And, unfortunately, probably perfectly valid in the US where something as stupid as software patents can be "valid".
I quote:
a checksum generator, coupled to receive the fresh copy of the document from the periodic fetcher, for generating a fresh checksum of a portion of the fresh copy of the document and comparing the fresh checksum to the original checksum, the checksum generator signaling a detected change to the remote client when the fresh checksum does not match the original checksum,
Note the bold part. Contrary to the inflamatory headlines, this patent does NOT cover blindly checksumming webpages, but rather strategically checksumming the critical part of a page, so the fluff doesn't affect the cache status.
If you read the press release, the patent isn't on storing checksums of HTML pages, but is for storing checksums of sections of a page between pre-identified HTML nodes.
Now, perhaps there is prior art for this, but its a damn good idea and I sort of doubt it because I've been around the block a few times and haven't seen ANY caching mechanisms that can determine if a page has changed based on a checksum calculated from just a portion of the page (presumably so things like today's date on a page doesn't affect the state of the cache).
That seems pretty damn innovative to me. I'm no big fan of software patents, but as software patents go, this is a lot more justifiable than most.
So flame away, but there is a lot of posturing going on here about prior art, and none of them seem to come close.
Adaptive optics is meant to correct tinier flaws in the curvature of the lens of the eye. As the article said, current Lasik machines typically only correct for astigmatism and prescription, but in a fairly smooth manner over the surface of the eye.
All this does is provide a more detailed map of the eye. "Bionic" vision, it isn't. I ended up with 20/15 vision after standard Lasik, and no matter what the people who get all excited about this technology think about it, the retina doesn't have enough resolution in terms of rods/cones for anything better than 20/12 vision. 20/10 could only happen with someone who naturally had a gene for a higher retinal density.
If you are lacking rods/cones in the eye, no amount of corrective optics in the lens can help. Its like upgrading your video card so you can do 1920x1280x24bit and only having a 640x480 VGA monitor. Nothing but replacing the monitor can help. Along the same lines, nothing but replacing the retina can help if the source of poor vision comes from it, not a misshapen lens.
Don't fret though, this technology won't help, but give it ten years, there are already implanted artificial retinas, and I wouldn't be suprised if in ten years bioengineered replacement eyes aren't happening as well. In both of those cases, as long as the nerve density within the optic nerve is normal, then when technology gets advanced enough it can be fixed. (Plus its worth remembering that the area of the retina that needs to be "corrected" to achieve perfect vision is very small, a millimeter or two in diameter. Peripheral vision in virtually everyone is very bad, dozens, if not hundreds, of times worse than their normal vision -- rod/cone and nerve density both are very low outside the very center of the retina)
The problem isn't that laws are being passed that are stealing our rights and selling them to corporations. The problem also isn't that manufacturers are building hardware to do what the laws aren't able to do.
These are all things that are easily under control of the people. We like to believe in these conspiracy theories that secretive business and government agents are developing these laws and technologies, but the fact is these businesses have money to do this because consumers buy their products, and these government officials are elected.
The true problem is twofold -- lack of understanding on the part of the general public, and a lack of caring on the part of many who do understand it. Does anyone on here think more than 1% of the population is aware of the DeCSS case? That's probably high by an order of magnitude! Does more than 1% of the population even know what DMCA is, much less how it affects them? I doubt it. And 99% of the people you could ask about restrictions like not being able to copy digital content at better than VHS quality wouldn't care, because they neither appreciate or have equipment capable of the higher quality.
Public ignorance and apathy are the reason we're losing these freedoms, not corporate greed and governmental corruption. Neither of those would have any power at all in a world of educated people who care about their rights.
Still offtopic, but you're absolutely right. You want to see a worse look, in my demure four door sedan, I can wipe the pavement with just about anything shy of a 911TT.
The day I spanked a C5 corvette from a light with two passengers, the guy looked like he wanted to cry!
The thing that amazes me with ricers though is that they can't admit to themselves that they're still driving a 130hp Honda...
The people who buy this crap are probably the same people who cut the springs on their Honda, bolt on an angry-beehive exhaust, slap on some stickers, light up their dash with neon, put on big shiny chrome wheels that weight 30lbs a piece and then try to drag race me from every damn traffic light!
JUST SAY NO!
Before anyone buys any of this stuff, think about the terrible habit you're starting. Take up crack or heroin, or extacy. There are rehab centers to help you get off of that, but nothing can cure bad taste! Look at this site and you can see how bad this addiction can really become! A five inch tailpipe can't make your car faster or look better, and a hole in your computer case won't either!
