First, I'd like to thank you for your work on Utah-GLX - this will mean that I can buy a Matrox card to use with some of your other work!
Second, I'd like to ask you what you mean by The choice isn?t between making their driver open source or closed source [but] between doing a closed source driver with their existing code, and doing a completely new driver.
So does this mean that they've licensed their code from someone else? Who?
Look at what's going on here,[...]they intend to deliver a driver which uses an infrastructure which isn't based on Mesa and isn't Open Source. That's nuts.
..but Diamond also makes drivers for cards based on nVidia chips. If you buy a Viper 770, which is based on the TNT2, you're getting Diamond's drivers in the box, not nVidia's. Or are Diamond's drivers just nVidia's with "enhancements"? I'd like to find that out.
One of the press-releases on the NVIDIA website says that they have some sort of mutual license/patent exchange deal going on with S3. So, presumably they don't feel that they're in competition with them and they can release all the specs. It may well be that Diamond's drivers are essentially NVIDIAS. In any event, unless they pull their socks up about Open Sourcing they're probably screwed as regards the *nix/XF86 market. Pity.
Hmm. As it happens I've just done that very thing. The response that I got arrived within 30 minutes of sending from Derek Perez of their PR department. His response? "Where is this campaign originating from?". Doesn't sound too friendly or hopeful!
If you have a Matrox G200, a G400, and ATi RagePro, Intel 810, RivaTNT or an S3 Virge, Utah GLX will support your card
I guess I'll be buying one of those then. Currently I have a Diamond Stealth III s540 16MB which develops unpleasant rubber banding problems under gimp. Enough to make it unusable in fact. From the UtahGLX mailing lists I note that several people have been trying to get S3 to release specs so that they can work on the Savage4 chipset. No dice so far apparently. I've also noticed several messages on comp.windows.386.x with people complaining about the rubber banding and freezing on Savage4/StealthIII implementations.
Basically it seems that manufacturers want to keep their hardware specs secret, they don't have too much of a problem if it's an older chipset (e.g. ViRGE for S3) but they perceive an advantage in secrecy for newer cards. The result of this is that their cards won't work for "advanced" functions such as GL and have weird glitches in ordinary, but intensive applications such as gimp. Result? A hearty recommendation from me not to buy a recent S3 chipset containing card - specifically the Savage chipsets.
My question would be, what is it that makes Matrox able to grok this and S3 not? Anyway, I'm dumping this thing and going for one of the one's you've mentioned. It might be useful if people went to The Linux Hardware Database and gave their experiences and ratings of graphics cards. This site provides a nice tabular, user reviewed summary of hardware and it's obvious from the XF86 FAQ that "what card should I buy" is something lots of people want to know.
No, you miss my point. I'm saying that although we're probably better off financially it wasn't money that made those movements a success. There's two tracks:
1. money 2. democratic politics
The only people that can afford to play 1. are the corporations and their owners. But, we have the option of 2., and as you point out, it worked.
A much better expansion of "lobby" is "political force to make the world as we would like it to be.
Well put, it's sort of like the language shift that has happened with "Special Interest Groups" in which there has been a conflation of corporate lobbying with citizen's groups. Although I agree with some of what the original poster was saying (namely that there are probably very disparate interests among the group known as geeks) I do nevertheless think that we are aware of an issue that the population at large isn't and it would be a service to all if we were to raise awareness about it.
Geeks or any other group that is not part of the ruling-class (sorry about that but I can't think of any other name for people that own the companies, corporations, factories and politicians) only get change by appealing to the common interests and empathy of the broad majority of society. As it stands we are highly paid compared to the majority of people but collectively we are worth peanuts compared to our bosses and hence we have little power by following the purchase politicians methodology. Far better is to publicly proselytize the dangers to everyone in society.
Um, Mattel might distribute someting for National Geographic, or they might have collaborated on something, but that would be the most of the relationship there.
Frankly I was even more surprised by the Princeton Review, I'm just quoting from the Popular Brands link at www.mattelshop.com - I don't actually know exactly what the relationship is but presumably if it's on their shop site they're selling it and making money from it or some spin-off.
We'd have to see a complete list of everybody Mattel owns in order to do this (most don't carry the Mattel mark), and I fear the list may be too long and comprehensive to pull it off.
Just looking at their e-shop confirms what you say here, they certainly make a lot of stuff. But a boycott of even there most popular things would hurt them. In fact it might be easier to get a boycott moving by concentrating on one or two of their most popular things instead of issuing a complicated long list that people will find a pain in the ass (oops that comment would be banned wouldn't it) to remember. To that end here are their own listed Popular Brands from the mattelshop website
A boycott would certainly be good and I hope that there will be some effect from it...bet there aren't that many Barbie/Little Mermaid owning geeks though. However the knock-on/social network ramifications could be large. Slashdot has around,what? 190,000, users now, if they have any chance of influencing friends and family that could spread effectively.
