Not really. He could just say, "yeah, I hate how Opera deals with China.. but they still make a pretty good browser."
What he said means he acknowledges that in his eyes Opera is doing wrong, that according to his own convictions he should stop using it, but that he won't because it's a good browser. I believe those things are at odds at each other. If you really believe the first part of the sentece, the "it's a good browser" one should be completely irrelevant. Once you say that in your eyes an offense has been committed that by itself merits refusing to support something or somebody, anything further is not necessary.
Do you propose we work to overthrow the Chinese government? I thought we learned from the Bush administration that idealistic crusades are a heap of trouble in their own right. Maybe at some point you have to say "screw the Chinese people", and move on.
Eh? Are you crazy or something? Please point the place where I suggested anything of the sort.
All I'm saying that the OP is being hypocritical. Whatever I happen to think about this doesn't enter into it. I could think Opera is going the right thing, or that they're Satan, and the OP's post would still be hypocritical.
That said, the mind boggles that you'd see the suggestion of a war in there. First, in such cases (speaking in a general sense here) I'd suggest not supporting Opera for siding with the chinese government. Second I'd suggest not supporting the chinese government either. Finally, I'd argue for something similar to the disinvestment campaign that helped end the apartheid. There's no need to spill any blood when you can simply make it ruinously unprofitable to continue to hold a position.
I don't like Google much and avoid their stuff whenever possible. I don't use pretty much anything by google besides the search.
Also, it seems you confuse my position with the OP's position. If the OP says that for him such an action is a good reason to switch to something else, that's hypocritical. My own take on the same situation may be different.
I think that censoring search is a lesser offense than censoring the whole net, as it's easy to work around, and Google does it very rarely and will tell you when they're doing it, so it's easy to switch to something else in that case. Google hasn't reached the point where I will refuse to use it, but it's getting pretty close.
I'm generally not terribly happy with Google, but neither with everybody else, since I realize that every search engine is an exercise in collecting lots of data. So it's hard to choose a good option there.
Sir, it's my darn right to be a hypocrite. Don't like it? Go live in China where they also tell you what sites you can and cannot see. I like my freedom of being a hypocrite.
That's a funny way to view things. But if you have a right to be a hypocrite, I have a right to point out that you are.
Personally, I think freedom always comes with a responsibility of helping to maintain it.
Can't save the whole world on my own you know. I am however an active member of Amnesty and I've written many a letter for the release of captives in foreign countries. Some of them even got released due to this hypocrite and 50.000 other hypocrites writing those letters.
That's a worthy thing to do, no complaints there
And you? What have you done lately?
I participate actively in a small political party that follows my beliefs. Maybe it'll get somewhere and make things better. Maybe in the end it won't. But I've got to try in any case. Nothing useful would come out of me grumbling about how much things suck but not bothering to do anything about it.
Since you're such a morally principled person who feels the need to posture himself over others, what are you doing to help the situation?
Nothing in this case, since I'm not involved in it in the first place. I'd uninstall it if I had it installed.
But I do refuse to do business with companies that I consider unethical, and for instance I bought a music player at another country so that I could have one that fulfills my need while not being from Apple. I also made a special effort to buy a TV not made by Sony back when the rootkit mess happened. Both cases involved some inconvenience and extra expense.
I also stick to 100% open source software on my computer for much the same reason. Sometimes it's inconvenient, but I figure it's a good long term decision.
I would change browser out of protest. Unfortunately there is no better browser for my needs.
That's awfully principled of you. "I would stop eating at a restaurant where the owner is an asshole, but then I'd have to walk half a mile more". It's like an attempt to paint yourself as a moral person, while being lazy and not doing anything anyway.
If you think it's really the wrong thing to do, and wrong enough to justify a switch to something else, then switch. If you think it's a perfectly fine thing for Opera to do, then just say that. But to take your option is simply hypocrisy. Sticking to principles isn't free, there is always some sort of sacrifice involved.
Still, good that this makes the news. Name and shame, but in the end it won't change a thing.
Why is it that some guy is taking the liberty to send anything he pleases to the aliens?
