There is nothing stopping you legally from working and distributing this project. The only licensing problems I can see is that linksys might try to sue you for distributing their binary-only driver. I have not read the license terms of that drivers, so I do not know if they allow re-distribution of it or not.
Worst case scenerio (for sourceforge), ship the sources without the binary driver. If you decide to not go with sourceforge, there is NOTHING IN THE GPL which REQUIRES you to distribute sources to linux kernel drivers that you distribute with your distribution. There are MANY linux distributions out there that distribute linux binary drivers without source. For instance, any distro which ships nvidia drivers (which is practically ALL of them). This is not a violation of the GPL, as it is legal for you to ship packages with seperate binary files provided they are not derrived from the GPL works. (which they are not.)
Anybody telling you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. This has NOTHING to do with the GPL or copyright law, and EVERYTHING to do with GPL zealots who want free wireless drivers. I say to those people: if you want it, write it yourself or petition the copyright owner to release his sources.
The DMCA does not disallow users to decrypt works for which they have purchased a license to. If you legally obtain a DVD, there is no law which states you cannot decrypt it with any method provided you do not distribute the work, or display it in public. The act of purchasing the DVD means you are authorized to decrypt the dvd by any means under the home recording act and fair use doctrine of the supreme court. The DMCA SPECIFICALLY states that all decryptions which are covered under the US Supreme Court "Fair Use" Doctrine are not to be illegal or prosecuted. Until the supreme court chimes in and says it is illegal to decrypt legally licensed works, it will always be innocent until proven guilty..
On the issue of DeCSS DISTRIBUTION: There has yet to be any ruling on the validity of appeals courts ruling that DeCSS distribution breaks the DMCA. Until the DMCA's clause which prohibits decryption tool distribution is proven constitutional (in which case the Supreme court would have to take back the fair use doctrine, which is unlikely, but not unprecedented) it will always be legal to distribute such tools. In all cases where this has come up, the DoJ has stopped short of taking it to the supreme court. Until companies are disallowed to lobby the department of justics, prosecution under false pretenses will always be an issue in America (and it is still illegal BTW).
There is a problem in america when people think things are illegal just because some company says it is. Just remember... there has been no court ruling which says that distribution of decryption tools is infringing on anyone's copyrights.
Since district courts cannot rule a law constitutional or unconstitutional, that particular clause of the DMCA has not yet been able to hold much weight. The MPAA will never allow the DMCA to be taken to the supreme court. This is why they sued 2600.com, and not a bigger corporation who has in the past distributed knowingly DeCSS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Elcomsoft was aquitted of all charges in its adobe e-book reader case, which has nearly identical case background to the DeCSS.
Now.. the fact that companies don't want to risk being sued, that is their decision to make. But the facts are that nobody can be held liable for a law which does not even comply with basic supreme court doctrine. You cannot be sued under copyright law unless you are copying works. And you cannot be brought up upon charges for crimes against the state without the department of justics getting involved. You won't find John Ashcroft doing that to a company like RedHat or Mandrake wrt DeCSS. There is too much risk of it going to the supreme court and getting shot down.
The ONLY target the DMCA can touch now is distributers without a good track record. And that is just the reason all DeCSS cases which have supreme court merit will be dropped by the DoJ forever until eternity.
Mpeg1 and 2 (including layer 3 a la MP3) are covered by patents for encoding.
If the decoding process IS patented, it does not carry a royalty. That is how mp3 became popular, because it was free to download the players. mpeg1 and 2 are the same way when it comes to video.
[ oops replied to wrong post below, this is the correct one ]
"The main idea remains that the idea of gnome was to to reuse as much stuff as possible (even when it shouldn't have), while KDE wrote much of these "from scratch" and has its stuff "more integrated" (just think about window managers)."
Actually...
According to Stallman and the GNU project, the idea of GNOME was to write a desktop to specifically replace KDE. The idea was that QT was not 100% free at the time, and the GNU project saw KDE's popularity as hurting the goals of the GNU project's operating system vision. So they started 2 projects: one to create a free replacement for QT, and another to create a replacement for the already free KDE. Since QT was GPL'd, the free replacement project was killed. But the GNOME project was already started and the developers decided to keep on working. In the process, GNOME made different choices on many aspects. Choosing to use CORBA to do their component technology was just one of the many different (than KDE's existing technology) choices the GNOME project chose. It just turns out that CORBA/bonabo (the Network Object Model part of GNOME) never got incorporated into many GNOME applications, and so now GNOME applications == GTK/glib applications.
When you think of the GNOME project, you should think of turning a primitive incomplete widget toolkit (the Gimp ToolKit) into what GTK+ is today, plus a set of applications which use this toolkit, plus guidelines on how these applications should behave. When you think of KDE today, you should think about the same things, but using already developed QT insted of GTK+ along with the ability to embed current applications into new ones efficienatly.
None of this has anything to do with KDE wanting to re-write everyting. In fact, they started with existing complete QT. and GNOME started with an incomplete GTK toolkit. The GNOME project is basically the GTK+ project combined with application rewriting with GTK+. So which project is the one that did the massive rewrites? I think that would be GNOME.
If you consider writing a program using GTK+ widget set and glib a GNOME application, you probably don't know the definition of Network Object Model Environment. (Hint, several KDE applications use such features, but most "GNOME" applications don't use bonobo.)
