and when they do, it's something newsworthy that everyone is reporting.
Then everybody else is obsessing over it too much as well.
Seriously? Apple is one of the most influential tech companies today and has changed industries with the iPod and iPhone, and you don't understand why people are interested in seeing their new product?
Meh. The iPhone is only new in the US, smartphones were around long before Apple made one. The iPod is yet another MP3 player, and Apple is now making yet another tablet. It's not industry changing, it's yet another variation on something of which at least 10 variations exist already.
Some people will forever have an irrational hatred of Apple. Logic just goes out the window for them. Even posting news about Apple gets their blood boiling for no reason.
This whole subject deserves maybe 1 post, once something is known about the device. Any more and it gets annoying and tiresome.
It's interesting that people predict massive problems despite there never being any massive problems. For example, name a single infrastructure event that impacted the daily lives of every American.
Raw pixels comes out to a rather large number per page, though. There is another standard: IPP, which is widely supported by network printers. AKA CUPS, which is what Apple uses.
In any case, I don't see what any of this has to do with Linux. Go and ask the printer manufacturers to standarize on a bitmap format, and I'm sure Linux would quickly get support for it.
But, if you're worried about cost, you shouldn't be buying a $49 printer in the first place, as you'll quickly pay for that cheapness by getting gouged on ink.
Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace?
The kernel does this to a large part already. In fact, printing is implemented in userspace, as well as many other devices. That's what libusb is for.
Devices like keyboards and hard disks don't make much sense to support in userspace, since the kernel already has to support everything having to do with hard disks, and the lower level USB protocol. The kernel knows what a hard disk is, it knows the standard USB protocol, it's very straightforward for it to use a hard disk over USB. Adding userspace there would only make things more complicated.
In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.
It already exists, and it's called "postscript". Buy a printer that supports it, and no problem. But if the printer insists in talking its own weird language it's not going to accept your "uncompressed raster data".
Are we ever going to see major new features (along the lines of the USB implementation, or SMP), or a major re-think? Or is this basically as good as it will ever get?
USB and SMP are things the kernel implemented, but weren't created inside it. The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist, so it's not going to get more things like that, unless new standards get created.
But, new things get added all the time, just watch the kernel reports at LWN.
Actually, IMO you completely misread the result of the GIF battle. The upshot was nobody cared about the IP issues, except the GNU/Free software types.
Oh, they cared, they just didn't make a lot of noise over it.
The patent was in the encoder. The people who cared about that were the ones who were making programs that encoded.gif files, which would be companies like Adobe, who didn't have that much trouble shelling out the $5000 or so the license was. For the "free software types" it was of course more problematic.
The only thing PNG had going for it adoption-wise was superior features like transparency.
You're forgetting support for more than 256 colors. Hardly anybody uses GIF these days, even without the patents, 256 color images look like crap.
There's one use for encryption people don't generally discuss: tech service.
I've been running a home server for a long time. Such systems over time accumulate years worth of mail, which will contain private data, website passwords, and so on. I personally feel uncomfortable with sending a disk containing years worth of data to a tech support department when I want to say, get it replaced under warranty. There have been a few stories about underpaid techs looking for music and porn on customers' hard drives. And if the disk is broken I can hardly erase it properly.
So my solution:
For servers, encrypt the disk, and keep the key in an USB drive always plugged into the server. If a disk breaks, I remove the disk, and send it for warranty replacement without worrying about the data.
For laptops, I use Ubuntu's disk encryption. It's even better there as laptops usually don't have RAID, and may break for multiple reasons that I can't personally fix.
Yes, but it's unrealistic to expect that if researchers didn't publish attacks, there wouldn't be any.
Somebody found the hole. It can't be that they're the only person on the planet who could possibly figure it out. Eventually somebody else will find it too, or maybe already has. If that person happens to have something malicious in mind, they won't publically disclose it. They'll exploit it for their own gain, or sell the information to people who will do that.
If nobody disclosed vulnerabilities for the public's benefit, they'd never get disclosed until somebody got hit with them. First somebody would perform a successful attack, and a postmortem examination would eventually result in figuring out what happened. But doing things this way means at least one victim is 100% guaranteed, and nobody can prepare for it in advance.
Then I think it shouldn't be possible for that license to legally exist. It should be possible to legally install anything you buy on a toaster, if you can manage it. Unsupported of course.