I think Jon Katz needs to write a series on it, Stories from the World of No Taste.
This has been said before about earlier movies, but NO movie director would put a real computer system in front of actors. Its screenshots of Gnome, doctored up by a graphic designer and written into director-style animations, so all the actor needs to do to interact with it is hit a key to go to the next frame or animation sequence.
People are crying out how this is a ripoff, how they have a right to listen to the CDs they purchased and other similar inane arguments.
If anyone saying that stopped for even a second to think about it, they'd realize how stupid those arguments are.
1).com's are dropping like flies. If you want a useful service like my.mp3.com to continue, bitching and moaning about them charging for service isn't going to help. Go visit f*ckedcompany.com for the latest list of companies that demonstrated that
2) Sure you own the CD. They're not charging you more for every CD you put in there so you're not paying for your CD twice. $3 a month isn't bad for the amount of bandwidth I use from them.
3) People borrow other people's CDs and use them to beam into their accounts. Very few people I know who used my.mp3.com hadn't done that. Thats illegal, and MP3.com has a legal responsibility given their situation and agreements to prevent that. Asking me to reinsert a CD that I legitimately own isn't a big deal.
People who see a problem with this either 1) have no understanding of economics 2) have no understanding of what license fees and bandwidth costs entail or 3) were planning on using the service to steal the CDs.
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work. Give me a way to stream them to my car, and I'd be even happier!
Did I say OS-X isn't Unix? Nope. I've used it a number of times, and I think its a rather amazing system and 100% unix where the command-line (non-gui) is concerned.
My point is you could be the world expert at administrating an OS-X system and it means NOTHING in the real world -- its not administrated, configured, secured or used the same way other Unix systems are. Any trained monkey can use a command line interface, that doesn't triple your workplace value. You get value as a system administrator by knowing how to properly manage, secure and administrate single servers and collections of servers.
There isn't another Unix in existance that is configured the way OS-X is. Saying otherwise demonstrates that you haven't spent a lot of time using it or even looking at it.
Ability to know what you're doing isn't that rare of a commodity in the workplace, contrary to what a lot of wannabe system administrators like to think. They have a belief that having fooled around with a few Unix variants as a hobby translates into real adminstration skills, which won't work in anything but the worst companies. Who wants to work for a compnay like that anyway?
The original poster has the same issue. He thinks that simply learning to use OS-X and do some very basic administrative talks via a CLI will make him a valuable system administrator. This just screams ignorance and a lack of understanding of the responsibilities of being a system administrator.
Pre-Linux that sort of attitude wasn't nearly as common. People who called themselves system administrators knew what they were doing in a lot of depth, not because they installed the system on their PC or took a week long training course.
Thats not a bad thing for the industry, since it drives the salaries of truely qualified individuals MUCH higher, but its bad for tech in general because that sort of lack of experience is what leads to system downtime, security breaches and other issues like that.
So maybe I offended some ignorant people with my post, but those people calling themselves unix administrators offends me.
Get real, learning an OS-X CLI and how to administrate OSX won't give you any noticable increase in market value in the real world. You still won't know how to administrate a "real" Unix, won't have any "real" training, won't have any "real" experience. It takes a LOT more than a couple weeks training to be a qualified Unix system adminstrator, especially when that training is on a heavily modified variant of a Unix that isn't widely used in real enterprise environments anyway. There would be almost no skills transfer from OS-X to other Unixes.
Thats the way to get them to pay for the training -- educate them on the real lack of value that such training represents and point out to them that any of their employees that think that the addition of that skill set would significantly increase their value in the marketplace are so out of touch with reality that their loss probably won't be very significant anyway.
I don't want to be rude, but its not like they're paying for you to get Sun Certified or something.
Boston seems to still be booming. The only people I know having any difficulty at all finding work are people who had jobs at companies who subsequently realized that they don't have the skills they claim to have.
The problem in the industry isn't companies going out of business. Its not affecting the availability of jobs. What has happened is that people who were mediocre at best at their jobs are let go, and now companies have realized that to survive in this market its better to have a vacant position that a position filled by the wrong person.
100% of the people I know who have real skills, whether software, graphic design, web production or whatever else are having no troubles at all finding work.
Its the people who think they are more qualified than they really are, or the people who believe they deserve things they don't that are having the problem.
