You are a criminal. A punishment is imposed upon you. This punishment removes some rights that you previously exercised.
Shock! Horror!
As I hope you appreciate, you are a complete and utter idiot. The EU has the right under its copetition laws to do this. You can not compare this to your insane example of a broken court. If the court system is broken, the law *does not matter*. You cannot presuppose a broken court system or government, and on the basis of that deny all governments the ability to do anything that can be abused. Clue: this leads to a government with zero power, and the world being run by organised crime who become the defacto government, but with out checks and balances.
And, back to you missing the point: MS has the right to comply with this order in three ways: 1) Document all interfaces 2) Provide the code implementing the interface 3) Pay 5% of global revenue as a fine. So your whole idiotic tirade was for nothing. If MS want, they can do everything under 1) or 3). If not, it is their own choice to relinquish copyright on that code.
The EU has demanded that MS *document* protocols, file formats, and interfaces, to allow competitors to interoperate just as well as MS themselves do. MS wants to impose a toll gate on this documentation, which they chose to provide as source code. The EU has said that this is not acceptable : MS can either provide the documentation no strings attached - in the form of code if they are incapable of doing it any other way, or they can face fines.
The point is to restore competition to the market. And if this were made into a general law for software providers, "Document your interfaces", OSS would do just fine.
This is utter utter crap. There are at least a hundred million roaming unemployed in China. Just think for a second : about half of the people employed by the state or state owned enterprises before Deng came to power have been sacked as these businesses became unprofitable.
" The narrow official definition of unemployment leaves out millions of people who are out of work, by a common-sense definition. A good place to start is to ask who is out of work and needs a job but is not counted in the official unemployment figures. These are the main categories: # Xia gang, or "off-post" workers, not registered as unemployed and still contractually tied to their work-units, possibly receiving short-term very limited benefits. # Surplus, unpaid but not officially laid off workers at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), technically hired but economically expendable. # Laid-off workers still contractually tied to their work units. # Migrant agricultural and rural workers who move to cities, an estimated 94 million of them, or more. # Surplus rural workers. # Workers who disappear into the informal economy. "
It is of course very difficult to get any sensible information out of China. The only people counted as unemployed are those who had a job in a city and lost it. That rate is about 10% of official urban workers, ie 30 million out of 300 million . The biggest portion left out are the roaming agricultural workers - at the very least a hundred million out of work due to cheap food imports from the US, Canada, the Ukraine etc.
Yes, I do know what you mean - maybe 5% of what I read is SF. Had to point it out though - I mean, Possession won the Man Booker prize for 1990;-) TBH, If I hold it as a standard I can't say that a huge amount of anything surpasses it...
But yes : In most SF or altered world settings, there is the tendency that a much greater proportion of the work goes into exposition and world development. It is also very difficult for an SF author to achieve what a lot of modern authors do : they take some aspect of culture or history you are likely to know a bit about, and reveal more information about it through a characters perceptions - so even exposition becomes character development in a way, as the perceptions of the character and the truth you do know are reconciled.
This is very difficult to do in a situation where the reader needs to be informed of the "truth", and the revelations need to be reinforced, not questioned at every turn. In SF, as the build up of "truth" is so arduous, differing perceptions are often couched in factionalisation or end up being so momentous that they dominate the plot rather easily.
Anyway, that is my take on why modern "reality" based literature seems to have more depth than the best that SF could ever even theoretically achieve. "Magical realism" ala Marquez or subtle aternate history like "The Plot Against America" is about the furthest you can go without losing some of that feeling of depth that comes from the real world. The closest I could recommend that is "real" SF is probably the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons. These very cleverly utilise a lot of our existing culture (eg the big three Abrahamic religions, Keats) and do manage to do a bit of what I mentioned above. But yes, the tech/physics bending still has its moments.
Possession : A Romance by A.S. Byatt? This is widely considered to be one of the finest British novels of the nineties. It is immensely powerful - certainly not just some run of the mill dreck. I don't want to say it is not "fair" to compare to poor old Gully Foyles outings, but that really is not the comparison you set out in your original post.
