You missed his point. I think what he was trying to say is that the distributor did nothing for him when he got the song from Gnutella. Nobody packaged it, put it on a store or announced it. So, the only one who is hurt (it's not stealing dammit!) is the artist, and is the only one who should get paid. So the RIAA has no right to whine about losing money.
Egads. SourceSafe? I had the unfortunate idea of trying it and it's crap. CVS is *much* better. SourceSafe doesn't support any kind of remote access (besides using a VPN), several people working on the same file, and generally a lot of things CVS provides
But this does nothing but putting DVD in the place of the CD. While a DVD is a bit hard to transfer over the internet, with a good broadband connection (mine is ADSL 256/128 unlimited) it can be done. Now instead of DivX encoded DVDs that fit on a CD you'll have a DivX encoded "Super DVD" that fits on a DVD. And what DivX offers is already very good. I've seen a movie recorded that way, and it looks great on my 19" monitor.
Besides making it completely unpractical for dialup users, it won't accomplish much. You still can compress it enough to make a CD sized video. It'll just continue as it is now. People who want to do it will still watch the DivX, the ones who want quality will buy the "Super DVD" or go to the cinema.
What's the problem? A small script run from cron will do just fine. On my Debian box I have a script that runs apt-get and if there's something new, it downloads, but doesn't install it. It just leaves the packages on the disk and sends an email. Then the next day I can decide whether I want those updates or not.
I still don't think it should be patentable. I don't think anything alive should be patentable. A patent is a legal monopoly. How can you do that with an organism? They reproduce by themselves. How can you patent something that has intelligence and wants to breed, or whose seeds could fly and grow even in another country? If you want to enforce the idea of patents on those new humans would have to be slaves.
Oh, and I work hard on software, and *don't* think they should be patentable. In fact in Spain they fortunately aren't patentable.
I think you're missing something. The point is to find where is the limit. A mouse with human cells probably could still be classified as a mouse. But what if we merged a few genes from a different specie into the human genome? Do you really think we should be able to patent 95% humans that are normal but with enhacements? Think of a human who can sense heat like a snake. Or maybe it might be possible to get a human to regenerate lost body parts? I don't think that should be patented.
So, where does it stop? 49% human is OK but 51% is not?
Since I added a Perl script to remove Yahoo crap from email to my.procmailrc I haven't seen them again. Still wastes my bandwidth, but no disk space at least
1. That's how you get Windows sooner or later. Backward compability is nice, but there has to be a limit
2. It doesn't matter how good is it if it makes my computer crash. My SB Live is nice too (open source drivers fortunately), and hell it took me a while to make it work decently. It can cause disk corruption when used with VIA chipsets.
Well, I'd say impossible. You don't even have to get to something as complicated as a kernel. Suppose you're writing something simpler, like a chat client. Now a vendor makes a closed source module that is really cool. It uses the hooks you had in version 1.0. But of course for version 2 you have this great idea of rewriting the plugin interface. Oops. Now that module won't work. If the vendor goes away nobody can fix it. Not even you, unless you decide that being forced by an inexitent company to keep compatibility is more important.
The next paragraph is what I find even stranger. So, the world isn't perfect. Okay, and why do we have to accept that? The world isn't perfect, I agree, but we should make an effort and try to make it better instead of accepting the situation. Yes, it's hard.
What about the distro, maybe you haven't noticed, but they all have update sites! They release new compiled kernels with modules and security fixes.
A kernel is a really big program. It works with hardware. How do you know the module isn't doing something nasty? How do you know it doesn't expect subsystem X to work in some way? Or that maybe it contains a workaround for a bug that will make it break when you fix the bug?
And why isn't it my job? How do you know that? I have some programming knowledge. I know a bit of C, VB, Perl, Clipper and DIV Games Studio. I'm not a genius, but at least I feel capable of fixing a few bugs or at least emailing a decent report. That's why I use Linux, because if I find a program doesn't have a feature maybe I can add it!
It looks like you never wrote any serious code, right? You can create all the wrappers you want, but the fact is you can't debug something you don't know how works.
