US Broadband is slow because that's the state of the infrastructure -- the infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and most of the country can't support a broadband build out.
It may surprise some, but the majority of the United States is not serviced by a cable television or internet system:
http://www.fcc.gov/maps/connec...
What happens if you scale that map so that regions are sized according to the population within the region rather than the geographical area of the region?
Or, to put it another way, is the majority of the US population serviced by a broadband Internet service provider? the FCC's "Eighth Broadband Progress Report", from August 2012, says that the percentage of the US population "without access to fixed broadband meeting the speed benchmark", said benchmark being 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, is 6% (5.9% of households), with the figure for rural areas being 23.7% and for non-rural areas being 1.8%. So the majority of the US population is serviced by a broadband ISP (by the FCC's 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up definition of "broadband") - and even the majority of the rural US population is.
Why is an area not serviced?
By "serviced" you presumably mean "serviced by broadband Internet access above some speed threshold"; what is your threshold? Presumably it's better than 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up, as most area that actually has people in it is serviced by services that's at least 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up.
So how about municipal broadband? Take the private company out of the picture and make internet a government service and it must get really cheap, right? Well, Bristol, Virginia is considered the most successful implementation of Municipal Broadband right now. This village of 17,000 people offers fiber optic connections to its residents for....roughly the same price as TWC or Comcast (for comparable speeds) and far far more expensive for 1GBps service ($320/mo) than Google offers.
And Google's service is a little under twice as expensive as the 1 GB/s service Bredbands Bolaget offers - 899 SEK/mo (the rate after the first year) is USD 137.73/mo at the current exchange rate. That, in turn, appears to suck relative to, say, HelloVision's $31.47 (at the exchange rate at the time for the South Korean Won) for 1Gb/s up and down, according to table 2 in the New America Foundation's "The Cost Of Connectivity 2013", but I don't know whether that's a first-year teaser rate or not (Bredbands Bolaget's first-year rate is, at the current exchange rate, $73.31).
The facts are this:
1. Huge portions of the country cannot be cost effectively serviced by high speed internet access.
How high is "high speed"?
3. Most large population centers do not have enough potential 1Gbps residential customers to make it cost effective to upgrade the equipment in those locations to support 1Gbps connection speeds -- businesses can already get those speeds and more but it is not inexpensive.
[Citation needed] What statistics do you have for the number of potential 1Gb/s residential customers in those large population centers?
4. New entrants with deep pockets don't have to deal with replacing equipment that is still being used to pay for the debt taken out to install it in the first place, but they will.
They do, however, have to deal with installing equipment in the first place.
5. More options for internet service in a community mean lower market shares for the participants, which mean
Were those who awarded him the title aware of the Zuse Z3 (it's two items above the ABC item on the page whose URL you cited (note: HTML, despite being a British rather than an all-American invention, isn't that hard to use, and if you use it when posting to/., URLs automatically get turned into links you can click)? It, unlike the ABC, was programmable, although it wasn't stored-program (it was programmed with punched tape) and didn't have, for example, conditional branches.
When I see the complaints against it by China, Russia, the EU, and so on, they're always advocating more restrictions, protection of their interests. They want the ability to blacklist sites that talk about their politicians, that discuss unfavorable religions or religious rights, that cover alternative lifestyles such as gay or transgender, and so on. They want to do it without arbitration, automatically.
So when did the EU (as opposed to China or Russia) advocate those things and indicate that it wants those abilities?
I'll admit Slashdot has serious balls to link to a news site that just got its own redesign, with the exact response that this site's beta got (and deserved just as much).
No, it deserved it more. Next to nbcnews.com, beta.slashdot.org is a masterpiece of clean Web design. (Hell, the new nbcnews.com makes buzzfeed.com look not too bad.)
(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)
EVERYONE HATES LOAD MORE COMMENTS.
either autoload them as you scroll down, or better yet just fucking load them to begin with.
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 (and no auto-load)
I kind of feel as though the walls are closing in on my a bit on the left and right. why so little text and so much empty space?
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
A DE isn't a thing, it's a application providing a layer of crap on top of your WM.
An application is a "thing".
