My god you have to be the stupidest person on earth.
Okay, please point me to some Warez that does NOT say "this is Adobe Photoshop" or whatever it is, and instead claims it is the Warez's sites own software that they personally wrote.
Why not rename the old folder to "old version of name" or something like that?
I agree with several posters here that the Mac is being more consistent but I also agree that it can destroy a lot of data.
Several have stated that dragging the contents of one folder to another will duplicate what Windows does, but this is not true. If there are subfolders it will replace them in the destination, while Windows (and rsync and cp and tar) will merge the contents of the subfolders.
Something that would be consistent would be to have any attempt to replace something of the same name pop up a question box that asks what to do. The exact same question would be asked for *both* folders and files:
replace = this is what the Mac does all the time, and Windows does with files
don't replace = don't make any change
rename old one = rename the old copy so it does not interfere with new one or any other files.
rename new one = rename the new copy
merge = this is what Windows does with folders. However this could be applied to *any* file, provided the program that owns the file knows what to do. I could imagine a user wants their Word documents by the same name concatenated. If merging is not possible then it does rename or something.
It will pop up this file for every file, and if merge is selected it will recursively pop up this box for files inside the merged folders. Add the Windows-style "do this for all files" checkmark so the user does not have to put up with this.
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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So you are saying there is no reason for a painting program to support CMYK, because if it has enough precision the conversion to RGB is sufficient? I wish you would explain that to all the people who say "gimp has no CMYK support and is thus useless for professional work". It sounds to me that if what you are saying is accurate, Gimp is "supporting" it just fine, because it does convert from RGB to CMYK on output, and that improving this conversion is all that is necessary. I always read "Gimp needs CMYK support" and "Photoshop has CMYK support" to mean that the actual buffer holding the image as it is edited has four channels in it, please correct me if wrong.
Having done quite a bit of work, but in film, which is rgb, I just want to make sure any attempt to support 16 bit integers is headed off. Any such effort should be put into supporting 16-bit floating point numbers, which can easily support all the useful values of 16 bit integers (it loses a few bits at the bright end, and gains many many bits at the dark end), plus it allows linear light levels to be efficiently represented and does not clamp to the 0-1 range and thus eliminates any gamut issues.
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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Quite right. The ability to represent linear light levels is another reason for using floating point (such as 16-bit half float).
Using linear light levels in 16 bit integers is not recommended. The resolution near zero is too coarse and up near 1 is much too fine, and multiplying by 2 halves your resolution (while is sRGB you need to multiply by more than 4 to halve your resolution, and in float you have to multiply by about 32000). So if you want linear light levels, I strongly recommend using 16-bit half float.
You have no idea what you are talking about
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You seem to think CMYK is somehow 32 bit (8 bits of each?) and that because 8-bit rgb has 24 bits it can't represent it, but because 16-bit rgb has 48 bits it can.
This is wrong. CMYK has FOUR dimensions. It is completely impossible to represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You claim is like saying that if I put finer graduations on a ruler, it can suddenly measure 2 dimensions rather than one!
The converters you talk about (and incidentally are in Gimp already, and in printer drivers when you send them rgb colors) map the 3-D space into the 4-D space. But they cannot fill the 4-D space, any more than you could fill a room with a piece of paper (while keeping the paper's shape a non-fractal). Thus there are CMYK colors that are not output. This has NOTHING to do with color resolution. No useful RGB->CMYK converter will produce both CMY=0,K=1 and CMY=1,K=1 output. Even if the CMYK device was 1 bit per ink and thus only capable of printing 16 different colors, you could not represent all those 16 possibilities with 24, or even 48, or 96 bits, or an infinite number of bits of rgb!
In reality the highest quality CMYK printing devices available have much less than 8 bit resolution in how much ink they lay down (once you take into account errors in ink delivery and spread). The resolution is so low that the volume represented by the RGB->CMYK conversion is over-sampled by many times when the source is 8 bit rgb. So actually 16 bits does not help one tiny bit in the area you are asking for.
