In fact, the GPL doesn't go half as far as any proprietary license goes, as it doesn't impose all those extensive usage constrictions and access limitations that companies such as Microsoft impose on their product buyers/licensees.
Actually it does. The GPL implies that the result of linking code against GPLed code is a 'derivative work' (what has happened in the situation under discussion). Ergo, this means the GPL "infects" anything that links against it, requiring that code to also be GPLed. This is not true of most (all ?) proprietry-licensed code.
"Microsoft originally was licensing the Linux drivers, also known as the Linux Integration Components (LIC), in a way that was in violation of the GPL. It was offering them under a combination of the GPL and a closed source license."
Of course, if we then look at what heinous violation of the GPL Microsoft were committing:
The driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts.
And people wonder why companies like Microsoft don't like the GPL in the first place...
No, its a software/driver issue. Same box under a 64 bit or PAE O/S will see the full 4gb.
If you're running a 64 bit or PAE capable OS, then you're comparing apples to oranges. You'll get the same results (missing RAM) with any 32 bit OS. Running in 64 bit or PAE mode changes the way the hardware works.
How much memory is reserved when a machine is running in 32 bit mode, is a hardware issue. Different hardware will give different results - but on a given piece of hardware, different OSes [in 32 bit mode] will produce the same results.
I'm impressed. It boots fast, it runs fast, the new taskbar is clean and useful [...]
I don't get the attraction to the updated Taskbar. Sure it looks cool, but it makes the same UI mistakes that OS X's Dock did, that make task-switching slower and more difficult.
Thankfully, at least, it's still possible to disable the collapse-everything-into-one-button "feature" in 7, as it was in XP.
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone thinks there's truth to this, it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now. I haven't compiled a package or hand edited a conf file once on my 2 month old laptop, and don't expect ever to have to. Also, installing XP (It came with Vista, which I didn't want) and making it work properly with all the necessary drivers took about 3 times as long as installing Ubuntu, and was much more difficult and stressful.
Try regularly moving your laptop between a few different docking station and external screen configurations, and let us know how you go.
Kind of embarassing when your multi-gigahertz PC can barely run a word processor, or stalls when trying to display a photo, huh?
Not really. My "multi-gigahertz" PC is doing vastly more complicated and dynamic calculations and running software developed at a fraction of the cost.
At least in the current state of things, running Linux as a guest with Windows as the host is just... Nuts.
I think you (and lots of other people) need to go and research the difference between a hypervisor and host-based virtualisation. Hyper-V is the former, not the latter.
I know this will probably sound snarky but I don't honestly get it. Why exactly would you want to run Linux server as a guest and have Windows server as the host? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all, and I'm a Windows guy.
I think you're confused. Hyper-V is a hypervisor, not host-based virtualisation. It runs on the bare metal, with a privileged Windows VM for management tasks (equivalent to dom0 on Xen, or the Service console on ESX).
You might want to use Hyper-V to run Linux because you have already committed to Hyper-V for your virtualisation infrastructure. This may be as simple as just having a single Hyper-V server running only one or two VMs, or as complete as multiple hosts with a substantial amount of established processes and procedures for managing that virtualisation infrastructure.
As much as I hate MS, I would absolutely make an about face on my opinions if they started joining in on putting things in under GPLv3 (without skirting it's intent). That's all I ask. I don't get why they don't, the whole marketplace would support them if they did so.
Because the intent of the GPL (and v3 even more so) is to essentially make the primary business model (selling software) of companies like Microsoft unsustainable.
So long as Microsoft's primary business is selling their software and not selling services for software someone else has written, they're not going to be GPLing any code. It would be business suicide.
A specific command could copy changes over in order to update the writable partition. This would be done during the shutdown process and a list of all changes could be reviewed before flipping the switch to make your drive writable.
People will happily run said command to infect themselves when offered some porn.
The problem with defeating malware isn't the technology, it's the people.
How do you propose trolling Slashdot - probably the Internet's highest-profile anti-Microsoft site - is going to achieve that ?
What's $20 million to a company with 10 times that in cash and a market cap in excess of $200 billion?