And a DE isn't an application, it's a combination of a toolkit library or libraries, a window manager on systems where you have a "window manager" program (e.g., systems with an X11-based GUI), some applications (file managers, etc.), and various other utilities implementing other "global" parts of the environment (such as a taskbar). You don't, for example, get KDE merely by running KWin as your window manager (assuming it can run on a system with no other KDE components than Qt and some KDE libraries).
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
Tried it. It hasn't "improved" quite to the the extent of nbcnews.com, but it's definitely an "improvement" in that sense. (More shiny, less useful; too many big pictures. I'm waiting for headlines like "15 ways to improve your.Net skills" or "5 weird ways LISP can simplify your code" or....)
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
I think it's funny how they mock the N. Korean government for presenting Kim Il Sung as a god and yet they are all too happy with their year 2014 that pushes some ordinary human being, who may not have even existed
...and who, if he did exist, was born a few more than 2,014 years ago in any case.:-)
Except you are not, because you do not have to step into any vaults or close the door.
Correct. You are not obliged to use GPLed code in whatever project you're doing. Don't want your project subject to the GPL, don't use GPLed code in that project.
My understanding is the GPL (and most other OSS licenses) forces you to distribute your code with the source. It doesn't force you to distribute your code. If you don't distribute by definition you don't have to distribute your source.
Correct, but if you don't distribute the code for your compiler, either 1) nobody outside your organization will be able to compile anything with it or 2) they'll only be able to do so by sending the code to you, as per the only case in your posting that would actually be allowed by the GPL (as I read it).
"If you don't distribute" doesn't handle the DLL case - don't distribute the DLL and nobody else can run the compiler, distribute the DLL and you have to distribute the source.
GPL: Billy, sharing your toys is a good thing and makes people happy; and if you don't share your toys with Tommy, I will beat you into an inch of your life.
BSD: Billy, sharing your toys if a good thing and makes people happy; and you share, others will share back and become your friend.
More like
GPL: Billy, sharing your toys is a good thing, and makes people happy, and if you try to share this toy with somebody who won't share it with other people, I will take it away from you (and that other person).
(Unfortunately, none of these analogies work perfectly, given that software isn't something that you can't use while somebody else is using it, unless it's non-free software with licensing restrictions such as "only one person can use it at a time".)
And RMS' complain isn't about the license, it's about the modular design of clang/LLVM and the fact it can be used piecemeal in other software projects.
The cause of the setback is the existence of a non-copylefted compiler that therefore becomes the base for nonfree compilers. The identity of that compiler -- whether it be LLVM, GCC, or something else -- is a secondary detail.
I think it would be a ok to define an interface for GCC to link with source-analyzing code. At least, I don't see any particular problem in it. It would be like adding such code to GCC, more or less.
They can leave the GPL license in place but just not contribute their changes anywhere.
...and hope nobody in a position to sue them finds out.
I'm pretty sure they would be free to put their own changes in a separate dll under a different license and just hook it into the normal GCCs compile process.
And I'm pretty sure they wouldn't, under the terms of the GPL; the fourth paragraph of section 1 "Source Code" in the GPLv3 says
The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.
(emphasis mine).
Or they could (Apple for example is pretty big brother why not get bigger?) just require people submitting to their App store to provide the source via a web submission and run their custom compiler against the code.
Uhm, I don't get it... have you missed the drama and frustration Apple caused for OSX developers while keeping the default Xcode compiler (gcc 4.2) at an ancient version for years?
I.e., kept it at 4.2.1, the last non-GPLv3 version?
Slashdot Mirror
US Broadband is slow because that's the state of the infrastructure -- the infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and most of the country can't support a broadband build out.
It may surprise some, but the majority of the United States is not serviced by a cable television or internet system: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/connec...
What happens if you scale that map so that regions are sized according to the population within the region rather than the geographical area of the region?
Or, to put it another way, is the majority of the US population serviced by a broadband Internet service provider? the FCC's "Eighth Broadband Progress Report", from August 2012, says that the percentage of the US population "without access to fixed broadband meeting the speed benchmark", said benchmark being 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, is 6% (5.9% of households), with the figure for rural areas being 23.7% and for non-rural areas being 1.8%. So the majority of the US population is serviced by a broadband ISP (by the FCC's 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up definition of "broadband") - and even the majority of the rural US population is.