It's impossible to create a definitive interface because Linux is still evolving, and will be doing so for a long time. Besides, that's what is it about! Openness. If you allow all the binary crap in the kernel the vendors want many of its advantages will go away. Kernel modules are already independent to some point. But Linux isn't Windows, the kernel changes. Interfaces will change.
What about making it easy to install hardware, that's what distributions are for. They come with everything compiled as modules and the system loads what's needed? Isn't that what you want?
I was stupid when choosing a video card and got a GeForce 2 MX. Now tell me how any programmer can debug something she can't see? nVidia's module already uses that wrapper idea you seem to like to much, and no, it ain't working. The Linux kernel is very modular. How do you know the module will work fine with a kernel with improvements? Some modules won't work with the preemption patch for example.
Sometimes I get kernel oopses after closing X. I'm sick of this, and will probably give up 3D acceleration soon and use nv instead. And look for a better manufacturer next time.
Okay, it's bloated. So what? If you want something small use IceWM. That's the good thing in Linux, we've got choice
Now, if you really like KDE I suggest that somebody set up a web site, download all the KDE source and set some democratic voting system to decide what parts of KDE are junk. Then start removing. I'd suggest not touching kdelibs to keep compatibility with KDE programs, and trying to keep in sync with the original KDE. Look for ways for reducing KDE's memory and CPU use. Maybe KDE developers would then integrate some improvements, or even add compilation time settings, maybe like the system used by the kernel. Isn't this why OSS is so great?
And how exactly will you get all that data? Maybe trasferring it with my 256Kbps ADSL router? Heck, with the maximum 2Mbps I can get here or even a 100Mbps connection it will still take a *lot* of time to transfer one uncompressed movie. I've got a 40GB disk and that is more space than I need right now. I also have ADSL. But I still download compressed data, SSH with compression and remove ads from websites.
Besides, being able to store an uncompressed movie doesn't mean you can play it. Disks get larger and larger, but it also takes more time to read all the data you can store on them. Read/write speed doesn't increase at the same time as storage space.
When I download music from Napster/Gnutella for free, listen to it, and then buy CDs with the music I like, I'm helping the artist. If I couldn't listen to that music, I wouldn't buy the CDs.
Now, what those companies want is charge me money for a "legitimate" compensation to the artist, who will not probably even get $1 for it. Therefore, the company gets fatter, the artist gets almost nothing, and the executives can brag about how without Napster the artists are getting money. Yeah, right.
Nice idea, but flawed. How about this:
The spammer connects to open.relay.net, and sends the first message to his/her own hotmail account made for checking purposes. If the email arrives the server is good, and the spammer sends the 50,000 messages. If it doesn't, the spammer tries another server.
And I believe they will continue being wrong for a long time. Take Win2K, for example. A stable and secure system (on NTFS), right?
Well, no. Here's something to show to your friends.
Windows test:
Boot Win9x. Open regedit and export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. That'll be enough.
Boot a fresh Win2K install, with the latest service pack and patches.
Login as a normal user
Double click the.reg file and click "Ok".
Reboot.
Watch an unbootable "secure and stable" system.
Linux test:
Boot any Linux distribution
Log in as an user
Try to edit anything in/etc
Doesn't work, right?:-)
I feel Windows will be plagued with this problem for a long time. It's simply needed to keep compatibility. Windows never went so far to have a completely functional $HOME. Yeah, you've got your settings there, but the amount of programs that use it correctly is very small, and almost all the installers write to HKLM. Compare that to Linux, where if I wanted I could have my own environment. Just make your own/lib,/usr and everything else, chroot, and you get to have absolutely anything you want without security problems! (Yeah, I know chroot can be broken, but that requires some work)
Even without going so far, it's perfectly possible to install KDE or Perl in $HOME avoiding bothering the sysadmin, and the DLL hell. Try that on Windows.
