I felt the way you do about the early drafts of the GPL3 but I mostly like the final version.
The thing that's new about GPL3, is that it tries to not only keep the code itself open and free, which I believe is a valid goal of a software license, but it tries to control *other* behaviors of an organization that are more marginally related to the code itself, such as patent cross-licensing agreements, etc.
I don't think that's the aim of the GPL3 at all. The purpose (as I understand it at least) is to keep the USERS of the code free to actually use and modify the code, not just look at it. The purpose of the patent wording is to keep someone from technically fulfilling their obligations under the GPL on one hand by releasing the relivent code while on the other hand threatening a patent lawsuit against anyone who actually tries to take advantage of those rights.
So, do you disagree with the goal above or do you just think they could have done it differently?
I can't imagine Dell requiring open-source drivers. Even if to support their Linux offerings.
The problem isn't the lack of drivers, it is what the Chinese will do with an open-source driver.
I really don't understand why Dell would care. They arn't hardware designers, just system integrators using (mostly) comodity parts.
Hardware manufacturer spends lots of time (read: money) developing software-instead-of-hardware approach to make a given computer peripherial lower cost to the consumer.
While I'm sure there are exceptions for the most part I'd say I'm happy to see those pursuing that approach go. Forget Linux etc. even on Windows these types of hardware tend to be the buggiest pieces of garbage available and are the first to become obsolete when a new version of Windows, or even sometimes a service pack, comes out. What's wrong with hardware makers competing based on making better hardware?
You release the hardware specs (or better yet, a real working driver) and you now enable somebody to duplicate all that work in a couple of weeks just reusing (yes, stealing) the software. No R&D time. Much, much cheaper product.
Well, they still have to duplicate the hardware which is IMHO a lot harder than copying the software, be it open or closed.
Considering that cf is used on the crowns of some mountain bike suspension forks, my guess is any issues with strength and durability would be found out pretty quickly.
Aircraft have a much longer service life than high end bikes.
they won't spend time fiddling with drivers, checking if the hardware will/might/won't work.
If they won't spend a little time finding out what hardware will work well with Linux then they should stick to Windows XP (but not Win2k or Vista because they both have the same problem). That's Ok, really. There are plenty of users out there who are savy enough to use Google and plenty more will get a Linux geek to take care of this sort of thing for them. There are even some who will (shudder) just go out and buy a computer with Linux pre-installed from Dell or whoever. The remaining folks who insist on buying their own hardware but don't want to do any research are by far the hardest demographic to satisfy and probably won't be supportable untill Linux has a more of the rest converted.
What gets me is that the Linux community still believes, in 2007, that auto-detection of hardware isn't worth the effort.
On what planet exactly? End user distros have been auto-detecting hardware for at least several years now. On average I'd even say that given a bare computer plus a Windows CD and a Ubuntu CD you're more likely to have everyting work on Ubuntu.
And just recently, I bought an ASUS motherboard, and tried to install Slackware 12.0 on it. And you know what happened? The kernel hangs after reporting the serial driver message. Sure, I could trace through the code to find the likely culprit.....
Or you could plug your Asus motherboard name/model into Google along with the words Linux and Slackware and probably have your answer in a few seconds. Better still, you could do this before buying the darn thing. If you buy from major online sites like Newegg you can search their user comments/reviews for the word Linux as well.
But a large part of driver installation on Linux is a manual process; on my 2003 Toshiba laptop, I end up recompiling the kernel to get the sound to work.
If you don't want to be recompiling kernels etc why on earth are you using Slackware? I can't get a standard size sheet of plywood into my wife's little Subaru hatchback either but that doesn't imply some sort of design deficiency in the Subuaru, it just wasn't designed for that.
If you want an idea of how good the Linux hardware detection/support is just burn yourself a copy of Knoppix and try it out on a few machines.
