The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
I've never had a problem with this. I always go to nVidia's or AMD's web site for my video drivers (on Windows). And some Linux distros DO provide binary drivers. I'll take a high-performance proprietary driver any day over a "free" but ineffective alternative. That said, I did pick one of my recent machines because it had a driver supported intrinsically by XOrg. Choice is good.
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
The only real argument you have, and a very good one at that.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Oh please. I doubt even 99% of Slashdot readers could fix a bug in a video driver -- particularly one for complex and high-performance hardware like nVidia and AMD video cards. Let's just put this old lie to rest, shall we? I have real work to do; I don't have time to be futzing about in some hardware driver for free, just for "free" software people can feel sanctimonious.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Electric lights were better than candles because they lasted longer and didn't set the house on fire (usually) and didn't need to be changed as often. Vast difference between that and "let's get rid of light switches because we can" bullcrap."
Instead of being a snarky fool, why not explain how using my Android phone to turn on and off my light is better than a simple light switch?
Yawn. Won't work. It's a complicated solution to a simple problem. If I want to turn the light on in a room, why make it more complicated than flipping a switch on the wall? I suppose they could allow you to program all sorts of schedules and such... which can be done far easier with simple on/off/dim/brighten sensors.
So the question is: What does this tech bring to the table that makes my life better or easier? Sounds to me like more tech for tech's sake, which is only good if you're selling the tech.
Good work, Slashdot. Maybe you'll be a tad more cautious before reported bogus news, eh?
As for individual posters: How many of the people who screamed vitriol at Samsung will now apologize? How many of those who vowed to boycott Samsung in yesterday's thread will admit they were wrong?
I'll bet very few.
We live in a society where people treat indignation like a drug, always ready to believe the negative, always looking to be a victim. Sad times for the species indeed.
Will people learn from this, and stop believing everything they read? One can only hope (a fool's hope, but hope nonetheless.)
You're wasting your breath. The amateur pundits and doomsayers have already pronounced Samsung guilty, and are declaring in mighty tones their determination to boycott a company over a single report. No thought, no investigation, no waiting for the truth. Just charge ahead, demand a head on a bloody pike, and scream indignation... that's the Internet way.
Should this prove to be a false positive, will Slashdot print a retraction?
As for me, I was looking at an Acer model for my daughter; I think I'll buy her Samsung instead.
I purchased a Samsung RF710 a month ago, and am running the default OS install with zero problems. Sure, I scanned the machine, but it had almost NO crapware (as compared to HP and Gateway), and it has performed flawlessly. No key loggers or other problems. If anything, this has been the cleanest laptop I've every purchased.
I wonder why Samsung did this? Has anyone other than the original author seen the same thing? It seems a strange move on Samsung's part.
I've switched to other search engines; from my experience, Google provides too many tangential and corporate references when I do research.
Also, how does Google "know" that their search results were valid? I'll often do a Google search, click a couple of links, and after being disappointed, I'll go to another search engine where I get more useful results.
What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.
Just because evidence is anecdotal doesn't mean it should be blithely discounted. If I say "Ouch" at being cut, that means the injury hurt me; the pain is quite real even if no one else has felt it.
'This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,' Jobs said. 'Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"
I have five different grocery stores near my house -- I don't have any problem buying groceries. They all sell slightly different "stuff", which gives me more choice than if I have just one store. CHOICE IS GOOD.
The Android marketplace is competitive capitalism; Apple is one-size-fits-all, buy-what-we-say communism.
I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.
I am a C/C++ programmer by trade; I'm not fond of PHP. Yet this "C++ saves energy over PHP" argument smells like more selfish politics to me. And selfish politics is what is bringing doom down on humanity's head -- the use of PHP vs. C++ is a sideline, a distraction, and only truly valuable for people who have a philosophical axe to grind.
You want to save a lot of energy? Shut down all the computers running MMOs. And stop wasting cycles looking for alien signals in cosmic radio waves. And get rid of banal YouTube videos... and... the list is endless. The science behind Global Warming is being used to further political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with adapting our species from a potential environment change.
In the end, selfish politics will kill us all. We will become a footnote in history is we do not discover enlightened self-interest.
I have. For some time in the early 90s, I lived in the middle of Nevada, 50 miles form the nearest working gas station, no plumbing (other than a hole in the ground.) I also spent more than twenty years living in some of the more remote communities of Colorado, where you could by completely cut off from civilization for a week at a time by snow.