You might feel differently if you had created the product! What you're doing (though I don't think you mean to) is stopping someone from being able to make money from their own work
There is no right to profit. That something would make somebody lose money doesn't automatically make it wrong, and that something makes money doesn't make it automatically right.
EULAs are agreed to by buyers, under no duress, why is this wrong or immoral?
No, there is plenty duress involved.
By the time you get to read an EULA, you've already bought something, went home, and opened the box. You can try to take it back, but most shops won't accept the returns of opened software, as you could have copied it. And since the vast majority of people consider the EULA to be a kind of standard boilerplate nobody reads or cares about, that if you tried to return a program because you disagreed with the EULA, the store clerk probably wouldn't even understand what you're talking about.
Additionally, EULAs appear on software that comes with hardware you bought. Yeah, a few people managed to return Windows and keep the hardware, but it's an annoying process that doesn't work everywhere.
For EULAs to be at least slightly acceptable, the ability to return the software must be guaranteed everywhere, without arguing for an hour, and it isn't.
You cannot modify the code without accepting the license! They let you run the software, but that's it! I'll agree it's pretty permissive, and I'll argue that the restrictions actually add value, but there is very little "clear air" between the two situations.
But that's not a restriction imposed by the GPL, it's imposed by copyright law.
Further more the GPL is infectious, if I add a small amount of GPL code to a project then the whole thing becomes GPL
No, it doesn't.
If you distribute GPL software in breach of the GPL, all that the GPL grants you is automatically revoked. You're left with copyright law. At that point, you're distributing somebody else's copyrighted work without permission, and it doesn't have any license that allows you to, so you're committing copyright infringement.
It's up to the copyright holder to decide what to do about that. Removing the GPLd code should fix the problem, as is stopping to infringe. They could also offer to give you a different license for a price, say they can't be bothered to prosecute so feel free to keep using it, or reach some other agreement. They can also just go and sue you for statuory damages. What will happen will depend on what the copyright holder decides to do, and "release it all under the GPL" isn't necessarily the only thing that can happen.
You're trying to draw a distinction between two sets of people: developers and users, why should this exist? They all use the software, the EULA isn't different, just more restrictive.
There's no distinction between developers and users, there's a distinction between people who distribute and people who don't. You're just as required to comply with the GPL if you simply redistribute the software.
You don't like Apple's EULA, fine, don't run the software - but that doesn't make the idea of a EULA less valid. What if I wanted to write code and specify that I didn't want it to be used for military use, should I not be allowed to do that?!
I don't like EULAs in general. Imposing conditions after something has been bought and paid for, and ownership has been transferred shouldn't be legal.
Note that again, the GPL doesn't impose anything: it grants things you wouldn't otherwise have, and you can ignore it if you like.
Err, the GPL does impose terms. Try putting GPL code into a device then selling it, not allowing anyone access to the code (no, don't - the FSF will come after you, and rightly so).
The GPL doesn't impose anything, it offers to allow to distribute if you comply with some requirements. Read the GPL. You're not required to agree to it. You can not agree with it, and still use the software. In case you don't believe me, I'll quote it:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Nothing besides the GPL allows you to redistribute the software. Without the GPL, you're limited to what copyright allows you. You got your copy, you can mess with it all you want, but that's it. It works the same was with for instance, a book. You own it, you can paint on it, use it as toilet paper, rebind it and so on. You don't get an EULA authorizing you to do such things, because you don't need permission. Copyright doesn't allow you to make copies though.
The "Try putting GPL code into a device then selling it" part is because you're distributing at that point. You're perfectly free to take some hardware, install Linux on it, modify it, and not give the source to anybody else. So long you don't distribute what you created.
You're trying to make the GPL an exception - it isn't.
It is. Look at any EULA. They always present themselves as mandatory, restrict usage, and place more restrictions than would exist under plain copyright. In contrast, the GPL is optional to agree to, doesn't restrict usage, and if you agree to the terms lifts restrictions.
If they'd won then Apple's business model would have been sunk, and they'd have no alternative but to drop the Mac and raise the price of Mac OS X - a lot. It's questionable if Mac OS X could have survived (I'd suggest it probably wouldn't have). Whatever Psystar's business would have been destroyed.