I'm thinking we need a new license, how somebody mentioned above. This is how I think things should work:
Commercial vendors are responsible for what they produce. After all they sell the work for money. Programs should work as advertised. If Win98 is advertised as faster than 95, then it must be faster. If it's better for playing DOS games, then it should be indeed better. If MS says it's secure (*snort*), then it should be secure. The vendor shall be responsible for serious security bugs, but not user stupidity. Not preventing you from doing an 'rm -rf/' doens't qualify.
GPL should remain as it is. That's logical, many GPL works are *in progress*. Open Source applications take advantage of the openess, which lets them be released early, in an incomplete state. For example, suppose I am a technician and make my own TV. A friend comes to my house.
Friend: Whoa, what's that?
Me: The TV I've been making
Friend: Can I try it?
Me: Sure, but it's not finished. Be very careful with it.
Now, should I be liable for damages if the TV that I already said is experimental catches fire? Of course not! I didn't make it as a professional work, it's just a toy I let somebody try.
An useful addition would be the QGPL (Quality GPL somebody mentioned). Standard GPL, but with additions. How about:
The software must be reasonably secure. That is, it won't let people break into computer, and won't delete all the data on your hard disk. The bug that doesn't render correctly HTML for site foo.com doesn't qualify.
All the reported bugs will be fixed in the next stable release
Perhaps as some people do, like D. J. Bernstein (the author of djbdns) offer a reward for serious bugs.
Maybe something else
Nice idea, but only for normal people. I'm sure you don't send thousands of emails a day, so this doesn't bother you, but the Linux Kernel mailing list does...
It's a really nice game. And it even runs faster on Linux than in Windows!
It's a very interesting Artificial Life game. Something like The Sims, but more oriented towards biology. It's written in its own interpreted language that you can see and modify (look in the Bootstrap folder). It's free (but not GPL'd) and you can get it here.
Creatures and Creatures 2 can work under Wine, but they're pretty unstable. It's also possible to play Creatures 3 with this one because they share the engine.
Well, they will include censorware stuff. That's nasty, of course. Well, but they can't forbid me from wiping all that crap, or installing Linux over it, right? Besides, I bet just anybody can get a Win95/98 CD without problems... It's as simple for a newbie as calling " the one who spends all the day on the computer" and asking him/her nicely to install a fresh OS without any stuff like that
Well, excuse me, Mr "Great", but I can't see why you think you're so great at all.
Let me introduce myself. I'm 19, and I live with my parents. I've played many violent games. I saw violence in movies, TV, the internet and at school. I've been hit, and beat several times. I also saw some amount of porn (who hasn't?) when I was younger, but it never interested me too much. I've been insulted many times too. Now guess how am I. Do you think I'm one of those violent idiots who think they can solve anything with violence? Well, sorry, but I'm a quiet, shy and peaceful person, and play games like Creatures (you have to take care of a virtual creature). I don't drink alcohol or take drugs or think women are inferior. And I'm wondering why. Let me tell you that regarless of all the violence (and some sex) I've seen, I have no intention of hurting, killing or raping anybody.
Now about yourself... What kind of parent are you? If your children love you, then I feel sorry for them. They don't deserve a parent who thinks that his/her time is too valuable to use it to take care about his/her own children!
Also, think that NOTHING in this world will stop your children from doing something you don't want them to, if they want. I needed only 3 minutes to disable my school's control system on computers, and anohter few minutes to discover the administrator's password. It was foolishly encoded by simple substitution. If your kids want to play games, they'll play games, either by downloading them from warez sites, getting them from friends, or buying them and lying about their age (I'm really 17, I just look like I'm 14 because of hormonal problems). I bet they can find some way of playing them while you're out, or at a friend's house.
You're their parent. It's your work to take care of them and teach them what's good and what's bad. Sincerly, if you really think the government is going to take care of your children and just with a foolish rating system, you're the biggest idiot and worst parent I've ever seen.
Sorry, but you just got on my nerves. Now I'll get back to Perl and Creatures:-)
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You missed his point. I think what he was trying to say is that the distributor did nothing for him when he got the song from Gnutella. Nobody packaged it, put it on a store or announced it. So, the only one who is hurt (it's not stealing dammit!) is the artist, and is the only one who should get paid. So the RIAA has no right to whine about losing money.