I can assure you Possession has made many "Best 100 books of the 20th century" lists....
And I agree it would make a bad film with a huge loss in the transition to the screen - just like most good modern novels. eg Corelli, White Teeth, American Psycho, etc. So much is in the style and the details that adaptions do fall flat...
It caches compiled code, and you can AOT things for faster startup. This is very often worse for long term performance, go and look at some of the newish optimisations which rely on the ability to heavily inline and uninline code at runtime according to new loads, and some profile driven optimisation techniques. Also there are irritating performance issues with.net code if it is compiled for the wrong appdomain usage....(single vs multi app domain Jitted code).
Most of these things have been done before.... in LISP, smalltalk, and shock, Java virtual machines. They are performance hacks. In no way can these implementation strategies be construed to mean there is "no VM". Even GCJ has a VM, *because a VM is a method of specifying semantics, not a specific implementation*.
I honestly have no idea why I expect a modicum of technical competence on Slashdot, but I do.
You are very confused..Net does run a VM. I have no idea what was going through your brain when you asserted the opposite..Net programs are CLR bytecode in a tiny PE wrapper that just calls the CLR. There is very little difference to a.jar file : it is just a bit more windows centric and odd. The only justification for calling the files.exe &.dll is familiarity, which breeds confusion.
Java is faster for some things,.Net for others. The programs you were using probably used Swing, as compared to Winforms. Swing is inherently more complex, and has taken a long time to optimise. Used carefully, it can perform just as well as a native toolkit. But most often it is not used carefully. Winforms is a horrible abortion, being based on a collection of horrible old common controls and sicko com wrappers. Hopefully avalon will quickly put it to death...
The JVM has quite a number of code generation optimisations that heve not yet been implemented in the CLR: its just an older, more mature implementation of an almost identical VM..Net does some AOT compilation tricks which help startup time.
I used Gentoo for a year after debian, and have now switched to Ubuntu.
I got bored. I could no longer be bothered to keep recompiling. It is just too much effort. And the worst thing is keeping up if you just wait a few things from ~x86. ( constantly messing with adding deps to/etc/portage/package.keywords )
Does get fucking nightmarish after a while. Sorry. I hope things have progressed since then.
Also, AFAIK, you can only install multiple library versions if the ebuild is designed for that (slots and all that). The vast majority aren't. Guess what, you can do the same with debian - you just include the version number in the name of the package. eg see libdb in ubuntu or debian which has multiple versions.
I will grant you that making an ebuild is easier than making a deb. But the average quality *is* lower - don't try telling me you've never been faced with an utterly broken ebuild in x86.
And no, the issue you have is not "dependency hell "- this was common parlance for having to go round manually picking up rpms. I'd call it apt breakage - where the archive is in an inconstent state. This does happen with Gentoo as well - please don't pretend that emerge update has worked flawlessly for you every single time. And to be honest, I expect you were using an external apt-source.
The population of the UK is 60 million. It is a fifth of the US. So its not *that* different - its bigger than any of the states, the region or the city you decided to mention. I have a hard time believing that you think land area determines how much news a place generates...
Could you please try to experience the media in another country before making random judgements about it? American media is horribly insular, and no one I know who has lived outside the US would dispute that. The main reasons are the general insularity of the popular culture ( especially away from the coasts), and the monopolisation of the news media by tycoons with vested interests. Its not normal, please don't take it at face value.
They will end up being replaced by the user by an easily bought U$2 pirated version of Windows XP.
This is where Trusted Computing should come back and bite MS in the arse.
Seriously : it would not be hard to make these machines incompatible with Windows (eg. just have the bios boot differently), and still compatible with Linux (worst case, provide a kernel/grub patch). Say you are doing it to combat piracy: then if they modify Windows to cope, it kind of puts all those "We hate piracy" rants in perspective. They know the number of people who will buy windows on these PCs is minimal, so it would totally be a mind share preservation move.
I've run KDE programs in luminocity : it works fine.
Hopefully, the composite manager will be a shared library that KWin, metacity, and any other window managers can use. The separate composite manager is probably going away.