Apple's business model being sunk would have been an entirely acceptable outcome for me. I'm arguing what I think that should be the rightful state of things. If Apple couldn't do business in such an environment, then I believe it shouldn't be able to.
My argument is that what Psystar wanted to do should be legally doable. This is completely independent from Apple, Psystar, or OS X, in fact I don't even have an interest in any of that stuff. I don't own Apple products, nor want any, for any price or for free.
But it is their product! Shouldn't they have the right to decide how it is sold?
Actually, no. In any country there are laws that decide how you can sell a product.
Let us, just for a moment, pretend the antitrust case never happened, okay? In that case what makes MSFT and Apple ANY different? Nothing that I can tell, except as I said Apple has better tastes and appeals to the rich, while MSFT sells to the average Joe who can't afford Apple.
On my part, I'm arguing about the general principle of the thing. In your case, I'd be criticising MS in the same way. I'm not making an anti-Apple argument, I'm making an anti-too controlling company argument.
And for all the hate that is spewed here, lets be honest for a moment: if it wasn't for MSFT most folks would NOT have two or three PCs, in fact most wouldn't have one at all. Because they couldn't afford one
Bullshit. The argument you're making is that if MSFT didn't exist, everything else would be the same, except for the place MSFT currently takes, leaving a gaping void. But things don't happen like that. If MSFT wasn't there, maybe Apple would be dominant, or IBM, or we'd all be using a modern version of the Amiga. Somebody would eventually see the market for cheap computers and provide them.
BTW, the modern PC has little to do with Microsoft, it's the consequence of the reverse engineering of an IBM product.
Now, if Windows wasn't there, that void would have been filled with something else as well. Maybe OS/2, or BeOS, but something, or maybe multiple things would have taken its place.
The GPL isn't affected by this because it's not an EULA.
The GPL doesn't say anything about how you can use the software. Want to change strings in the Linux kernel? Go ahead. Want to reverse engineer the binary? No problem. You can completely ignore the GPL and still use any GPL licensed program. You're not required to accept it in order to use the program (in this respect, showing the GPL as an EULA in an installer isn't really correct).
Now, copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute, so if you want to, you need permission. And the GPL gives you that, if you comply with the requirements. The GPL gives you an offer (you can redistribute, provided you comply with X), and you can accept it by complying with the requirements. That's a contract, not an EULA.
EULAs are different because they attempt to impose terms post-purchase.
Pedantic: IQ 100 is supposed to be the population's average.
If you kill everybody below a set IQ, the scores will have to be adjusted. The average person will now be smarter, so somebody with formerly an IQ of 100 may now have one of 90.
1. Android and the N900 didn't exist back when the iPhone was released. 2. When it was released it was obviously capable but without applications, which gave plenty motivation for jailbreaking. 3. If I bought it, it's mine, and I'll take it apart if I please.
Slashdot Mirror
And, as could be expected, it seems your comment got deleted, or was never approved for posting.
So why are there at least 3 stories on a product nobody knows yet what's it like?
1
2
3
Then everybody else is obsessing over it too much as well.
Meh. The iPhone is only new in the US, smartphones were around long before Apple made one. The iPod is yet another MP3 player, and Apple is now making yet another tablet. It's not industry changing, it's yet another variation on something of which at least 10 variations exist already.
This whole subject deserves maybe 1 post, once something is known about the device. Any more and it gets annoying and tiresome.
Because the 10 articles that get posted every time Steve Jobs scratches his butt are getting very tiresome.
Slashdot doesn't have an article about every new product Sony or HP make, and I don't see why Apple is any more noteworthy.
That is kind of freaky.
So what happens at that temperature? CO2 starts pooling as a liquid on the ground?
Screw that. I'm not buying any game that requires a connection for single player.
But, of course, if enough people think like me, and sales go down, that'll be blamed on "piracy" as well.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 probably comes close.
I've been saying it for a long time.
Instead of obsessing over getting human appearance right, they should just give it a human shape, and dress it in a fursuit.
Raw pixels comes out to a rather large number per page, though.
There is another standard: IPP, which is widely supported by network printers. AKA CUPS, which is what Apple uses.
In any case, I don't see what any of this has to do with Linux. Go and ask the printer manufacturers to standarize on a bitmap format, and I'm sure Linux would quickly get support for it.
