I'm sorry if this post comes out as a flame, but repeat after me: "Creating a compatible interpreter is not the same as pirating software"
This means that creating WINE is not the same as trading mp3s, and it's not the same as creating a trading ground for mp3s. They are not even closely related.
I do not know how often people post things like this. RIAA attacked and closed Napster because they created a trading ground for mp3s. WINE and ffmpeg is creating an implementation of the Win32-api and WMA-decoder respectively.
There are however TWO ways that this WMA-decoder might be illegal: 1. It might be breaking the DMCA, by reverse-engineering or by circumventing DRM. I do not know if this might apply though. 2. It might be a breach of some software patent in WMA.
It has _nothing_ to do with the napster situation however.
Ok.. this states some of the non-binding agreements they entered into when applying for the right to broadcast over the air.
It just states that a certain amount of air time should be stuff produced in Norway and some percentage should be based on arts and culture rather than just pure entertainment.
Besides not being binding this has nothing to do with not being able to express themselves.
"That is weird, I saw tons of porn in Gardenmoen airport (the main airport outside of Oslo)"
This is the soft core porn. Shops are allowed to put this wherever they want. It cannot contain any erect male genetalia, although I find that kind of sexist.
"Aren't Norwegian cabdrivers handing out condoms?"
Yeah, but this have more to do with sexually transmitted diseases.
"I thought sex and scenery were the only things going for Norway, I guess now freedom of the press can tie for #3"
Actually, we're also pretty much up there in music. No, not the Britney top-10 stuff, but jazz, electronica and the dark and scary kinds of rock.
What you are saying is simply not true. The channels you are talking about are the only ones allowed to broadcast OVER THE AIR. Now I'm not a radio expert, but this might have lots of other reasons to
If you want to broadcast over cable or satellite you are welcome to do so. And we do have plenty of Television channels available. Not all of them in norwegian, but as Metropol so sadly showed, there are perhaps not a market for any more norwegian television channels. Around 70% of the population can be reached through cable or satellite and cable are also available in the areas the advertisers are most interested in anyway.
Besides, apart from some regulations on how much advertisements the TV-stations are allowed to send, they are basically free to do whatever they want. Otherwise you'd probably not see "Åpen Post" and "Torsdagsklubben" publically humiliate just about any prominent national figure.
And I'm not totally sure about Norway being that good. For instance, hardcore porn is banned in Norway.
You will also get a slap on your fingers if you publish and publically distribute racist material. I'm not sure of the limit, but "White Election Alliance" (directly translated from "Hvit valgallianse") a neo-nazi, racist political party got a fine and a slap on their fingers for distributing a policical program that asked for the sterilization of all adopted kids from third world countries.
I'm generally pretty happy with the freedom here though, but it's not like it is "anything goes".
We do NOT however ban bad language from public television. If people want to say "fuck", or the norwegian translation "pule" on the air, they are perfectly entitled to do so.
Please, please file a bug report about this at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Nautilus generally works really fast now, but there might be some speed issues left due to bugs.
If you find issues please file bugs for them, that would increase the possibility of it being fixed quite a lot.
If you attach an strace when browsing windows shares it would be even more helpful, since it would give pointers as to WHY Nautilus is slow in these regards.
Great and insightful comment (apart from the trolling about Nautilus. It isn't written by idiots). I do have one reply though. Why not just fork Metacity?
I'm one of the people that love Metacity, and would hate it if Havoc started to back down. But why not just fork it?
Create a "CrackCity" that contains all the silly, nilly options that some people adore so much and everyone would be happy. I for one would be very happy because I would not have to see lots of flames about Metacity being too simplistic. I've even given it a possible name which is a really lovable pun.
Actually I've used new versions of Xsnow with GNOME 2.0 and Nautilus. It works perfectly as far as I can see.
The only problem is that it required a small rewrite of the cutesy hacks on the root-window.
I think that is a small prize to pay considering that the other option is to spend huge amounts of time and effort to rewrite the desktop managers to conform with the cutesy hacks.
Re:"can't find nothing but positive comments"
on
The Captains of Nautilus
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps he meant comments by people that have actually tried Nautilus 2.
