I see you have bought into the idea that copying equals theft. You also seem to think that this notion is not controversial.
When you copy, you don't remove an item from the seller. They can still sell to someone else.
When you copy, there is a huge chance that the seller does not actually loose anything at all. When you steal, the seller has lost something concrete.
If unauthorized copying equals theft, then copying Maya equals stealing a car. Yet, the person who copied Maya would probably NEVER EVER by the application because of it's huge price tag. The makers of Maya have thus lost nothing, while the car store have lost a car which they cannot sell to someone else, because you have taken it from them.
Copying is NOT theft. You are NOT shoplifting by downloading the latest singel from Justin Timberlake.
It is still illegal, and unethical, but it is not considered a big crime by the general public, and having the law give out penalties that is far more than what the general public thinks is the right punishment is a dangerous path.
I would guess most people think a fine of about $50-500 depending on how much you have copied is an acceptable punishment. Fines of the store price of the items copied is NOT acceptable.
You don't take away the life savings of a college student for copying some music.
I am a current Mac-user, and I'm really happy with it, but you are right, Apple need to be careful about this.
Why? Because the market is so small that there is not room for more than a couple of ISVs in each field, and if Apple moves in on it, there is at most room for one. Plus, if the Apple product is really good (which they actually mostly are), ISVs that expect high profit margins, like Adobe will probably just leave the field (like they did with Premiere).
If Apple have the resources to develop all kinds of software, then by all means go for it, otherwise they need the ISVs to provide value for the platform. Even Microsoft cannot really afford to alienate all the ISVs.
On the other hand. If Apple sticks with only a few select software areas they might succeed with it, by creating software so good that people will want a Mac to run it. This is probably Apple's current strategy.
Talking about Apple as a monopoly is just BS though. "x86 compatible personal computers" is not the market. "Personal computers" are. Microsoft and Apple ARE in competition no matter what the anti-trust trial told you. Apple agreeing to this view is probably because they HAD to, or risk Microsoft retracting MS Office or Internet Explorer.
Actually, the big ones consolidate. Think about UnitedLinux for instance. Besides at least one of the big ones will probably go bankrupt sooner or later.
These small ones forking means nothing. Businesses cares about consolidating, enthusiasts do not. Which business is seriously going to care about either Gentoo or the new one?
They are both for the enthusiast, and any newcomers trying to cater for the businesses with something as obscure as a source based distribution are probably living in a fantasy world.
If you are a business user, then move along, nothing to see hear. Chances are you have never heard of Gentoo before, and you will certainly not ever hear about the fork.
True. This is also why I'm actually I'm opposed to people choosing only the "relevant" courses in their education. These people tend to see any other courses as a waste of time. I see it as a way to mature on other levels and increasing your general level of education.
To everyone on this kind of "fast track" I just like to say: Calm down. Stress, and monotomy will reach you soon enough. Use your time at college and university to explore other types of knowledge as well, and it will most likely make you a better person.
.. about as much as really fit people want instant and fully working diet pills for everybody.
If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge. If there was a really easy way og absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Besides, I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace. I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and violent as average Joe.
I remember Netscape being quite omnipresent at one time. If they tightly integrate their search engine with Windows while making it work well, things might change.
1. Branding. Netscape is far better known than Mozilla. 2. Some features (AIM integration for instance) 3. Disabling debugfeatures. The standard Mozilla distribution include test-menus. It is not really meant for end-users, though distributors usually do this with Mozilla as well.
You may not be cache the page, but Slashdot certainly is doing it.
Since most visits is probably just viewing the main page, it makes sense to make this a static page that is updated regularily instead of making it purely dynamic. This saves Slashdot SQL-queries and makes the site run more smoothly.
Is this typical of americanism on Slashdot?
on
AOL Bridges AIM and ICQ
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm Norwegian, that is northern Europe. I've never met anyone that says they've used AIM. Just about everyone still uses ICQ or MSN and from what I've heard that is also true of most other European countries.
Slashdot have lots of readers from other places than the US, and it seems the editors either forget about that or do not care. The rest of the world does not mimic the US in all regards.
When the editors add comments like "I can't remember the last time I used ICQ, or even what my number was." it is obviously to suggest that nobody uses ICQ. This might be true in the US, but it is probably not true of the rest of the world.
Europeans obviously still stay here despite of this, but it is quite annoying at times. There are other places in the world than the US.
You will be happy to know that one of the big improvements Ximian has made to OpenOffice.org, is to integrate it with fontconfig to make sure it uses the exact same font base as all other apps.
and I have no clue about Quark Express, so according to good tradition, this is the right story to post my opinion on.
I just have to say that Quark Express is the worst f***** web browser EVER! And they've taken away all of the good options from the last version. Quite frankly I'm scared that Quark Express will be totally useless as a web browser with version 7.