"The main idea remains that the idea of gnome was to to reuse as much stuff as possible (even when it shouldn't have), while KDE wrote much of these "from scratch" and has its stuff "more integrated" (just think about window managers)."
Actually...
According to Stallman and the GNU project, the idea of GNOME was to write a desktop to specifically replace KDE. The idea was that QT was not 100% free at the time, and the GNU project saw KDE's popularity as hurting the goals of the GNU project's operating system vision. So they started 2 projects: one to create a free replacement for QT, and another to create a replacement for the already free KDE. Since QT was GPL'd, the free replacement project was killed. But the GNOME project was already started and the developers decided to keep on working. In the process, GNOME made different choices on many aspects. Choosing to use CORBA to do their component technology was just one of the many different (than KDE's existing technology) choices the GNOME project chose. It just turns out that CORBA/bonabo (the Network Object Model part of GNOME) never got incorporated into many GNOME applications, and so now GNOME applications == GTK/glib applications.
When you think of the GNOME project, you should think of turning a primitive incomplete widget toolkit (the Gimp ToolKit) into what GTK+ is today, plus a set of applications which use this toolkit, plus guidelines on how these applications should behave. When you think of KDE today, you should think about the same things, but using already developed QT insted of GTK+ along with the ability to embed current applications into new ones efficienatly.
None of this has anything to do with KDE wanting to re-write everyting. In fact, they started with existing complete QT. and GNOME started with an incomplete GTK toolkit. The GNOME project is basically the GTK+ project combined with application rewriting with GTK+. So which project is the one that did the massive rewrites? I think that would be GNOME.
If you consider writing a program using GTK+ widget set and glib a GNOME application, you probably don't know the definition of Network Object Model Environment. (Hint, several KDE applications use such features, but most "GNOME" applications don't use bonobo.)
..."while the other was to reuse everything that was available (gtk from Gimp,...) and plug different things together..."
According to the GNU project, GNOME was started because they were afraid QT would overtake the free desktop in marketshare and they would have yet another non-free desktop that was popular (much like CDE at the time)
If you look into history of the GNOME project, and this idea, the GNU project even started a free QT compatible widget library to replace QT. But since GNOME got more popular, the GNU project spun off GNOME and killed the free QT replacement project.
Today, what you say might be true somewhat. But the start of GNOME was purely a political statement.
I preferr to tell new users to alternate click. But sometimes they get confused about the difference between "alternate" and "right" clicking. Then i just explain to them that some ppl call it alternate click and others call it right click. The main point you want to get across to new users is that your index finger does the most of the work, and you only use the secondary button if you want to to special things to an icon.
"me: - Home desktop users want to play 3d video games.
you: No they don't..."
Uhh... yes, there are plenty of home users that want to do that, and there are over 100,000 of them playing online right now for just a single game. The fact that these people are smaller than the whole of windows users makes no difference. The majority of windows users will never switch to linux period (unles of course windows ends up dying in their lifetime).
"You entirely missed what I was saying. The number of people that use their computers for games are greatly outnumbered by the people who just use their computer for the web, email, and work related tasks."
No, I saw what you were saying, but that doesn't make your argument sound. MY point is that most 3D online gamers are computer savvy people. They know how to install graphics cards, drivers, programs, etc.. MOST windows users will NEVER know any of this information about any of these tasks on ANY operating system. Therefore, which audience would you think would be able to switch to Linux on the desktop first if given the chance? My point is that the people that are technically inclined to switch are forced to not switch, and the people that aren't technically inclined will never switch anyway. (at least for the forseeable future)
"I've been using nVidia's drivers since they first came out. I've never had any problems with them, and ever since the XFree 4.x drivers came out, I've gotten better performance in Linux than in Windows"
Well, I'm happy for you, I'm glad you have no problems with nVidia's 1.0 release of beta drivers. Just remember that you aren't the only one using them without problems, but a huge number of people are having X lock up on them randomly during games and during normal 2D usage. I'm pretty sure everyone knows it is bugs in the driver when it comes to different motherboard chipsets. But the facts are that not everyone runs the same motherboard chipset you have, and therefore, a significant number of people running chipsets different than yours are having serious issues.
Besides, nVidia isn't the only graphics chip manufacturer out there, and theirs is the only modern chip that works at all in accelerated 3D mode. So you can't claim that its not 3D cards holding everyone back. 3D hardware support problems is just as bad as game support.
"a very low percentage of computer users use their computer for 3D games. Just because the Slashdot crowd does doesn't mean that everyone else does. Besides, despite all the whining on Slashdot about no games for Linux, it doesn't seem to stop people here from using Linux."
That very low percentage isn't as low as you might think. It is significant enough. And I can guarantee you that there are people being held back from linux because of the state of 3D hardware and games. I'm not saying this is linux communitie's fault, but the fact that there isn't any reasonable hardware available except for nvidia's in certain configurations, and because of this of course nobody is going to make games for it, then it forces EVERY would be free desktop gamer out there to stay on windows or macos. Please don't underestimate these numbers. You said yourself ppl are complaining about it all the time. And nobody who enjoys playing their favorite games will switch to linux and live through dual boot hell just to play games. Even though they could in a heartbeat.