I don't believe any of those above have actually TRIED Nautilus 2 before bitching about it.
And if they have, then they haven't tried it with decent hardware.
GNOME 2.0 isn't meant for people with P166MMX and 64MB ram. It might get closer with GNOME 2.2 as some memory leaks and performance bits are being fixed. This still doesn't change that GNOME 2 (and Nautilus) is meant for machines of around Celeron 350+ and 128MB ram+. RAM is especially important.
Nautilus seems to scale very well with hardware. In opening Windows, thumbnailing, and switching directories it is the fastest file manager on my Athlon XP 1800+ with 256MB ram. It seems quite a bit faster than Konqueror (for RH 8) and Explorer (for XP).
On a PIII 600 with 128MB ram it still opens new windows in around the same time as XP explorer, and bit faster than Konqueror. It's other operations are around the speed of Konqueror.
You can see the same pattern on my laptop with Red Hat 8 (PIII 733 with 256MB ram).
The most important part however if your Linux/UNIX file managers are slower than explorer is: turn on UDMA for your disks. Not all distributions do that by default. And almost none manage to get the settings totally right.
Windows 2000 explorer might be faster. I haven't tried to compare that one with Nautilus, but I'm actually pretty confident that with the new GNOME performance profiling done by WIPRO/SUN, it will be faster than that too.
For those suggesting ROX filer as a speedier alternative, more power to you. I do not like it that much, but some people seem to love it.
"because no one person or group can say whether the options are good or bad"
Sure I can. It IS possible to say what options are good or bad. If these two are fulfilled, then it is a bad option: 1. If the option is wanted by a really small minority. 2. If it is just a minor inconvenience for the minority, and they can change the way they work.
"They're only crack options to YOU. To somebody else, they're good options - that's why they exist."
They are bad too me because they make it seriously difficult to find the good options.
"You should be complaining about the design of configuration tools, not the abundance of options."
Show me ONE SINGLE example of what you are talking about here. I challenge you, show me ONE example of good configuration tools that have the kind of abundance we are talking about here.
It is impossible to create a nice preference dialog for a big system if you do not set a certain limit on the number of options.
You should not need some sort of search-facility just to configure your desktop.
You totally do not understand the issue. Too much choice is bad for everyone except the people that really love to tweak stuff.
For everyone else, too much choice is bad. 1. It clutters up the interface 2. It complicates the software and introduces bugs, some of which are hard to track down because of the myriad of options available to complicate things. 3. It is extremely confusing.
Choice is not "good period". Choice is good if the options are good.
KDE does have a problem with being too messy. The control center is way too messy. If you like KDE then by all means keep using it, but do not try to call me an idiot for not wanting all the options you like.
BTW: your analogy stinks. Choice about what software to use is good. That is what the analogy works with. A better analogy is if the cars had big buttons that stated how fast the windows should open or close, or big fat buttons stating what concentration the window cleaning liquid should have. This would be tweakable. Certainly fun for someone but exceptionally bad for the rest.
"Nevermind the fact that if it was too confusing for you to deal with, THEN LEAVE IT ON THE FUCKING DEFAULT BEHAVIOR!!"
This is just insulting. The point is that there are some GOOD options. But how am I going to FIND those options if the interface is cluttered up with loads and loads of crack-options?
You my friend did not understand my point at all. Options DO have costs, which means you have to be careful about what options you give, and what you just decide on.
GNOME will hopefully never be a unification of all the options and features that have ever existed in desktop environments, like "emacs" is for editors.
I don't miss options at all. Page-flipping could be sort of nice, but I'm seriously glad that there is only one choice for workspace/viewports now.
If I had a dime for every time I've heard someone scream about some option being removed from GNOME I'd be rich by now. If everyone was to be satisfied we would be back to the mess that was GNOME 1.4. Instead I have a beautiful, easy to use and clean desktop.
The point is that while an individual outcry for an option might be acceptable to include, including options for everyone will not because everyone wants different options. One thing people never seem to remember is that preferences do have costs. They are not something to just throw in so that everyone is happy. If the GNOME-team starts backing down on option after option then eventually NOONE will be happy because GNOME would be a bloated and unstructured mess.