I'm talking about the case where someone gets the GPLed version, uses it in secret to develop something ( ie in-house app), decides it is good enough to sell ( it seems quite a low bar is set on MacOS X and Windows), and then buys a licence.
Trolltech might suspect they had been developing using the GPLed release, but it would be very difficult to prove. This would be a more frequent occurence than someone taking their GPLed work closed.
Now I've just got to figure out why on earth Trolltech want to do this in the first place: it seems to just be refusing sales in the end. Not good for business....
I really have to wonder if that licence is enforceable : they have to prove that you developed the code against QT rather than the headers, which are non copyrightable afaik. I guess this is a contract and they can do what they like... and they only need to prove the balance of probabilities : it is pretty unlikely anyone developed against the headers alone with much success. TINLA, IANAL.
Tbh, they are unlikely to find out about this happening: most proprietary developers I know are perfectly comfortable with piracy of tools and libraries - and are shocked when I include attribution for any open source stuff I have used. I hope Trolltech don't lose a lot from in-house apps... but maybe they will just view this as a kind of advertising like MS & Adobe seem to...
Hopefully they will make enough cash for this whole thing not to be a big issue: companies perceived as "open source" sueing their customers is the last thing we need.
I don't think you are looking for an image manipulation program, but a drawing program. Gimp is good for messing with photos etc. : try Inkscape for drawing, it is really very nice.
I wouldn't rely on legal hacks like Section 508 - after a few tries, they'll just "approve" some assistive software.
We need real antitrust action on this (treating the entire entertainment and electronics industry as one complex monopoly). But consumer education and abject market failure are the only likely ways we have to win.
Interesting that MS themselves appear to be abandoning the registry in favour of XML files (app.config, web.config, security.config, machine.config) then, isn't it?
Except that a whole lot of newish distros are based on debian and use.deb , eg Knoppix, Mepis, Lindows, Xandros, Ubuntu, Libranet, Progeny. They aren't getting less popular - but alien generally works for rpms. The real problem is that generally what is inside these packages is infact very tightly coupled to everything else about a distro. This is where the LSB has failed, and needs more work.
Tbh, package formats is not a level of integration that matters. Lets face it, on windows, you either get a sicko.msi which does whatever it wants, or a sicko.exe which does whatever it wants. Any vaguely standard system is a step up from that.
This is one of the stupidest comments I have read in a while.
Do you understand that the important thing about free software is not acquisition cost? The other advantages apply to China just as much as the West. Also, remember that a lot of formerly state owned businesses are consolidating and ending up with significant overseas (eg US, EU) operations. It won't be viable for MS to let them get away with it to maintain market share, unless they want to abandon all licencing revenue. Doubtful.
On the consumer side, if Linux got a significant share in Japan, US, and EU, the Chinese will use it because thats where the games will be. China is not going to last as the bastion of proprietary software. How short termist are you?
X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.
The best performing remote desktop solution for X is NX from nomachine. And yes, it does perform better than Citrix.
They have primarily pursued the goofy desktop in a window model as well. But there is nothing in their protocol mandating this : it is merely a limitation of the current client.
Best of all, NX is Free Software released under the GPL. Its a seperate process than the X server, so no legal viruses are going to eat up your nVidia driver.
NX sell a proprietary packaged up version. There is a project called FreeNX aiming to produce a fully Free set of NX tools ; however they appear to be closely allied to KDE, and aim to make it a feature for KDE to lord over Gnome. I hope I'm wrong.
I'd just like to remind fellow open source fans that " always will have " is a pretty strong statement for an AC to make about project he probably has nothing whatsoever to do with.
Who knows, FreeBSD might copy this new Linux release process if it proves tremendously successful, with a few modifications to fit into their monolithic organisation vs. multiple distributions and individual developers of the Linux world.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a criminal. A punishment is imposed upon you. This punishment removes some rights that you previously exercised.
Shock! Horror!
As I hope you appreciate, you are a complete and utter idiot. The EU has the right under its copetition laws to do this. You can not compare this to your insane example of a broken court. If the court system is broken, the law *does not matter*. You cannot presuppose a broken court system or government, and on the basis of that deny all governments the ability to do anything that can be abused. Clue: this leads to a government with zero power, and the world being run by organised crime who become the defacto government, but with out checks and balances.