Egads. SourceSafe? I had the unfortunate idea of trying it and it's crap. CVS is *much* better. SourceSafe doesn't support any kind of remote access (besides using a VPN), several people working on the same file, and generally a lot of things CVS provides
But this does nothing but putting DVD in the place of the CD. While a DVD is a bit hard to transfer over the internet, with a good broadband connection (mine is ADSL 256/128 unlimited) it can be done. Now instead of DivX encoded DVDs that fit on a CD you'll have a DivX encoded "Super DVD" that fits on a DVD. And what DivX offers is already very good. I've seen a movie recorded that way, and it looks great on my 19" monitor.
Besides making it completely unpractical for dialup users, it won't accomplish much. You still can compress it enough to make a CD sized video. It'll just continue as it is now. People who want to do it will still watch the DivX, the ones who want quality will buy the "Super DVD" or go to the cinema.
No way! I talk to 14 year old girls, and they talk in a completely normal way. Maybe 8 year olds do talk like that.
What's the problem? A small script run from cron will do just fine. On my Debian box I have a script that runs apt-get and if there's something new, it downloads, but doesn't install it. It just leaves the packages on the disk and sends an email. Then the next day I can decide whether I want those updates or not.
I still don't think it should be patentable. I don't think anything alive should be patentable. A patent is a legal monopoly. How can you do that with an organism? They reproduce by themselves. How can you patent something that has intelligence and wants to breed, or whose seeds could fly and grow even in another country? If you want to enforce the idea of patents on those new humans would have to be slaves.
Oh, and I work hard on software, and *don't* think they should be patentable. In fact in Spain they fortunately aren't patentable.
I think you're missing something. The point is to find where is the limit. A mouse with human cells probably could still be classified as a mouse. But what if we merged a few genes from a different specie into the human genome? Do you really think we should be able to patent 95% humans that are normal but with enhacements? Think of a human who can sense heat like a snake. Or maybe it might be possible to get a human to regenerate lost body parts? I don't think that should be patented.
So, where does it stop? 49% human is OK but 51% is not?
Since I added a Perl script to remove Yahoo crap from email to my .procmailrc I haven't seen them again. Still wastes my bandwidth, but no disk space at least
OpenSSL comes with a program that will help. I think it's 'openssl s_client'
If you compiled Qt from source that means you forgot to enable gif support. It's not enabled by default. Try 'configure --help'.
If you got a package that means it was compiled without gif support, maybe by mistake, so get an updated package, or compile Qt yourself.
1. That's how you get Windows sooner or later. Backward compability is nice, but there has to be a limit
2. It doesn't matter how good is it if it makes my computer crash. My SB Live is nice too (open source drivers fortunately), and hell it took me a while to make it work decently. It can cause disk corruption when used with VIA chipsets.
Well, I'd say impossible. You don't even have to get to something as complicated as a kernel. Suppose you're writing something simpler, like a chat client. Now a vendor makes a closed source module that is really cool. It uses the hooks you had in version 1.0. But of course for version 2 you have this great idea of rewriting the plugin interface. Oops. Now that module won't work. If the vendor goes away nobody can fix it. Not even you, unless you decide that being forced by an inexitent company to keep compatibility is more important.
The next paragraph is what I find even stranger. So, the world isn't perfect. Okay, and why do we have to accept that? The world isn't perfect, I agree, but we should make an effort and try to make it better instead of accepting the situation. Yes, it's hard.
What about the distro, maybe you haven't noticed, but they all have update sites! They release new compiled kernels with modules and security fixes.
A kernel is a really big program. It works with hardware. How do you know the module isn't doing something nasty? How do you know it doesn't expect subsystem X to work in some way? Or that maybe it contains a workaround for a bug that will make it break when you fix the bug?
And why isn't it my job? How do you know that? I have some programming knowledge. I know a bit of C, VB, Perl, Clipper and DIV Games Studio. I'm not a genius, but at least I feel capable of fixing a few bugs or at least emailing a decent report. That's why I use Linux, because if I find a program doesn't have a feature maybe I can add it!