Unless the requestor has some more insightful arguments about why the option needs to be included other than "this prevents GNOME 2 from being useful" it won't be included, simple as that.
I'd like to quote the questions put forward by Havoc Pennington when someone requested panel configuration:
"For all those options you need to go through these questions:
- why do you want the different behavior
- why would someone _not_ want the different behavior
- if _everyone_ wants the different behavior, we should just switch to it, not make it an option.
-Does everyone want it? Why or why not?
- if there are two different behaviors needed, can the two cases be autodetected? if so let's do that, no need to make the user configure it manually.
- is the reason for wanting or not wanting a minor issue that doesn't matter much? if so, then we should just pick a default, it's not worth a preference."
.. and not only physically impaired people. Why? Because accessibility measures means several things: 1. There has to be at least a minimum measure of structure. 2. The sites will work better with alternative browsers. 3. Accessibility-issues often lead to convenience for everyone. The drive behind the GNOME-accessibility has made the desktop more keyboard-friendly which is a boon for everyone. 4. We're not in our physical prime for our entire life. Just about everyone will get some quirks eventually. Not everyone will go blind, but most people will have their eyesight weakened, and a site tweaked for accessibility will be easier.
Actually, at the university of Waterloo the students have already paid parts of the licensing fee, regardless of wether or not they even want Windows XP through their study-fees (or what it is called). This means that students that use Linux are subsidising the students that use Windows. That is hardly fair.
It is probably a bit cheaper than it would otherwise, but it is certainly not giving it away.
Slackware is also commercial, so the whole arguments fall down.
On the other hand Debian, which is fully non-commercial is only at Linux 3.0, what is up with that? Those lazy mother******. They should be working hard on getting me Linux 9.0 like Mandrake right NOW. I hope Jeebus punishes them for their lack of effort.
2) Much in the style of Microsoft, RedHat is pushing its users (particularly business users) towards subscription services, in this case for updates. Yes, that also includes SECURITY updates. You may make the argument that they still are available for free, but up2date will claim that the server on which the free updates are located is too "busy" to process your request
Please do not state this without informing that the updates are also freely available on ANY Red Hat mirror-ftp. You do not have to use up2date at all. The software is also pure GPL and people can create their own update software, which have been done (apt-get for rpm: http://apt-rpm-tuxfamily.org)
Added to that, up2date collects information on your hardware, what packages you have installed, and sends it all off in a profile that identifies your account to your identity, your machine's identity, and the configuration of your machine. Windows XP anyone?
It makes no secret about what it is doing, you have to agree to do this. You do not have to do this at all. It is easy to skip, unlike the passport-registration bugging in XP that will bug you until you turn it off by finding it in an obscure menu place.
Re:Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hop
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2
I have upgraded from Red Hat 7.2 to 7.3 with apt-rpm. This worked flawlessly. I have no idea wether or not RH7.3 to RH 8.0 will work as flawlessly.
Besides, dist-upgrading hasn't always worked that fine with Debian if you count unstable;-).
Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hope!
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Check out Freshrpms. There are already lots of packages available for Psyche (Red Hat 8.0), and most of them are for multimedia. They are even apt-getable through apt-rpm.
This should fix most if not all problems with Red Hat and multimedia.
There are a couple of misleading bits in this article.
"This much software from Microsoft would cost about $400"
This is just plain wrong. This much software from Microsoft would cost a lot more than $400.
The office suite and the Operating system alone would cost more than $400.
The other thing is the statement about Microsoft Internet Explorer still being the best browser out there, without any argument to back it up. Why is it better than anything else out there? For me it certainly isn't, since I'm way too bothered by all the pop-ups..
Can someone enlighten me as to what this means? Does it for instance mean that drivers compiled for 2.6.1 will be binary compatible with other 2.6.x-kernels unlike in the 2.4-tree?
Slashdot Mirror
While you are correct, this is besides the point.
Even IF it is still available to do this, it is just really, really inconvenient compared to how you could do it earlier.
I hate products that are made really inconvenient for me as a purchaser just because someone may share it with their friends.