I guess overall, there are many things holding free desktops back from usage in mass. For gamers, its 3D hardware support and games. For everyday home users who don't want 3D, it is programs like Quicken, MS Office, Internet Explorer (online banking requires explorer in many circumstances), being able to plug in their USB inkjet printer and have it print photos using photo quality paper and ink without having to drop to command line and manually edit config files. There are many other things that are holding many many people back. Most of it boils down to lack of hardwar
So what if the most common games on computers are things like solitare? That wasn't the argument. Here are some general points you failed to address.
- Home desktop users want to play 3d video games. - There is no 3D hardware drivers available for the Linux kernel or for XFree86 that performs within a marginal distance from windows/MacOS 3D hardware (except pre-beta quality nVidia drivers). - idsoftware FPS games + UT/UT2k3 is NOT by any means remotely close to any significant fraction of FPS games. Even id based games aren't ported to linux. - games "like solitare" aren't even playable on linux. Just check out Yahoo online multiplayer card games, or any other online gaming community similar. You won't find it to work on Linux's web brosers. - When we talk about games, we don't mean single player i want to blow time while I wait for my 4:00 appointment game. We are talking about online multiplayer games, which are virtually non-extant on linux and the consol.
Your statements that "most people play games on a consol" are baseless, and no evidence exists which agrees with anything your are saying. On the other hand, there are plenty of online PC gamers, and those games just ARE NOT available on any other platforms than OS X and Windows.
Just to make some SPECULATION (not facts or claims) I'll bet there are currently more online gamers playing a game RIGHT NOW than there are home users running linux on the desktop period. (at least in the US). Check out Gamespy Stats. And these are just the gamespy supported games, which is very far from a complete list.
Also from that list you can see that the games supported on linux are a very very small minority of the overall games listed. (Quake 1/2/3, RTCW, UT, UT2k3, ET)
None of my post proves that what is holding back linux on the home deskto is true, but if you stop to consider the enthusiasts are going to be the first to switch to linux, and the enthusiast/competant windows users have a significant portion of 3d gamers using ATI or nVidia 3d video cards playing online multiplayer games, its hard to argue that the HUGE 3D MP gamer community is an untapped audience that would switch to linux in a heartbeat if 3d video hardware were available for it and most popular games ram on linux.
Don't point to the failure of Loki. They faild on their own. Their business model was based on existing linux users feeling sorry for them. They had absoulutely no chance with their strategy. No game they published came out for linux remotely CLOSE to the same time it came out for windows. Forcing anybody who was interested in such titles to buy the windows release and dual boot.
Excelent point. Something that has been true for ages. The GUI interfaces on linux have certaintly helped out, but even they have unobvious handeling in many places.
The reason windows is so popular (aside from it being an immoral monopoly) is that people who use it don't have to memorize where everything goes. If they want to do a task, they simply go to the most obvious place, and sure enough, what they want is there.
There is no "Konqueror" in windows, there is "internet explorer" and it is labled as a web browser. There is no "Evolution" in windows, It is simply a desktop icon that says "Outlook mail". There is no XMMS for windows, instead they have Windows Media Player. When you go to windows, you can find what you are looking for, and you can install complex programs that need to be installed on a whim. Even on debian linux, you cannot do this even using the nice GUI tools. Because none of the package names make sence to normal people. They don't describe what the package does, but some cryptic name that someone thought was clever. Not only that, but "apt" the word has nothing to do whatsoever to do with installing applications on your computer. Especially when compared to "Add/Remove Programs".
In closing, until an operating system can present an obvious desktop to people, people won't use it in mass. Memorizing shit that you otherwise should not have to memorize is the reason Linux, BSD, and even Apple MacOS is in the minority (the chooser should not be the application that lets you "choose" your printer, that is fucking ridiculous). The only reason MacOS is used by a (small) many is that it only forces you to memorize a few things, insted of the whole interface.
"lmost everyone I know agrees that overall OS X is a better..."
Wakeup call. Everyone you know are mac fanatics just like you. The rest of the world doesn't like 1 mouse buttons, no task bar, mouse-required task switching, the list goes on and on and on...
Apple doesn't even have a place to type in the WEP key for wireless connections in its WIRELESS control pannel for a given connection. Insted you have to drop down some silly icon that isn't labeled in the upper right hand corner of the desktop. Its just ridiculous.
I can list crap like this all day long. The desktop is a joke. It looks pretty, and its simple to use for about 20% of what you might want to use it for. The rest is just a buncha crap. period.
Now that KOffice has decided to go with the same file format as OpenOffice.org, this is actually not that far fetched. I can see this port becoming a really big deal on the Mac platform as a MS Office replacement that is compatible with PC's using OpenOffice.org (obviously there are features in either suite that aren't implemented in the other but at least they both use the same base specification of file format, unlike MS Office)
Yes, I agree about "OK" and "Cancel" buttons. However, in KDE none of this is hardcoded (for most dialogues, some are but they are not the norm and are of depreciated status)
For most KDE applications using KDE guidelines, the OK and Cancel buttons can be switched just by changing 1 line of code. For the random dialog that doesn't swap the buttons properly, it is a bug and should be reported to the bug tracking system. As far as this particular port, it is Beta and so I would assume this hasn't been fixed yet but it is only a matter of time before that line of code is adjusted to match. Afterall, that is the whole idea of porting applications, so they look at least reasonably native.
Yes, but this is BETA. The main goal of this project is to get KOffice working on MacOS X using native file and print dialogues, and desktop themes, and other features that would allow KOffice to integrate well with the Mac OS X Desktop.