However, it would be good to have a multi-pronged response to these guys. I note that they have a Shop Mattel web-site which automatically repeated reloads would probably slow down (nothing illegal, just lots of stupid users reloading;-) ).
It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards.
I should point out that I haven't seen actual statistical proof for this. ( I have witnessed an instance first-hand, but anecdote doesn't count for much unless it occurs en masse.)
I think perhaps we're being a little too hasty in condemning Germany so easily here. Their rules about fascist parties and cults are based upon an assessment of how to implement the Never again that is echoed not just by the Jewish community but by communists, homosexuals, gypsies and others.
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
Well, everything can be claimed to be a slippery slope to some undesired destination. Mostly though we're able to avoid the undesired consequences if we wish to: in the case of censorship the implementation of antagonistic review bodies and safeguards operating in the public domain should be enough to prevent the destruction of democratic debate providing there are enough people that care about it. There's no way to implement a comprehensive set of rules that will function without superintendence - a constant struggle between interested parties carried out in the public eye is probably the best way to ensure that any abuse that happens is condoned by a large number of people in our society.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids
That sounds good. What happens though if there are people convinced by these arguments and they act upon them? It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards. Indeed Searchlight magazine, a british publication quotes Irving as stating that the setting up of "fascist cells" is the object of his League of St.George appearances. So, these things are not necessarily just academic debates about how many died. They are potentially the nucleus for the death or maiming of some "degenerate". IMHO it is the same problem that always attends discussion of free speech: the decision to allow it should take into account its likely effects. Your post seems to advocate an absolute right to speech without this consideration. Do I misunderstand you? If not how do you propose to avoid these problems?
Dude, the "bastards" that you so casually refer to are our friends. They're Jeff and Tim. Not just some faceless mega-corporation bureaucrats that are trying to make money by any means possible. No sir, Jeff has a human face and therefore you should not question his actions when he is being friendly to you and asking you to call him Jeff. Did you hear him ask to be called bastard? No! I thought not! See? He's our buddy.
Well, I'll hope that you're right about Bezos being unwilling to ruin his reputation with geeks. But how much of Amazon's business comes from geeks? I'm glad that he realizes that the current patent system is a bad way to run things for software, but probably all the CEO's of large corporations would like to speed-up innovation without losing competitive advantage. So we're left with stasis for a long while really. I agree totally that he's "also saying, "We're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot because we don't believe the law is exactly right[...]" after all he's running a business in a cut-throat environment. And I would argue that his decisions will be made on that basis, not on the basis of whether or not/. readers are unhappy because he is unable to do what he and they would like. --Crush
Dismissing plausible but unpleasant alternatives as merely cynical without addressing their substantive points counts as an ad hominem attack. MattMann points out that Bezos is a sophisticated, intelligent being and that there is a slim chance that Amazon on it's own (even with O'Reilly's help) will have the muscle to effect change in the PTO. So what we're left with is an agreement that life is unfair, but that's business.
Great. Maybe that's what it was designed to do. Just because Bezos is a normal, intelligent, coherent letter writer who doesn't live up to the non-essential characteristics of the "evil patent monopolist/ capitalist" that some have portrayed him as doesn't mean that the problem is still there. All he's saying is, "it's a bad system, but I didn't make the rules and I'd like to change them". True. Yet while it's nice that he's saying that he's going to try to attempt to begin to initiate some sort of reform he's still doing a Bad Thing now. Just because he's not a monster (in fact he's a hacker just like you and Tim) doesn't mean that there isn't a problem now. --Crush
I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris. That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
Use RH6.1 which has xfs prepatched with xfsft for TT fonts
If it's just the sizes that bother you, that's a pretty oldish problem which is fixed by switching the order of the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts in your font catalogue There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfontsthat might help
Finally Christopher Browne has really helpful web-pages with this topic indexed (among many others) at cbbrowne
There is no need for an Amazon boycott That's really a matter of tactics and given that it is relatively easy to get O'Reilly from other sources it would be useful to do so. Also, I don't just buy tech books, I buy a lot of fiction and history. I assume that others are also buying a large amount from them (or were). The O'Reilly business model is sort of irrelevant to the issue of bringing pressure to bear on Amazon to stop the patenting. I always hate it when people advocate something they call "pragmatism", yet I guess that's what I'm trying to do in this post. I see a boycott as more likely to happen and simpler for individuals to implement. Later we can turn our attention to O'Reilly;-)
If O'Reilly put his money where is mouth is, he'd GPL the the content of the books and we could then download them instead of buying them from Amazon. I like the idea. However that's a separate fight from the patents issue. Sometimes one thing at a time is more effective. Or do you see both stemming from the same source?
