in domain names? If the unix.org page says at the bottom "UNIX is a trademark of the Open Group (or whoever owns it today), who are not affliated with this site." that *ought* to be totally sufficient, in a sane world.
I worked at a medium-sized company that had free soft drinks in the fridge at all times, and had no problems keeping them stocked. $600 is a *lot* of cola in bulk -- they should probably skip the not-from-concentrate fruit juices and iced coffee and go with the budget stuff -- it can't possibly actually be that expensive. I mean, when you're paying your employees tens of thousands of dollars a year, you can afford a few cans of soda. Makes people happy, and keeps 'em dosed up on caffeine, which is good for productivity, especially for us ADD programmer types.
Sure. What's so wrong with that? Seems like advertising for something you believe in is objectively better than advertising for a large corporation for free.
July 2001 est. population density (people per sq/km of land):
Finland: 16.9
Sweden: 21.6
Japan: 415.0
US: 30.4
Of course, as you say, the density of major urban areas is in many ways more important than overall density. But it's still worth noting the difference in Japan -- I'd count a 13.7x difference as significant enough to have an effect.
Please, don't bug your vendor about this unless they don't provide a fix in a reasonable time. Any decent vendor is *already* working on a fix for this, and "passing the word on" a million times is just going to be annoying to their poor support folks.
Except not all browsers pass on the referrer. And what if I want to do something like 'wget' to pull down a particular file to listen to later?
If they don't want you linking directly to their audio files, why not just *say* that? "Please don't link directly to the media files on this site; instead, link to the parent web pages which contain them. Thank you."
Doesn't make it easy to organize and sync *my* music collection, at least not with the additional $1000 purchase of an Apple computer (and finding some space to put it). That's hardly high-value proposition.
As it is, I have a nice organizational scheme called "a directory tree" and a sync system called "rsync". It might be missing a few frills, but it's very quick, doesn't rely on anything special, and works perfectly well. If I wanted to do more sophisticated cataloging, it would be next to trivial to set up something with namazu. Unlike the iPod, the Toshiba device would fit right into this.
Of course, the ability to slip it into any computer (give or take) isn't the only advantage of having a removable drive -- as I'm sure dozens of people have pointed out by now, it makes it easy to upgrade as well.
With its rectangular shape, liquid crystal display and circular control panel, the Gigabeat bears a passing resemblance to Apple Inc.'s iPod....
Okay, I can see the "circular control panel" as an iPod reference, but come on -- rectangular shape? liquid crystal display?!? Those are hardly unique hallmarks of Apple design.
In any case, the removable PC Card hard drive makes this way more than an iPod clone. Who needs iTunes -- or any other special software?
Almost identical code, with some little bits of compatiblity wrappers. On Win32, *nix, BeOS, and OS X. My particular program (which you can download from my web site if you want) uses SDL, and if it did any networking, would use SDL_net. But there are several other good cross-platform libraries to choose from if you want, depending on your application -- my point isn't that I am so special in my ability to do this, but that it's not difficult for *anyone* to do.
Debug time might be faster, if you didn't have to spend so much time debugging Java quirks. My program uses SDL and does have a gui, although it doesn't use an external widget set (you can download it from my web site if you want). The fact that I can do it isn't really my point, though -- the fact is that it can be done without too much effort by anyone, since the core, difficult work has already been done.
I *do* write applications for Windows, Linux, and Solaris, all at the same time. And people use them. What language? C. No sharp, not even any plus plusses. (Although I could do that too if I wanted to.) What's the big deal?
I'm not sure your Unix analogy holds. cp is pretty slow on some media -- and mv doesn't move change the original bits at all if it can help it -- it just changes metadata. If it can't do that, then it exactly does a cp and unlinks (i.e. rms the original after.
Are you sure about that? If the numbers reported in the second article are correct, the "teleportation" does in fact happen at faster than light speed -- see this comment.
And when I say "to", I mean "too". Slashdot made me do it, I swear.
Yeah I thought that was pretty funny too. I think the reporter is wrong, though -- the spooky part is that it happens *faster* than the speed of light. I'm pretty sure about this, in fact, because there's a famous Einstein line about "spooky action at a distance" referring to faster-than-light quantum effects, which I'm pretty sure the scientists quoted would be aware of.
That being the case, everyone here is totally missing the point. And in fact, the reporters who wrote the linked-to story missed it to, despite this quote:
The bits about teleporting solid objects (including humans) were just humoring the reporter -- sort of like the whole "could this experiment destroy the universe" thing surrounding supercolliders. The true interesting practical application of this is FTL communication -- vital for any space missions going much further than, say, Mars -- and pretty handy even if you're only that far away.
Let me clarify: it makes it easier to maintain packages with multiple patches (and multiple sources -- you seem to have ignored that), because your final source package includes both the original source + RH (or whatever) patches and perhaps source + your own patches and source -- all separated neatly. In your scenario, where are you keeping *your* patch? How do you give it to other people?
Actually, rpms can depend on files and/or packages. Either way.
But as for switching RPM-based distros to dpkg: RPM doesn't map 1-1 with dpkg. I don't want to get into a big relgious war (although, that's pretty much this whole story...), but one thing I find technically superior is the ease with which an RPM can incorporate multiple sources and multiple patches -- this means it's very easy to take a Red Hat package, which contains pristine, original source + patches, and add my own local patches leaving the RH patches in their own "pristine" state. This is harder to do in dpkg -- requires some slight-of-hand at least.
Distros like Debian GNU/Linux and Red Hat Linux don't take a while to release (to take your example) the very latest XFree86 4.x because of some inherent slowness in putting together binary packages. It takes time because they test new releases before dumping them out there.
I'm also skeptical about your casual benchmarks. On Red Hat Linux, for example, key system elements like the kernel and glibc *are* selected based on your particular CPU. Almost everything else is compiled with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 -- that is, optimized for i686 but still able to run on older systems.