And, back to you missing the point: MS has the right to comply with this order in three ways:
1) Document all interfaces
2) Provide the code implementing the interface
3) Pay 5% of global revenue as a fine.
So your whole idiotic tirade was for nothing. If MS want, they can do everything under 1) or 3). If not, it is their own choice to relinquish copyright on that code.
Sorry, but you are talking utter shit.
The EU has demanded that MS *document* protocols, file formats, and interfaces, to allow competitors to interoperate just as well as MS themselves do. MS wants to impose a toll gate on this documentation, which they chose to provide as source code. The EU has said that this is not acceptable : MS can either provide the documentation no strings attached - in the form of code if they are incapable of doing it any other way, or they can face fines.
The point is to restore competition to the market. And if this were made into a general law for software providers, "Document your interfaces", OSS would do just fine.
Yes, the difference being that under the system of the US, Chinas unemployment figures would approach the population of the US.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FD01Ad01.html
is the reference I forgot...
This is utter utter crap. There are at least a hundred million roaming unemployed in China. Just think for a second : about half of the people employed by the state or state owned enterprises before Deng came to power have been sacked as these businesses became unprofitable.
"
The narrow official definition of unemployment leaves out millions of people who are out of work, by a common-sense definition. A good place to start is to ask who is out of work and needs a job but is not counted in the official unemployment figures. These are the main categories:
# Xia gang, or "off-post" workers, not registered as unemployed and still contractually tied to their work-units, possibly receiving short-term very limited benefits.
# Surplus, unpaid but not officially laid off workers at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), technically hired but economically expendable.
# Laid-off workers still contractually tied to their work units.
# Migrant agricultural and rural workers who move to cities, an estimated 94 million of them, or more.
# Surplus rural workers.
# Workers who disappear into the informal economy.
"
It is of course very difficult to get any sensible information out of China. The only people counted as unemployed are those who had a job in a city and lost it. That rate is about 10% of official urban workers, ie 30 million out of 300 million . The biggest portion left out are the roaming agricultural workers - at the very least a hundred million out of work due to cheap food imports from the US, Canada, the Ukraine etc.
Yes, I do know what you mean - maybe 5% of what I read is SF. Had to point it out though - I mean, Possession won the Man Booker prize for 1990 ;-) TBH, If I hold it as a standard I can't say that a huge amount of anything surpasses it...
But yes : In most SF or altered world settings, there is the tendency that a much greater proportion of the work goes into exposition and world development. It is also very difficult for an SF author to achieve what a lot of modern authors do : they take some aspect of culture or history you are likely to know a bit about, and reveal more information about it through a characters perceptions - so even exposition becomes character development in a way, as the perceptions of the character and the truth you do know are reconciled.
This is very difficult to do in a situation where the reader needs to be informed of the "truth", and the revelations need to be reinforced, not questioned at every turn. In SF, as the build up of "truth" is so arduous, differing perceptions are often couched in factionalisation or end up being so momentous that they dominate the plot rather easily.
Anyway, that is my take on why modern "reality" based literature seems to have more depth than the best that SF could ever even theoretically achieve. "Magical realism" ala Marquez or subtle aternate history like "The Plot Against America" is about the furthest you can go without losing some of that feeling of depth that comes from the real world. The closest I could recommend that is "real" SF is probably the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons. These very cleverly utilise a lot of our existing culture (eg the big three Abrahamic religions, Keats) and do manage to do a bit of what I mentioned above. But yes, the tech/physics bending still has its moments.
Possession : A Romance by A.S. Byatt? This is widely considered to be one of the finest British novels of the nineties. It is immensely powerful - certainly not just some run of the mill dreck. I don't want to say it is not "fair" to compare to poor old Gully Foyles outings, but that really is not the comparison you set out in your original post.
I can assure you Possession has made many "Best 100 books of the 20th century" lists....
And I agree it would make a bad film with a huge loss in the transition to the screen - just like most good modern novels. eg Corelli, White Teeth, American Psycho, etc. So much is in the style and the details that adaptions do fall flat...