The reason this is possible is because QT/Mac was released under the GPL, and so KOffice can be ported using the native QT Themes provided on the OS X platform. All the work is pretty much done for them via QT. Now they just need to get them to play well together.
"Spreads are as high as the market will allow, "discount" or "retail" store."
Thats exactly what I'm saying. Bestbuy can keep their DVD+R and DVD-R media at the same price, while another local retailer will have the +R at that price and the -R at another lower price. Because the costs are different. For both BestBuy and the local computer shop. The difference is that BestBuy pretty much sells at or above MSRP on almost everything until a special rolls along, or the national street price drops a relatively large amount. Until then, they are buying at wholesale and selling at MSRP. And because they are so big, and everyone who goes into a place like Best Buy will walk out with a stack of CD-R media just because they have pallets of it sitting in stragetic locations around the store. All this while all the shops are buying at wholesale and marking them some margin above wholesale. And selling to their regular customers.
"EVERYONE work on a cost VS price spread, regardless of what they've told you."
I work in retail. Nobody has "told" me anything. I see how the market runs both locally and on the US internet sites. I do price comparisons in both markets over a variety of retailers, and wholesale vendors. Of course everyone works on a cost basis. But many items margins are reduced because of 1) MSRP's and 2) Local street value. When DVD+R has the same MSRP as the idendical brand DVD-R, but the cost from the wholesalers is different, shops that work on a reduced margin will have different prices on the +R and -R. Big retailers (and shops that work off MSRP's) tend to mark them at the same price point in this scenerio, and that is what my post was talking about.
I have not come across a SINGLE wholesaler that has a cost on DVD+R less than DVD-R, and so where I work, our selling price is about 2 dollars more for a 3 pack of the same branded/speed DVD-R.
"In 90 days a product depreciates enough to make selling at "cost" profitable."
Reguardless of what "they" told you, there is no such "90 day depreciation period" you claim to speak of. Maybe in some other retail markets, but definately NOT computer components, supplies, or blank media. And definately NOT blank media most of all. The price stays at what the market can bare. period. With the big high volume outfits setting the pace.
There are two different types of retailers.. Discount retailers, and MSRP retailers...
Discount retailers usually have some sort of standard markup, and balance that with MSPR and street price to try to give customers the best prices on all products. This usually ends up showing the end user the price differences between DVD+R and DVD-R media. In reality, retailers must pay significantly more money for DVD+R(W) media and less for DVD-R Media. However, MSRP's are marked at the same price point.
So when you go to BestBuy where they price everything at the MSRP minus some discount (balanced for margins of course) you will usually see Imation DVD-R and DVD+R cost the same amount. That is because BestBuy's margin isn't calculated by their cost, but by the MSRP.
However, if you go to a discount store, where everything is marked up insted of marked down, you will notice that DVD+R media of the same brand is significantly more expensive than DVD-R, and has been since DVD+R has existed. This price differential can be as much as $1 USD per disk.
Lighten up dude. Do you feel proud of your accomplishments wrt any of your hobbies? This guy is using his spare time to do something he is interested in. Any time a milestone happens in such projects, congradulations are in order. He should give himself a pat on the back.
"If any part of YOUR post had pointed out inaccuracies in mine, I might consider you insightful..."
maybe I should have said... "you see only the negative in china and only the positive in america". Relative to the rest of the world, yes your post is grossly misleading. I'm sorry for saying it was innacurate.
That was the point I was trying to get across. Because every type of human rights violations you have pointed out happen EVERY SINGLE DAY in the united states on the same order of magnitude (not necessarilly numbers wise, but brutality wise).
Does China imprison people for organized religious worship? Yes. Does the US FORCE children to acknowledge God as their god? Yes.
Does China imprison political activists based ENTIRELY on words? Yes. Does the US allow and encourage litigation against people who posted links to the DeCSS source code and still to this day the US Government bans its presence on the internet? Yes. Does the US imprison political activists based ENTIRELY on what plant they choose to grow in their garden? Yes. Does the United States not gas and beat thousands of peacefull protesters on a regular basis? Yes.
Does China force women to undergo abortions? Yes. Does the US force women to die because of laws banning late term abortions? Yes.
My post was ment to illustrate your misconception of China. You seem to believe that China is beyond the US in being wrong. You are wrong because you are blinded by "conservative" propaganda which hides our problems in the US (from its citizens) while exaggerating those identical problems in communist China. No, I am not saying that the US government shoots tanks at protestors. But we do have major problems with freedom of speech in the US. And they are NOT unlike those in China as you would try to represent. We also have major problems with freedom of religion, and the bible belt politics is enough evidence for this.
Go ask anyone in China what they think about the US wrt this argument. If they are as ignorant as you, they will tell you that these problems exist in the US, not China.
You forget that these countries are self sufficient in everything they need to maintain themselves. So they will never reach a point where they must inflate into infinity in order to pay for their imports like has been done in the united states with reguard to oil, (and some foods).
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing stopping you legally from working and distributing this project. The only licensing problems I can see is that linksys might try to sue you for distributing their binary-only driver. I have not read the license terms of that drivers, so I do not know if they allow re-distribution of it or not.
