So those of us who no one likes will never be let to join? And I thought my life was bad now! First I'm kept out of all of the real world social places... not the online ones too? Could it get any worse?
God bless the slashdot fool who knows nothing of the subject matter they are discussing and yet perfectly willing to give an opinion based only in their own delusions.
Who are the characters? Meet the players I'll give here a quick introduction to and discussion of the systems I'll be talking about. Note that the histories presented are not comprehensive or authoritative, and no attempt has been made to make them that way. Deal.
Unix Unix isn't (precisely) an operating system.
Well, it is, and it isn't.
In specific usage, Unix is an operating system originally developed in the late 60's at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Over the years since then it's been developed and distributed as a commercial operating system, and a research operating system, by Bell Labs and USG and USDL and ATTIS and USL and Novell and SCO and anybody else who could come up with an acronym.
It's probably not too much exaggeration to say that Unix is the single most influential operating system in modern computing. Every general-purpose computing device you'll find, and a lot of specific-purpose computing devices, will be using ideas and concepts and often code from something in the Unix family tree.
When we use the word 'Unix', then, we far more often mean the general form, than the specific OS that carries the name Unix(TM). The general form means "Any operating system which, in design and execution and interface and general taste, is substantially similar to the Unix system." That means all the BSDs, Linuxen, SunOS, Tru64, SCO, Irix, AIX, HP/UX, and a cast of hundreds or thousands of others.
I'm not interested in getting into semantic discussions about how many angels can dance on a head of split hair. Let it suffice that when I use phrases like "Unix systems", I mean exactly what you think of when I use the phrase. Pedantry City is ---> that way.
Linux Linux also means several things. It's a kernel, originally written by Linus Torvalds when he was a student in Finland. Since then it's been beat up, punched around, tweaked, poked, prodded, manged, digested, spit out, stomped on, chewed up, tossed out, brought in, and otherwise manipulated (not necessarily in that order, of course) by more other people than you could easily count.
Linux is also the term for a family of operating systems. While there are fascinating metaphysical discussions taking place in dozens of places around the world at this very second (I guarantee it) about how "Linux isn't really an operating system, it's just a kernel", or "It should be called 'GNU/Linux'", or similar topics, I'm also going to neatly avoid that semantic cesspool. When I say "Linux", I mean Red Hat. I mean Slackware. I mean Mandrake. I mean Debian. I mean SuSe. I mean Gentoo. I mean every one of the 2 kadzillion distributions out there, based around a Linux kernel with substantially similar userlands, mostly based on GNU tools, that are floating around the ether.
BSD BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution". Originally, it was a set of patches and extra add-on utilities for the official Bell Unix system that were developed by the CSRG at the University of California, Berkeley. Over time, it evolved to change and/or replace more and more of the system, until at some undefined point it became basically its own OS that merely happened to share chunks of code with Bell's Unix system.
Of course, it still required that you have a Bell license to use the system, since a lot of it was still Bell's code. All of the code written by Berkeley, however, was released under what's come to be known as the BSD license, which basically translates to "Do whatever the hell you want with the code, just give us credit for writing it". And a lot of the BSD code ended up working its way back into the "official" Unix system too, in System III and System V. And, a lot of both strains worked their way into the various commercial forks of Unix.
After the CSRG (mostly) dissolved and stopped developing the BSD system, several groups went off different ways with the code. One of these was the 386BSD project, which took the BSD code and made it run on the Intel i386 platform.
I made the *choice* over the summer to buy an iPod and would spend that 400 dollars all over again if I needed to.
iTunes and the iPod's support for it just makes the deal even sweater. Only those who refrain from the pair think they are bad. Join the club friends, give your money to apple for the greatest product they've ever made IMO.
They are not withholding any code which is under the GPL.
IF they allegations are true and System V code was copied into Linux, said System V code, while in the System V code base is not covered by the GPL and thus they are not required to release it.