I mean, if we're going to seriously entretain the idea that some day some other civilization might receive the message, then such things should be planned carefully to be as meaningful, easily decodable and as non-threatening as possible lest it bite us in the ass some day. That excludes random people with access to the hardware sending messages just because they can out of their own initiative.
Just for a start, iPhone text to speech? There has to be some better way to encode a DNA sequence that would more obvious to decode that machine-generated voice in a human language.
And, if we're not really taking this seriously and this is just a gimmick, why bother in the first place? Surely there has to be some better use of the equipment.
The performance of the game engine is pathetic at best, for example.
Fast engines rely on tradeoffs and precalculations, and those are very hard to make in SL.
In games like Quake you can know for certain that you're always going to be inside and optimize for that. You can make objects from precisely positioned vertexes that are never wasted, and carefully made textures. You can make precalculations based on the 100% certain knowledge that a wall isn't going to disappear ever, and that new ones aren't going to appear.
SL isn't like that. The world is made from lots of objects with a shape that (except for sculpted prims) isn't precisely controllable, so waste is guaranteed. Object size is limited, so long walls will include multiple objects. Some shapes can only be achieved by combining objects. Textures are user made, often too large, and in many cases not carefully designed. Nothing much can be precalculated, as objects can unpredictably appear, disappear, move, change shape size and texture.
Yes, performance could probably be better, but SL being what it is makes it impossible to ever reach the peformance of a FPS.
The server is not at all good about sending you RELEVANT network traffic first/at the expense of unimportant stuff, so when you get into a highly congested area the game becomes utterly unresponsive.
SL does try to prioritize the important stuff. There's just quite a lot of it. Textures are large and at any time you're going to look at a whole lot of them.
The slowdown has two possible causes, depending on what you refer to. If you get lagged, one possible reason is that you have a connection with a slow upload speed, and the large amount of data being downloaded clogs it. In this case lowering the bandwidth usage setting should help.
If you get a lower framerate that's because texture uncompression is very CPU intensive. SL uses multicore CPUs suboptimally so good improvement could be made there, but unless you have at least two, a slowdown is inevitable.
Need I go on? SL is incompetent at best and while I like to see people try I also like to see them succeed.
Having looked at the code, I don't really think it's incompetent. Of course there's room for improvement, but so there is with everything. SL is a quite odd piece of tech that has to deal with things games don't, so there are significant challenges in making it work well.
SL is about as competently developed as it can be.
It doesn't get the benefit of an optimized and static world with well picked textures, because there's nobody to enforce such a thing. Before SL there was ActiveWorlds, which had exactly the same issues for the same reason.
And SL isn't really a game. It's more of a MUD with a GUI. You couldn't do the same things in say, WoW, and if you managed anyway they wouldn't be tolerated (Blizzard doesn't really like people messing with their system).
It's very simple: there are hundreds of thousands of things on the website, the vast majority of which are crap. Not just bad, but crap. And they stay there because even if nobody wants them, there's no incentive to get them removed either.
It got so bad it's nearly impossible to find the right thing unless you know the precise thing you're looking for.
So, this move is them trying to get people to remove all the crap that doesn't sell, to get a more cleaned up listing.
Having to enter the card number a second time would make people suspicious. I'd probably stop right there. In any case it's a considerable hassle, so I'd shop somewhere else.
It'd have the very nice side effect of killing such programs, due to having one being probably a loss instead of a profit.
It's very much in the interests of the artists to have this, including quite a few very well known ones who can easily get a lot of publicity. Also, the whole "but, but, the artists!" thing the record companies like so much isn't really going to fly with the artists being for this.
If you spend your evenings coding and selling the same software that you write during the day, I think your employer may like to know about it.
That would be a weird way of doing things. I could only see it being possible for an OSS project, because otherwise the employer would own the codebase.
But even in that case, why would I want to do even more work on the same stuff I do at work, at home? I get more than enough of that already, and if I wanted more I'd just stay longer and earn overtime.
Nah, anything I work on from home is going to be completely unrelated to my current job.
If you write software for a living, you can't go home and sell your days coding.