The user's computer exposure to web criminals was not due to the user's lack of attention to minute details of the program, but by the criminal negligence on the part of the programmer to shield the user's data from his program's access.
I'd go further and say that in at least some cases automatically sharing everything (or at least all media files) is an intentional (mis)feature of the P2P programs. The folks that make these programs often gain from the popularity of their programs either through advertising or through sales of paid versions and the easiest way to become popular is to make sure there is plenty of stuff for users to download. Of course the cheapest way to get content onto the network is to get users to provide it automatically.
For example, the Big Bang theory doesn't require a strange, unobserved "locally generated" "electric fog".
No but it does require a strange, unobserved "dark energy". Ever since they discovered that the speed of the expansion of the universe has been increasing the Big Bang theory has been in trouble. Unfortunately we don't have anything better so we keep it on life support.
So the DoD wants to keep track of who is at what rally? In what way does that infringe on civil rights anymore than video monitoring of street corners in Baltimore, for instance?
Keeping lists of citizens excercising their constitutional rights to speech and association is bad because the information can be used to intimidate citizens in subtle and hard to prove ways. While I personally don't know how being in the "Threat and Local Observation Notices" database could possibly do any harm, some people might worry that it would cause them to fail background screenings often required for employment, audits by the IRS, being singled out for "special treatment" at the airport etc. The more paranoid among us might even worry that if things were to really get bad then the first people they would come for would be those on these lists.
I've recorded a few of these "Teleworld Paid Program" shows on Discovery and they are indeed advertising for Tivo and related products but I havn't seen any sign of data encoded in the program?
One of the advantages of having non-local storage are that it is safe from fire/flood/theft/whatever that might happen to your local storage. Another advantage is that it makes it easy to share data among users at multiple locations. There are obviously disadvantages too such as slow access speed, high cost, etc but I'm sure some folks will find it useful.
I'd read somewhere that Directv broadcast their guide data (for DirecTivo use) as paid programming at night on the Discovery channel but I've been unable to spot it. Does anyone know exactly when/where it's being shown?
MythTV is a lot more than just a DVR. The combination of MythTV + Mythmusic + MythVideo is far better than any other device I've seen at any price. I also really like being able to get at all of my music/movies/tv from any room in the house.
It is not so easy if you have satellite internet service (i.e. DirecWay/HughesNet). The web-services method of downloading the guide data that Zap2It uses does not work with DirecWay. I had to abandon MythTV, install Windows, and use BeyondTV to have a working PVR.
That's odd, were they intentionally blocking it or what? Did you try bypassing the proxy server built into the Direcway box? The old 1 way (satellite down, modem up) Direcway setups were pretty bad but the 2 way devices seemed to work pretty well.
I'd love to get the data for free and I even have something resembling a plan for doing so but in the mean time my MythTV box is WELL worth an extra $5/month.
I'll call it natural selection and applied darwinism.
Applied darwinism gone horibly wrong maybe. The problem is this doesn't kill, it just gives the victim a "dangerous" looking eye patch which is sure to attract the opposite sex and increase the odds of reproduction.
The ability to travel is the biggest natural evolutionary threat of "oneness".
That doesn't make any sense to me. When people with different genes mix you end up with a new combination that didn't exist before thus creating more diversity, not less.
For a fun and tasty experiment go get yourself a bag of M&Ms and seperate the reds and blues. Now put the reds and blues in a clear container together and start mixing them. No matter how much you mix them you still end up with clusters with groups of reds together and clusters of blues together. What you don't get no matter how much you mix is a completely homogeneous mixture.
The second biggest threat are the people who through the media continue to suggest this mixing is natural when it is not.
Throughout history when two groups of people meet one of the first things they do is f***. That's about as natural as it gets.
yea? this is a "community" that argues over everything as it is, just look at all the "fractures" over KDE vs. Gnome...
Which worked out pretty darn well. QT ended up being distributed under the GPL which put distributers of KDE on more solid legal footing while both KDE and Gnome became much better and more mature products due to the competition.