Or did I miss something else that you are blabbing about?
At the start of last year, I was looking for an internship for the summer and was not feeling to confident in the job market I went a lil overboard and mailed 104 resumes in 10 days. Long story short I ended up with an internship at an electronics company an hour from where I live/go to school. I have been quite fortunate to hang onto that job into the fall when school started and even now into the spring after graduation.
Unfortunately, I am still not fulltime, I am just an 'intern' doing 40 hours a week and hoping the whole while that they decide to bring me to a fulltime salary status before too long.
Just three weeks ago I graduated after 4 and a half years of getting my BS in CS (not that I need a degree to prove my level of BS). Also not qualifying for any free money and not attempting to earn any scholarships, I did what many before me have done... put my name on the dotted line and financed my college education.
Granted when I started the tech market was booming and I figured I'd have em all paid off quite fast with the money I'd be making hand over fist, that was of course not the most realistic plan.
You seem to already know that a solid education is required for the most part in order to get a good job, thus taking out loans for said education tends to be the best solution if you cannot find the free money.
Ultimately, the person benefiting from the education should pay for it, IE: You!
Some non-bright people would be written up for time to time because of pictures of them in possession of alcohol while in their dorm rooms (it was/is a dry campus).
Many didn't think it 'fair' as no one had caught them in the act, few fully recognized how damaging a photo like that can be... even if false.
One friend took a picture of me and Photoshoped a water bong and a bottle of vodka into it with me... it was so good looking that the university actually 'investigated' to see if it was true, thankfully it didn't get that far for the simple reason that they knew I wasn't stupid enough to let a real picture like that of me exist.
Just imagine a microwave installation receiving power from space, flapping birds would enter one side, and a KFC would set up shop on the other (yes, I know such frying would require a high intensity area).
going to http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1056281 016831&skuId=5720419&type=product links to what I picked up a week ago for 130 before a 30 dollar MIR. 100 bucks, not bad for a +/- R/RW:)
Just a lil FYI, unlike most on this topic, I have extensive experience in dealing with ATSC transport streams. This summer for my employer I designed and built a self contained application which builds an MPEG 2 stream into an ATSC stream. Other projects for this company I have worked on is an ATSC analysis device and a separate display/decoder test device.
For a side project this week, I've been working on my own app to remove the MPEG2 data from the transport stream as I got sick of trying to make HDTVtoMPEG to work the way I wanted... so I wrote my own from scratch.
An ATSC digital television transport stream operates at 19.392658 megabits per second over an 8VSB connection (coax), no more, no less. This is the bit rate that a consumer level decoder works at and is the speed of what ever source you will find in your home.
At the production and broadcast level, 27 megabits is the standard. Very often a second decoder of sorts is used to down sample the 27 megabit ASI stream into the 19.39 8VSB stream, just as higher bit rates can be used in production, but ultimately they must be at the 19.392658 level in order to be decoded by the decoder in any home with a consumer level decoder.
I'm going to have to say you are wrong with your numbers...
A terrestrial ATSC stream runs at roughly 19.39 megabits per second, regardless of what it contains. Thus, recording the stream it's self requires about 8.7 gigs per hours. 19.39/8 = 2.42375 megabytes per second * 3600 seconds/hour = 8725.5 megabytes.
It is possible to extract the MPEG2 stream from the ATSC stream with out much effort (if you know what you are doing), however such an ability is the reason for the implementation of the so called broadcast flag to keep you from being able to have access to the raw MPEG2.
This is such good news for me, and here I was, ready to throw windows out of my life and become a linux guru, thanks microsoft for showing me what a mistake that would be!!!
So... if you received such a letter you'd fight them to the bitter end? Tell us... how on earth would you pay for legal representation? Or would you attempt to defend yourself? In either case, I'm sad to say, you would loose, because you do not have the resources to fight.