The reason those places are still wilderness is that it isn't possible to do much in those places. You can't grow enough crops for survival, for starters, and water can be a concern. Not being able to get FedX packages can be just as limiting as stoplight cameras at times...
The problem isn't being around other people -- it's people failing to live by the golden rule.
You seem to have a lot of stored up anger. Care to talk about it?
You're damned right -- I'm pissed off. A lot of people should be pissed off. Fundamental freedoms erode as people focus on symptoms, not causes. It's easier to slap a law on a symptom than it is to directly address the real problem.
Addressing causes isn't easy -- I've been fighting battles for quite some time now, doing the best I can with what I have. This is not the world I wanted to grow up in, and it sure as hell isn't what I want to leave my kids as a legacy.
Such was the comment from my 18yo daughter, directed at the psychiatrist in the original article. And she hasn't played WoW in 6 months!
Daughter like father -- I, too, am sick and damned tied of people telling me what I can do with my own body and life.
Until a hundred years ago, a person could simply pick up and go somewhere to get away from meddlesome, prying, and officious egotists who assume they have the only "right" answers. You could go to the "frontier", and be free of such stupidity and arrogance. But now the frontier is gone, there is nowhere to escape, and society is eating itself to death as more "do-gooders" try to "save" us.
Flash drives are a big no-no in the federal government and military. If something is so sensitive that it needs this kind of encryption wrapped in dynamite, then it should not be walking around on a USB drive. Dumb dumb dumb.
True... but not everyone who requires security is a government spook. For most of us non-spooks, this thing has merit.
I've used Subversion for years to sync my various systems. I have four different machines (2 Vista, 2 Linux) and 20GB of data that must be kept in sync.
Of course, there could be somethign much better out there. I'm just very comfortable with Subversion, and it works.
All knowledge is "in the air", whether printed on paper or stored magnetically or transmitted across the universe. Knowledge exists whther or not it has physical form; if all the math books in the universe disappeared tomorrow, 2 + 2 would *still* equal 4 and force would still equal mass times exceleration.
My daughters have educated themselves though physical and digital media; they are home-schooled, something that seemes near and dear to Bradbury's heart. The Internet gives them access to knowledge, ideas, and people they would *never* have encountered in a real library. The Internet EXPANDS our knowledge; it does not replace books, it COMPLEMENTS THEM.
Of course not. Song of the South is not being printed because Disney is afraid of old stereotypes, and not for any profit motive. That is entirely different than a national columnist downloaded an unreleased popular movie, and then bragging about it in his column for his own profit (i.e., page hits).
Motive matters. No one is making a profit from pirated copies of Song of the South. No one is is making a (significant) profit for themselves off publishing information to Wikileaks. In both cases, no one is losing any money via pirated copies, and therefore, it doesn't matter.
Long ago, in another life, I wrote programming books for a living. When a company in China put those books on a CD and tried selling it online with paying royalties, we pursued them (and got no money, but stopped the CD sales). On the other hand, I know of three colleges in third-world countries who use my books as classroom texts; they could not afford to buy copies, so after my publisher reverted rights to me, I GAVE AWAY my books in PDF form for people who needed them. The difference was in the motivation and intent of the "pirate."
Friedman did not get fired for talking about the existence of the pirated movies; he has talked about such things in the past without repercussion.
IN THIS CASE, he admited to downloading the video, and wrote a REVIEW of the movie. That is not reporting, that is stealing and then bragging about it.
As a workign journalist, I have strong support for freedom of the press.
A vast chasm divides Wikileaks (which publishes hidden information to expose issues and problems in society) and movie piracy (which exists for the selfish purposes of greedy and impatient children). They are not the same thing, even remotely.
Linux is a religion. Many people use it not because they have a good technical reason, but because Linux isn't Windows (or even OS X). Criticizing Linux is like pointing out logical flaws in traditional religion -- the response is often anger, and therefore counter-productive. Zealotry leads to tunnel vision.
"Linux" is a false concept. Linux is an operating system kernel, and largely invisible when using one of the distributions built upon it. Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, what-have-you -- difference is good for evolution, but lousy for stability and engineering. Who keeps track of the "Linux" bug and suggestion database? Somehow, we need to foster enlightened self-interest among thousands of contributors, hundreds of projects, and dozens of distributions, all of whom have their own itches to scratch.
Thus, I doubt sincerely that constructive criticism will ever be useful or welcome in the religion of herding cats.
Seems to me that these folks are just creating a profitable product from free-as-in-beer components. No religion, no Linux evangelism, just capitalism at work.