Yes I can, so long it's my own code, made on my own time and equipment, and not something I took from the office.
it belongs to your employer.
No, it doesn't.
Things I do at home on my own equipment are none of my employer's business. The only thing that belongs to my employer is what I do at work.
In this case however I think the lesson plan should belong to the school anyway, since it's a work related activity that should be done at work time -- meaning there should be paid time allocated for the teacher to work on a lesson plan, at the school. Though this is probably an unrealistic expectation as teachers have a weird way of working and routinely do work at home.
What if it WAS a mistake? What if Microsoft didn't check the code/programmer claimed it wasn't GPL/whatever?
Well, they should have. It's a generally very bad idea to release software containing somebody else's code without permission.
Try to pull that off with MS code and see how well that goes.
Because if it was a mistake, they appeared to have been doing the right thing. Furthermore, they weren't even selling this, nor was anyone else. If anything, it was a violation of GPL not copyright stuff.
No, it's very much copyright stuff. GPL infringement is copyright infringement, since the GPL is what gives you the right to distribute the software. Remove the GPL by claiming it doesn't apply or infriging on it, and what you have left is plain copyright.
This was MS' own choice. They could have reached a different solution with the copyright holder. They could have went to court and ended up paying damages, or the copyright holder could have agreed to license it under different terms for money, or lifetime free MS software or whatever. The copyright holder and MS can reach pretty much any agreement, it doesn't necessarily have to involve releasing the source.
Though releasing the source does fix things for sure with no need to negotiate.
I had no idea GPL people were so like the RIAA that they would want to "crucify" a company for possibly accidentally using (stealing? slashdot will call using GPL code against GPL license [and giving the result away for free]"stealing" but slashdot won't call downloading songs/movies stealing?) open source code without releasing the resulting open source. Sounds... very progressive. Encourages people to use GPL. "Hey, use our free software and code! It's great! Use it however you want! But if you don't follow the GPL you are a horrible, horrible company, even worse than people that illegally download copyrighted materials."
GPL != BSD. The GPL very much relies on copyright, and GPL licensed code is just as copyrighted as the Windows one.
People releasing code under the GPL generally do expect it to be respected, and would prefer other not to use it to infringing on it. Just like most companies would rather you not use their software at all than pirate it.
Things not working the way I want them to is always a bug (from my point of view). That's why I want the source to everything, so I can fix things to my liking.
That stuff's closed source, and you didn't ask for those.
I thought I made it clear enough, I want source for everything. I actually use it, as described in another post of mine.
I can get the source for the userland tools and run that under any other OS, and to my knowledge the OS X kernel doesn't contain anything particularly awesome. AFAIK the cool stuff is in the GUI, which is closed. So long it stays that way I'm just not really interested.
You were bitching about the kernel, and were spreading FUD about how it wasn't open. I disproved you.
I pointed to my source.
So I repeat the question yet again: what precisely is wrong with that MacWorld article, and was it ever right, or did something change since then?
You said the kernel sources weren't available and well, you were mistaken.
I cited an article that suggested it was closed. So, I repeat the question: is that article completely wrong? Or something changed since its publication?
The other stuff really IS closed, always has been and it makes sense. Apple is a software/hardware BUSINESS in direct competition with MS. The bits that are closed really are very innovative and impressive and they don't want to give it away. That's their choice.
Yeah, that's great, doesn't work for me though.
And BTW, Red Hat is a "BUSINESS" too, yet I can get the source to their stuff. Funny.
They don't want your contributions to it, which I doubt you would make anyway (most open source users do NOT contribute, they just whine and expect free support) and they don't want to give it to you for free. Wah, go cry about it or simply don't use it. Just because they don't follow the GNU Freetard business model doesn't mean they are screwing you. They really do screw iPhone users AND developers though. Those guys have a legitimate beef.
I'm not whining. You should read the thread you're posting in.
I'm explaining why the mere availability of GCC and other OSS applications in OS X mentioned earlier in the thread by 3vi1 means very little in regards to overall openness, and why that a few parts turn out to have source available still don't fulfill my needs. I'm interested in the ability of debugging the entire system from top to bottom (and yep, I actually do that and not just talk about it), and the ability to open bash in a terminal window doesn't do that much for that.