You left out a step, after SCO has many fortune 1000 companies who've paid for licenses, any smaller companies who challenge SCO in court would be facing the war chest built up since this started.
Thus in court we will hear an SCO lawyer name off all of the big name companies who have 'recognized' SCO's claims and licensed their technology, and why should any smaller company be permitted to not play by the rules.
If it is a beam weapon... wouldn't such a beam be nothing more then waves? Can't waves be affected by gravity? Thus wouldn't such a statement about a gravity free weapon be flawed?
I've spent the last 6 months working with professional and broadcast level digital tv encoders and decoders, even writing a fair amount of software on both sides. This flag is pretty pointless, and is often a laugh when discussed at work.
With the hardware we build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by our systems if implemented. Besides, if you end up modifying the ATSC standard, in order to prevent breaking all previous encoders/decoders on the market, you would need to make such modifications to portions of the stream which are unused, and existing off the shelf parts would ignore such a modification. Thus, the protection starts off ineffective.
Even after the existing non compliant decoders/recorders/etc on the market are retired to due age or death, newer hardware which ignores such protections would still be available, you'd just have to pay a fair amount.
What's on my Christmas list this year? A DTV decoder as well as a recorder/player unit, cost for both? About 15k. As sad is it is to ask, how important is your right to copy to you? Is it work 15 thousand dollars?
I've found that on my laptop, the cost of running seti@home cuts my battery life in half, so when I care about power I am sure to leave it off, however, when ever it's plugged in, it like the rest of my boxes are chugging away. When it comes to power costs I don't really care currently as I don't pay my electricity, it's included with my rent and believe you me I make good use of that.
As for premature death of CPU, being under heavy load should not hurt it, powering on and off often does far more 'wear and tear'.
the reason you want drivers for such a 'card' is because the nic is embeded. As truly happy owner of one such card... I can firmly say I am inlove, and see no reason why I should have to find a pci card to add in when I run BSD on it.
Speaking of wackyness... I read this article, followed one of the links, hit the back button and the story was gone... 5 min later it was back, followed another link, hit the back button and the story had changed. Hit refresh again, and it changed yet again!
I cannot speak to exactly why we chose Linux over BSD, in large part it was due to the quality of Red Boot Linux (a Red Hat distro designed for embedded applications). The licensing aspects of the OS were pretty much irrelevant to us as we have not made any changes to it which we are not willing to disclose to our customer, while the higher level application software which we wrote in house is not bound my any external licenses.
For their next trick they will run around stores like best buy with pages of printed Linux kernel, rubbing it all around the packages containing Windows, office and other software products and finally demanding that because GLPed code has touched this other code, that they must be open sourced.
Extreme yes, but I've known people who are almost this bad.
You should be grateful that a company releases any specs for their device if it does not contain GPL based code.
It is NOT the responsibility of a company to provide you with documentation on a product, if you wish to know the internal workings of it, that is up to you to discover. Frankly, I'm surprised Linksys has not come out threatening to sue under the DMCA for any reverse engineering of the unit, it's doubtful that this GPL violation would have been noticed if it had not been at the very least looked at in a way Linksys did not intend.
Note: While I am not a big time open source advocate, I do recognize the potential and usefulness of things such as the GPL, I do not believe that a company should be required to disclose anything more above the GPLed code.
I work for a company where we are developing a product running an embedded version of Linux with plenty of our own, proprietary code running on top of it (we have been very careful to ensure that the two code bases never mix). You seem to be of the opinion that anyone who purchases this product down the line should be entitled not only to the source of the Linux code we used, but also the specs of the interface we built for interaction with the hardware as well as the code that uses this interface, neither of which contains a single line of outside or GLPed code.
This is part of the reason some consider Linux to be viral, some actually believe that code running with or under Linux is required to have it's source available to all those who want it, that would be a big no.
Slashdot Mirror
If Bill Gates says it's so... it must be!