I'm sorry if this post comes out as a flame, but repeat after me:
"Creating a compatible interpreter is not the same as pirating software"
This means that creating WINE is not the same as trading mp3s, and it's not the same as creating a trading ground for mp3s. They are not even closely related.
I do not know how often people post things like this. RIAA attacked and closed Napster because they created a trading ground for mp3s. WINE and ffmpeg is creating an implementation of the Win32-api and WMA-decoder respectively.
There are however TWO ways that this WMA-decoder might be illegal:
1. It might be breaking the DMCA, by reverse-engineering or by circumventing DRM. I do not know if this might apply though.
2. It might be a breach of some software patent in WMA.
It has _nothing_ to do with the napster situation however.
Ok.. this states some of the non-binding agreements they entered into when applying for the right to broadcast over the air.
It just states that a certain amount of air time should be stuff produced in Norway and some percentage should be based on arts and culture rather than just pure entertainment.
Besides not being binding this has nothing to do with not being able to express themselves.
"That is weird, I saw tons of porn in Gardenmoen airport (the main airport outside of Oslo)"
This is the soft core porn. Shops are allowed to put this wherever they want. It cannot contain any erect male genetalia, although I find that kind of sexist.
"Aren't Norwegian cabdrivers handing out condoms?"
Yeah, but this have more to do with sexually transmitted diseases.
"I thought sex and scenery were the only things going for Norway, I guess now freedom of the press can tie for #3"
Actually, we're also pretty much up there in music. No, not the Britney top-10 stuff, but jazz, electronica and the dark and scary kinds of rock.
What you are saying is simply not true. The channels you are talking about are the only ones allowed to broadcast OVER THE AIR. Now I'm not a radio expert, but this might have lots of other reasons to
If you want to broadcast over cable or satellite you are welcome to do so. And we do have plenty of Television channels available. Not all of them in norwegian, but as Metropol so sadly showed, there are perhaps not a market for any more norwegian television channels. Around 70% of the population can be reached through cable or satellite and cable are also available in the areas the advertisers are most interested in anyway.
Besides, apart from some regulations on how much advertisements the TV-stations are allowed to send, they are basically free to do whatever they want. Otherwise you'd probably not see "Åpen Post" and "Torsdagsklubben" publically humiliate just about any prominent national figure.
"Gaute: Ikke sant at det suger når man ser på ZTV, og så er musikkvideoene sensurert? Aargh! ;)"
:P
Noe helt utrolig
And I'm not totally sure about Norway being that good. For instance, hardcore porn is banned in Norway.
You will also get a slap on your fingers if you publish and publically distribute racist material. I'm not sure of the limit, but "White Election Alliance" (directly translated from "Hvit valgallianse") a neo-nazi, racist political party got a fine and a slap on their fingers for distributing a policical program that asked for the sterilization of all adopted kids from third world countries.
I'm generally pretty happy with the freedom here though, but it's not like it is "anything goes".
We do NOT however ban bad language from public television. If people want to say "fuck", or the norwegian translation "pule" on the air, they are perfectly entitled to do so.
Please, please file a bug report about this at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Nautilus generally works really fast now, but there might be some speed issues left due to bugs.
If you find issues please file bugs for them, that would increase the possibility of it being fixed quite a lot.
If you attach an strace when browsing windows shares it would be even more helpful, since it would give pointers as to WHY Nautilus is slow in these regards.
Great and insightful comment (apart from the trolling about Nautilus. It isn't written by idiots). I do have one reply though. Why not just fork Metacity?
I'm one of the people that love Metacity, and would hate it if Havoc started to back down. But why not just fork it?
Create a "CrackCity" that contains all the silly, nilly options that some people adore so much and everyone would be happy. I for one would be very happy because I would not have to see lots of flames about Metacity being too simplistic. I've even given it a possible name which is a really lovable pun.
Actually I've used new versions of Xsnow with GNOME 2.0 and Nautilus. It works perfectly as far as I can see.
The only problem is that it required a small rewrite of the cutesy hacks on the root-window.
I think that is a small prize to pay considering that the other option is to spend huge amounts of time and effort to rewrite the desktop managers to conform with the cutesy hacks.