If you consider that we're talking about a full distribution of GNU/Linux with KDE, GNOME, GNU-tools etc. and not just the kernel, finding a list like this is near impossible.
If you want to check if a given country has had people involved, searching through for instance KDE and GNOME-cvs for xxxx@xxx.yy where yy is a given country code could be an indication.
I don't think there is many countries that are NOT involved, and you only have to start a project in your home country to package local stuff with a Linux-distribution to be able to say that at least some parts are made in your country.
Because if the network is saturated and everone keeps trying hard, the latency will grow to infinity (really!).
Think about a really heavily congested traffic-route. If this is just a tiny bit more saturated one day all hell breaks loose and everyone has to wait for hours.
By throttling down at least you will be able to trasmit at a certain (albeit lower rate). If the senders do not slow down, almost no packages will reach the receiver resulting in even more retransmits and even more slowdown until the whole network just stalls.
No honey, thats why we have the buffers. So you could receive packets out of sequence and wait for the middle ones to arrive. This is why we have 32-bit seq and ack fields in the tcp header just after the src and dst ports. seq tells the packets order in the queue. Ack tells the seq ofthe next packet (from other peer) so we can use random increments to prevent spoofing of packets. Or make it harder atleast.
But that's out of the scope of this rant.
This is true, but when the TCP congestion window is full (or the Receiver window), TCP has to wait for acks. So the original is not totally untrue either.
Umm, No. I'm not 100% sure but I think the network devices are dump thingies that talk to each other on predefined carriage frequencies. Thus, you can't really "slow down" the speed to increase possibility to get the packet through. And certainly this has nothing to do with TCP. Resending of failed packets is a Good Thing (TM). They are just sent again untill they reach their destination or the "I give up"-treshold has been reached.
Both Ethernet (the most common linksystem to run IP on) and TCP has abilities to throttle. TCP does this by simply waiting some time between retransmits if it senses a lot of package loss (either by never receiving ACKs or receiving multiple ACKs with the same number). It does so by shrinking the Congestion Window, and thus makes sure it has to wait for ACKs before transmitting the next package sometimes.
Remember that IP itself does not make any guarantees that packages will reach the receiver in-order or even at all. It is TCP that provides the concept of reliable data transfer by doing retransmits.
The article is uninformed however, and this mechanism for congestion control is a necessary and important part of TCP. Leaving it out so that you can squeeze some more juice out of the system will only lead to hurt in the long run.
This is just comical. I've compiled things myself with full optimization, and apart from glibc and the kernel you just don't see these kinds of results. At most you get a 10% performance increase. More often you wouldn't notice it unless you've compiled the system yourself and look for speedups.
Besides compiling on with big optimizations breaks things very often. Gentoo-users are notorious for reporting bugs that only show up in Gentoo.
I just seriously hope you are not promoting Gentoo as someones first distribution, something which quite frankly will scare off most people forever.
Yes, Gentoo is probably great for some, but most people just really want to run a system that is not as painful to install and upgrade. They do not want to compile all their apps, and just want a clean 10 seconds binary install.
Gentoo is probably one of the least generally acceptable distributions, and people should accept it as a niche product, albeit a fine niche product.
When it comes to apt-get vs. portage. I can install a full GNOME install, Mozilla and Open Office in less than 5 minutes with apt-get. How long does it take with Gentoo? 5 hours?
Re:The real thing that sets Ximian Desktop 2 apart
on
Ximian's Back
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· Score: 1
If you hate inconsistency, then I'd go for Totem instead of Mplayer.
For Mozilla this would not even come down to a question about the GPL because there are loads of other copyright owners in the Mozilla source.
UNLESS, Mozilla requires that all contributors sign over the copyright to AOL, which would be rather evil.
If they do not, they would have to replace all the code submitted by the contributors, something which would rule out the idea of making something GPL and leech off contributors before retracting it.
Besides, I think the GPL is pretty solid here as well, even if it is not as open and shut as it is in the case of third parties taking GPL-code and closing it.
.. and Waste may very well be illegal, no matter if it was released under the GPL.
What matters is WHO released it under the GPL. If the ones that released it had no legal rights to do what they did, then Waste is illegal, and redistributing it is illegal.
Why? Because only the copyright holder can release software like this. Otherwise the license is void, and you are all doing something illegal by distributing the source.
The above is pretty much clear, but lawyers might want to answer the question of wether the people that released the software did in fact have the rights to do something like this. If a lowly employee releases software, my guess is that he does not have the rights to do so. Otherwise any employee of Microsoft would have the right to release Windows under the GPL..
Before distributing Waste, you should be pretty sure that it was in fact a release warranted by Nullsoft executives, otherwise it may be illegal.