So those of us who no one likes will never be let to join? And I thought my life was bad now! First I'm kept out of all of the real world social places... not the online ones too? Could it get any worse?
Yes, the above is sarcasm!
God bless the slashdot fool who knows nothing of the subject matter they are discussing and yet perfectly willing to give an opinion based only in their own delusions.
Who are the characters?
Meet the players
I'll give here a quick introduction to and discussion of the systems I'll be talking about. Note that the histories presented are not comprehensive or authoritative, and no attempt has been made to make them that way. Deal.
Unix
Unix isn't (precisely) an operating system.
Well, it is, and it isn't.
In specific usage, Unix is an operating system originally developed in the late 60's at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Over the years since then it's been developed and distributed as a commercial operating system, and a research operating system, by Bell Labs and USG and USDL and ATTIS and USL and Novell and SCO and anybody else who could come up with an acronym.
It's probably not too much exaggeration to say that Unix is the single most influential operating system in modern computing. Every general-purpose computing device you'll find, and a lot of specific-purpose computing devices, will be using ideas and concepts and often code from something in the Unix family tree.
When we use the word 'Unix', then, we far more often mean the general form, than the specific OS that carries the name Unix(TM). The general form means "Any operating system which, in design and execution and interface and general taste, is substantially similar to the Unix system." That means all the BSDs, Linuxen, SunOS, Tru64, SCO, Irix, AIX, HP/UX, and a cast of hundreds or thousands of others.
I'm not interested in getting into semantic discussions about how many angels can dance on a head of split hair. Let it suffice that when I use phrases like "Unix systems", I mean exactly what you think of when I use the phrase. Pedantry City is ---> that way.
Linux
Linux also means several things. It's a kernel, originally written by Linus Torvalds when he was a student in Finland. Since then it's been beat up, punched around, tweaked, poked, prodded, manged, digested, spit out, stomped on, chewed up, tossed out, brought in, and otherwise manipulated (not necessarily in that order, of course) by more other people than you could easily count.
Linux is also the term for a family of operating systems. While there are fascinating metaphysical discussions taking place in dozens of places around the world at this very second (I guarantee it) about how "Linux isn't really an operating system, it's just a kernel", or "It should be called 'GNU/Linux'", or similar topics, I'm also going to neatly avoid that semantic cesspool. When I say "Linux", I mean Red Hat. I mean Slackware. I mean Mandrake. I mean Debian. I mean SuSe. I mean Gentoo. I mean every one of the 2 kadzillion distributions out there, based around a Linux kernel with substantially similar userlands, mostly based on GNU tools, that are floating around the ether.
BSD
BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution". Originally, it was a set of patches and extra add-on utilities for the official Bell Unix system that were developed by the CSRG at the University of California, Berkeley. Over time, it evolved to change and/or replace more and more of the system, until at some undefined point it became basically its own OS that merely happened to share chunks of code with Bell's Unix system.
Of course, it still required that you have a Bell license to use the system, since a lot of it was still Bell's code. All of the code written by Berkeley, however, was released under what's come to be known as the BSD license, which basically translates to "Do whatever the hell you want with the code, just give us credit for writing it". And a lot of the BSD code ended up working its way back into the "official" Unix system too, in System III and System V. And, a lot of both strains worked their way into the various commercial forks of Unix.
After the CSRG (mostly) dissolved and stopped developing the BSD system, several groups went off different ways with the code. One of these was the 386BSD project, which took the BSD code and made it run on the Intel i386 platform.
I made the *choice* over the summer to buy an iPod and would spend that 400 dollars all over again if I needed to.
iTunes and the iPod's support for it just makes the deal even sweater. Only those who refrain from the pair think they are bad. Join the club friends, give your money to apple for the greatest product they've ever made IMO.
Last I checked SCO was not violating the GPL.
They are not withholding any code which is under the GPL.
IF they allegations are true and System V code was copied into Linux, said System V code, while in the System V code base is not covered by the GPL and thus they are not required to release it.