Perhaps he meant comments by people that have actually tried Nautilus 2.
I don't believe any of those above have actually TRIED Nautilus 2 before bitching about it.
And if they have, then they haven't tried it with decent hardware.
GNOME 2.0 isn't meant for people with P166MMX and 64MB ram. It might get closer with GNOME 2.2 as some memory leaks and performance bits are being fixed. This still doesn't change that GNOME 2 (and Nautilus) is meant for machines of around Celeron 350+ and 128MB ram+. RAM is especially important.
Nautilus seems to scale very well with hardware. In opening Windows, thumbnailing, and switching directories it is the fastest file manager on my Athlon XP 1800+ with 256MB ram. It seems quite a bit faster than Konqueror (for RH 8) and Explorer (for XP).
On a PIII 600 with 128MB ram it still opens new windows in around the same time as XP explorer, and bit faster than Konqueror. It's other operations are around the speed of Konqueror.
You can see the same pattern on my laptop with Red Hat 8 (PIII 733 with 256MB ram).
The most important part however if your Linux/UNIX file managers are slower than explorer is:
turn on UDMA for your disks. Not all distributions do that by default. And almost none manage to get the settings totally right.
Windows 2000 explorer might be faster. I haven't tried to compare that one with Nautilus, but I'm actually pretty confident that with the new GNOME performance profiling done by WIPRO/SUN, it will be faster than that too.
For those suggesting ROX filer as a speedier alternative, more power to you. I do not like it that much, but some people seem to love it.
"because no one person or group can say whether the options are good or bad"
Sure I can. It IS possible to say what options are good or bad.
If these two are fulfilled, then it is a bad option:
1. If the option is wanted by a really small minority.
2. If it is just a minor inconvenience for the minority, and they can change the way they work.
"They're only crack options to YOU. To somebody else, they're good options - that's why they exist."
They are bad too me because they make it seriously difficult to find the good options.
"You should be complaining about the design of configuration tools, not the abundance of options."
Show me ONE SINGLE example of what you are talking about here. I challenge you, show me ONE example of good configuration tools that have the kind of abundance we are talking about here.
It is impossible to create a nice preference dialog for a big system if you do not set a certain limit on the number of options.
You should not need some sort of search-facility just to configure your desktop.
Haven't tried it. It might be nice, and I should look into it before I comment on the messy control center more times.
You totally do not understand the issue. Too much choice is bad for everyone except the people that really love to tweak stuff.
For everyone else, too much choice is bad.
1. It clutters up the interface
2. It complicates the software and introduces bugs, some of which are hard to track down because of the myriad of options available to complicate things.
3. It is extremely confusing.
Choice is not "good period". Choice is good if the options are good.
KDE does have a problem with being too messy. The control center is way too messy. If you like KDE then by all means keep using it, but do not try to call me an idiot for not wanting all the options you like.
BTW: your analogy stinks. Choice about what software to use is good. That is what the analogy works with.
A better analogy is if the cars had big buttons that stated how fast the windows should open or close, or big fat buttons stating what concentration the window cleaning liquid should have. This would be tweakable. Certainly fun for someone but exceptionally bad for the rest.
"Nevermind the fact that if it was too confusing for you to deal with, THEN LEAVE IT ON THE FUCKING DEFAULT BEHAVIOR!!"
This is just insulting. The point is that there are some GOOD options. But how am I going to FIND those options if the interface is cluttered up with loads and loads of crack-options?
You my friend did not understand my point at all. Options DO have costs, which means you have to be careful about what options you give, and what you just decide on.
GNOME will hopefully never be a unification of all the options and features that have ever existed in desktop environments, like "emacs" is for editors.
Then it will be an option. As I said, if you have a good argument for why something should be an option, then it will be.
I don't miss options at all. Page-flipping could be sort of nice, but I'm seriously glad that there is only one choice for workspace/viewports now.
If I had a dime for every time I've heard someone scream about some option being removed from GNOME I'd be rich by now. If everyone was to be satisfied we would be back to the mess that was GNOME 1.4. Instead I have a beautiful, easy to use and clean desktop.