If your license and OS are so great, why are you even whining about Apple not being open?
I'm not. I'm perfectly happily using Linux on all my computers. Really I'm not really very interested in even a 100% OSS Apple system, as what I currently have works fine for me.
Because you want their goodies for free. Just use Linux and STFU.
Meh. I could probably have their goodies for free from BitTorrent if I really wanted, and I could easily pay for them as well. No, payment isn't the issue. It simply doesn't do what I want it to do, and I was explaining why. In its current state it they could pay me to take it, and I'd still not be interested.
Speaking from experience, I wouldn't recommend trying it. Better just to isolate the bug, report it to Apple and let somebody who understands the XNU kernel fix it.
That only works if Apple cares about the bug, and it's a bug and not some unusual thing I'd like.
Also, what if my bug is "It doesn't work on Atom"?
The above is probably true for Linux too. Most people are just not technically competent to code in the kernel of any modern operating system.
I don't consider myself to be "most people" and aim a bit higher.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Slashdot Mirror
What he said means he acknowledges that in his eyes Opera is doing wrong, that according to his own convictions he should stop using it, but that he won't because it's a good browser. I believe those things are at odds at each other. If you really believe the first part of the sentece, the "it's a good browser" one should be completely irrelevant. Once you say that in your eyes an offense has been committed that by itself merits refusing to support something or somebody, anything further is not necessary.
Eh? Are you crazy or something? Please point the place where I suggested anything of the sort.
All I'm saying that the OP is being hypocritical. Whatever I happen to think about this doesn't enter into it. I could think Opera is going the right thing, or that they're Satan, and the OP's post would still be hypocritical.
That said, the mind boggles that you'd see the suggestion of a war in there. First, in such cases (speaking in a general sense here) I'd suggest not supporting Opera for siding with the chinese government. Second I'd suggest not supporting the chinese government either. Finally, I'd argue for something similar to the disinvestment campaign that helped end the apartheid. There's no need to spill any blood when you can simply make it ruinously unprofitable to continue to hold a position.
I don't like Google much and avoid their stuff whenever possible. I don't use pretty much anything by google besides the search.
Also, it seems you confuse my position with the OP's position. If the OP says that for him such an action is a good reason to switch to something else, that's hypocritical. My own take on the same situation may be different.
I think that censoring search is a lesser offense than censoring the whole net, as it's easy to work around, and Google does it very rarely and will tell you when they're doing it, so it's easy to switch to something else in that case. Google hasn't reached the point where I will refuse to use it, but it's getting pretty close.
I'm generally not terribly happy with Google, but neither with everybody else, since I realize that every search engine is an exercise in collecting lots of data. So it's hard to choose a good option there.
That's a funny way to view things. But if you have a right to be a hypocrite, I have a right to point out that you are.
Personally, I think freedom always comes with a responsibility of helping to maintain it.
That's a worthy thing to do, no complaints there
I participate actively in a small political party that follows my beliefs. Maybe it'll get somewhere and make things better. Maybe in the end it won't. But I've got to try in any case. Nothing useful would come out of me grumbling about how much things suck but not bothering to do anything about it.
Nothing in this case, since I'm not involved in it in the first place. I'd uninstall it if I had it installed.
But I do refuse to do business with companies that I consider unethical, and for instance I bought a music player at another country so that I could have one that fulfills my need while not being from Apple. I also made a special effort to buy a TV not made by Sony back when the rootkit mess happened. Both cases involved some inconvenience and extra expense.
I also stick to 100% open source software on my computer for much the same reason. Sometimes it's inconvenient, but I figure it's a good long term decision.
That's awfully principled of you. "I would stop eating at a restaurant where the owner is an asshole, but then I'd have to walk half a mile more". It's like an attempt to paint yourself as a moral person, while being lazy and not doing anything anyway.