It may be that the release was warranted by someone with the proper authority, but if AOL/Nullsoft states otherwise, this might be decided by trial.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm NOT voting for Microsoft. If they win it will probably be because of some technicality that does nothing to remove the problem with patents.
That is not safe bet to say at all.
Red Hat 9 was actually a release that broke some backwards compatibility, mainly due to the new kernel threads.
It might just be that this next release is Red Hat 9.1.
I see you have bought into the idea that copying equals theft. You also seem to think that this notion is not controversial.
When you copy, you don't remove an item from the seller. They can still sell to someone else.
When you copy, there is a huge chance that the seller does not actually loose anything at all. When you steal, the seller has lost something concrete.
If unauthorized copying equals theft, then copying Maya equals stealing a car. Yet, the person who copied Maya would probably NEVER EVER by the application because of it's huge price tag. The makers of Maya have thus lost nothing, while the car store have lost a car which they cannot sell to someone else, because you have taken it from them.
Copying is NOT theft. You are NOT shoplifting by downloading the latest singel from Justin Timberlake.
It is still illegal, and unethical, but it is not considered a big crime by the general public, and having the law give out penalties that is far more than what the general public thinks is the right punishment is a dangerous path.
I would guess most people think a fine of about $50-500 depending on how much you have copied is an acceptable punishment. Fines of the store price of the items copied is NOT acceptable.
You don't take away the life savings of a college student for copying some music.
PHP-code gets compiled. It just happens automatically at runtime.
Just because you do not actively do it, it does not mean that it does not happen.
I am a current Mac-user, and I'm really happy with it, but you are right, Apple need to be careful about this.
Why? Because the market is so small that there is not room for more than a couple of ISVs in each field, and if Apple moves in on it, there is at most room for one. Plus, if the Apple product is really good (which they actually mostly are), ISVs that expect high profit margins, like Adobe will probably just leave the field (like they did with Premiere).
If Apple have the resources to develop all kinds of software, then by all means go for it, otherwise they need the ISVs to provide value for the platform. Even Microsoft cannot really afford to alienate all the ISVs.
On the other hand. If Apple sticks with only a few select software areas they might succeed with it, by creating software so good that people will want a Mac to run it. This is probably Apple's current strategy.
Talking about Apple as a monopoly is just BS though. "x86 compatible personal computers" is not the market. "Personal computers" are. Microsoft and Apple ARE in competition no matter what the anti-trust trial told you. Apple agreeing to this view is probably because they HAD to, or risk Microsoft retracting MS Office or Internet Explorer.
Actually, the big ones consolidate. Think about UnitedLinux for instance. Besides at least one of the big ones will probably go bankrupt sooner or later.
These small ones forking means nothing. Businesses cares about consolidating, enthusiasts do not. Which business is seriously going to care about either Gentoo or the new one?
They are both for the enthusiast, and any newcomers trying to cater for the businesses with something as obscure as a source based distribution are probably living in a fantasy world.
If you are a business user, then move along, nothing to see hear. Chances are you have never heard of Gentoo before, and you will certainly not ever hear about the fork.
True. This is also why I'm actually I'm opposed to people choosing only the "relevant" courses in their education. These people tend to see any other courses as a waste of time. I see it as a way to mature on other levels and increasing your general level of education.
To everyone on this kind of "fast track" I just like to say:
Calm down. Stress, and monotomy will reach you soon enough. Use your time at college and university to explore other types of knowledge as well, and it will most likely make you a better person.
Not everyone has English as their native language. :-)
.. about as much as really fit people want instant and fully working diet pills for everybody.
If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge. If there was a really easy way og absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Besides, I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace. I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and violent as average Joe.
I remember Netscape being quite omnipresent at one time. If they tightly integrate their search engine with Windows while making it work well, things might change.
1. Branding. Netscape is far better known than Mozilla.
2. Some features (AIM integration for instance)
3. Disabling debugfeatures. The standard Mozilla distribution include test-menus. It is not really meant for end-users, though distributors usually do this with Mozilla as well.
Your words directly contradict the words of the article, which was written and performed by actual chemists.
I'm conflicted. Who am I to believe? A couple of chemists or some guy on Slashdot?
You may not be cache the page, but Slashdot certainly is doing it.
Since most visits is probably just viewing the main page, it makes sense to make this a static page that is updated regularily instead of making it purely dynamic. This saves Slashdot SQL-queries and makes the site run more smoothly.
I'm Norwegian, that is northern Europe. I've never met anyone that says they've used AIM. Just about everyone still uses ICQ or MSN and from what I've heard that is also true of most other European countries.
Slashdot have lots of readers from other places than the US, and it seems the editors either forget about that or do not care. The rest of the world does not mimic the US in all regards.
When the editors add comments like "I can't remember the last time I used ICQ, or even what my number was." it is obviously to suggest that nobody uses ICQ. This might be true in the US, but it is probably not true of the rest of the world.