It caches compiled code, and you can AOT things for faster startup. This is very often worse for long term performance, go and look at some of the newish optimisations which rely on the ability to heavily inline and uninline code at runtime according to new loads, and some profile driven optimisation techniques. Also there are irritating performance issues with .net code if it is compiled for the wrong appdomain usage....(single vs multi app domain Jitted code).
Most of these things have been done before.... in LISP, smalltalk, and shock, Java virtual machines. They are performance hacks. In no way can these implementation strategies be construed to mean there is "no VM". Even GCJ has a VM, *because a VM is a method of specifying semantics, not a specific implementation*.
I honestly have no idea why I expect a modicum of technical competence on Slashdot, but I do.
You are very confused. .Net does run a VM. I have no idea what was going through your brain when you asserted the opposite. .Net programs are CLR bytecode in a tiny PE wrapper that just calls the CLR. There is very little difference to a .jar file : it is just a bit more windows centric and odd. The only justification for calling the files .exe & .dll is familiarity, which breeds confusion.
.Net for others. The programs you were using probably used Swing, as compared to Winforms. Swing is inherently more complex, and has taken a long time to optimise. Used carefully, it can perform just as well as a native toolkit. But most often it is not used carefully. Winforms is a horrible abortion, being based on a collection of horrible old common controls and sicko com wrappers. Hopefully avalon will quickly put it to death...
.Net does some AOT compilation tricks which help startup time.
Java is faster for some things,
The JVM has quite a number of code generation optimisations that heve not yet been implemented in the CLR: its just an older, more mature implementation of an almost identical VM.
I used Gentoo for a year after debian, and have now switched to Ubuntu.
/etc/portage/package.keywords )
/usr/sbin/dispatch-conf
I got bored. I could no longer be bothered to keep recompiling. It is just too much effort. And the worst thing is keeping up if you just wait a few things from ~x86. ( constantly messing with adding deps to
sudo emerge sync
sudo emerge --update --deep --verbose --ask world
sudo emerge --verbose --ask depclean
sudo revdep-rebuild --verbose --ask
sudo
Does get fucking nightmarish after a while. Sorry.
I hope things have progressed since then.
Also, AFAIK, you can only install multiple library versions if the ebuild is designed for that (slots and all that). The vast majority aren't. Guess what, you can do the same with debian - you just include the version number in the name of the package. eg see libdb in ubuntu or debian which has multiple versions.
I will grant you that making an ebuild is easier than making a deb. But the average quality *is* lower - don't try telling me you've never been faced with an utterly broken ebuild in x86.
And no, the issue you have is not "dependency hell "- this was common parlance for having to go round manually picking up rpms. I'd call it apt breakage - where the archive is in an inconstent state. This does happen with Gentoo as well - please don't pretend that emerge update has worked flawlessly for you every single time. And to be honest, I expect you were using an external apt-source.
The population of the UK is 60 million. It is a fifth of the US. So its not *that* different - its bigger than any of the states, the region or the city you decided to mention. I have a hard time believing that you think land area determines how much news a place generates...
Could you please try to experience the media in another country before making random judgements about it? American media is horribly insular, and no one I know who has lived outside the US would dispute that. The main reasons are the general insularity of the popular culture ( especially away from the coasts), and the monopolisation of the news media by tycoons with vested interests. Its not normal, please don't take it at face value.
They will end up being replaced by the user by an easily bought U$2 pirated version of Windows XP.
This is where Trusted Computing should come back and bite MS in the arse.
Seriously : it would not be hard to make these machines incompatible with Windows (eg. just have the bios boot differently), and still compatible with Linux (worst case, provide a kernel/grub patch). Say you are doing it to combat piracy: then if they modify Windows to cope, it kind of puts all those "We hate piracy" rants in perspective. They know the number of people who will buy windows on these PCs is minimal, so it would totally be a mind share preservation move.
That is complete rubbish, you ignoramus.
I've run KDE programs in luminocity : it works fine.
Hopefully, the composite manager will be a shared library that KWin, metacity, and any other window managers can use. The separate composite manager is probably going away.