GPL2 was fine, the lessers are fine. But, brow beating projects into GPL3 is going to make the community rebel, and these people are all about rebellion.
What exactly is wrong with the GPL3 and what makes you think anyone is "brow beating" anyone else into using it?
There are always going a few people who thrive on argument and chaos but most of the people actually involved in the creation of the GPL3 have been pretty civil IMHO and I think that even includes RMS. Just look at how much the GPL3 has improved since the first draft based on input from just about anyone who cared enough to speak up.
Yes, 3rd party has keys to our home. It is quite common with the apartment houses where I live. It is however quite unlikely that they would steal from us, as they would be number one suspects. So far I have never been robbed by they key holders, nor have I ever heard of a case that someone else had been.
Breaking in to the appartment manager's office in order to steal keys to the other appartments is a pretty common strategy among burglers.
many many people actually do possess a shred of respect for the law,
Really? The vast majority of computers I've worked on have at least one piece of unlicensed or improperly licensed software installed on them. Until MS added unzip functionality to Windows virtually every Windows PC in existance had an unlicensed copy of Winzip installed, and even now probably half of the copies of Office I see were copied from friends or installed on more than one computer. I'm actually the only one I know who's even read most of the licenses for the software installed on their computer.
If people don't have a problem borrowing their friends copy of Office then what makes you think they would have a problem with violating someone's patent in order to view a DVD that they've paid for?
1 - If you drive a liquid H2 car, you're driving A BOMB! One that can never be turned off, unplugged, get in a bad crash, or run out of fuel or it will explode!
Sure but that's pretty much true of any energy storage system. It's not like gasoline, or for that matter modern batteries are all that safe either. Also any tank capable of storing compressed H2 is going to be inherrently pretty strong.
- what happens if the great big H2 tanks at the filling station are involved in an earthquake, terrorist attack, or extended power outage?
The gas escapes and dispurses? We already have tanks and pipelines with propane and natural gas all over the place and those are far more dangerous than H2 which at least has the advantage of being lighter than air.
- it's FUCKING expensive!!! It looks to me like generating H2 via electrolysis of water is in the same general ballpark effenciency wise as charging/discharging batteries (both somewhere in the 50% range).
- Solid (metal infused) H2 tanks take approximately 6-8 hours to refill with enough H2 to drive 150 miles. This is MUCH worse than electric only cars. (In fact, using Toshiba's new battery technology, we could refuel electric cars in 90 seconds, to 90% charge. - we don't have ANYTHING resembling an industry for transportation, storage, or pumping of H2.
It's not like we have the infrstructure in place to charge an electric car anywhere near that quickly either in most places. That's a LOT of power.
- it's too damned big of a system. Cars would have to be the size of hybrid SUVs and loose either 2 seats or the trunk to run on H2 safely.
Same problem with batteries.
- will you trust a grease monkey to fix an H2 powered engine? (no offense to my many talented automotive engineering friends) Do you have any idea what it might take to fix an engine like this? can it even be repaired at the component level safely?
H2 engines are pretty much the same as gasoline engines so I'm not sure why you think they would be more dangerous to work on. Working with an electrical system capable of delivering thousands of watts for an extended period of time doesn't sound exactly safe either.
But for me the best thing about this would be the ability to use it at home without using additional minutes rather than at hotspots. Even when I'm within feet of a land line I often find myself reaching for my cell because I hate being tied down by a cord. I know wifi only phones and standard cordless phones have been around forever but who wants to carry around another phone.
At the time that SP1 is released, more time will have passed so that our application vendors will have re-written or updated their code to match Vista's changes.
So you're not really waiting for SP1 then are you?
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The issue is that the GPL3 tries to tell me what kind of arrangements I can make with my customers *outside* of just how the code is treated.
??? What makes you think the GPL3 does anything like that?
