I know about make available. All you have to is offer to send the source to anyone that you distribute the binary. You can even charge for media. As I said if you don't modify any GPL code then I don't think you have to make the source available since it is already available. So yea there is a lot of options that should be explored before calling foul.
Naw Tesla was a briliant man that became a nutcase. Bucky was mostly a con man. He sold dreams and people bought them. Bucky was in the classic words of Douglas Adams, "mostly harmless" Not the worst way to be remembered.
Wouldn't contacting the company be a better place to start? They are not required to put the source code on the website. Also if they don't modify the source do they have to make it available? Does Dell offer Ubuntu for download?
I use nVidia's drivers everyday and they work pretty well. Intel's drivers... Well They do very little and also do not support all the features of the GPU. While I praise Intel, ATI, and nVidia for providing drivers for Linux I find the praise for Intel's drivers at best annoying. Yea it is FOSS but only in name. Intel writes the drivers and they are or at least in the past been very poorly documented. ATI/AMD has been working very hard to open up their cards and as of right now they are the leaders in FOSS support for good GPUs.
Yes. Why? The PS/2 ports are only useful for using a PS/2 KVM which are cheap and common. There are MANY devices that only work with RS-232 ports. USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable. You will see these mini-ITX boards used a lot in embedded systems so yea I will lose the PS/2 port any day but please keep the come and lpt ports.
Yadda yadda yadda... Please stop playing the FOSS zealot if you don't know what your talking about. ATI HAS released the specs to their cards unlike nVidia. The new card already runs with the FOSS driver. The FOSS driver is improving daily.
Funny but that is what they said 50 years ago:) I do think that we will work out Fusion but I would plan on 500 years. Do I think it will take 500 years? Not really but better to plan for it not being here than to assume best case.
Fissionable material isn't that limited. In the big picture Everything is limited. Right now a lot of reactor fuel is wasted in the US. Other countries recycle their fuel. You can also breed fuel in breeder reactors and can you can use a thorium cycle for reactors as well. If are worried about carbon emissions right now then yes we should build nuclear power plants right now. Yes develop solar and wind and geothermal as well but start building reactors. Let's just run some numbers. The largest solor plant I know of is 354MW solar thermal power plant in Mojave CA. Diablo Canyon nuclear plant 2,200 MWs Diablo Canyon can run day and night rain or shine producing that power while the output for the solar plant is just peak. When one looks at building 2,200 MWs of wind power you start getting in to a lot of Windmills. GeoThermal isn't everywhere at least not at a practical deapth. It should be used more but it also isn't a silver bullet.
The simple truth is that if you want to build a fossil fuel free power plant that can power a big city your choices today are a Nuclear Plant, a Dam, or if your really lucky a geothermal plant.
As to why we don't harness volcano? Because we can not tame a volcano. For the most part people just don't like to live near active ones and people don't as a rule want to build on them.
Yes no and maybe. If I was making an embedded system I would LOVE to have it DRMed/encrypted out the wazo. Most embedded devices should be hard to modify. It would add security to the system and make it more reliable. I want it to be next to impossible for any type of security breach including an unauthorized person reflashing the device. That is from a device owner/developer point of view.
As an end user of more mainstream devices... Not on your life. I want to write code and add features. Would it be great if I could get my mother a PC that has the OS in ROM and stores just datafiles on mass storage. Well yes I can see the value in it. It would be immune from viruses, Trojans, and other flavors of malware. Would I want it? Nope. So like many things in life the answer depends on your point of view. Is it cool that I can re flash my motherboards bios? Yes. Is it just a little scary to know that I can brick a motherboard???
Writing to program files isn't a bug. It was also just fine under Windows95/98 Some people are still using software from then everyday. If a program works it works. That was a Microsoft enforced change not a bug. Also you have the issue with journal playback, the audio, USB.... and on and on. For you Vista may work just fine but for many many many thousands of people it really doesn't. That is the key problem. Two many people on Slashdot only deal with their PC or maybe a few friends. At my office we joke that if a problem effects one out of 1000 people we will hear about it at least 10 times a day.
"Only software that was already broken for normal user accounts in XP, i.e. software that blindly tried to write into the Program Files directory, or software that tried to use registry keys that it wasn't allowed." That is a purist point of view. To the end user they had a program that worked just fine and now it doesn't. Your USB problem is one of the ones that have been reported also many USB to serial converters have issues with just shutting down after a few hours of use. I notice you are not going to comment on audio problems.
What it comes down to for most users. Does Vista help me get my work done or does it slow me down. I claim that it helps almost nobody and slows almost everybody down.