But, if you're worried about cost, you shouldn't be buying a $49 printer in the first place, as you'll quickly pay for that cheapness by getting gouged on ink.
I have no clue why would it be overkill, it's supported perfectly fine by printers that are positively ancient these days and rotting on junkyards.
The kernel does this to a large part already. In fact, printing is implemented in userspace, as well as many other devices. That's what libusb is for.
Devices like keyboards and hard disks don't make much sense to support in userspace, since the kernel already has to support everything having to do with hard disks, and the lower level USB protocol. The kernel knows what a hard disk is, it knows the standard USB protocol, it's very straightforward for it to use a hard disk over USB. Adding userspace there would only make things more complicated.
It already exists, and it's called "postscript". Buy a printer that supports it, and no problem. But if the printer insists in talking its own weird language it's not going to accept your "uncompressed raster data".
USB and SMP are things the kernel implemented, but weren't created inside it. The kernel can't add implementation for a bus that doesn't exist, so it's not going to get more things like that, unless new standards get created.
But, new things get added all the time, just watch the kernel reports at LWN.
Why would I worry about porn? If some tech drone sees there's porn there, big deal.
Now something that worries me a lot more is somebody digging up a credit card number from the browser cache.
Oh, they cared, they just didn't make a lot of noise over it.
The patent was in the encoder. The people who cared about that were the ones who were making programs that encoded .gif files, which would be companies like Adobe, who didn't have that much trouble shelling out the $5000 or so the license was. For the "free software types" it was of course more problematic.
You're forgetting support for more than 256 colors. Hardly anybody uses GIF these days, even without the patents, 256 color images look like crap.
There's one use for encryption people don't generally discuss: tech service.
I've been running a home server for a long time. Such systems over time accumulate years worth of mail, which will contain private data, website passwords, and so on. I personally feel uncomfortable with sending a disk containing years worth of data to a tech support department when I want to say, get it replaced under warranty. There have been a few stories about underpaid techs looking for music and porn on customers' hard drives. And if the disk is broken I can hardly erase it properly.
So my solution:
For servers, encrypt the disk, and keep the key in an USB drive always plugged into the server. If a disk breaks, I remove the disk, and send it for warranty replacement without worrying about the data.
For laptops, I use Ubuntu's disk encryption. It's even better there as laptops usually don't have RAID, and may break for multiple reasons that I can't personally fix.
Yes, but it's unrealistic to expect that if researchers didn't publish attacks, there wouldn't be any.
Somebody found the hole. It can't be that they're the only person on the planet who could possibly figure it out. Eventually somebody else will find it too, or maybe already has. If that person happens to have something malicious in mind, they won't publically disclose it. They'll exploit it for their own gain, or sell the information to people who will do that.
If nobody disclosed vulnerabilities for the public's benefit, they'd never get disclosed until somebody got hit with them. First somebody would perform a successful attack, and a postmortem examination would eventually result in figuring out what happened. But doing things this way means at least one victim is 100% guaranteed, and nobody can prepare for it in advance.
Then I think it shouldn't be possible for that license to legally exist. It should be possible to legally install anything you buy on a toaster, if you can manage it. Unsupported of course.
Ok, then if I were to buy hardware and OS X retail, install it on the hardware, and sell that, why should anybody be able to stop me?
There is no right to profit. That something would make somebody lose money doesn't automatically make it wrong, and that something makes money doesn't make it automatically right.
No, there is plenty duress involved.
By the time you get to read an EULA, you've already bought something, went home, and opened the box. You can try to take it back, but most shops won't accept the returns of opened software, as you could have copied it. And since the vast majority of people consider the EULA to be a kind of standard boilerplate nobody reads or cares about, that if you tried to return a program because you disagreed with the EULA, the store clerk probably wouldn't even understand what you're talking about.
Additionally, EULAs appear on software that comes with hardware you bought. Yeah, a few people managed to return Windows and keep the hardware, but it's an annoying process that doesn't work everywhere.
For EULAs to be at least slightly acceptable, the ability to return the software must be guaranteed everywhere, without arguing for an hour, and it isn't.
But that's not a restriction imposed by the GPL, it's imposed by copyright law.
No, it doesn't.
If you distribute GPL software in breach of the GPL, all that the GPL grants you is automatically revoked. You're left with copyright law. At that point, you're distributing somebody else's copyrighted work without permission, and it doesn't have any license that allows you to, so you're committing copyright infringement.