The upside is that pay seems to still be rising for those of us who fall into the former category since there aren't people in the latter leeching off companies as much.
A couple things worth mentioning: what they do is not private peering, its private unidirectional peering, dynamic routing, and a bunch of other very clever technologies. Proof is in the pudding, they've definitely (from experience) got the best connectivity out there.
They peer with all the big networks, but don't allow the big networks to route traffic back through them. They're also not like a typical colocation facility in that they've got a large number (or were planning a large number, at least) of PNAP locations, and they provided mostly leased lines except for a couple of larger data centers. They're really expensive, but you get what you pay for.
I couldn't read the article because the link seemed to be broken, so it may have mentioned this, but last I knew their technology that maps network connectivity and dynamically modifies their packet routing through modification of router tables within the networks they peer with via BGP is all Linux based, and has been from day one.
I had a hardware freeze in a brand-new E450 today (4x400 UltraSparc II's with 4 meg cache) and was trying to figure out what might've caused it when I saw the article.
The Starwars showing sucked. The resolution was poor at best (1024x768 stretched wide-screen, from what I remember), it flickered and was full of motion artifacts. Think AVI circa 1995.
I saw Dinosaur at the Arizona Mills theater in Arizona two weeks ago in a 100% digital screening. My jaw dropped when the green "this preview is approved for all audiences" screen popped up. Its that amazing. No hint of flicker, no hint of pixelation, no motion artfacts, perfect focus. It kept getting better and better (the previews were digital, as well as the movie). You don't appreciate how annoying a 24hz flicker is until you see a movie without it.
I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.
Rumor has it Dinosaur is showing here in MA out in Framingham. I'd recommend anyone who can see it on a digital screen see it. The movie isn't half bad, and experiencing digital projection for the first time is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time.
I hope they do the same with Titan AE in the theaters that today have digital projectors.
I was totally and completely blown away by it. Digital projection is to film what CDs were to cassette tapes. Once you've seen it, seeing optical film is just so... flat.
My point wasn't that what the town/school/police/government did wasn't wrong, my point is that people commenting that he was simply doing to the students in the school what they did to him was incorrect. They slandered him, he libeled them. The kids father wants the other students held to the same standard, but what they did wasn't the same, legally. Morally or ethically, yes they're pretty much the same.
And these days no one should be at all suprised that individuals representing the government overstepped their bounds, trounced on a citizen's rights and generally behaved in a manner that would be reprehensible if done by a third world country. But this is the U.S., the greatest police state in the world!
Calling someone a slut vocally is slander, calling them that online is libel.
Seems to me libel has always been more capable of taking legal action against that slander.
Our rights online may be being taken away left and right, but this seems a pretty clear cut case to me. The fact that online libelous writing hasn't been taken up in courts before this has no bearing on it.
I bought a BP6 yesterday and last night I was using the RPMs from the CD they provided to upgrade my RedHat 6.1 installation.
First off, I think its really slick that they include a Linux distribution with their motherboards. People should be really careful about how they talk to Abit about this -- don't flame them or attack them, but be polite about pointing out the issue.
I wanted to recompile their "extra" modules -- the stuff for monitoring system temperatures and stuff, to work with the 2.2.12 kernel that came with RH 6.1. Lack of source was annoying but I ended up just upgrading the kernel too, to the Abit version and everything works great.
I'm not convinced that they're really violating the GPL anyway. I don't get from the GPL that I have to distribute source to a package I'm distributing in binary form if that package consists of third party source code available elsewhere and thirty party source patches, also available elsewhere.
I didn't see anything in their distribution I couldn't get and compile from other places on the net. The only difference seemed to be that the configuration of the software, and the packaging made it convenient to install.
Does this really violate the GPL? Does anyone know of a specific package included in the distribution that consists of patches to GPL'd software where that source and patch aren't available elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
And, unfortunately, probably perfectly valid in the US where something as stupid as software patents can be "valid".
I quote:
a checksum generator, coupled to receive the fresh copy of the document from the periodic fetcher, for generating a fresh checksum of a portion of the fresh copy of the document and comparing the fresh checksum to the original checksum, the checksum generator signaling a detected change to the remote client when the fresh checksum does not match the original checksum,
Note the bold part. Contrary to the inflamatory headlines, this patent does NOT cover blindly checksumming webpages, but rather strategically checksumming the critical part of a page, so the fluff doesn't affect the cache status.