The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero). If your screen shows 8 bits and the original was 8 bits, you have effectively reduced your screen to 6 bits. If the original was 16 bits (and your screen was showing the top 8 bits) then after the multiply your screen is still showing an 8 bit image (the top 8 bits of the remaining 14). (that is not real accurate, a correct program with knowledge of sRGB would do something more complex and you would lose more than 2 bits at the bright end, less at the dark end).
Also more than 8 bits should absolutely use 16 bit half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of effort. Float data has the advantage that it is not clamped (this eliminates gamut limitations), and that a vastly larger range of useful data. Even 16 bit data would start to lose resolution on an 8 bit screen if multiplied by more than 256 (actually somewhat larger if sRGB is correctly followed). But 16-bit float would allow a multplication by 65540 or so before there would be loss. The only reason for 16-bit integers was that older computers could not do float fast enough, but this is not a problem now, modern graphics cards even take half-float data directly.
Re:Grabbing my copy before it gets slashdotted
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Maybe they will skip all that nonsense and use 16 bits for half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of data space. Even in sRGB there are far too many samples at the bright end and not enough at the dark end, and it is still limited to the 0-1 range. Floating point data would allow an unlimited gamut as well as allowing lossless brightening/dimming of the image. The only useful and efficient forms for image data are 8-bit sRGB, and 16-bit half or 32-bit float linear representation. I have some hope that at least Gimp will realize this and not give in to the clueless people asking for 16-bit integers, any time wasted doing that would be better spent on float representations.
They consider the copies necessary to run the software fair use, so using it does not violate copyright or any other laws.
By that definition of fair use, a license (which only grants rights) cannot do anything about use of the software, anyway. Because not everybody agrees with their definition of fair use, it also explicitly says that use is allowed.
Since you are not violating the license by using the software, it does not matter whether you accept it or not.
You are correct that you cannot be forced to reveal your source code. However you will then not be in compliance with the GPL and remain able to be sued for copyright violations.
If copyright violations vanished after they happened, which seems to be your assumption, then copyright would be unenforcable.
In reality, even releasing the source code would be meaningless. They still violated the copyright and are liable. It is true that it is likely that releasing the source code would stop the copyright holder from suing, but legally it means nothing.
Obeying the GPL when you redistribute source code does require you to reveal your modifications to that code. However it is a logical fallacy to say that "the GPL forces you to reveal your modifications". That is because you are making the false assumption that "the GPL forces you to comply with the GPL". The true statement is that "copyright law forces you to either comply with the GPL or be liable for copyright infringement".
h.264 is the codec used by modern Quicktime movies. Perhaps you have heard of Quicktime? If not, it is a type of movie format made by a computer company called Apple. Perhaps you have heard of Apple? They make Macintoshes, a fairly popular type of computer.
And MS-DOS did a really lousy job of isolating hardware from software. Ironically, this fuckup assured lockin of the IBM-compatible/PC combination: software written for this platform was essential impossible to port to other platforms.
Actually this is not really accurate. Early MSDOS did just about as well as anybody else at being platform-independent, more of the blame is on IBM, who threw together the "bios" really quickly and badly. MSDOS actually did run on several 8086 machines that were not IBM-compatable. The "bios" is not to be confused with the rom that everybody calls the "bios" today, but instead a block of software added to MSDOS for a particular machine (in effect a single driver for the whole machine). Other machines had enormously faster and more useful bios code.
The biggest problem with MSDOS was the 1-character-at-a-time API to the "bios", which was the same as CP/M. This added an enormous amount of overhead to any I/O. This was addressed in MSDOS 2.0, where they copied the most obvious parts of Unix and made a driver api that took a whole block of characters at a time. However by then it was too late.