Difficult as it might be for some to believe, there's not just a great big pool of money at Microsoft's headquarters that people can just walk by and pull wads of cash from to spend on furthering the empire. Expenses still have to be justified, and millions is not an insignificant part of any business unit's budget.
You keep using that term "authenticity," which doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Oh, I'm pretty sure the person who started using "authenticity" thinks I'm using it the way they intended.
Authenticity != accuracy. Someone can say something that they really believe is true, and even if it isn't, it's authentic. Someone posting for purely ulterior motives, lying for whatever financial gain that they can stand to benefit from, posts their crap, intelligent discourse becomes impossible.
The problem is you have no way of knowing why someone is posting what they're posting. Nor have you, ever (well, at least not since the internet was big enough to encompass more than a few dozen institutions).
There really was "authenticity" back in the days of Usenet. Anyone old enough to remember Usenet, FidoNet, etc., back in their glory days will tell you that.
I was there. I do remember. Trolling usenet was practically a professional sport, and you no more knew a poster's motivations then than you do now.
I completely and totally disagree. In fact, the fact that we're having this discussion is proof of that authenticity.
No, it's not. You have no idea what my motivations are for posting in this thread.
If I believed you weren't arguing for yourself, if I thought you were being paid by a media company to try to shift the public frame towards astroturfing being okay, then you'd lose the authenticity you have, and I'd stop arguing with you -- Arguing with someone whose job it is to present a certain point of view would be a waste of time.
Arguing with someone who won't change their mind for any reason is a waste of time.
It's because I believe you're a regular person expressing your opinion of your own free will that your opinion gains authenticity. When the fundamental premise of arguing of one's own conviction and opinion leaves, when someone is aruging as an obligation to their employer, the whole discussion -- regardless of what is said -- loses value.
The problem is you have no way of knowing the motivations of the other people in the discussion. You can make a call, sure, but sometimes you're going to be wrong.
Well, that's because Windows is--undebatably--defective by design. Not to say that the Linux kernel release model doesn't have its issues. But come on, we all know that the design underlying Windows has been bogus since the start.
I mean seriously, most Americans still fail to realise the difference between it's and its even though most of us nonnative speakers are quite fluent with it. We can even tell the difference between you're and your, often even their, there and they're!
Non-native speakers are generally advantaged by having actually been taught English properly, whereas pretty much all native speakers under the age of 30 or so typically have not.
It's hard for people who have spent most of their life being told that "correctness isn't important, so long as you're understood" to have proper spelling and grammar.;)
Couldn't you say that a driver who drives less has less driver experience than somebody who drives more?
Certainly.
Therefore the driver who drives less could be a higher risk?
Not necessarily (and apparently not - unless you can think of a good reason why the insurance companies would lie in a way that would cost them more money by misclassifying risk).
Remember, what an insurance company considers "risk" and what you (as a road user) consider "risk" are not the same thing. The insurance company is concerned about their profits. You are concerned about your life.
Obviously, you ran Vista on a recent high powered machine, with super graphics.
And by "recent", "high powered" and "super" you mean a 3 year old PC that probably cost less than a grand new, right ?
So, even on expensive new machines, businesses and consumers found that Vista sucked.
No, they didn't. They found that on absolutely bottom of the barrel machines it sucked, but if you spent a relatively insignificant amount putting in some more RAM and maybe a basic video card, it worked fine.
The last time Vista needed an "expensive" machine (costing say, over $1000) to run acceptably, was a year or two before it was even released.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the GPL doesn't go half as far as any proprietary license goes, as it doesn't impose all those extensive usage constrictions and access limitations that companies such as Microsoft impose on their product buyers/licensees.
Actually it does. The GPL implies that the result of linking code against GPLed code is a 'derivative work' (what has happened in the situation under discussion). Ergo, this means the GPL "infects" anything that links against it, requiring that code to also be GPLed. This is not true of most (all ?) proprietry-licensed code.
The more likely scenario is that some stupid developer copied and pasted code because he couldn't figure out how to implement it on his own.
Actually, the extent of their GPL violation was linking some GPLed code to closed-source binaries. Truly evil, right ?