The vast, vast majority of people don't give a frak about "intellectual freedom" and "revolution" -- what they want is an inexpensive tool that works.
Slashdot Mirror
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
I've never had a problem with this. I always go to nVidia's or AMD's web site for my video drivers (on Windows). And some Linux distros DO provide binary drivers. I'll take a high-performance proprietary driver any day over a "free" but ineffective alternative. That said, I did pick one of my recent machines because it had a driver supported intrinsically by XOrg. Choice is good.
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
The only real argument you have, and a very good one at that.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Oh please. I doubt even 99% of Slashdot readers could fix a bug in a video driver -- particularly one for complex and high-performance hardware like nVidia and AMD video cards. Let's just put this old lie to rest, shall we? I have real work to do; I don't have time to be futzing about in some hardware driver for free, just for "free" software people can feel sanctimonious.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Possible, yes. Likely, no.
Well said, sir.
Electric lights were better than candles because they lasted longer and didn't set the house on fire (usually) and didn't need to be changed as often. Vast difference between that and "let's get rid of light switches because we can" bullcrap."
Instead of being a snarky fool, why not explain how using my Android phone to turn on and off my light is better than a simple light switch?
Yawn. Won't work. It's a complicated solution to a simple problem. If I want to turn the light on in a room, why make it more complicated than flipping a switch on the wall? I suppose they could allow you to program all sorts of schedules and such... which can be done far easier with simple on/off/dim/brighten sensors.
So the question is: What does this tech bring to the table that makes my life better or easier? Sounds to me like more tech for tech's sake, which is only good if you're selling the tech.
Good work, Slashdot. Maybe you'll be a tad more cautious before reported bogus news, eh?
As for individual posters: How many of the people who screamed vitriol at Samsung will now apologize? How many of those who vowed to boycott Samsung in yesterday's thread will admit they were wrong?
I'll bet very few.
We live in a society where people treat indignation like a drug, always ready to believe the negative, always looking to be a victim. Sad times for the species indeed. Will people learn from this, and stop believing everything they read? One can only hope (a fool's hope, but hope nonetheless.)
You're wasting your breath. The amateur pundits and doomsayers have already pronounced Samsung guilty, and are declaring in mighty tones their determination to boycott a company over a single report. No thought, no investigation, no waiting for the truth. Just charge ahead, demand a head on a bloody pike, and scream indignation... that's the Internet way. Should this prove to be a false positive, will Slashdot print a retraction? As for me, I was looking at an Acer model for my daughter; I think I'll buy her Samsung instead.
I purchased a Samsung RF710 a month ago, and am running the default OS install with zero problems. Sure, I scanned the machine, but it had almost NO crapware (as compared to HP and Gateway), and it has performed flawlessly. No key loggers or other problems. If anything, this has been the cleanest laptop I've every purchased. I wonder why Samsung did this? Has anyone other than the original author seen the same thing? It seems a strange move on Samsung's part.
I've switched to other search engines; from my experience, Google provides too many tangential and corporate references when I do research.
Also, how does Google "know" that their search results were valid? I'll often do a Google search, click a couple of links, and after being disappointed, I'll go to another search engine where I get more useful results.
What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.
Just because evidence is anecdotal doesn't mean it should be blithely discounted. If I say "Ouch" at being cut, that means the injury hurt me; the pain is quite real even if no one else has felt it.
I have five different grocery stores near my house -- I don't have any problem buying groceries. They all sell slightly different "stuff", which gives me more choice than if I have just one store. CHOICE IS GOOD.
The Android marketplace is competitive capitalism; Apple is one-size-fits-all, buy-what-we-say communism.
I'll take the chaos, thank you.
I never have mod points when I read soemthign excellent. :)
Well said, sir.
Why is Chrome OS considered "cutting edge"?
I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.
Isn't this "study" a waste of energy?
I am a C/C++ programmer by trade; I'm not fond of PHP. Yet this "C++ saves energy over PHP" argument smells like more selfish politics to me. And selfish politics is what is bringing doom down on humanity's head -- the use of PHP vs. C++ is a sideline, a distraction, and only truly valuable for people who have a philosophical axe to grind.
You want to save a lot of energy? Shut down all the computers running MMOs. And stop wasting cycles looking for alien signals in cosmic radio waves. And get rid of banal YouTube videos... and... the list is endless. The science behind Global Warming is being used to further political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with adapting our species from a potential environment change.
In the end, selfish politics will kill us all. We will become a footnote in history is we do not discover enlightened self-interest.