Worst case scenerio (for sourceforge), ship the sources without the binary driver. If you decide to not go with sourceforge, there is NOTHING IN THE GPL which REQUIRES you to distribute sources to linux kernel drivers that you distribute with your distribution. There are MANY linux distributions out there that distribute linux binary drivers without source. For instance, any distro which ships nvidia drivers (which is practically ALL of them). This is not a violation of the GPL, as it is legal for you to ship packages with seperate binary files provided they are not derrived from the GPL works. (which they are not.)
Anybody telling you otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. This has NOTHING to do with the GPL or copyright law, and EVERYTHING to do with GPL zealots who want free wireless drivers. I say to those people: if you want it, write it yourself or petition the copyright owner to release his sources.
Heh,
They have webcam's on mars covering the mars rover? Awesome!
tariff?
I didn't know that fraunhoffer charged a tax for MP3 Decoding imports to its country.
You cannot copyright data, such as encryption keys or how many miles it is to the next city.
The only way to protect ideas is through patents and trade secret.
The DMCA does not disallow users to decrypt works for which they have purchased a license to. If you legally obtain a DVD, there is no law which states you cannot decrypt it with any method provided you do not distribute the work, or display it in public. The act of purchasing the DVD means you are authorized to decrypt the dvd by any means under the home recording act and fair use doctrine of the supreme court. The DMCA SPECIFICALLY states that all decryptions which are covered under the US Supreme Court "Fair Use" Doctrine are not to be illegal or prosecuted. Until the supreme court chimes in and says it is illegal to decrypt legally licensed works, it will always be innocent until proven guilty..
On the issue of DeCSS DISTRIBUTION: There has yet to be any ruling on the validity of appeals courts ruling that DeCSS distribution breaks the DMCA. Until the DMCA's clause which prohibits decryption tool distribution is proven constitutional (in which case the Supreme court would have to take back the fair use doctrine, which is unlikely, but not unprecedented) it will always be legal to distribute such tools. In all cases where this has come up, the DoJ has stopped short of taking it to the supreme court. Until companies are disallowed to lobby the department of justics, prosecution under false pretenses will always be an issue in America (and it is still illegal BTW).
There is a problem in america when people think things are illegal just because some company says it is. Just remember... there has been no court ruling which says that distribution of decryption tools is infringing on anyone's copyrights.
Since district courts cannot rule a law constitutional or unconstitutional, that particular clause of the DMCA has not yet been able to hold much weight. The MPAA will never allow the DMCA to be taken to the supreme court. This is why they sued 2600.com, and not a bigger corporation who has in the past distributed knowingly DeCSS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Elcomsoft was aquitted of all charges in its adobe e-book reader case, which has nearly identical case background to the DeCSS.
Now.. the fact that companies don't want to risk being sued, that is their decision to make. But the facts are that nobody can be held liable for a law which does not even comply with basic supreme court doctrine. You cannot be sued under copyright law unless you are copying works. And you cannot be brought up upon charges for crimes against the state without the department of justics getting involved. You won't find John Ashcroft doing that to a company like RedHat or Mandrake wrt DeCSS. There is too much risk of it going to the supreme court and getting shot down.
The ONLY target the DMCA can touch now is distributers without a good track record. And that is just the reason all DeCSS cases which have supreme court merit will be dropped by the DoJ forever until eternity.
Mpeg1 and 2 (including layer 3 a la MP3) are covered by patents for encoding.
If the decoding process IS patented, it does not carry a royalty. That is how mp3 became popular, because it was free to download the players. mpeg1 and 2 are the same way when it comes to video.
[ oops replied to wrong post below, this is the correct one ]
"The main idea remains that the idea of gnome was to to reuse as much stuff as possible (even when it shouldn't have), while KDE wrote much of these "from scratch" and has its stuff "more integrated" (just think about window managers)."
Actually...
According to Stallman and the GNU project, the idea of GNOME was to write a desktop to specifically replace KDE. The idea was that QT was not 100% free at the time, and the GNU project saw KDE's popularity as hurting the goals of the GNU project's operating system vision. So they started 2 projects: one to create a free replacement for QT, and another to create a replacement for the already free KDE. Since QT was GPL'd, the free replacement project was killed. But the GNOME project was already started and the developers decided to keep on working. In the process, GNOME made different choices on many aspects. Choosing to use CORBA to do their component technology was just one of the many different (than KDE's existing technology) choices the GNOME project chose. It just turns out that CORBA/bonabo (the Network Object Model part of GNOME) never got incorporated into many GNOME applications, and so now GNOME applications == GTK/glib applications.
When you think of the GNOME project, you should think of turning a primitive incomplete widget toolkit (the Gimp ToolKit) into what GTK+ is today, plus a set of applications which use this toolkit, plus guidelines on how these applications should behave. When you think of KDE today, you should think about the same things, but using already developed QT insted of GTK+ along with the ability to embed current applications into new ones efficienatly.
None of this has anything to do with KDE wanting to re-write everyting. In fact, they started with existing complete QT. and GNOME started with an incomplete GTK toolkit. The GNOME project is basically the GTK+ project combined with application rewriting with GTK+. So which project is the one that did the massive rewrites? I think that would be GNOME.
If you consider writing a program using GTK+ widget set and glib a GNOME application, you probably don't know the definition of Network Object Model Environment. (Hint, several KDE applications use such features, but most "GNOME" applications don't use bonobo.)