No they really didn't People complained that it had a kiddie UI and couldn't play a lot of games that 98 could. They actually praised it for being a secure as w2k and a lot less likely to give you the BSOD than 98. Also within a few months everybody was using it because it was so much better than 98. And that was long before SP1. Not only that people where not demanding 98 or ME more than a year after realease. In other words the pain was worth the gain.
That all depends on what you think "to many years" of doubling" means. I was thinking maybe 20 or so. If you doubled the amount of IP traffic every year for 32 years you would end up with over four billion times the traffice we have now. At 33 years it would be around eight billion.... Yes every technology reaches a state of maturity in at least area of performance. Ships today are not significantly faster than ships from the 1950s. There are just more of them that can approach the top speeds of the best of the 1950s ships. Aircraft are not significantly faster than they where in the late 1960s. At some point the growth in IP traffic will slow to a lot less than doubling every year.
How bad is Vista? Well that depends. The UAC does break a good amount of software that works just fine on XP. Also the journal playback doesn't work with the UAC turned on. It was a security issue but it is also how some programs did simple macros and allowed you to create applications that pushed text into other windows apps. Also the USB system seems to have some bugs in it. Also the sound system can be really odd at times. Some computers produce really crappy sound if you record at less than 16 bit 22 khz stereo. That shouldn't be an issue for just recording voice. It does use more disk space and memory than XP. It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different. So as you have put it if you turn off all the extras then it isn't that bad. But if you turn off all the extras is it any better than XP? That is what makes Vista so bad. It really is a lot to some pain for little to no gain. XP works as well as Vista, uses less resources, and everybody knows most of it's quirks and problems. I feel that Vista is a case of not worth it. And what I find shocking is that most of the normal users out there feel the same way.
But that is what doesn't make sense. Last time I checked Microsoft charged less for Windows in China than in the US not more. When you think about how many systems are built and preloaded with Windows in China I can not believe that it costs Lenovo less to sell Windows on a PC in the US than it does to sell it in China.
I know you are being funny but the truth is that it will level off at some time. It will not take to many years of doubling before the amount reaches good enough. Most voice is moving to using IP as a transport, video is rapidly moving that way. Data has now moved almost exclusively to TCP/IP "anyone else remember IPX?".
I about ten years ago I told some friends that in the near future we will no longer have a phone line and cable TV but instead a data port. Eventually we will have enough band width.
And if I ran into a mountian lion I wouldn't shoot on site. But if it acted aggressivly or attacked then yes I would defend myself or others. What is the difficultiy that you have in understanding that a large preditor can be a threat to humans.
Not really. I bought FS2004. I run the cracked version of it because I don't want to have to find the disk every time I play it. I am honest because I am honest. In this case I doubt I will buy Spore. The DRM is just too big of a pain do deal with. DRM seems to be making honest people into criminals. Seems way to like prohibition to me.
Okay why do you think he was over reacting. 1. From what I read at no time did the guns come out of the the truck. In rual areas it is common to have guns in the gun rack of your truck A lot of the time. If all of a sudden a bunch of people showed up in the middle of no where I can see the logic of taking guns with me and keeping both secure and in plain site. 2. He took pictures of peoples plates. Why not. You have no idea why they are there. If they are up to no good then it is good info for the cops. So what did the farmer do wrong? Now the Geohashers I feel over reacted. They saw some guns in a gun rack... RUN WE ARE IN DANGER!!! Well not really. I see that all the time. Did anyone even try to say hello and be friendly to the rancher? Explain to them what they where doing. Odds are he would know a good deal about GPS and the internet. If the Geohashers had just waved and said hello then the photos might have been of a a bunch of people smiling and waving. Yea I would say the Geohashers where the ones that over reacted. Dang city folks.
I have no problem with killing a Black Widow. Yes a mountain lion can call people so it is a threat. The risk of running into one is minor for most people but if threatened then I do think they have the right to defend themselves.
"Mountain lions are protected in virtually every state. If you shoot one, you are committing a felony, even if it's killing your dogs or livestock." Too bad. I am actually all for protecting wildlife even predators. But that being said if a Mountain lion is attacking my dog then it is also a threat to me. "There are a few things about the old west that I really hate... one of them is the disrespect for the land. And wolves and mountain lions are part of the land here, just like the pines and rattlers." If I come across a rattler in the woods then that rattler lives and I go the other way. If it is near my house then it is a threat and I will remove it how I see fit. It may get relocated or it may loose it's life. The thing is so am I and my children and even my pets. When it comes to self protection then fair is far. Most people with your attitude tend to live in the city and go and visit the "land" you think it is some kind of theme park.
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I know about make available. All you have to is offer to send the source to anyone that you distribute the binary. You can even charge for media.
As I said if you don't modify any GPL code then I don't think you have to make the source available since it is already available.
So yea there is a lot of options that should be explored before calling foul.