If you read the press release, the patent isn't on storing checksums of HTML pages, but is for storing checksums of sections of a page between pre-identified HTML nodes.
Now, perhaps there is prior art for this, but its a damn good idea and I sort of doubt it because I've been around the block a few times and haven't seen ANY caching mechanisms that can determine if a page has changed based on a checksum calculated from just a portion of the page (presumably so things like today's date on a page doesn't affect the state of the cache).
That seems pretty damn innovative to me. I'm no big fan of software patents, but as software patents go, this is a lot more justifiable than most.
So flame away, but there is a lot of posturing going on here about prior art, and none of them seem to come close.
Adaptive optics is meant to correct tinier flaws in the curvature of the lens of the eye. As the article said, current Lasik machines typically only correct for astigmatism and prescription, but in a fairly smooth manner over the surface of the eye. All this does is provide a more detailed map of the eye. "Bionic" vision, it isn't. I ended up with 20/15 vision after standard Lasik, and no matter what the people who get all excited about this technology think about it, the retina doesn't have enough resolution in terms of rods/cones for anything better than 20/12 vision. 20/10 could only happen with someone who naturally had a gene for a higher retinal density. If you are lacking rods/cones in the eye, no amount of corrective optics in the lens can help. Its like upgrading your video card so you can do 1920x1280x24bit and only having a 640x480 VGA monitor. Nothing but replacing the monitor can help. Along the same lines, nothing but replacing the retina can help if the source of poor vision comes from it, not a misshapen lens. Don't fret though, this technology won't help, but give it ten years, there are already implanted artificial retinas, and I wouldn't be suprised if in ten years bioengineered replacement eyes aren't happening as well. In both of those cases, as long as the nerve density within the optic nerve is normal, then when technology gets advanced enough it can be fixed. (Plus its worth remembering that the area of the retina that needs to be "corrected" to achieve perfect vision is very small, a millimeter or two in diameter. Peripheral vision in virtually everyone is very bad, dozens, if not hundreds, of times worse than their normal vision -- rod/cone and nerve density both are very low outside the very center of the retina)
I'm reading an article on slashdot about screenshots. Click on the screenshot and it shows the article on slashdot!
Which came first? The article or the image?
I feel like my brain is about to blow core.
The problem isn't that laws are being passed that are stealing our rights and selling them to corporations. The problem also isn't that manufacturers are building hardware to do what the laws aren't able to do.
These are all things that are easily under control of the people. We like to believe in these conspiracy theories that secretive business and government agents are developing these laws and technologies, but the fact is these businesses have money to do this because consumers buy their products, and these government officials are elected.
The true problem is twofold -- lack of understanding on the part of the general public, and a lack of caring on the part of many who do understand it. Does anyone on here think more than 1% of the population is aware of the DeCSS case? That's probably high by an order of magnitude! Does more than 1% of the population even know what DMCA is, much less how it affects them? I doubt it. And 99% of the people you could ask about restrictions like not being able to copy digital content at better than VHS quality wouldn't care, because they neither appreciate or have equipment capable of the higher quality.
Public ignorance and apathy are the reason we're losing these freedoms, not corporate greed and governmental corruption. Neither of those would have any power at all in a world of educated people who care about their rights.
Still offtopic, but you're absolutely right. You want to see a worse look, in my demure four door sedan, I can wipe the pavement with just about anything shy of a 911TT.
The day I spanked a C5 corvette from a light with two passengers, the guy looked like he wanted to cry!
The thing that amazes me with ricers though is that they can't admit to themselves that they're still driving a 130hp Honda...
The people who buy this crap are probably the same people who cut the springs on their Honda, bolt on an angry-beehive exhaust, slap on some stickers, light up their dash with neon, put on big shiny chrome wheels that weight 30lbs a piece and then try to drag race me from every damn traffic light!
JUST SAY NO!
Before anyone buys any of this stuff, think about the terrible habit you're starting. Take up crack or heroin, or extacy. There are rehab centers to help you get off of that, but nothing can cure bad taste! Look at this site and you can see how bad this addiction can really become! A five inch tailpipe can't make your car faster or look better, and a hole in your computer case won't either!
I think Jon Katz needs to write a series on it, Stories from the World of No Taste.
This has been said before about earlier movies, but NO movie director would put a real computer system in front of actors. Its screenshots of Gnome, doctored up by a graphic designer and written into director-style animations, so all the actor needs to do to interact with it is hit a key to go to the next frame or animation sequence.