"The main idea remains that the idea of gnome was to to reuse as much stuff as possible (even when it shouldn't have), while KDE wrote much of these "from scratch" and has its stuff "more integrated" (just think about window managers)."
Actually...
According to Stallman and the GNU project, the idea of GNOME was to write a desktop to specifically replace KDE. The idea was that QT was not 100% free at the time, and the GNU project saw KDE's popularity as hurting the goals of the GNU project's operating system vision. So they started 2 projects: one to create a free replacement for QT, and another to create a replacement for the already free KDE. Since QT was GPL'd, the free replacement project was killed. But the GNOME project was already started and the developers decided to keep on working. In the process, GNOME made different choices on many aspects. Choosing to use CORBA to do their component technology was just one of the many different (than KDE's existing technology) choices the GNOME project chose. It just turns out that CORBA/bonabo (the Network Object Model part of GNOME) never got incorporated into many GNOME applications, and so now GNOME applications == GTK/glib applications.
When you think of the GNOME project, you should think of turning a primitive incomplete widget toolkit (the Gimp ToolKit) into what GTK+ is today, plus a set of applications which use this toolkit, plus guidelines on how these applications should behave. When you think of KDE today, you should think about the same things, but using already developed QT insted of GTK+ along with the ability to embed current applications into new ones efficienatly.
None of this has anything to do with KDE wanting to re-write everyting. In fact, they started with existing complete QT. and GNOME started with an incomplete GTK toolkit. The GNOME project is basically the GTK+ project combined with application rewriting with GTK+. So which project is the one that did the massive rewrites? I think that would be GNOME.
If you consider writing a program using GTK+ widget set and glib a GNOME application, you probably don't know the definition of Network Object Model Environment. (Hint, several KDE applications use such features, but most "GNOME" applications don't use bonobo.)
..."while the other was to reuse everything that was available (gtk from Gimp, ...) and plug different things together..."
According to the GNU project, GNOME was started because they were afraid QT would overtake the free desktop in marketshare and they would have yet another non-free desktop that was popular (much like CDE at the time)
If you look into history of the GNOME project, and this idea, the GNU project even started a free QT compatible widget library to replace QT. But since GNOME got more popular, the GNU project spun off GNOME and killed the free QT replacement project.
Today, what you say might be true somewhat. But the start of GNOME was purely a political statement.
I preferr to tell new users to alternate click. But sometimes they get confused about the difference between "alternate" and "right" clicking. Then i just explain to them that some ppl call it alternate click and others call it right click. The main point you want to get across to new users is that your index finger does the most of the work, and you only use the secondary button if you want to to special things to an icon.
"me: - Home desktop users want to play 3d video games.
you: No they don't..."
Uhh... yes, there are plenty of home users that want to do that, and there are over 100,000 of them playing online right now for just a single game. The fact that these people are smaller than the whole of windows users makes no difference. The majority of windows users will never switch to linux period (unles of course windows ends up dying in their lifetime).
"You entirely missed what I was saying. The number of people that use their computers for games are greatly outnumbered by the people who just use their computer for the web, email, and work related tasks."
No, I saw what you were saying, but that doesn't make your argument sound. MY point is that most 3D online gamers are computer savvy people. They know how to install graphics cards, drivers, programs, etc.. MOST windows users will NEVER know any of this information about any of these tasks on ANY operating system. Therefore, which audience would you think would be able to switch to Linux on the desktop first if given the chance? My point is that the people that are technically inclined to switch are forced to not switch, and the people that aren't technically inclined will never switch anyway. (at least for the forseeable future)
"I've been using nVidia's drivers since they first came out. I've never had any problems with them, and ever since the XFree 4.x drivers came out, I've gotten better performance in Linux than in Windows"
Well, I'm happy for you, I'm glad you have no problems with nVidia's 1.0 release of beta drivers. Just remember that you aren't the only one using them without problems, but a huge number of people are having X lock up on them randomly during games and during normal 2D usage. I'm pretty sure everyone knows it is bugs in the driver when it comes to different motherboard chipsets. But the facts are that not everyone runs the same motherboard chipset you have, and therefore, a significant number of people running chipsets different than yours are having serious issues.
Besides, nVidia isn't the only graphics chip manufacturer out there, and theirs is the only modern chip that works at all in accelerated 3D mode. So you can't claim that its not 3D cards holding everyone back. 3D hardware support problems is just as bad as game support.
"a very low percentage of computer users use their computer for 3D games. Just because the Slashdot crowd does doesn't mean that everyone else does. Besides, despite all the whining on Slashdot about no games for Linux, it doesn't seem to stop people here from using Linux."
That very low percentage isn't as low as you might think. It is significant enough. And I can guarantee you that there are people being held back from linux because of the state of 3D hardware and games. I'm not saying this is linux communitie's fault, but the fact that there isn't any reasonable hardware available except for nvidia's in certain configurations, and because of this of course nobody is going to make games for it, then it forces EVERY would be free desktop gamer out there to stay on windows or macos. Please don't underestimate these numbers. You said yourself ppl are complaining about it all the time. And nobody who enjoys playing their favorite games will switch to linux and live through dual boot hell just to play games. Even though they could in a heartbeat.