If you think it's really the wrong thing to do, and wrong enough to justify a switch to something else, then switch. If you think it's a perfectly fine thing for Opera to do, then just say that. But to take your option is simply hypocrisy. Sticking to principles isn't free, there is always some sort of sacrifice involved.
The way you're doing it, indeed it won't.
Why is it that some guy is taking the liberty to send anything he pleases to the aliens?
I mean, if we're going to seriously entretain the idea that some day some other civilization might receive the message, then such things should be planned carefully to be as meaningful, easily decodable and as non-threatening as possible lest it bite us in the ass some day. That excludes random people with access to the hardware sending messages just because they can out of their own initiative.
Just for a start, iPhone text to speech? There has to be some better way to encode a DNA sequence that would more obvious to decode that machine-generated voice in a human language.
And, if we're not really taking this seriously and this is just a gimmick, why bother in the first place? Surely there has to be some better use of the equipment.
Fast engines rely on tradeoffs and precalculations, and those are very hard to make in SL.
In games like Quake you can know for certain that you're always going to be inside and optimize for that. You can make objects from precisely positioned vertexes that are never wasted, and carefully made textures. You can make precalculations based on the 100% certain knowledge that a wall isn't going to disappear ever, and that new ones aren't going to appear.
SL isn't like that. The world is made from lots of objects with a shape that (except for sculpted prims) isn't precisely controllable, so waste is guaranteed. Object size is limited, so long walls will include multiple objects. Some shapes can only be achieved by combining objects. Textures are user made, often too large, and in many cases not carefully designed. Nothing much can be precalculated, as objects can unpredictably appear, disappear, move, change shape size and texture.
Yes, performance could probably be better, but SL being what it is makes it impossible to ever reach the peformance of a FPS.
SL does try to prioritize the important stuff. There's just quite a lot of it. Textures are large and at any time you're going to look at a whole lot of them.
The slowdown has two possible causes, depending on what you refer to. If you get lagged, one possible reason is that you have a connection with a slow upload speed, and the large amount of data being downloaded clogs it. In this case lowering the bandwidth usage setting should help.
If you get a lower framerate that's because texture uncompression is very CPU intensive. SL uses multicore CPUs suboptimally so good improvement could be made there, but unless you have at least two, a slowdown is inevitable.
Having looked at the code, I don't really think it's incompetent. Of course there's room for improvement, but so there is with everything. SL is a quite odd piece of tech that has to deal with things games don't, so there are significant challenges in making it work well.
SL is about as competently developed as it can be.
It doesn't get the benefit of an optimized and static world with well picked textures, because there's nobody to enforce such a thing. Before SL there was ActiveWorlds, which had exactly the same issues for the same reason.
And SL isn't really a game. It's more of a MUD with a GUI. You couldn't do the same things in say, WoW, and if you managed anyway they wouldn't be tolerated (Blizzard doesn't really like people messing with their system).
It's very simple: there are hundreds of thousands of things on the website, the vast majority of which are crap. Not just bad, but crap. And they stay there because even if nobody wants them, there's no incentive to get them removed either.
It got so bad it's nearly impossible to find the right thing unless you know the precise thing you're looking for.
So, this move is them trying to get people to remove all the crap that doesn't sell, to get a more cleaned up listing.
Why? It's perfect.
Having to enter the card number a second time would make people suspicious. I'd probably stop right there. In any case it's a considerable hassle, so I'd shop somewhere else.
It'd have the very nice side effect of killing such programs, due to having one being probably a loss instead of a profit.
No, that's not it either.
It's just that such things are very uncommon where I am.
Indeed, I feel fortunate to live in a country with employment contracts that don't require selling my soul to my employer.
I don't think it's going to be that easy though.
It's very much in the interests of the artists to have this, including quite a few very well known ones who can easily get a lot of publicity. Also, the whole "but, but, the artists!" thing the record companies like so much isn't really going to fly with the artists being for this.
That would be a weird way of doing things. I could only see it being possible for an OSS project, because otherwise the employer would own the codebase.
But even in that case, why would I want to do even more work on the same stuff I do at work, at home? I get more than enough of that already, and if I wanted more I'd just stay longer and earn overtime.