Naw Tesla was a briliant man that became a nutcase. Bucky was mostly a con man. He sold dreams and people bought them.
Bucky was in the classic words of Douglas Adams, "mostly harmless"
Not the worst way to be remembered.
Wouldn't contacting the company be a better place to start? They are not required to put the source code on the website.
Also if they don't modify the source do they have to make it available? Does Dell offer Ubuntu for download?
I can see that but then the devices that I work with that use Com ports cast about $5000 to replace. Most kvm swithes are a lot cheaper. :)
I use nVidia's drivers everyday and they work pretty well.
Intel's drivers... Well They do very little and also do not support all the features of the GPU.
While I praise Intel, ATI, and nVidia for providing drivers for Linux I find the praise for Intel's drivers at best annoying.
Yea it is FOSS but only in name. Intel writes the drivers and they are or at least in the past been very poorly documented.
ATI/AMD has been working very hard to open up their cards and as of right now they are the leaders in FOSS support for good GPUs.
Yes.
Why? The PS/2 ports are only useful for using a PS/2 KVM which are cheap and common.
There are MANY devices that only work with RS-232 ports. USB converts are on the whole junk and not very reliable.
You will see these mini-ITX boards used a lot in embedded systems so yea I will lose the PS/2 port any day but please keep the come and lpt ports.
Yadda yadda yadda...
Please stop playing the FOSS zealot if you don't know what your talking about.
ATI HAS released the specs to their cards unlike nVidia. The new card already runs with the FOSS driver. The FOSS driver is improving daily.
Funny but that is what they said 50 years ago :)
I do think that we will work out Fusion but I would plan on 500 years.
Do I think it will take 500 years? Not really but better to plan for it not being here than to assume best case.
In many places people use electricity for heating and it is efficient. We use heat pumps.
Fissionable material isn't that limited. In the big picture Everything is limited.
Right now a lot of reactor fuel is wasted in the US. Other countries recycle their fuel.
You can also breed fuel in breeder reactors and can you can use a thorium cycle for reactors as well.
If are worried about carbon emissions right now then yes we should build nuclear power plants right now. Yes develop solar and wind and geothermal as well but start building reactors.
Let's just run some numbers.
The largest solor plant I know of is 354MW solar thermal power plant in Mojave CA.
Diablo Canyon nuclear plant 2,200 MWs Diablo Canyon can run day and night rain or shine producing that power while the output for the solar plant is just peak. When one looks at building 2,200 MWs of wind power you start getting in to a lot of Windmills.
GeoThermal isn't everywhere at least not at a practical deapth. It should be used more but it also isn't a silver bullet.
The simple truth is that if you want to build a fossil fuel free power plant that can power a big city your choices today are a Nuclear Plant, a Dam, or if your really lucky a geothermal plant.
As to why we don't harness volcano? Because we can not tame a volcano. For the most part people just don't like to live near active ones and people don't as a rule want to build on them.
How very free speech friendly of you.
But I have to admit I could have gone the rest of my life without having to read trash like the original post.
Yes no and maybe.
If I was making an embedded system I would LOVE to have it DRMed/encrypted out the wazo. Most embedded devices should be hard to modify. It would add security to the system and make it more reliable.
I want it to be next to impossible for any type of security breach including an unauthorized person reflashing the device. That is from a device owner/developer point of view.
As an end user of more mainstream devices... Not on your life. I want to write code and add features.
Would it be great if I could get my mother a PC that has the OS in ROM and stores just datafiles on mass storage. Well yes I can see the value in it. It would be immune from viruses, Trojans, and other flavors of malware.
Would I want it? Nope.
So like many things in life the answer depends on your point of view.
Is it cool that I can re flash my motherboards bios? Yes. Is it just a little scary to know that I can brick a motherboard???
Writing to program files isn't a bug. It was also just fine under Windows95/98 Some people are still using software from then everyday. If a program works it works.
That was a Microsoft enforced change not a bug.
Also you have the issue with journal playback, the audio, USB.... and on and on.
For you Vista may work just fine but for many many many thousands of people it really doesn't. That is the key problem. Two many people on Slashdot only deal with their PC or maybe a few friends. At my office we joke that if a problem effects one out of 1000 people we will hear about it at least 10 times a day.
"Only software that was already broken for normal user accounts in XP, i.e. software that blindly tried to write into the Program Files directory, or software that tried to use registry keys that it wasn't allowed."
That is a purist point of view. To the end user they had a program that worked just fine and now it doesn't.
Your USB problem is one of the ones that have been reported also many USB to serial converters have issues with just shutting down after a few hours of use.
I notice you are not going to comment on audio problems.
What it comes down to for most users. Does Vista help me get my work done or does it slow me down.
I claim that it helps almost nobody and slows almost everybody down.