People are crying out how this is a ripoff, how they have a right to listen to the CDs they purchased and other similar inane arguments.
.com's are dropping like flies. If you want a useful service like my.mp3.com to continue, bitching and moaning about them charging for service isn't going to help. Go visit f*ckedcompany.com for the latest list of companies that demonstrated that
If anyone saying that stopped for even a second to think about it, they'd realize how stupid those arguments are.
1)
2) Sure you own the CD. They're not charging you more for every CD you put in there so you're not paying for your CD twice. $3 a month isn't bad for the amount of bandwidth I use from them.
3) People borrow other people's CDs and use them to beam into their accounts. Very few people I know who used my.mp3.com hadn't done that. Thats illegal, and MP3.com has a legal responsibility given their situation and agreements to prevent that. Asking me to reinsert a CD that I legitimately own isn't a big deal.
People who see a problem with this either 1) have no understanding of economics 2) have no understanding of what license fees and bandwidth costs entail or 3) were planning on using the service to steal the CDs.
Personally, I'd pay a lot more than $3 a month to not have to drag all my CDs to work. Give me a way to stream them to my car, and I'd be even happier!
Did I say OS-X isn't Unix? Nope. I've used it a number of times, and I think its a rather amazing system and 100% unix where the command-line (non-gui) is concerned.
My point is you could be the world expert at administrating an OS-X system and it means NOTHING in the real world -- its not administrated, configured, secured or used the same way other Unix systems are. Any trained monkey can use a command line interface, that doesn't triple your workplace value. You get value as a system administrator by knowing how to properly manage, secure and administrate single servers and collections of servers.
There isn't another Unix in existance that is configured the way OS-X is. Saying otherwise demonstrates that you haven't spent a lot of time using it or even looking at it.
Ability to know what you're doing isn't that rare of a commodity in the workplace, contrary to what a lot of wannabe system administrators like to think. They have a belief that having fooled around with a few Unix variants as a hobby translates into real adminstration skills, which won't work in anything but the worst companies. Who wants to work for a compnay like that anyway?
The original poster has the same issue. He thinks that simply learning to use OS-X and do some very basic administrative talks via a CLI will make him a valuable system administrator. This just screams ignorance and a lack of understanding of the responsibilities of being a system administrator.
Pre-Linux that sort of attitude wasn't nearly as common. People who called themselves system administrators knew what they were doing in a lot of depth, not because they installed the system on their PC or took a week long training course.
Thats not a bad thing for the industry, since it drives the salaries of truely qualified individuals MUCH higher, but its bad for tech in general because that sort of lack of experience is what leads to system downtime, security breaches and other issues like that.
So maybe I offended some ignorant people with my post, but those people calling themselves unix administrators offends me.
Get real, learning an OS-X CLI and how to administrate OSX won't give you any noticable increase in market value in the real world. You still won't know how to administrate a "real" Unix, won't have any "real" training, won't have any "real" experience. It takes a LOT more than a couple weeks training to be a qualified Unix system adminstrator, especially when that training is on a heavily modified variant of a Unix that isn't widely used in real enterprise environments anyway. There would be almost no skills transfer from OS-X to other Unixes.
Thats the way to get them to pay for the training -- educate them on the real lack of value that such training represents and point out to them that any of their employees that think that the addition of that skill set would significantly increase their value in the marketplace are so out of touch with reality that their loss probably won't be very significant anyway.
I don't want to be rude, but its not like they're paying for you to get Sun Certified or something.
Boston seems to still be booming. The only people I know having any difficulty at all finding work are people who had jobs at companies who subsequently realized that they don't have the skills they claim to have.
The problem in the industry isn't companies going out of business. Its not affecting the availability of jobs. What has happened is that people who were mediocre at best at their jobs are let go, and now companies have realized that to survive in this market its better to have a vacant position that a position filled by the wrong person.
100% of the people I know who have real skills, whether software, graphic design, web production or whatever else are having no troubles at all finding work.
Its the people who think they are more qualified than they really are, or the people who believe they deserve things they don't that are having the problem.
The upside is that pay seems to still be rising for those of us who fall into the former category since there aren't people in the latter leeching off companies as much.
I got the apology, even though I didn't actually get the spam they were apologizing for!
A couple things worth mentioning: what they do is not private peering, its private unidirectional peering, dynamic routing, and a bunch of other very clever technologies. Proof is in the pudding, they've definitely (from experience) got the best connectivity out there.