Why is an area not serviced?
By "serviced" you presumably mean "serviced by broadband Internet access above some speed threshold"; what is your threshold? Presumably it's better than 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up, as most area that actually has people in it is serviced by services that's at least 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up.
So how about municipal broadband? Take the private company out of the picture and make internet a government service and it must get really cheap, right? Well, Bristol, Virginia is considered the most successful implementation of Municipal Broadband right now. This village of 17,000 people offers fiber optic connections to its residents for....roughly the same price as TWC or Comcast (for comparable speeds) and far far more expensive for 1GBps service ($320/mo) than Google offers.
And Google's service is a little under twice as expensive as the 1 GB/s service Bredbands Bolaget offers - 899 SEK/mo (the rate after the first year) is USD 137.73/mo at the current exchange rate. That, in turn, appears to suck relative to, say, HelloVision's $31.47 (at the exchange rate at the time for the South Korean Won) for 1Gb/s up and down, according to table 2 in the New America Foundation's "The Cost Of Connectivity 2013", but I don't know whether that's a first-year teaser rate or not (Bredbands Bolaget's first-year rate is, at the current exchange rate, $73.31).
The facts are this:
1. Huge portions of the country cannot be cost effectively serviced by high speed internet access.
How high is "high speed"?
3. Most large population centers do not have enough potential 1Gbps residential customers to make it cost effective to upgrade the equipment in those locations to support 1Gbps connection speeds -- businesses can already get those speeds and more but it is not inexpensive.
[Citation needed] What statistics do you have for the number of potential 1Gb/s residential customers in those large population centers?
4. New entrants with deep pockets don't have to deal with replacing equipment that is still being used to pay for the debt taken out to install it in the first place, but they will.
They do, however, have to deal with installing equipment in the first place.
5. More options for internet service in a community mean lower market shares for the participants, which mean
So, you have a theory, right, and it has a spout?
I'm a little theory Short and stout Here's my handle Here's my spout.
Red Devil will be released in Q3 2014.
"wants" are infinite.
Yup. If I could, I'd have an infinite number of cars, and an infinite number of computers, in a house with an infinite amount of space.
Or not.
What a careless comment. Many were terminated for much less. He's now a target of US regime.
If by "he" you mean "the European Union's digital agenda chief", if the US government looks for a "he", then Ms. Kroes is safe.
Since names can be so political and controversial, I propose that we just simply use a numerical address.
Fits right in with ICANN, "Numbers" being what the second "N" stands for.
The inventor of the computer is actually John Atanasoff: http://www.computerhistory.org...
He claimed, successfully, the title
Were those who awarded him the title aware of the Zuse Z3 (it's two items above the ABC item on the page whose URL you cited (note: HTML, despite being a British rather than an all-American invention, isn't that hard to use, and if you use it when posting to /., URLs automatically get turned into links you can click)? It, unlike the ABC, was programmable, although it wasn't stored-program (it was programmed with punched tape) and didn't have, for example, conditional branches.
When I see the complaints against it by China, Russia, the EU, and so on, they're always advocating more restrictions, protection of their interests. They want the ability to blacklist sites that talk about their politicians, that discuss unfavorable religions or religious rights, that cover alternative lifestyles such as gay or transgender, and so on. They want to do it without arbitration, automatically.
So when did the EU (as opposed to China or Russia) advocate those things and indicate that it wants those abilities?
I'll admit Slashdot has serious balls to link to a news site that just got its own redesign, with the exact response that this site's beta got (and deserved just as much).
No, it deserved it more. Next to nbcnews.com, beta.slashdot.org is a masterpiece of clean Web design. (Hell, the new nbcnews.com makes buzzfeed.com look not too bad.)
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.
1924 called, it wants its idea back. At least cars aren't getting their styling tweaked every year any more.
(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)
EVERYONE HATES LOAD MORE COMMENTS. either autoload them as you scroll down, or better yet just fucking load them to begin with.
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 (and no auto-load)
I kind of feel as though the walls are closing in on my a bit on the left and right. why so little text and so much empty space?
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
+(10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10)^(10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10)
A DE isn't a thing, it's a application providing a layer of crap on top of your WM.