"Microsoft originally was licensing the Linux drivers, also known as the Linux Integration Components (LIC), in a way that was in violation of the GPL. It was offering them under a combination of the GPL and a closed source license."
Of course, if we then look at what heinous violation of the GPL Microsoft were committing:
The driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts.
And people wonder why companies like Microsoft don't like the GPL in the first place...
Unlike MS, Google doesn't try to force me into using any particular technology or software (or more importantly, OS).
What technology or software is it you feel Microsoft is "forcing" you to use ?
No, its a software/driver issue. Same box under a 64 bit or PAE O/S will see the full 4gb.
If you're running a 64 bit or PAE capable OS, then you're comparing apples to oranges. You'll get the same results (missing RAM) with any 32 bit OS. Running in 64 bit or PAE mode changes the way the hardware works.
How much memory is reserved when a machine is running in 32 bit mode, is a hardware issue. Different hardware will give different results - but on a given piece of hardware, different OSes [in 32 bit mode] will produce the same results.
I'm impressed. It boots fast, it runs fast, the new taskbar is clean and useful [...]
I don't get the attraction to the updated Taskbar. Sure it looks cool, but it makes the same UI mistakes that OS X's Dock did, that make task-switching slower and more difficult.
Thankfully, at least, it's still possible to disable the collapse-everything-into-one-button "feature" in 7, as it was in XP.
Install 4GB ram into 3 different 32 bit XP boxes (hardware wise) and you'll likely have 3 different amounts of RAM available to the OS.
That's because it's a hardware issue, not an OS issue.
There is a good reason to use it: some forums filter 'ass' but accept 'arse'.
The biggest good reason, of course, is that it's the correct spelling rather than some Americanised abomination of English. ;)
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone thinks there's truth to this, it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now. I haven't compiled a package or hand edited a conf file once on my 2 month old laptop, and don't expect ever to have to. Also, installing XP (It came with Vista, which I didn't want) and making it work properly with all the necessary drivers took about 3 times as long as installing Ubuntu, and was much more difficult and stressful.
Try regularly moving your laptop between a few different docking station and external screen configurations, and let us know how you go.
Kind of embarassing when your multi-gigahertz PC can barely run a word processor, or stalls when trying to display a photo, huh?
Not really. My "multi-gigahertz" PC is doing vastly more complicated and dynamic calculations and running software developed at a fraction of the cost.
The GPL doesn't tell that you can't sell software.
Nor did I suggest that it did.
At least in the current state of things, running Linux as a guest with Windows as the host is just... Nuts.
I think you (and lots of other people) need to go and research the difference between a hypervisor and host-based virtualisation. Hyper-V is the former, not the latter.
I know this will probably sound snarky but I don't honestly get it. Why exactly would you want to run Linux server as a guest and have Windows server as the host? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all, and I'm a Windows guy.
I think you're confused. Hyper-V is a hypervisor, not host-based virtualisation. It runs on the bare metal, with a privileged Windows VM for management tasks (equivalent to dom0 on Xen, or the Service console on ESX).
You might want to use Hyper-V to run Linux because you have already committed to Hyper-V for your virtualisation infrastructure. This may be as simple as just having a single Hyper-V server running only one or two VMs, or as complete as multiple hosts with a substantial amount of established processes and procedures for managing that virtualisation infrastructure.
As much as I hate MS, I would absolutely make an about face on my opinions if they started joining in on putting things in under GPLv3 (without skirting it's intent). That's all I ask. I don't get why they don't, the whole marketplace would support them if they did so.
Because the intent of the GPL (and v3 even more so) is to essentially make the primary business model (selling software) of companies like Microsoft unsustainable.
So long as Microsoft's primary business is selling their software and not selling services for software someone else has written, they're not going to be GPLing any code. It would be business suicide.
Back in the day when Lotus was king and Excel was buggy crap (the opposite of today), MS's motto was "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run."
Ignoring for a second the sheer stupidity of this statement, can you provide any examples - including versions - of DOS breaking Lotus ?
The author maintains control over the source.
No, the author creates control over other people's source.
If you're only interested in your own source code, then the BSDL is fine. If you want to influence other people's code, you need the GPL.