Nah, anything I work on from home is going to be completely unrelated to my current job.
Stop right there. I'm not in the US, so what the US law says on it doesn't mean a whole lot for me.
Also, I'm paid by the hour and don't work from home.
I have, in full. There's none of that nonsense in it. If there was, I wouldn't have signed it.
Yes I can, so long it's my own code, made on my own time and equipment, and not something I took from the office.
No, it doesn't.
Things I do at home on my own equipment are none of my employer's business. The only thing that belongs to my employer is what I do at work.
In this case however I think the lesson plan should belong to the school anyway, since it's a work related activity that should be done at work time -- meaning there should be paid time allocated for the teacher to work on a lesson plan, at the school. Though this is probably an unrealistic expectation as teachers have a weird way of working and routinely do work at home.
No, that was a patent case and not copyright infringement.
Well, they should have. It's a generally very bad idea to release software containing somebody else's code without permission.
Try to pull that off with MS code and see how well that goes.
No, it's very much copyright stuff. GPL infringement is copyright infringement, since the GPL is what gives you the right to distribute the software. Remove the GPL by claiming it doesn't apply or infriging on it, and what you have left is plain copyright.
This was MS' own choice. They could have reached a different solution with the copyright holder. They could have went to court and ended up paying damages, or the copyright holder could have agreed to license it under different terms for money, or lifetime free MS software or whatever. The copyright holder and MS can reach pretty much any agreement, it doesn't necessarily have to involve releasing the source.
Though releasing the source does fix things for sure with no need to negotiate.
GPL != BSD. The GPL very much relies on copyright, and GPL licensed code is just as copyrighted as the Windows one.
People releasing code under the GPL generally do expect it to be respected, and would prefer other not to use it to infringing on it. Just like most companies would rather you not use their software at all than pirate it.
It will trap light alright, just not at the Earth's radius.
If all of the Earth was squeezed into a tiny point the gravity would remain the same for things that are where the ground used to be.
But as you get closer to it, it will grow, until you can't escape anymore.
There's no IP.
There is copyright, patents and trademarks. This sounds like a trademark thing, so no need to confuse the issue.
Things not working the way I want them to is always a bug (from my point of view). That's why I want the source to everything, so I can fix things to my liking.
I thought I made it clear enough, I want source for everything. I actually use it, as described in another post of mine.
I can get the source for the userland tools and run that under any other OS, and to my knowledge the OS X kernel doesn't contain anything particularly awesome. AFAIK the cool stuff is in the GUI, which is closed. So long it stays that way I'm just not really interested.
I pointed to my source.
So I repeat the question yet again: what precisely is wrong with that MacWorld article, and was it ever right, or did something change since then?
I cited an article that suggested it was closed. So, I repeat the question: is that article completely wrong? Or something changed since its publication?
Yeah, that's great, doesn't work for me though.
And BTW, Red Hat is a "BUSINESS" too, yet I can get the source to their stuff. Funny.
I'm not whining. You should read the thread you're posting in.
I'm explaining why the mere availability of GCC and other OSS applications in OS X mentioned earlier in the thread by 3vi1 means very little in regards to overall openness, and why that a few parts turn out to have source available still don't fulfill my needs. I'm interested in the ability of debugging the entire system from top to bottom (and yep, I actually do that and not just talk about it), and the ability to open bash in a terminal window doesn't do that much for that.
I'm not. I'm perfectly happily using Linux on all my computers. Really I'm not really very interested in even a 100% OSS Apple system, as what I currently have works fine for me.
Meh. I could probably have their goodies for free from BitTorrent if I really wanted, and I could easily pay for them as well. No, payment isn't the issue. It simply doesn't do what I want it to do, and I was explaining why. In its current state it they could pay me to take it, and I'd still not be interested.
Sure, where is the source to the display server, window manager, and audio manager?
What is this then? Did things change?
That only works if Apple cares about the bug, and it's a bug and not some unusual thing I'd like.
Also, what if my bug is "It doesn't work on Atom"?
I don't consider myself to be "most people" and aim a bit higher.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."