Also, I would quite like the idea of anyone being able to download and print for themselves, for personal use, a copy of a book. However I would not like it if some other company were able to take an author's work and repackage it with a different cover and undercut them - I can imagine one of the publishing giants doing this if O'Reilly GPL'ed their works. So, a sort of "Fair Use" access to the works would mean that if I were really in need of cheap refs I could get them. If I had money I could buy them nicely bound. Reading over that I'm not sure that I agree with myself, but I do think that stopping exploitation of authors would be essential. Any thoughts?
Well, they'll probably put him in the same cell as rapists if CA is anything to go by. As for murder...yeah, but he's not a cop so different rules apply.
O'Reilly puts his money where his mouth is. O'Reilly chose to chase up the issue. i.e. O'Reilly is putting his money (and influence) where his mouth is.
No, he's not putting money anywhere than in his bank account at the moment. If he were putting his money where his mouth is he would be refusing to ship through Amazon. Please note, I am not making any statement about whether or not that is the right thing to do. Just disputing your rhetoric. At the moment all that is happening is "mouth". There is no economic incentive issuing from O'Reilly. RMS is the one advocating that we put our money somewhere else other than Amazon. Let's not get confused about the difference between a verbal appeal and an economic boycott! --Crush
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'd like to thank you for your work on Utah-GLX - this will mean that I can buy a Matrox card to use with some of your other work!
Second, I'd like to ask you what you mean by The choice isn?t between making their driver open source or closed source [but] between doing a closed source driver with their existing code, and doing a completely new driver.
So does this mean that they've licensed their code from someone else? Who?
Look at what's going on here,[...]they intend to deliver a driver which uses an infrastructure which isn't based on Mesa and isn't Open Source. That's nuts.
You said it pal!
One of the press-releases on the NVIDIA website says that they have some sort of mutual license/patent exchange deal going on with S3. So, presumably they don't feel that they're in competition with them and they can release all the specs. It may well be that Diamond's drivers are essentially NVIDIAS. In any event, unless they pull their socks up about Open Sourcing they're probably screwed as regards the *nix/XF86 market. Pity.
Where is this campaign originating from?
Short and sweet eh? I thought I'd written him a pretty civil letter explaining cogently what the problem was. Anyone else had any feedback?
Hmm. As it happens I've just done that very thing. The response that I got arrived within 30 minutes of sending from Derek Perez of their PR department. His response? "Where is this campaign originating from?".
Doesn't sound too friendly or hopeful!
I bought Diamond (ahck!). It's collecting dust
Which one? what was wrong?
--Crush
If you have a Matrox G200, a G400, and ATi RagePro, Intel 810, RivaTNT or an S3 Virge, Utah GLX will support your card
I guess I'll be buying one of those then. Currently I have a Diamond Stealth III s540 16MB which develops unpleasant rubber banding problems under gimp. Enough to make it unusable in fact. From the UtahGLX mailing lists I note that several people have been trying to get S3 to release specs so that they can work on the Savage4 chipset. No dice so far apparently. I've also noticed several messages on comp.windows.386.x with people complaining about the rubber banding and freezing on Savage4/StealthIII implementations.
Basically it seems that manufacturers want to keep their hardware specs secret, they don't have too much of a problem if it's an older chipset (e.g. ViRGE for S3) but they perceive an advantage in secrecy for newer cards. The result of this is that their cards won't work for "advanced" functions such as GL and have weird glitches in ordinary, but intensive applications such as gimp. Result? A hearty recommendation from me not to buy a recent S3 chipset containing card - specifically the Savage chipsets.
My question would be, what is it that makes Matrox able to grok this and S3 not? Anyway, I'm dumping this thing and going for one of the one's you've mentioned. It might be useful if people went to The Linux Hardware Database and gave their experiences and ratings of graphics cards. This site provides a nice tabular, user reviewed summary of hardware and it's obvious from the XF86 FAQ that "what card should I buy" is something lots of people want to know.
No, you miss my point. I'm saying that although we're probably better off financially it wasn't money that made those movements a success. There's two tracks:
1. money
2. democratic politics
The only people that can afford to play 1. are the corporations and their owners. But, we have the option of 2., and as you point out, it worked.
--Crush
A much better expansion of "lobby" is "political force to make the world as we would like it to be.