I guess overall, there are many things holding free desktops back from usage in mass. For gamers, its 3D hardware support and games. For everyday home users who don't want 3D, it is programs like Quicken, MS Office, Internet Explorer (online banking requires explorer in many circumstances), being able to plug in their USB inkjet printer and have it print photos using photo quality paper and ink without having to drop to command line and manually edit config files. There are many other things that are holding many many people back. Most of it boils down to lack of hardwar
So what if the most common games on computers are things like solitare? That wasn't the argument. Here are some general points you failed to address.
- Home desktop users want to play 3d video games.
- There is no 3D hardware drivers available for the Linux kernel or for XFree86 that performs within a marginal distance from windows/MacOS 3D hardware (except pre-beta quality nVidia drivers).
- idsoftware FPS games + UT/UT2k3 is NOT by any means remotely close to any significant fraction of FPS games. Even id based games aren't ported to linux.
- games "like solitare" aren't even playable on linux. Just check out Yahoo online multiplayer card games, or any other online gaming community similar. You won't find it to work on Linux's web brosers.
- When we talk about games, we don't mean single player i want to blow time while I wait for my 4:00 appointment game. We are talking about online multiplayer games, which are virtually non-extant on linux and the consol.
Your statements that "most people play games on a consol" are baseless, and no evidence exists which agrees with anything your are saying. On the other hand, there are plenty of online PC gamers, and those games just ARE NOT available on any other platforms than OS X and Windows.
Just to make some SPECULATION (not facts or claims) I'll bet there are currently more online gamers playing a game RIGHT NOW than there are home users running linux on the desktop period. (at least in the US). Check out Gamespy Stats. And these are just the gamespy supported games, which is very far from a complete list.
Also from that list you can see that the games supported on linux are a very very small minority of the overall games listed. (Quake 1/2/3, RTCW, UT, UT2k3, ET)
None of my post proves that what is holding back linux on the home deskto is true, but if you stop to consider the enthusiasts are going to be the first to switch to linux, and the enthusiast/competant windows users have a significant portion of 3d gamers using ATI or nVidia 3d video cards playing online multiplayer games, its hard to argue that the HUGE 3D MP gamer community is an untapped audience that would switch to linux in a heartbeat if 3d video hardware were available for it and most popular games ram on linux.
Don't point to the failure of Loki. They faild on their own. Their business model was based on existing linux users feeling sorry for them. They had absoulutely no chance with their strategy. No game they published came out for linux remotely CLOSE to the same time it came out for windows. Forcing anybody who was interested in such titles to buy the windows release and dual boot.
"There's no 'User Accounts' option on any XP I've used... Presumably you're using a special one."
Presumably, you are ignorant.
Excelent point. Something that has been true for ages. The GUI interfaces on linux have certaintly helped out, but even they have unobvious handeling in many places.
/Remove Programs".
The reason windows is so popular (aside from it being an immoral monopoly) is that people who use it don't have to memorize where everything goes. If they want to do a task, they simply go to the most obvious place, and sure enough, what they want is there.
There is no "Konqueror" in windows, there is "internet explorer" and it is labled as a web browser. There is no "Evolution" in windows, It is simply a desktop icon that says "Outlook mail". There is no XMMS for windows, instead they have Windows Media Player. When you go to windows, you can find what you are looking for, and you can install complex programs that need to be installed on a whim. Even on debian linux, you cannot do this even using the nice GUI tools. Because none of the package names make sence to normal people. They don't describe what the package does, but some cryptic name that someone thought was clever. Not only that, but "apt" the word has nothing to do whatsoever to do with installing applications on your computer. Especially when compared to "Add
In closing, until an operating system can present an obvious desktop to people, people won't use it in mass. Memorizing shit that you otherwise should not have to memorize is the reason Linux, BSD, and even Apple MacOS is in the minority (the chooser should not be the application that lets you "choose" your printer, that is fucking ridiculous). The only reason MacOS is used by a (small) many is that it only forces you to memorize a few things, insted of the whole interface.
"lmost everyone I know agrees that overall OS X is a better..."
Wakeup call. Everyone you know are mac fanatics just like you. The rest of the world doesn't like 1 mouse buttons, no task bar, mouse-required task switching, the list goes on and on and on...
Apple doesn't even have a place to type in the WEP key for wireless connections in its WIRELESS control pannel for a given connection. Insted you have to drop down some silly icon that isn't labeled in the upper right hand corner of the desktop. Its just ridiculous.
I can list crap like this all day long. The desktop is a joke. It looks pretty, and its simple to use for about 20% of what you might want to use it for. The rest is just a buncha crap. period.
Now that KOffice has decided to go with the same file format as OpenOffice.org, this is actually not that far fetched. I can see this port becoming a really big deal on the Mac platform as a MS Office replacement that is compatible with PC's using OpenOffice.org (obviously there are features in either suite that aren't implemented in the other but at least they both use the same base specification of file format, unlike MS Office)
Yes, I agree about "OK" and "Cancel" buttons. However, in KDE none of this is hardcoded (for most dialogues, some are but they are not the norm and are of depreciated status)
For most KDE applications using KDE guidelines, the OK and Cancel buttons can be switched just by changing 1 line of code. For the random dialog that doesn't swap the buttons properly, it is a bug and should be reported to the bug tracking system. As far as this particular port, it is Beta and so I would assume this hasn't been fixed yet but it is only a matter of time before that line of code is adjusted to match. Afterall, that is the whole idea of porting applications, so they look at least reasonably native.