IBM screwed it up by making the "bios" interface incapable of even rudimentary things. The text output had no escape sequences and could do nothing other than spew text to the screen like a terminal. The text input was incapable of distinguishing all the keys you could hit on the keyboard. And the "bios", especially the BIOS code in rom, was unbelievably slow. The lower level rom code managed to make an interface that needed TWO calls to print a character (one to move the cursor, the other to set the character), which is twice as bad as the stupidest possible api I could imagine anybody writing!
At the time, directly writing to the hardware was always going to be a big win (until the multi-character api was added). But IBM made directly writing to the hardware a *requirement* to get a working program, and their existing code magnified the win by probably an order of magnitude. It is possible that things would be different if the bios had been intelligently designed (would have taken about 1 day by any copetent programmer of CP/M). Can't guarantee it. But I don't really think the blame lies on Microsoft.
Waaaahhh! Mommy! The cruel man put a dollar sign in Microsoft's initials!!!! All I did was say he was an Communist Open Sores loser who lives in his mom's basement who worships the General Public Virus and Linsux. And then he went and did this HORRIBLE insult. WAAAAHHHH!!!!
Seriously, the letters "MS" mean Multiple Sclerosis to anybody over 35, and I think this is a rather clever way to make an unambiguous abbreviation and hardly an insult. Perhaps you really don't have anything better to complain about to pick on this.
"GPL it" is really shorthand for "release the source in some way". I'm sure the people asking for it would be equally happy with MIT licensed or BSD or public domain. Or even some strange license from ATI as long as it allows the source to be modified and the result put onto a Linux distribution disk.
The advantage of the GPL for ATI is that others could not take the code and put it into closed source things (such as the NVidia driver...)
I can't understand why they don't want to don't want to do "Return to Arrogance", it sounds like a kewl game, though I am not familiar with the original game it is a sequel to...
I have written a lot of code under the BSD-style license and been happy about it. It has let me apply that code in places where corporate policies are too anal to allow GPL code.
That is YOUR code It does not in one bit matter whether you "GPL'd it", it is still yours, to dual license, or to redistribute as BSD, or to stop distributing it at all, and you can give copies to that corporation to do whatever they want, even if you have posted it everywhere with a GPL license. (I'm assumming you told the truth when you said "I have written a lot of code", as if it was somebody else's you are in much more trouble than a little copyright violation...)
Starting out your rant with such a bone-headed mistake was probably not a good idea.
And I don't understand your strange Motorola analogy. Plenty of people who have all kinds of different opinions on OSS would agree that Motorola has zero reason to complain.
Governments started to mandate that all software they purchase must read/write an "open standard" format.
There were 3 possible things Microsoft could do about this:
1. Not sell to governments. They did not want to do this, first they would lose a lot of sales. Far more important, the government would buy something else. Very quickly tens of thousands of government employees and millions working with the government would buy this alternative software for their home machines (as they want to read/write these documents) and Microsoft would lose a huge amount of their income. (this would not really happen, Microsoft would very quickly make Word read/write these documents, but that would lead to the same situation as #2).
2. Make Word read/write an open standard format. But if Microsoft Word could write an open standard format, then other programs, not written by Microsoft, could read the data from Word. And if Microsoft Word could read an open standard format, then other programs, not written by Microsoft, could write data to Word. This means it would be possible for another program to *process* Word documents, and people would be able to edit and work with documents without using Word. At least some would actually buy some competing product. Though this would be a tiny defection compared to #1, they apparently decided it was unpalatable.
3. Lie and cheat and try to stop or defuse this somehow.
Microsoft choose #3. First they flooded the world with a huge amount of disinformation, which basically amounted to "open standard means you must use Open Office and Open Office ONLY. It is physically impossible due to some basic laws of nature for a commercial piece of software, especially one written by the great and powerful Microsoft, to work with an open standard. Therefore every single tiny thing that is wrong with Open Office is an argument against open standards" This FUD was so pervasive that even defenders of ODF seem to fall for it. In fact though Open Office can be complete crap and it is irrelevant.