The point is that while an individual outcry for an option might be acceptable to include, including options for everyone will not because everyone wants different options. One thing people never seem to remember is that preferences do have costs. They are not something to just throw in so that everyone is happy. If the GNOME-team starts backing down on option after option then eventually NOONE will be happy because GNOME would be a bloated and unstructured mess.
Unless the requestor has some more insightful arguments about why the option needs to be included other than "this prevents GNOME 2 from being useful" it won't be included, simple as that.
I'd like to quote the questions put forward by Havoc Pennington when someone requested panel configuration:
"For all those options you need to go through these questions:
- why do you want the different behavior
- why would someone _not_ want the different behavior
- if _everyone_ wants the different behavior, we should just switch to it, not make it an option.
-Does everyone want it? Why or why not?
- if there are two different behaviors needed, can the two cases be autodetected? if so let's do that, no need to make the user configure it manually.
- is the reason for wanting or not wanting a minor issue that doesn't matter much? if so, then we should just pick a default, it's not worth a preference."
.. and not only physically impaired people. Why? Because accessibility measures means several things:
1. There has to be at least a minimum measure of structure.
2. The sites will work better with alternative browsers.
3. Accessibility-issues often lead to convenience for everyone. The drive behind the GNOME-accessibility has made the desktop more keyboard-friendly which is a boon for everyone.
4. We're not in our physical prime for our entire life. Just about everyone will get some quirks eventually. Not everyone will go blind, but most people will have their eyesight weakened, and a site tweaked for accessibility will be easier.
Actually, at the university of Waterloo the students have already paid parts of the licensing fee, regardless of wether or not they even want Windows XP through their study-fees (or what it is called).
This means that students that use Linux are subsidising the students that use Windows. That is hardly fair.
It is probably a bit cheaper than it would otherwise, but it is certainly not giving it away.
Slackware is also commercial, so the whole arguments fall down.
On the other hand Debian, which is fully non-commercial is only at Linux 3.0, what is up with that? Those lazy mother******. They should be working hard on getting me Linux 9.0 like Mandrake right NOW. I hope Jeebus punishes them for their lack of effort.
I missed a dot. It should be apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org instead of apt-rpm-tuxfamily.org.
2) Much in the style of Microsoft, RedHat is pushing its users (particularly business users) towards subscription services, in this case for updates. Yes, that also includes SECURITY updates. You may make the argument that they still are available for free, but up2date will claim that the server on which the free updates are located is too "busy" to process your request
Please do not state this without informing that the updates are also freely available on ANY Red Hat mirror-ftp. You do not have to use up2date at all. The software is also pure GPL and people can create their own update software, which have been done (apt-get for rpm: http://apt-rpm-tuxfamily.org)
Added to that, up2date collects information on your hardware, what packages you have installed, and sends it all off in a profile that identifies your account to your identity, your machine's identity, and the configuration of your machine. Windows XP anyone?
It makes no secret about what it is doing, you have to agree to do this. You do not have to do this at all. It is easy to skip, unlike the passport-registration bugging in XP that will bug you until you turn it off by finding it in an obscure menu place.
I have upgraded from Red Hat 7.2 to 7.3 with apt-rpm. This worked flawlessly. I have no idea wether or not RH7.3 to RH 8.0 will work as flawlessly.
;-).
Besides, dist-upgrading hasn't always worked that fine with Debian if you count unstable
Check out Freshrpms. There are already lots of packages available for Psyche (Red Hat 8.0), and most of them are for multimedia. They are even apt-getable through apt-rpm.
This should fix most if not all problems with Red Hat and multimedia.
There are a couple of misleading bits in this article.
"This much software from Microsoft would cost about $400"
This is just plain wrong. This much software from Microsoft would cost a lot more than $400.
The office suite and the Operating system alone would cost more than $400.
The other thing is the statement about Microsoft Internet Explorer still being the best browser out there, without any argument to back it up. Why is it better than anything else out there? For me it certainly isn't, since I'm way too bothered by all the pop-ups..
Otherwise a decent piece.
Can someone enlighten me as to what this means? Does it for instance mean that drivers compiled for 2.6.1 will be binary compatible with other 2.6.x-kernels unlike in the 2.4-tree?