It looks like you never wrote any serious code, right? You can create all the wrappers you want, but the fact is you can't debug something you don't know how works.
It's impossible to create a definitive interface because Linux is still evolving, and will be doing so for a long time. Besides, that's what is it about! Openness. If you allow all the binary crap in the kernel the vendors want many of its advantages will go away. Kernel modules are already independent to some point. But Linux isn't Windows, the kernel changes. Interfaces will change.
What about making it easy to install hardware, that's what distributions are for. They come with everything compiled as modules and the system loads what's needed? Isn't that what you want?
I was stupid when choosing a video card and got a GeForce 2 MX. Now tell me how any programmer can debug something she can't see? nVidia's module already uses that wrapper idea you seem to like to much, and no, it ain't working. The Linux kernel is very modular. How do you know the module will work fine with a kernel with improvements? Some modules won't work with the preemption patch for example.
Sometimes I get kernel oopses after closing X. I'm sick of this, and will probably give up 3D acceleration soon and use nv instead. And look for a better manufacturer next time.
Now, if you really like KDE I suggest that somebody set up a web site, download all the KDE source and set some democratic voting system to decide what parts of KDE are junk. Then start removing. I'd suggest not touching kdelibs to keep compatibility with KDE programs, and trying to keep in sync with the original KDE. Look for ways for reducing KDE's memory and CPU use. Maybe KDE developers would then integrate some improvements, or even add compilation time settings, maybe like the system used by the kernel. Isn't this why OSS is so great?
And how exactly will you get all that data? Maybe trasferring it with my 256Kbps ADSL router? Heck, with the maximum 2Mbps I can get here or even a 100Mbps connection it will still take a *lot* of time to transfer one uncompressed movie. I've got a 40GB disk and that is more space than I need right now. I also have ADSL. But I still download compressed data, SSH with compression and remove ads from websites.
Besides, being able to store an uncompressed movie doesn't mean you can play it. Disks get larger and larger, but it also takes more time to read all the data you can store on them. Read/write speed doesn't increase at the same time as storage space.
Not thinking of the consequences of getting posted on /.
When I download music from Napster/Gnutella for free, listen to it, and then buy CDs with the music I like, I'm helping the artist. If I couldn't listen to that music, I wouldn't buy the CDs.
Now, what those companies want is charge me money for a "legitimate" compensation to the artist, who will not probably even get $1 for it. Therefore, the company gets fatter, the artist gets almost nothing, and the executives can brag about how without Napster the artists are getting money. Yeah, right.
Nice idea, but flawed. How about this:
The spammer connects to open.relay.net, and sends the first message to his/her own hotmail account made for checking purposes. If the email arrives the server is good, and the spammer sends the 50,000 messages. If it doesn't, the spammer tries another server.
How would you avoid that?
Yeah, great. Now all trolls would have to do is to put all the incrementing stuff into a post, and then add a link to goatse or something else.
And I believe they will continue being wrong for a long time. Take Win2K, for example. A stable and secure system (on NTFS), right?
.reg file and click "Ok".
/etc
:-)
/lib, /usr and everything else, chroot, and you get to have absolutely anything you want without security problems! (Yeah, I know chroot can be broken, but that requires some work)
Well, no. Here's something to show to your friends.
Windows test:
Boot Win9x. Open regedit and export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. That'll be enough.
Boot a fresh Win2K install, with the latest service pack and patches.
Login as a normal user
Double click the
Reboot.
Watch an unbootable "secure and stable" system.
Linux test:
Boot any Linux distribution
Log in as an user
Try to edit anything in
Doesn't work, right?
I feel Windows will be plagued with this problem for a long time. It's simply needed to keep compatibility. Windows never went so far to have a completely functional $HOME. Yeah, you've got your settings there, but the amount of programs that use it correctly is very small, and almost all the installers write to HKLM. Compare that to Linux, where if I wanted I could have my own environment. Just make your own
Even without going so far, it's perfectly possible to install KDE or Perl in $HOME avoiding bothering the sysadmin, and the DLL hell. Try that on Windows.