I felt the way you do about the early drafts of the GPL3 but I mostly like the final version.
The thing that's new about GPL3, is that it tries to not only keep the code itself open and free, which I believe is a valid goal of a software license, but it tries to control *other* behaviors of an organization that are more marginally related to the code itself, such as patent cross-licensing agreements, etc.
I don't think that's the aim of the GPL3 at all. The purpose (as I understand it at least) is to keep the USERS of the code free to actually use and modify the code, not just look at it. The purpose of the patent wording is to keep someone from technically fulfilling their obligations under the GPL on one hand by releasing the relivent code while on the other hand threatening a patent lawsuit against anyone who actually tries to take advantage of those rights.
So, do you disagree with the goal above or do you just think they could have done it differently?
I can't imagine Dell requiring open-source drivers. Even if to support their Linux offerings.
The problem isn't the lack of drivers, it is what the Chinese will do with an open-source driver.
I really don't understand why Dell would care. They arn't hardware designers, just system integrators using (mostly) comodity parts.
Hardware manufacturer spends lots of time (read: money) developing software-instead-of-hardware approach to make a given computer peripherial lower cost to the consumer.
While I'm sure there are exceptions for the most part I'd say I'm happy to see those pursuing that approach go. Forget Linux etc. even on Windows these types of hardware tend to be the buggiest pieces of garbage available and are the first to become obsolete when a new version of Windows, or even sometimes a service pack, comes out. What's wrong with hardware makers competing based on making better hardware?
You release the hardware specs (or better yet, a real working driver) and you now enable somebody to duplicate all that work in a couple of weeks just reusing (yes, stealing) the software. No R&D time. Much, much cheaper product.
Well, they still have to duplicate the hardware which is IMHO a lot harder than copying the software, be it open or closed.
Considering that cf is used on the crowns of some mountain bike suspension forks, my guess is any issues with strength and durability would be found out pretty quickly.
Aircraft have a much longer service life than high end bikes.
they won't spend time fiddling with drivers, checking if the hardware will/might/won't work.
If they won't spend a little time finding out what hardware will work well with Linux then they should stick to Windows XP (but not Win2k or Vista because they both have the same problem). That's Ok, really. There are plenty of users out there who are savy enough to use Google and plenty more will get a Linux geek to take care of this sort of thing for them. There are even some who will (shudder) just go out and buy a computer with Linux pre-installed from Dell or whoever. The remaining folks who insist on buying their own hardware but don't want to do any research are by far the hardest demographic to satisfy and probably won't be supportable untill Linux has a more of the rest converted.
What gets me is that the Linux community still believes, in 2007, that auto-detection of hardware isn't worth the effort.
On what planet exactly? End user distros have been auto-detecting hardware for at least several years now. On average I'd even say that given a bare computer plus a Windows CD and a Ubuntu CD you're more likely to have everyting work on Ubuntu.
And just recently, I bought an ASUS motherboard, and tried to install Slackware 12.0 on it. And you know what happened? The kernel hangs after reporting the serial driver message. Sure, I could trace through the code to find the likely culprit.....
Or you could plug your Asus motherboard name/model into Google along with the words Linux and Slackware and probably have your answer in a few seconds. Better still, you could do this before buying the darn thing. If you buy from major online sites like Newegg you can search their user comments/reviews for the word Linux as well.
But a large part of driver installation on Linux is a manual process; on my 2003 Toshiba laptop, I end up recompiling the kernel to get the sound to work.
If you don't want to be recompiling kernels etc why on earth are you using Slackware? I can't get a standard size sheet of plywood into my wife's little Subaru hatchback either but that doesn't imply some sort of design deficiency in the Subuaru, it just wasn't designed for that.
If you want an idea of how good the Linux hardware detection/support is just burn yourself a copy of Knoppix and try it out on a few machines.
The user's computer exposure to web criminals was not due to the user's lack of attention to minute details of the program, but by the criminal negligence on the part of the programmer to shield the user's data from his program's access.