Yes, but this is BETA. The main goal of this project is to get KOffice working on MacOS X using native file and print dialogues, and desktop themes, and other features that would allow KOffice to integrate well with the Mac OS X Desktop.
The reason this is possible is because QT/Mac was released under the GPL, and so KOffice can be ported using the native QT Themes provided on the OS X platform. All the work is pretty much done for them via QT. Now they just need to get them to play well together.
"Spreads are as high as the market will allow, "discount" or "retail" store."
Thats exactly what I'm saying. Bestbuy can keep their DVD+R and DVD-R media at the same price, while another local retailer will have the +R at that price and the -R at another lower price. Because the costs are different. For both BestBuy and the local computer shop. The difference is that BestBuy pretty much sells at or above MSRP on almost everything until a special rolls along, or the national street price drops a relatively large amount. Until then, they are buying at wholesale and selling at MSRP. And because they are so big, and everyone who goes into a place like Best Buy will walk out with a stack of CD-R media just because they have pallets of it sitting in stragetic locations around the store. All this while all the shops are buying at wholesale and marking them some margin above wholesale. And selling to their regular customers.
"EVERYONE work on a cost VS price spread, regardless of what they've told you."
I work in retail. Nobody has "told" me anything. I see how the market runs both locally and on the US internet sites. I do price comparisons in both markets over a variety of retailers, and wholesale vendors. Of course everyone works on a cost basis. But many items margins are reduced because of 1) MSRP's and 2) Local street value. When DVD+R has the same MSRP as the idendical brand DVD-R, but the cost from the wholesalers is different, shops that work on a reduced margin will have different prices on the +R and -R. Big retailers (and shops that work off MSRP's) tend to mark them at the same price point in this scenerio, and that is what my post was talking about.
I have not come across a SINGLE wholesaler that has a cost on DVD+R less than DVD-R, and so where I work, our selling price is about 2 dollars more for a 3 pack of the same branded/speed DVD-R.
"In 90 days a product depreciates enough to make selling at "cost" profitable."
Reguardless of what "they" told you, there is no such "90 day depreciation period" you claim to speak of. Maybe in some other retail markets, but definately NOT computer components, supplies, or blank media. And definately NOT blank media most of all. The price stays at what the market can bare. period. With the big high volume outfits setting the pace.
no... they burn DVD-R.
There are two different types of retailers.. Discount retailers, and MSRP retailers...
Discount retailers usually have some sort of standard markup, and balance that with MSPR and street price to try to give customers the best prices on all products. This usually ends up showing the end user the price differences between DVD+R and DVD-R media. In reality, retailers must pay significantly more money for DVD+R(W) media and less for DVD-R Media. However, MSRP's are marked at the same price point.
So when you go to BestBuy where they price everything at the MSRP minus some discount (balanced for margins of course) you will usually see Imation DVD-R and DVD+R cost the same amount. That is because BestBuy's margin isn't calculated by their cost, but by the MSRP.
However, if you go to a discount store, where everything is marked up insted of marked down, you will notice that DVD+R media of the same brand is significantly more expensive than DVD-R, and has been since DVD+R has existed. This price differential can be as much as $1 USD per disk.
Lighten up dude. Do you feel proud of your accomplishments wrt any of your hobbies? This guy is using his spare time to do something he is interested in. Any time a milestone happens in such projects, congradulations are in order. He should give himself a pat on the back.
Sure it's not rocket science but most hobbies aren't.
They are different means to the same end. That end is no freedom of speech. And if you haven't noticed, the US has the same problems
"If any part of YOUR post had pointed out inaccuracies in mine, I might consider you insightful..."
maybe I should have said... "you see only the negative in china and only the positive in america". Relative to the rest of the world, yes your post is grossly misleading. I'm sorry for saying it was innacurate.
That was the point I was trying to get across. Because every type of human rights violations you have pointed out happen EVERY SINGLE DAY in the united states on the same order of magnitude (not necessarilly numbers wise, but brutality wise).
Does China imprison people for organized religious worship? Yes.
Does the US FORCE children to acknowledge God as their god? Yes.
Does China imprison political activists based ENTIRELY on words? Yes.
Does the US allow and encourage litigation against people who posted links to the DeCSS source code and still to this day the US Government bans its presence on the internet? Yes.
Does the US imprison political activists based ENTIRELY on what plant they choose to grow in their garden? Yes.
Does the United States not gas and beat thousands of peacefull protesters on a regular basis? Yes.
Does China force women to undergo abortions? Yes.
Does the US force women to die because of laws banning late term abortions? Yes.
My post was ment to illustrate your misconception of China. You seem to believe that China is beyond the US in being wrong. You are wrong because you are blinded by "conservative" propaganda which hides our problems in the US (from its citizens) while exaggerating those identical problems in communist China. No, I am not saying that the US government shoots tanks at protestors. But we do have major problems with freedom of speech in the US. And they are NOT unlike those in China as you would try to represent. We also have major problems with freedom of religion, and the bible belt politics is enough evidence for this.
Go ask anyone in China what they think about the US wrt this argument. If they are as ignorant as you, they will tell you that these problems exist in the US, not China.
You make one big error in your judgement.
You forget that these countries are self sufficient in everything they need to maintain themselves. So they will never reach a point where they must inflate into infinity in order to pay for their imports like has been done in the united states with reguard to oil, (and some foods).