It's up to the copyright holder to decide what to do about that. Removing the GPLd code should fix the problem, as is stopping to infringe. They could also offer to give you a different license for a price, say they can't be bothered to prosecute so feel free to keep using it, or reach some other agreement. They can also just go and sue you for statuory damages. What will happen will depend on what the copyright holder decides to do, and "release it all under the GPL" isn't necessarily the only thing that can happen.
There's no distinction between developers and users, there's a distinction between people who distribute and people who don't. You're just as required to comply with the GPL if you simply redistribute the software.
I don't like EULAs in general. Imposing conditions after something has been bought and paid for, and ownership has been transferred shouldn't be legal.
Note that again, the GPL doesn't impose anything: it grants things you wouldn't otherwise have, and you can ignore it if you like.
Why have a certification process, when you can have sandboxing? It's not a new concept even.
I'm sure Google could figure out how to do it with say, SELinux.
The GPL doesn't impose anything, it offers to allow to distribute if you comply with some requirements. Read the GPL. You're not required to agree to it. You can not agree with it, and still use the software. In case you don't believe me, I'll quote it:
Nothing besides the GPL allows you to redistribute the software. Without the GPL, you're limited to what copyright allows you. You got your copy, you can mess with it all you want, but that's it. It works the same was with for instance, a book. You own it, you can paint on it, use it as toilet paper, rebind it and so on. You don't get an EULA authorizing you to do such things, because you don't need permission. Copyright doesn't allow you to make copies though.
The "Try putting GPL code into a device then selling it" part is because you're distributing at that point. You're perfectly free to take some hardware, install Linux on it, modify it, and not give the source to anybody else. So long you don't distribute what you created.
It is. Look at any EULA. They always present themselves as mandatory, restrict usage, and place more restrictions than would exist under plain copyright. In contrast, the GPL is optional to agree to, doesn't restrict usage, and if you agree to the terms lifts restrictions.
Apple's business model being sunk would have been an entirely acceptable outcome for me. I'm arguing what I think that should be the rightful state of things. If Apple couldn't do business in such an environment, then I believe it shouldn't be able to.
My argument is that what Psystar wanted to do should be legally doable. This is completely independent from Apple, Psystar, or OS X, in fact I don't even have an interest in any of that stuff. I don't own Apple products, nor want any, for any price or for free.
Actually, no. In any country there are laws that decide how you can sell a product.
On my part, I'm arguing about the general principle of the thing. In your case, I'd be criticising MS in the same way. I'm not making an anti-Apple argument, I'm making an anti-too controlling company argument.
Bullshit. The argument you're making is that if MSFT didn't exist, everything else would be the same, except for the place MSFT currently takes, leaving a gaping void. But things don't happen like that. If MSFT wasn't there, maybe Apple would be dominant, or IBM, or we'd all be using a modern version of the Amiga. Somebody would eventually see the market for cheap computers and provide them.
BTW, the modern PC has little to do with Microsoft, it's the consequence of the reverse engineering of an IBM product.
Now, if Windows wasn't there, that void would have been filled with something else as well. Maybe OS/2, or BeOS, but something, or maybe multiple things would have taken its place.
The GPL isn't affected by this because it's not an EULA.
The GPL doesn't say anything about how you can use the software. Want to change strings in the Linux kernel? Go ahead. Want to reverse engineer the binary? No problem. You can completely ignore the GPL and still use any GPL licensed program. You're not required to accept it in order to use the program (in this respect, showing the GPL as an EULA in an installer isn't really correct).
Now, copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute, so if you want to, you need permission. And the GPL gives you that, if you comply with the requirements. The GPL gives you an offer (you can redistribute, provided you comply with X), and you can accept it by complying with the requirements. That's a contract, not an EULA.
EULAs are different because they attempt to impose terms post-purchase.
Pedantic: IQ 100 is supposed to be the population's average.
If you kill everybody below a set IQ, the scores will have to be adjusted. The average person will now be smarter, so somebody with formerly an IQ of 100 may now have one of 90.
3 reasons:
1. Android and the N900 didn't exist back when the iPhone was released.
2. When it was released it was obviously capable but without applications, which gave plenty motivation for jailbreaking.
3. If I bought it, it's mine, and I'll take it apart if I please.