I'd go further and say that in at least some cases automatically sharing everything (or at least all media files) is an intentional (mis)feature of the P2P programs. The folks that make these programs often gain from the popularity of their programs either through advertising or through sales of paid versions and the easiest way to become popular is to make sure there is plenty of stuff for users to download. Of course the cheapest way to get content onto the network is to get users to provide it automatically.
For example, the Big Bang theory doesn't require a strange, unobserved "locally generated" "electric fog".
No but it does require a strange, unobserved "dark energy". Ever since they discovered that the speed of the expansion of the universe has been increasing the Big Bang theory has been in trouble. Unfortunately we don't have anything better so we keep it on life support.
So the DoD wants to keep track of who is at what rally? In what way does that infringe on civil rights anymore than video monitoring of street corners in Baltimore, for instance?
Keeping lists of citizens excercising their constitutional rights to speech and association is bad because the information can be used to intimidate citizens in subtle and hard to prove ways. While I personally don't know how being in the "Threat and Local Observation Notices" database could possibly do any harm, some people might worry that it would cause them to fail background screenings often required for employment, audits by the IRS, being singled out for "special treatment" at the airport etc. The more paranoid among us might even worry that if things were to really get bad then the first people they would come for would be those on these lists.
I've recorded a few of these "Teleworld Paid Program" shows on Discovery and they are indeed advertising for Tivo and related products but I havn't seen any sign of data encoded in the program?
Any other thoughts? Anyone?
One of the advantages of having non-local storage are that it is safe from fire/flood/theft/whatever that might happen to your local storage. Another advantage is that it makes it easy to share data among users at multiple locations. There are obviously disadvantages too such as slow access speed, high cost, etc but I'm sure some folks will find it useful.
I'd read somewhere that Directv broadcast their guide data (for DirecTivo use) as paid programming at night on the Discovery channel but I've been unable to spot it. Does anyone know exactly when/where it's being shown?
MythTV is a lot more than just a DVR. The combination of MythTV + Mythmusic + MythVideo is far better than any other device I've seen at any price. I also really like being able to get at all of my music/movies/tv from any room in the house.
It is not so easy if you have satellite internet service (i.e. DirecWay/HughesNet). The web-services method of downloading the guide data that Zap2It uses does not work with DirecWay. I had to abandon MythTV, install Windows, and use BeyondTV to have a working PVR.
That's odd, were they intentionally blocking it or what? Did you try bypassing the proxy server built into the Direcway box? The old 1 way (satellite down, modem up) Direcway setups were pretty bad but the 2 way devices seemed to work pretty well.
I'd love to get the data for free and I even have something resembling a plan for doing so but in the mean time my MythTV box is WELL worth an extra $5/month.
I'll call it natural selection and applied darwinism.
Applied darwinism gone horibly wrong maybe. The problem is this doesn't kill, it just gives the victim a "dangerous" looking eye patch which is sure to attract the opposite sex and increase the odds of reproduction.
The ability to travel is the biggest natural evolutionary threat of "oneness".
That doesn't make any sense to me. When people with different genes mix you end up with a new combination that didn't exist before thus creating more diversity, not less.
For a fun and tasty experiment go get yourself a bag of M&Ms and seperate the reds and blues. Now put the reds and blues in a clear container together and start mixing them. No matter how much you mix them you still end up with clusters with groups of reds together and clusters of blues together. What you don't get no matter how much you mix is a completely homogeneous mixture.
The second biggest threat are the people who through the media continue to suggest this mixing is natural when it is not.
Throughout history when two groups of people meet one of the first things they do is f***. That's about as natural as it gets.
yea? this is a "community" that argues over everything as it is, just look at all the "fractures" over KDE vs. Gnome...
Which worked out pretty darn well. QT ended up being distributed under the GPL which put distributers of KDE on more solid legal footing while both KDE and Gnome became much better and more mature products due to the competition.