A specific command could copy changes over in order to update the writable partition. This would be done during the shutdown process and a list of all changes could be reviewed before flipping the switch to make your drive writable.
People will happily run said command to infect themselves when offered some porn.
The problem with defeating malware isn't the technology, it's the people.
The "return" part is "total global domination."
How do you propose trolling Slashdot - probably the Internet's highest-profile anti-Microsoft site - is going to achieve that ?
What's $20 million to a company with 10 times that in cash and a market cap in excess of $200 billion?
Difficult as it might be for some to believe, there's not just a great big pool of money at Microsoft's headquarters that people can just walk by and pull wads of cash from to spend on furthering the empire. Expenses still have to be justified, and millions is not an insignificant part of any business unit's budget.
You keep using that term "authenticity," which doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Oh, I'm pretty sure the person who started using "authenticity" thinks I'm using it the way they intended.
Authenticity != accuracy. Someone can say something that they really believe is true, and even if it isn't, it's authentic. Someone posting for purely ulterior motives, lying for whatever financial gain that they can stand to benefit from, posts their crap, intelligent discourse becomes impossible.
The problem is you have no way of knowing why someone is posting what they're posting. Nor have you, ever (well, at least not since the internet was big enough to encompass more than a few dozen institutions).
There really was "authenticity" back in the days of Usenet. Anyone old enough to remember Usenet, FidoNet, etc., back in their glory days will tell you that.
I was there. I do remember. Trolling usenet was practically a professional sport, and you no more knew a poster's motivations then than you do now.
I completely and totally disagree. In fact, the fact that we're having this discussion is proof of that authenticity.
No, it's not. You have no idea what my motivations are for posting in this thread.
If I believed you weren't arguing for yourself, if I thought you were being paid by a media company to try to shift the public frame towards astroturfing being okay, then you'd lose the authenticity you have, and I'd stop arguing with you -- Arguing with someone whose job it is to present a certain point of view would be a waste of time.
Arguing with someone who won't change their mind for any reason is a waste of time.
It's because I believe you're a regular person expressing your opinion of your own free will that your opinion gains authenticity. When the fundamental premise of arguing of one's own conviction and opinion leaves, when someone is aruging as an obligation to their employer, the whole discussion -- regardless of what is said -- loses value.
The problem is you have no way of knowing the motivations of the other people in the discussion. You can make a call, sure, but sometimes you're going to be wrong.
Well, that's because Windows is--undebatably--defective by design. Not to say that the Linux kernel release model doesn't have its issues. But come on, we all know that the design underlying Windows has been bogus since the start.
How so ?
I mean seriously, most Americans still fail to realise the difference between it's and its even though most of us nonnative speakers are quite fluent with it. We can even tell the difference between you're and your, often even their, there and they're!
Non-native speakers are generally advantaged by having actually been taught English properly, whereas pretty much all native speakers under the age of 30 or so typically have not.
It's hard for people who have spent most of their life being told that "correctness isn't important, so long as you're understood" to have proper spelling and grammar. ;)
Change the OS and you won't be able to run your stuff... and this isn't Apple/Linux' fault.
But this is equally true of OS X and - albeit to a lesser degree - even Linux.
Couldn't you say that a driver who drives less has less driver experience than somebody who drives more?
Certainly.
Therefore the driver who drives less could be a higher risk?
Not necessarily (and apparently not - unless you can think of a good reason why the insurance companies would lie in a way that would cost them more money by misclassifying risk).
Remember, what an insurance company considers "risk" and what you (as a road user) consider "risk" are not the same thing. The insurance company is concerned about their profits. You are concerned about your life.
Obviously, you ran Vista on a recent high powered machine, with super graphics.
And by "recent", "high powered" and "super" you mean a 3 year old PC that probably cost less than a grand new, right ?
So, even on expensive new machines, businesses and consumers found that Vista sucked.
No, they didn't. They found that on absolutely bottom of the barrel machines it sucked, but if you spent a relatively insignificant amount putting in some more RAM and maybe a basic video card, it worked fine.
The last time Vista needed an "expensive" machine (costing say, over $1000) to run acceptably, was a year or two before it was even released.