They peer with all the big networks, but don't allow the big networks to route traffic back through them. They're also not like a typical colocation facility in that they've got a large number (or were planning a large number, at least) of PNAP locations, and they provided mostly leased lines except for a couple of larger data centers. They're really expensive, but you get what you pay for.
I couldn't read the article because the link seemed to be broken, so it may have mentioned this, but last I knew their technology that maps network connectivity and dynamically modifies their packet routing through modification of router tables within the networks they peer with via BGP is all Linux based, and has been from day one.
Its very slick stuff.
That hasn't happened in a while... ;)
I had a hardware freeze in a brand-new E450 today (4x400 UltraSparc II's with 4 meg cache) and was trying to figure out what might've caused it when I saw the article.
That makes sun 0/1 so far...
Someone ought to fix that.
The patent is very clear -- it applies to computer systems where data is transmitted via the public telephone network.
Thats probably why they're only targeting ISP's.
Am I the only one who can't get Linux to boot from an ATA/66 drive? LILO just hangs.
:)
Someone ought to fix that first
The Starwars showing sucked. The resolution was poor at best (1024x768 stretched wide-screen, from what I remember), it flickered and was full of motion artifacts. Think AVI circa 1995.
I saw Dinosaur at the Arizona Mills theater in Arizona two weeks ago in a 100% digital screening. My jaw dropped when the green "this preview is approved for all audiences" screen popped up. Its that amazing. No hint of flicker, no hint of pixelation, no motion artfacts, perfect focus. It kept getting better and better (the previews were digital, as well as the movie). You don't appreciate how annoying a 24hz flicker is until you see a movie without it.
I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.
Rumor has it Dinosaur is showing here in MA out in Framingham. I'd recommend anyone who can see it on a digital screen see it. The movie isn't half bad, and experiencing digital projection for the first time is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time.
I hope they do the same with Titan AE in the theaters that today have digital projectors.
I was totally and completely blown away by it. Digital projection is to film what CDs were to cassette tapes. Once you've seen it, seeing optical film is just so... flat.
My point wasn't that what the town/school/police/government did wasn't wrong, my point is that people commenting that he was simply doing to the students in the school what they did to him was incorrect. They slandered him, he libeled them. The kids father wants the other students held to the same standard, but what they did wasn't the same, legally. Morally or ethically, yes they're pretty much the same.
And these days no one should be at all suprised that individuals representing the government overstepped their bounds, trounced on a citizen's rights and generally behaved in a manner that would be reprehensible if done by a third world country. But this is the U.S., the greatest police state in the world!
Calling someone a slut vocally is slander, calling them that online is libel.
Seems to me libel has always been more capable of taking legal action against that slander.
Our rights online may be being taken away left and right, but this seems a pretty clear cut case to me. The fact that online libelous writing hasn't been taken up in courts before this has no bearing on it.
The Exodus data center in Waltham is 15 miles away... and, according to traceroute, the new Slashdot servers are 15 hops away.
Coincidence?
Hmmmmm...
The kernel source is on the CD -- its a completely stock RedHat 6.1 distribution with new kernel sources.
The kernel sources DO include their patches, and work fine.
If you got the RedHat 6.1 SRPMS, and added a few (freely available) patches to them, you'd have the Abit distribution...
So source is available for the whole thing.
I bought a BP6 yesterday and last night I was using the RPMs from the CD they provided to upgrade my RedHat 6.1 installation.
First off, I think its really slick that they include a Linux distribution with their motherboards. People should be really careful about how they talk to Abit about this -- don't flame them or attack them, but be polite about pointing out the issue.
I wanted to recompile their "extra" modules -- the stuff for monitoring system temperatures and stuff, to work with the 2.2.12 kernel that came with RH 6.1. Lack of source was annoying but I ended up just upgrading the kernel too, to the Abit version and everything works great.
I'm not convinced that they're really violating the GPL anyway. I don't get from the GPL that I have to distribute source to a package I'm distributing in binary form if that package consists of third party source code available elsewhere and thirty party source patches, also available elsewhere.
I didn't see anything in their distribution I couldn't get and compile from other places on the net. The only difference seemed to be that the configuration of the software, and the packaging made it convenient to install.
Does this really violate the GPL? Does anyone know of a specific package included in the distribution that consists of patches to GPL'd software where that source and patch aren't available elsewhere?
I think this is an overreaction...