No they really didn't People complained that it had a kiddie UI and couldn't play a lot of games that 98 could.
They actually praised it for being a secure as w2k and a lot less likely to give you the BSOD than 98.
Also within a few months everybody was using it because it was so much better than 98. And that was long before SP1. Not only that people where not demanding 98 or ME more than a year after realease.
In other words the pain was worth the gain.
That all depends on what you think "to many years" of doubling" means. I was thinking maybe 20 or so.
If you doubled the amount of IP traffic every year for 32 years you would end up with over four billion times the traffice we have now. At 33 years it would be around eight billion....
Yes every technology reaches a state of maturity in at least area of performance.
Ships today are not significantly faster than ships from the 1950s. There are just more of them that can approach the top speeds of the best of the 1950s ships.
Aircraft are not significantly faster than they where in the late 1960s.
At some point the growth in IP traffic will slow to a lot less than doubling every year.
I do hope that this is just a reflection of your sig.
How bad is Vista? Well that depends. The UAC does break a good amount of software that works just fine on XP.
Also the journal playback doesn't work with the UAC turned on. It was a security issue but it is also how some programs did simple macros and allowed you to create applications that pushed text into other windows apps.
Also the USB system seems to have some bugs in it.
Also the sound system can be really odd at times. Some computers produce really crappy sound if you record at less than 16 bit 22 khz stereo. That shouldn't be an issue for just recording voice.
It does use more disk space and memory than XP.
It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different.
So as you have put it if you turn off all the extras then it isn't that bad.
But if you turn off all the extras is it any better than XP?
That is what makes Vista so bad. It really is a lot to some pain for little to no gain.
XP works as well as Vista, uses less resources, and everybody knows most of it's quirks and problems. I feel that Vista is a case of not worth it. And what I find shocking is that most of the normal users out there feel the same way.
But that is what doesn't make sense. Last time I checked Microsoft charged less for Windows in China than in the US not more. When you think about how many systems are built and preloaded with Windows in China I can not believe that it costs Lenovo less to sell Windows on a PC in the US than it does to sell it in China.
I know you are being funny but the truth is that it will level off at some time. It will not take to many years of doubling before the amount reaches good enough. Most voice is moving to using IP as a transport, video is rapidly moving that way. Data has now moved almost exclusively to TCP/IP "anyone else remember IPX?".
I about ten years ago I told some friends that in the near future we will no longer have a phone line and cable TV but instead a data port. Eventually we will have enough band width.
And if I ran into a mountian lion I wouldn't shoot on site. But if it acted aggressivly or attacked then yes I would defend myself or others. What is the difficultiy that you have in understanding that a large preditor can be a threat to humans.
Not really.
I bought FS2004. I run the cracked version of it because I don't want to have to find the disk every time I play it.
I am honest because I am honest.
In this case I doubt I will buy Spore. The DRM is just too big of a pain do deal with.
DRM seems to be making honest people into criminals.
Seems way to like prohibition to me.
Okay why do you think he was over reacting.
1. From what I read at no time did the guns come out of the the truck. In rual areas it is common to have guns in the gun rack of your truck A lot of the time. If all of a sudden a bunch of people showed up in the middle of no where I can see the logic of taking guns with me and keeping both secure and in plain site.
2. He took pictures of peoples plates. Why not. You have no idea why they are there. If they are up to no good then it is good info for the cops.
So what did the farmer do wrong?
Now the Geohashers I feel over reacted. They saw some guns in a gun rack... RUN WE ARE IN DANGER!!! Well not really. I see that all the time.
Did anyone even try to say hello and be friendly to the rancher? Explain to them what they where doing. Odds are he would know a good deal about GPS and the internet.
If the Geohashers had just waved and said hello then the photos might have been of a a bunch of people smiling and waving.
Yea I would say the Geohashers where the ones that over reacted.
Dang city folks.
I have no problem with killing a Black Widow.
Yes a mountain lion can call people so it is a threat. The risk of running into one is minor for most people but if threatened then I do think they have the right to defend themselves.
"Mountain lions are protected in virtually every state. If you shoot one, you are committing a felony, even if it's killing your dogs or livestock."
Too bad. I am actually all for protecting wildlife even predators. But that being said if a Mountain lion is attacking my dog then it is also a threat to me.
"There are a few things about the old west that I really hate... one of them is the disrespect for the land. And wolves and mountain lions are part of the land here, just like the pines and rattlers." If I come across a rattler in the woods then that rattler lives and I go the other way. If it is near my house then it is a threat and I will remove it how I see fit. It may get relocated or it may loose it's life.
The thing is so am I and my children and even my pets. When it comes to self protection then fair is far.
Most people with your attitude tend to live in the city and go and visit the "land" you think it is some kind of theme park.