An application is a "thing".
And a DE isn't an application, it's a combination of a toolkit library or libraries, a window manager on systems where you have a "window manager" program (e.g., systems with an X11-based GUI), some applications (file managers, etc.), and various other utilities implementing other "global" parts of the environment (such as a taskbar). You don't, for example, get KDE merely by running KWin as your window manager (assuming it can run on a system with no other KDE components than Qt and some KDE libraries).
Just hit up SlashBI.
The goggles, they do nothing!
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
Tried it. It hasn't "improved" quite to the the extent of nbcnews.com, but it's definitely an "improvement" in that sense. (More shiny, less useful; too many big pictures. I'm waiting for headlines like "15 ways to improve your .Net skills" or "5 weird ways LISP can simplify your code" or....)
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
I think it's funny how they mock the N. Korean government for presenting Kim Il Sung as a god and yet they are all too happy with their year 2014 that pushes some ordinary human being, who may not have even existed
...and who, if he did exist, was born a few more than 2,014 years ago in any case. :-)
Looks like someone confused an OS with a WindowManager again.
Looks like someone confused a desktop environment with a window manager again.
Except you are not, because you do not have to step into any vaults or close the door.
Correct. You are not obliged to use GPLed code in whatever project you're doing. Don't want your project subject to the GPL, don't use GPLed code in that project.
I thought you were going to tell us about the time you blew a seal.
No, it was just ice cream.
My understanding is the GPL (and most other OSS licenses) forces you to distribute your code with the source. It doesn't force you to distribute your code. If you don't distribute by definition you don't have to distribute your source.
Correct, but if you don't distribute the code for your compiler, either 1) nobody outside your organization will be able to compile anything with it or 2) they'll only be able to do so by sending the code to you, as per the only case in your posting that would actually be allowed by the GPL (as I read it).
"If you don't distribute" doesn't handle the DLL case - don't distribute the DLL and nobody else can run the compiler, distribute the DLL and you have to distribute the source.
GPL: Billy, sharing your toys is a good thing and makes people happy; and if you don't share your toys with Tommy, I will beat you into an inch of your life. BSD: Billy, sharing your toys if a good thing and makes people happy; and you share, others will share back and become your friend.
More like
GPL: Billy, sharing your toys is a good thing, and makes people happy, and if you try to share this toy with somebody who won't share it with other people, I will take it away from you (and that other person).
(Unfortunately, none of these analogies work perfectly, given that software isn't something that you can't use while somebody else is using it, unless it's non-free software with licensing restrictions such as "only one person can use it at a time".)
And RMS' complain isn't about the license, it's about the modular design of clang/LLVM and the fact it can be used piecemeal in other software projects.
Stallman's email says that
Not making the front ends for GCC compilers be libraries was done as one way of preventing GCC's code from being used in compilers that aren't free software, but he also said "We're looking for new methods now to try to prevent this". Discussion ensued, with Stallman apparently not being completely hostile towards ways of linking GCC code with other code:
This is a compiler. What stops a company from branching a GCC and keeping their own mods secret?
The threat of having the Software Freedom Law Center filing a lawsuit against them?
They can leave the GPL license in place but just not contribute their changes anywhere.
...and hope nobody in a position to sue them finds out.
I'm pretty sure they would be free to put their own changes in a separate dll under a different license and just hook it into the normal GCCs compile process.
And I'm pretty sure they wouldn't, under the terms of the GPL; the fourth paragraph of section 1 "Source Code" in the GPLv3 says
(emphasis mine).
Or they could (Apple for example is pretty big brother why not get bigger?) just require people submitting to their App store to provide the source via a web submission and run their custom compiler against the code.
As GCC isn't covered under the GNU Affero General Public License, they might be able to get away with that.
Uhm, I don't get it... have you missed the drama and frustration Apple caused for OSX developers while keeping the default Xcode compiler (gcc 4.2) at an ancient version for years?
I.e., kept it at 4.2.1, the last non-GPLv3 version?
So you, like RMS, will not be happy until it is impossible for a computer programmer to make a living from his occupation.
Assuming the programmer's occupation is writing software to be sold rather than writing software to be used internally within some organization.