Well put, it's sort of like the language shift that has happened with "Special Interest Groups" in which there has been a conflation of corporate lobbying with citizen's groups. Although I agree with some of what the original poster was saying (namely that there are probably very disparate interests among the group known as geeks) I do nevertheless think that we are aware of an issue that the population at large isn't and it would be a service to all if we were to raise awareness about it.
Geeks or any other group that is not part of the ruling-class (sorry about that but I can't think of any other name for people that own the companies, corporations, factories and politicians) only get change by appealing to the common interests and empathy of the broad majority of society. As it stands we are highly paid compared to the majority of people but collectively we are worth peanuts compared to our bosses and hence we have little power by following the purchase politicians methodology. Far better is to publicly proselytize the dangers to everyone in society.
Off-topic - goliard? isn't that like a jark?!
--Crush
Um, Mattel might distribute someting for National Geographic, or they might have collaborated on something, but that would be the most of the relationship there.
Frankly I was even more surprised by the Princeton Review, I'm just quoting from the Popular Brands link at www.mattelshop.com - I don't actually know exactly what the relationship is but presumably if it's on their shop site they're selling it and making money from it or some spin-off.
We'd have to see a complete list of everybody Mattel owns in order to do this (most don't carry the Mattel mark), and I fear the list may be too long and comprehensive to pull it off.
Just looking at their e-shop confirms what you say here, they certainly make a lot of stuff. But a boycott of even there most popular things would hurt them. In fact it might be easier to get a boycott moving by concentrating on one or two of their most popular things instead of issuing a complicated long list that people will find a pain in the ass (oops that comment would be banned wouldn't it) to remember. To that end here are their own listed Popular Brands from the mattelshop website
:A boycott would certainly be good and I hope that there will be some effect from it...bet there aren't that many Barbie/Little Mermaid owning geeks though. However the knock-on/social network ramifications could be large. Slashdot has around ,what? 190,000, users now, if they have any chance of influencing friends and family that could spread effectively.
However, it would be good to have a multi-pronged response to these guys. I note that they have a Shop Mattel web-site which automatically repeated reloads would probably slow down (nothing illegal, just lots of stupid users reloading ;-) ).
--Nestor
"I never died says he" - Ballad of Joe Hill.
Delphi and C++Builder for Linux....details. Should be cool.
It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards.
I should point out that I haven't seen actual statistical proof for this. ( I have witnessed an instance first-hand, but anecdote doesn't count for much unless it occurs en masse.)
Censorship is a slippery slope; once you start down it, everything is vulnerable.
Well, everything can be claimed to be a slippery slope to some undesired destination. Mostly though we're able to avoid the undesired consequences if we wish to: in the case of censorship the implementation of antagonistic review bodies and safeguards operating in the public domain should be enough to prevent the destruction of democratic debate providing there are enough people that care about it. There's no way to implement a comprehensive set of rules that will function without superintendence - a constant struggle between interested parties carried out in the public eye is probably the best way to ensure that any abuse that happens is condoned by a large number of people in our society.
One holds it out for the world to see... and ridicule and spit upon and point and laugh and use as an object lesson for your kids
That sounds good. What happens though if there are people convinced by these arguments and they act upon them? It is claimed by some involved in Anti-Fascist movements that there is a correlation between public meetings led by such luminaries as the Holocaust denier David Irving and attacks on perceived enemies afterwards. Indeed Searchlight magazine, a british publication quotes Irving as stating that the setting up of "fascist cells" is the object of his League of St.George appearances. So, these things are not necessarily just academic debates about how many died. They are potentially the nucleus for the death or maiming of some "degenerate". IMHO it is the same problem that always attends discussion of free speech: the decision to allow it should take into account its likely effects. Your post seems to advocate an absolute right to speech without this consideration. Do I misunderstand you? If not how do you propose to avoid these problems?Dude, the "bastards" that you so casually refer to are our friends. They're Jeff and Tim. Not just some faceless mega-corporation bureaucrats that are trying to make money by any means possible. No sir, Jeff has a human face and therefore you should not question his actions when he is being friendly to you and asking you to call him Jeff. Did you hear him ask to be called bastard? No! I thought not! See? He's our buddy.
Well, I'll hope that you're right about Bezos being unwilling to ruin his reputation with geeks. But how much of Amazon's business comes from geeks? I'm glad that he realizes that the current patent system is a bad way to run things for software, but probably all the CEO's of large corporations would like to speed-up innovation without losing competitive advantage. So we're left with stasis for a long while really. I agree totally that he's "also saying, "We're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot because we don't believe the law is exactly right[...]" after all he's running a business in a cut-throat environment. And I would argue that his decisions will be made on that basis, not on the basis of whether or not /. readers are unhappy because he is unable to do what he and they would like.