Or did I miss something else that you are blabbing about?
At the start of last year, I was looking for an internship for the summer and was not feeling to confident in the job market I went a lil overboard and mailed 104 resumes in 10 days. Long story short I ended up with an internship at an electronics company an hour from where I live/go to school. I have been quite fortunate to hang onto that job into the fall when school started and even now into the spring after graduation.
Unfortunately, I am still not fulltime, I am just an 'intern' doing 40 hours a week and hoping the whole while that they decide to bring me to a fulltime salary status before too long.
Just three weeks ago I graduated after 4 and a half years of getting my BS in CS (not that I need a degree to prove my level of BS). Also not qualifying for any free money and not attempting to earn any scholarships, I did what many before me have done... put my name on the dotted line and financed my college education.
Granted when I started the tech market was booming and I figured I'd have em all paid off quite fast with the money I'd be making hand over fist, that was of course not the most realistic plan.
You seem to already know that a solid education is required for the most part in order to get a good job, thus taking out loans for said education tends to be the best solution if you cannot find the free money.
Ultimately, the person benefiting from the education should pay for it, IE: You!
Some non-bright people would be written up for time to time because of pictures of them in possession of alcohol while in their dorm rooms (it was/is a dry campus).
Many didn't think it 'fair' as no one had caught them in the act, few fully recognized how damaging a photo like that can be... even if false.
One friend took a picture of me and Photoshoped a water bong and a bottle of vodka into it with me... it was so good looking that the university actually 'investigated' to see if it was true, thankfully it didn't get that far for the simple reason that they knew I wasn't stupid enough to let a real picture like that of me exist.
UV Radiation no doubt, or not.
Just imagine a microwave installation receiving power from space, flapping birds would enter one side, and a KFC would set up shop on the other (yes, I know such frying would require a high intensity area).
going to http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1056281 016831&skuId=5720419&type=product links to what I picked up a week ago for 130 before a 30 dollar MIR. 100 bucks, not bad for a +/- R/RW :)
Just a lil FYI, unlike most on this topic, I have extensive experience in dealing with ATSC transport streams. This summer for my employer I designed and built a self contained application which builds an MPEG 2 stream into an ATSC stream. Other projects for this company I have worked on is an ATSC analysis device and a separate display/decoder test device.
For a side project this week, I've been working on my own app to remove the MPEG2 data from the transport stream as I got sick of trying to make HDTVtoMPEG to work the way I wanted... so I wrote my own from scratch.
An ATSC digital television transport stream operates at 19.392658 megabits per second over an 8VSB connection (coax), no more, no less. This is the bit rate that a consumer level decoder works at and is the speed of what ever source you will find in your home.
At the production and broadcast level, 27 megabits is the standard. Very often a second decoder of sorts is used to down sample the 27 megabit ASI stream into the 19.39 8VSB stream, just as higher bit rates can be used in production, but ultimately they must be at the 19.392658 level in order to be decoded by the decoder in any home with a consumer level decoder.
I'm going to have to say you are wrong with your numbers...
A terrestrial ATSC stream runs at roughly 19.39 megabits per second, regardless of what it contains. Thus, recording the stream it's self requires about 8.7 gigs per hours. 19.39/8 = 2.42375 megabytes per second * 3600 seconds/hour = 8725.5 megabytes.
It is possible to extract the MPEG2 stream from the ATSC stream with out much effort (if you know what you are doing), however such an ability is the reason for the implementation of the so called broadcast flag to keep you from being able to have access to the raw MPEG2.
This is such good news for me, and here I was, ready to throw windows out of my life and become a linux guru, thanks microsoft for showing me what a mistake that would be!!!
So... if you received such a letter you'd fight them to the bitter end? Tell us... how on earth would you pay for legal representation? Or would you attempt to defend yourself? In either case, I'm sad to say, you would loose, because you do not have the resources to fight.