Europeans obviously still stay here despite of this, but it is quite annoying at times. There are other places in the world than the US.
You will be happy to know that one of the big improvements Ximian has made to OpenOffice.org, is to integrate it with fontconfig to make sure it uses the exact same font base as all other apps.
Now it renders exactly the same as Gnome-apps.
and I have no clue about Quark Express, so according to good tradition, this is the right story to post my opinion on.
I just have to say that Quark Express is the worst f***** web browser EVER! And they've taken away all of the good options from the last version. Quite frankly I'm scared that Quark Express will be totally useless as a web browser with version 7.
If you consider that we're talking about a full distribution of GNU/Linux with KDE, GNOME, GNU-tools etc. and not just the kernel, finding a list like this is near impossible.
If you want to check if a given country has had people involved, searching through for instance KDE and GNOME-cvs for xxxx@xxx.yy where yy is a given country code could be an indication.
I don't think there is many countries that are NOT involved, and you only have to start a project in your home country to package local stuff with a Linux-distribution to be able to say that at least some parts are made in your country.
The SCO group is part of this?
The obligatory:
1. Create crappy software
2. Make other people correct it's flaws
3. Sue the fixers for copyright infringement
4. Profit!
Because if the network is saturated and everone keeps trying hard, the latency will grow to infinity (really!).
Think about a really heavily congested traffic-route. If this is just a tiny bit more saturated one day all hell breaks loose and everyone has to wait for hours.
By throttling down at least you will be able to trasmit at a certain (albeit lower rate). If the senders do not slow down, almost no packages will reach the receiver resulting in even more retransmits and even more slowdown until the whole network just stalls.
This is true, but when the TCP congestion window is full (or the Receiver window), TCP has to wait for acks. So the original is not totally untrue either.
Both Ethernet (the most common linksystem to run IP on) and TCP has abilities to throttle. TCP does this by simply waiting some time between retransmits if it senses a lot of package loss (either by never receiving ACKs or receiving multiple ACKs with the same number). It does so by shrinking the Congestion Window, and thus makes sure it has to wait for ACKs before transmitting the next package sometimes.
Remember that IP itself does not make any guarantees that packages will reach the receiver in-order or even at all. It is TCP that provides the concept of reliable data transfer by doing retransmits.
The article is uninformed however, and this mechanism for congestion control is a necessary and important part of TCP. Leaving it out so that you can squeeze some more juice out of the system will only lead to hurt in the long run.
This is just comical. I've compiled things myself with full optimization, and apart from glibc and the kernel you just don't see these kinds of results. At most you get a 10% performance increase. More often you wouldn't notice it unless you've compiled the system yourself and look for speedups.
Besides compiling on with big optimizations breaks things very often. Gentoo-users are notorious for reporting bugs that only show up in Gentoo.
I just seriously hope you are not promoting Gentoo as someones first distribution, something which quite frankly will scare off most people forever.
Yes, Gentoo is probably great for some, but most people just really want to run a system that is not as painful to install and upgrade. They do not want to compile all their apps, and just want a clean 10 seconds binary install.
Gentoo is probably one of the least generally acceptable distributions, and people should accept it as a niche product, albeit a fine niche product.
When it comes to apt-get vs. portage. I can install a full GNOME install, Mozilla and Open Office in less than 5 minutes with apt-get. How long does it take with Gentoo? 5 hours?
If you hate inconsistency, then I'd go for Totem instead of Mplayer.
For Mozilla this would not even come down to a question about the GPL because there are loads of other copyright owners in the Mozilla source.
UNLESS, Mozilla requires that all contributors sign over the copyright to AOL, which would be rather evil.
If they do not, they would have to replace all the code submitted by the contributors, something which would rule out the idea of making something GPL and leech off contributors before retracting it.
Besides, I think the GPL is pretty solid here as well, even if it is not as open and shut as it is in the case of third parties taking GPL-code and closing it.
.. and Waste may very well be illegal, no matter if it was released under the GPL.
What matters is WHO released it under the GPL. If the ones that released it had no legal rights to do what they did, then Waste is illegal, and redistributing it is illegal.
Why? Because only the copyright holder can release software like this. Otherwise the license is void, and you are all doing something illegal by distributing the source.
The above is pretty much clear, but lawyers might want to answer the question of wether the people that released the software did in fact have the rights to do something like this. If a lowly employee releases software, my guess is that he does not have the rights to do so. Otherwise any employee of Microsoft would have the right to release Windows under the GPL..
Before distributing Waste, you should be pretty sure that it was in fact a release warranted by Nullsoft executives, otherwise it may be illegal.
It may be that the release was warranted by someone with the proper authority, but if AOL/Nullsoft states otherwise, this might be decided by trial.