I have. For some time in the early 90s, I lived in the middle of Nevada, 50 miles form the nearest working gas station, no plumbing (other than a hole in the ground.) I also spent more than twenty years living in some of the more remote communities of Colorado, where you could by completely cut off from civilization for a week at a time by snow.
The reason those places are still wilderness is that it isn't possible to do much in those places. You can't grow enough crops for survival, for starters, and water can be a concern. Not being able to get FedX packages can be just as limiting as stoplight cameras at times...
The problem isn't being around other people -- it's people failing to live by the golden rule.
You're damned right -- I'm pissed off. A lot of people should be pissed off. Fundamental freedoms erode as people focus on symptoms, not causes. It's easier to slap a law on a symptom than it is to directly address the real problem.
Addressing causes isn't easy -- I've been fighting battles for quite some time now, doing the best I can with what I have. This is not the world I wanted to grow up in, and it sure as hell isn't what I want to leave my kids as a legacy.
"Quit trying to save me! You're killing me!"
Such was the comment from my 18yo daughter, directed at the psychiatrist in the original article. And she hasn't played WoW in 6 months!
Daughter like father -- I, too, am sick and damned tied of people telling me what I can do with my own body and life.
Until a hundred years ago, a person could simply pick up and go somewhere to get away from meddlesome, prying, and officious egotists who assume they have the only "right" answers. You could go to the "frontier", and be free of such stupidity and arrogance. But now the frontier is gone, there is nowhere to escape, and society is eating itself to death as more "do-gooders" try to "save" us.
YUCK!
True... but not everyone who requires security is a government spook. For most of us non-spooks, this thing has merit.
I've used Subversion for years to sync my various systems. I have four different machines (2 Vista, 2 Linux) and 20GB of data that must be kept in sync.
Of course, there could be somethign much better out there. I'm just very comfortable with Subversion, and it works.
All knowledge is "in the air", whether printed on paper or stored magnetically or transmitted across the universe. Knowledge exists whther or not it has physical form; if all the math books in the universe disappeared tomorrow, 2 + 2 would *still* equal 4 and force would still equal mass times exceleration.
My daughters have educated themselves though physical and digital media; they are home-schooled, something that seemes near and dear to Bradbury's heart. The Internet gives them access to knowledge, ideas, and people they would *never* have encountered in a real library. The Internet EXPANDS our knowledge; it does not replace books, it COMPLEMENTS THEM.
Android uses Linux, but isn't Linux (no standard libraries, for example).
Android uses Java, but it isn't standard Java nor is it compatible with most Java apps.
Android is open source, except for certain fiddly-bits they keep private.
This is not the competition for Windows we've been looking for.
Of course not. Song of the South is not being printed because Disney is afraid of old stereotypes, and not for any profit motive. That is entirely different than a national columnist downloaded an unreleased popular movie, and then bragging about it in his column for his own profit (i.e., page hits).
Motive matters. No one is making a profit from pirated copies of Song of the South. No one is is making a (significant) profit for themselves off publishing information to Wikileaks. In both cases, no one is losing any money via pirated copies, and therefore, it doesn't matter.
Long ago, in another life, I wrote programming books for a living. When a company in China put those books on a CD and tried selling it online with paying royalties, we pursued them (and got no money, but stopped the CD sales). On the other hand, I know of three colleges in third-world countries who use my books as classroom texts; they could not afford to buy copies, so after my publisher reverted rights to me, I GAVE AWAY my books in PDF form for people who needed them. The difference was in the motivation and intent of the "pirate."
Again: Motive matters.
Friedman did not get fired for talking about the existence of the pirated movies; he has talked about such things in the past without repercussion.
IN THIS CASE, he admited to downloading the video, and wrote a REVIEW of the movie. That is not reporting, that is stealing and then bragging about it.
As a workign journalist, I have strong support for freedom of the press.
A vast chasm divides Wikileaks (which publishes hidden information to expose issues and problems in society) and movie piracy (which exists for the selfish purposes of greedy and impatient children). They are not the same thing, even remotely.
Two problems arise when criticizing Linux:
Thus, I doubt sincerely that constructive criticism will ever be useful or welcome in the religion of herding cats.
Seems to me that these folks are just creating a profitable product from free-as-in-beer components. No religion, no Linux evangelism, just capitalism at work.
The vast, vast majority of people don't give a frak about "intellectual freedom" and "revolution" -- what they want is an inexpensive tool that works.