--Crush
Dismissing plausible but unpleasant alternatives as merely cynical without addressing their substantive points counts as an ad hominem attack. MattMann points out that Bezos is a sophisticated, intelligent being and that there is a slim chance that Amazon on it's own (even with O'Reilly's help) will have the muscle to effect change in the PTO. So what we're left with is an agreement that life is unfair, but that's business.
Great. Maybe that's what it was designed to do.
Just because Bezos is a normal, intelligent, coherent letter writer who doesn't live up to the non-essential characteristics of the "evil patent monopolist/ capitalist" that some have portrayed him as doesn't mean that the problem is still there. All he's saying is, "it's a bad system, but I didn't make the rules and I'd like to change them". True. Yet while it's nice that he's saying that he's going to try to attempt to begin to initiate some sort of reform he's still doing a Bad Thing now. Just because he's not a monster (in fact he's a hacker just like you and Tim) doesn't mean that there isn't a problem now.
--Crush
Er..the earliest life here *was* anaerobic. The oxygen in our atmosphere is courtesy of the oxygenic photosynthesisers
Yes, that's what I was saying. Hence the "possibly the earliest life was anaerobic " line and the point about ferrous oxides.
Cheers
--Crush
Well, there are lots of extremophiles here already that survive very "harsh" conditions. Large numbers of microbes are anaerobic, possibly the earliest life here was anaerobic. Geologists and evolutionists get all excited over the presence of oxidized iron because they believe that it's the result of the emergence of microbes that produced the stuff and then other ones emerged that were able to use it. There are bacteria Deinoccus radiodurans that are very happy in strongly radioactive environments, bacteria that eat "poisonous" contaminants. That's all apparently home-grown without any need to postulate microbes hitchhiking in on space debris.
That last point is why it's so darn important NOT to contaminate Europa - supposing we find life there after possible contamination. We look at it and it's similar to Earth microbes - cool! That means that there are only a limited number of paths for evolution to take to produce single-celled life, it's independent convergence[*}.....oh, wait no, didn't we just smash a possibly contaminated spaceprobe in here about 20 years ago? {*} Yeah, I know it's damned unlikely to get the same combination of bases/nucleotides at the sequence level necessary for the _true_ definition of convergence, but let's just think even about similar phenotypic morphology - wouldn't it be neat if they had flagella?
FDU-Mini HOWTO
They have a fontpack
which provides some nice stuff like Arial Black etc...and then install one of the TT font servers:
There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfontsthat might help
--Crush
That's really a matter of tactics and given that it is relatively easy to get O'Reilly from other sources it would be useful to do so. Also, I don't just buy tech books, I buy a lot of fiction and history. I assume that others are also buying a large amount from them (or were). The O'Reilly business model is sort of irrelevant to the issue of bringing pressure to bear on Amazon to stop the patenting. I always hate it when people advocate something they call "pragmatism", yet I guess that's what I'm trying to do in this post. I see a boycott as more likely to happen and simpler for individuals to implement. Later we can turn our attention to O'Reilly
I like the idea. However that's a separate fight from the patents issue. Sometimes one thing at a time is more effective. Or do you see both stemming from the same source?
Also, I would quite like the idea of anyone being able to download and print for themselves, for personal use, a copy of a book. However I would not like it if some other company were able to take an author's work and repackage it with a different cover and undercut them - I can imagine one of the publishing giants doing this if O'Reilly GPL'ed their works. So, a sort of "Fair Use" access to the works would mean that if I were really in need of cheap refs I could get them. If I had money I could buy them nicely bound. Reading over that I'm not sure that I agree with myself, but I do think that stopping exploitation of authors would be essential. Any thoughts?
Well, they'll probably put him in the same cell as rapists if CA is anything to go by. As for murder...yeah, but he's not a cop so different rules apply.
O'Reilly puts his money where his mouth is. O'Reilly chose to chase up the issue. i.e. O'Reilly is putting his money (and influence) where his mouth is.
No, he's not putting money anywhere than in his bank account at the moment. If he were putting his money where his mouth is he would be refusing to ship through Amazon.
Please note, I am not making any statement about whether or not that is the right thing to do. Just disputing your rhetoric. At the moment all that is happening is "mouth". There is no economic incentive issuing from O'Reilly. RMS is the one advocating that we put our money somewhere else other than Amazon.
Let's not get confused about the difference between a verbal appeal and an economic boycott!
--Crush