Commercial vendors are responsible for what they produce. After all they sell the work for money. Programs should work as advertised. If Win98 is advertised as faster than 95, then it must be faster. If it's better for playing DOS games, then it should be indeed better. If MS says it's secure (*snort*), then it should be secure. The vendor shall be responsible for serious security bugs, but not user stupidity. Not preventing you from doing an 'rm -rf /' doens't qualify.
GPL should remain as it is. That's logical, many GPL works are *in progress*. Open Source applications take advantage of the openess, which lets them be released early, in an incomplete state. For example, suppose I am a technician and make my own TV. A friend comes to my house.
Friend: Whoa, what's that?
Me: The TV I've been making
Friend: Can I try it?
Me: Sure, but it's not finished. Be very careful with it.
Now, should I be liable for damages if the TV that I already said is experimental catches fire? Of course not! I didn't make it as a professional work, it's just a toy I let somebody try.
An useful addition would be the QGPL (Quality GPL somebody mentioned). Standard GPL, but with additions. How about:
The software must be reasonably secure. That is, it won't let people break into computer, and won't delete all the data on your hard disk. The bug that doesn't render correctly HTML for site foo.com doesn't qualify.
All the reported bugs will be fixed in the next stable release
Perhaps as some people do, like D. J. Bernstein (the author of djbdns) offer a reward for serious bugs.
Maybe something else
Ideas? Comments?
Nice idea, but only for normal people. I'm sure you don't send thousands of emails a day, so this doesn't bother you, but the Linux Kernel mailing list does...
It's a very interesting Artificial Life game. Something like The Sims, but more oriented towards biology. It's written in its own interpreted language that you can see and modify (look in the Bootstrap folder). It's free (but not GPL'd) and you can get it here.
Creatures and Creatures 2 can work under Wine, but they're pretty unstable. It's also possible to play Creatures 3 with this one because they share the engine.
Well, they will include censorware stuff. That's nasty, of course. Well, but they can't forbid me from wiping all that crap, or installing Linux over it, right? Besides, I bet just anybody can get a Win95/98 CD without problems... It's as simple for a newbie as calling " the one who spends all the day on the computer" and asking him/her nicely to install a fresh OS without any stuff like that
Well, excuse me, Mr "Great", but I can't see why you think you're so great at all.
:-)
Let me introduce myself. I'm 19, and I live with my parents. I've played many violent games. I saw violence in movies, TV, the internet and at school. I've been hit, and beat several times. I also saw some amount of porn (who hasn't?) when I was younger, but it never interested me too much. I've been insulted many times too. Now guess how am I. Do you think I'm one of those violent idiots who think they can solve anything with violence? Well, sorry, but I'm a quiet, shy and peaceful person, and play games like Creatures (you have to take care of a virtual creature). I don't drink alcohol or take drugs or think women are inferior. And I'm wondering why. Let me tell you that regarless of all the violence (and some sex) I've seen, I have no intention of hurting, killing or raping anybody.
Now about yourself... What kind of parent are you? If your children love you, then I feel sorry for them. They don't deserve a parent who thinks that his/her time is too valuable to use it to take care about his/her own children!
Also, think that NOTHING in this world will stop your children from doing something you don't want them to, if they want. I needed only 3 minutes to disable my school's control system on computers, and anohter few minutes to discover the administrator's password. It was foolishly encoded by simple substitution. If your kids want to play games, they'll play games, either by downloading them from warez sites, getting them from friends, or buying them and lying about their age (I'm really 17, I just look like I'm 14 because of hormonal problems). I bet they can find some way of playing them while you're out, or at a friend's house.
You're their parent. It's your work to take care of them and teach them what's good and what's bad. Sincerly, if you really think the government is going to take care of your children and just with a foolish rating system, you're the biggest idiot and worst parent I've ever seen.
Sorry, but you just got on my nerves. Now I'll get back to Perl and Creatures