GPL2 was fine, the lessers are fine. But, brow beating projects into GPL3 is going to make the community rebel, and these people are all about rebellion.
What exactly is wrong with the GPL3 and what makes you think anyone is "brow beating" anyone else into using it?
There are always going a few people who thrive on argument and chaos but most of the people actually involved in the creation of the GPL3 have been pretty civil IMHO and I think that even includes RMS. Just look at how much the GPL3 has improved since the first draft based on input from just about anyone who cared enough to speak up.
"the product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons ... "
fully clothed in what? nurses uniforms? fettish gear? rubber? a gimp suit?
Well, fully clothed in balloons of course!
Yes, 3rd party has keys to our home. It is quite common with the apartment houses where I live. It is however quite unlikely that they would steal from us, as they would be number one suspects. So far I have never been robbed by they key holders, nor have I ever heard of a case that someone else had been.
Breaking in to the appartment manager's office in order to steal keys to the other appartments is a pretty common strategy among burglers.
many many people actually do possess a shred of respect for the law,
Really? The vast majority of computers I've worked on have at least one piece of unlicensed or improperly licensed software installed on them. Until MS added unzip functionality to Windows virtually every Windows PC in existance had an unlicensed copy of Winzip installed, and even now probably half of the copies of Office I see were copied from friends or installed on more than one computer. I'm actually the only one I know who's even read most of the licenses for the software installed on their computer.
If people don't have a problem borrowing their friends copy of Office then what makes you think they would have a problem with violating someone's patent in order to view a DVD that they've paid for?
Not that I disagree with your point but:
1 - If you drive a liquid H2 car, you're driving A BOMB! One that can never be turned off, unplugged, get in a bad crash, or run out of fuel or it will explode!
Sure but that's pretty much true of any energy storage system. It's not like gasoline, or for that matter modern batteries are all that safe either. Also any tank capable of storing compressed H2 is going to be inherrently pretty strong.
- what happens if the great big H2 tanks at the filling station are involved in an earthquake, terrorist attack, or extended power outage?
The gas escapes and dispurses? We already have tanks and pipelines with propane and natural gas all over the place and those are far more dangerous than H2 which at least has the advantage of being lighter than air.
- it's FUCKING expensive!!!
It looks to me like generating H2 via electrolysis of water is in the same general ballpark effenciency wise as charging/discharging batteries (both somewhere in the 50% range).
- Solid (metal infused) H2 tanks take approximately 6-8 hours to refill with enough H2 to drive 150 miles. This is MUCH worse than electric only cars. (In fact, using Toshiba's new battery technology, we could refuel electric cars in 90 seconds, to 90% charge.
- we don't have ANYTHING resembling an industry for transportation, storage, or pumping of H2.
It's not like we have the infrstructure in place to charge an electric car anywhere near that quickly either in most places. That's a LOT of power.
- it's too damned big of a system. Cars would have to be the size of hybrid SUVs and loose either 2 seats or the trunk to run on H2 safely.
Same problem with batteries.
- will you trust a grease monkey to fix an H2 powered engine? (no offense to my many talented automotive engineering friends) Do you have any idea what it might take to fix an engine like this? can it even be repaired at the component level safely?
H2 engines are pretty much the same as gasoline engines so I'm not sure why you think they would be more dangerous to work on. Working with an electrical system capable of delivering thousands of watts for an extended period of time doesn't sound exactly safe either.
But for me the best thing about this would be the ability to use it at home without using additional minutes rather than at hotspots. Even when I'm within feet of a land line I often find myself reaching for my cell because I hate being tied down by a cord. I know wifi only phones and standard cordless phones have been around forever but who wants to carry around another phone.
At the time that SP1 is released, more time will have passed so that our application vendors will have re-written or updated their code to match Vista's changes.
So you're not really waiting for SP1 then are you?