You left out a step, after SCO has many fortune 1000 companies who've paid for licenses, any smaller companies who challenge SCO in court would be facing the war chest built up since this started.
Thus in court we will hear an SCO lawyer name off all of the big name companies who have 'recognized' SCO's claims and licensed their technology, and why should any smaller company be permitted to not play by the rules.
If it is a beam weapon... wouldn't such a beam be nothing more then waves? Can't waves be affected by gravity? Thus wouldn't such a statement about a gravity free weapon be flawed?
I've spent the last 6 months working with professional and broadcast level digital tv encoders and decoders, even writing a fair amount of software on both sides. This flag is pretty pointless, and is often a laugh when discussed at work.
With the hardware we build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by our systems if implemented. Besides, if you end up modifying the ATSC standard, in order to prevent breaking all previous encoders/decoders on the market, you would need to make such modifications to portions of the stream which are unused, and existing off the shelf parts would ignore such a modification. Thus, the protection starts off ineffective.
Even after the existing non compliant decoders/recorders/etc on the market are retired to due age or death, newer hardware which ignores such protections would still be available, you'd just have to pay a fair amount.
What's on my Christmas list this year? A DTV decoder as well as a recorder/player unit, cost for both? About 15k. As sad is it is to ask, how important is your right to copy to you? Is it work 15 thousand dollars?
I've been meaning to write a similar app for myself and seti.
I've found that on my laptop, the cost of running seti@home cuts my battery life in half, so when I care about power I am sure to leave it off, however, when ever it's plugged in, it like the rest of my boxes are chugging away. When it comes to power costs I don't really care currently as I don't pay my electricity, it's included with my rent and believe you me I make good use of that.
As for premature death of CPU, being under heavy load should not hurt it, powering on and off often does far more 'wear and tear'.
the reason you want drivers for such a 'card' is because the nic is embeded. As truly happy owner of one such card... I can firmly say I am inlove, and see no reason why I should have to find a pci card to add in when I run BSD on it.
Speaking of wackyness... I read this article, followed one of the links, hit the back button and the story was gone... 5 min later it was back, followed another link, hit the back button and the story had changed. Hit refresh again, and it changed yet again!
I cannot speak to exactly why we chose Linux over BSD, in large part it was due to the quality of Red Boot Linux (a Red Hat distro designed for embedded applications). The licensing aspects of the OS were pretty much irrelevant to us as we have not made any changes to it which we are not willing to disclose to our customer, while the higher level application software which we wrote in house is not bound my any external licenses.
I agree, some have that kind of rational.
For their next trick they will run around stores like best buy with pages of printed Linux kernel, rubbing it all around the packages containing Windows, office and other software products and finally demanding that because GLPed code has touched this other code, that they must be open sourced.
Extreme yes, but I've known people who are almost this bad.
You should be grateful that a company releases any specs for their device if it does not contain GPL based code.
It is NOT the responsibility of a company to provide you with documentation on a product, if you wish to know the internal workings of it, that is up to you to discover. Frankly, I'm surprised Linksys has not come out threatening to sue under the DMCA for any reverse engineering of the unit, it's doubtful that this GPL violation would have been noticed if it had not been at the very least looked at in a way Linksys did not intend.
Note: While I am not a big time open source advocate, I do recognize the potential and usefulness of things such as the GPL, I do not believe that a company should be required to disclose anything more above the GPLed code.
I work for a company where we are developing a product running an embedded version of Linux with plenty of our own, proprietary code running on top of it (we have been very careful to ensure that the two code bases never mix). You seem to be of the opinion that anyone who purchases this product down the line should be entitled not only to the source of the Linux code we used, but also the specs of the interface we built for interaction with the hardware as well as the code that uses this interface, neither of which contains a single line of outside or GLPed code.
This is part of the reason some consider Linux to be viral, some actually believe that code running with or under Linux is required to have it's source available to all those who want it, that would be a big no.