I'm talking about the case where someone gets the GPLed version, uses it in secret to develop something ( ie in-house app), decides it is good enough to sell ( it seems quite a low bar is set on MacOS X and Windows), and then buys a licence.
Trolltech might suspect they had been developing using the GPLed release, but it would be very difficult to prove. This would be a more frequent occurence than someone taking their GPLed work closed.
Now I've just got to figure out why on earth Trolltech want to do this in the first place: it seems to just be refusing sales in the end. Not good for business....
I really have to wonder if that licence is enforceable : they have to prove that you developed the code against QT rather than the headers, which are non copyrightable afaik. I guess this is a contract and they can do what they like... and they only need to prove the balance of probabilities : it is pretty unlikely anyone developed against the headers alone with much success. TINLA, IANAL.
Tbh, they are unlikely to find out about this happening: most proprietary developers I know are perfectly comfortable with piracy of tools and libraries - and are shocked when I include attribution for any open source stuff I have used. I hope Trolltech don't lose a lot from in-house apps... but maybe they will just view this as a kind of advertising like MS & Adobe seem to...
Hopefully they will make enough cash for this whole thing not to be a big issue: companies perceived as "open source" sueing their customers is the last thing we need.
-
Knife the baby
-
Kneecap
-
Air supply
You ignorant, cowardly apologist. Thats justified just by your last post!I don't think you are looking for an image manipulation program, but a drawing program. Gimp is good for messing with photos etc. : try Inkscape for drawing, it is really very nice.
Not perfect yet, but getting there quick.
http://www.inkscape.org/
Really?
I wouldn't rely on legal hacks like Section 508 - after a few tries, they'll just "approve" some assistive software.
We need real antitrust action on this (treating the entire entertainment and electronics industry as one complex monopoly). But consumer education and abject market failure are the only likely ways we have to win.
Interesting that MS themselves appear to be abandoning the registry in favour of XML files (app.config, web.config, security.config, machine.config) then, isn't it?
Except that a whole lot of newish distros are based on debian and use .deb , eg Knoppix, Mepis, Lindows, Xandros, Ubuntu, Libranet, Progeny. They aren't getting less popular - but alien generally works for rpms. The real problem is that generally what is inside these packages is infact very tightly coupled to everything else about a distro. This is where the LSB has failed, and needs more work.
.msi which does whatever it wants, or a sicko .exe which does whatever it wants. Any vaguely standard system is a step up from that.
Tbh, package formats is not a level of integration that matters. Lets face it, on windows, you either get a sicko
This is one of the stupidest comments I have read in a while.
Do you understand that the important thing about free software is not acquisition cost? The other advantages apply to China just as much as the West. Also, remember that a lot of formerly state owned businesses are consolidating and ending up with significant overseas (eg US, EU) operations. It won't be viable for MS to let them get away with it to maintain market share, unless they want to abandon all licencing revenue. Doubtful.
On the consumer side, if Linux got a significant share in Japan, US, and EU, the Chinese will use it because thats where the games will be. China is not going to last as the bastion of proprietary software. How short termist are you?
Citrix is a hack.
X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.
The best performing remote desktop solution for X is NX from nomachine. And yes, it does perform better than Citrix.
They have primarily pursued the goofy desktop in a window model as well. But there is nothing in their protocol mandating this : it is merely a limitation of the current client.
Best of all, NX is Free Software released under the GPL. Its a seperate process than the X server, so no legal viruses are going to eat up your nVidia driver.
NX sell a proprietary packaged up version. There is a project called FreeNX aiming to produce a fully Free set of NX tools ; however they appear to be closely allied to KDE, and aim to make it a feature for KDE to lord over Gnome. I hope I'm wrong.
Doesn't that sound like the perfect murder motive in an episode of Gritty Detective Show?
I'd just like to remind fellow open source fans that
" always will have " is a pretty strong statement for an AC to make about project he probably has nothing whatsoever to do with.
Who knows, FreeBSD might copy this new Linux release process if it proves tremendously successful, with a few modifications to fit into their monolithic organisation vs. multiple distributions and individual developers of the Linux world.