However eventually a few people realized that Microsoft was lying. It did not help that Microsoft's own engineers (who fortunatly still have a little bit of pride) wrote that it would be "trivial" to make Word read/write ODF.
So they decided they better get something else declared a standard. But designed such that other software not under their control cannot read/write it, thus removing the problems they have with solution #2. Also make sure they beat back their engineers and tell them not to write anything else and continue to pretend they are too stupid to do it. This is what they are attempting now.
Excellent job at confusing server and desktop. This is all about servers, Microsoft is not attacking Linux on the desktop because they see it (perhaps correctly) as an insiginificantly tiny threat. For servers, "familiarity" and "applications" tend to favor Linux/Unix somewhat. Microsoft's arguments are more that it is easier to run Windows servers or that it somehow costs less, and also the truthful fact that their servers integrate better with their desktops (which is it assummed everybody uses).
In addition I very much suspect that companies installing servers do not want DRM. At best they don't care, but saying they requested it is really stupid.
Too bad, because you are obviously intelligent and worked hard on this post. But you do have to be careful to not make whoppers of mistakes like this.
I am downloading AdBlocker right now. I have been using Firefox for years but never tried that out, until I heard all this publicity. Got me interested in it enough to go through the installation, and once that is done I'm probably going to leave it on all the time (provided it works as well as his rant makes it sound).
Unfortunatly making any scheme of "testing" a file for a watermark available makes it easy to remove the watermark (keep trying, running the test after each try, until you succeed). Still what you propose might work, but there has to be a lot of roadblocks before you can check the watermark on a file, ie only very trusted people have access to those filtering programs. A design where knowing how to add the watermark does not help you remove it would also be very helpful (so all those companies required to add them don't have the ability to remove it), but I'm not sure that is possible.
This would work if the detection tools are secret. Oddly enough this is an example where security through obscurity works, the reason being that even the answer is secret, so there is no possible reverse engineering.
The big hole is that there are stupid people in charge of the RIAA/etc. They will immediately say "can't we make a machine that refuses to play the music without the correct watermark", or (as in this post) "can't we use it to control ads?". There you go, idiots, you have just made the detector tool public, your watermark is worthless and will be removed in seconds.
It is certainly a pleasure to see *somebody* who still knows what "FUD" means. I clicked on your response, expecting to find a link to a "microsoft sucks", but you actually limited yourself to a real example of Linux FUD.
Unfortunately far too many people seem today to think FUD means "lie", or even "anything negative said about the competition".
In fact FUD could be perfectly truthful or a fabrication. What it means is spinning some fact (or falsehood) into *fear*, where you say "yea that might seem ok, but just maybe, in the future, it could change into this horribly contrived scenario that I will now state...". Saying anything bad about *right now*, whether it is true or false, is NOT "FUD".
If you limit to true examples of FUD, Microsoft is way ahead in number of statements. In particular almost everything they say about the GPL is FUD, and the patent stuff is FUD. I don't think most of what they say about Linux itself is FUD, even the cost arguments, as they typically just state the immediate cost of changing from Windows to Linux (obviously non-zero), rather than any kind of prediction of future costs, which would be FUD. Sometimes they insert the cost of switching back from Linux to Windows as a cost of using Linux, that just maybe is FUD.
Best example I think of FUD on the Linux side is the dire warnings about what DRM will do. It probably is not going to be anywhere near as bad as stated, worst is that it probably means you have to buy Windows and new hardware if you want to watch any popular entertainment. Your example is also quite good, saying that this feature of Windows could be used for evil purposes, is certainly FUD as well.
I believe this will literally recieve THOUSANDS of times as much publicity as any real information about global warming.
Check in another week. Find out how many mainstream articles have been written about global warming. This mistake is going to be in 95% of the mainstream articles, almost definately.
It is always amusing how the denyers cry that they are being censored. So literally having THOUSANDS of times more chances of having their opinions being published, compared to a study supporting global warming, is "censorship", huh?
Yes, the atime updates are stored in buffers and only flushed to disk on a sync and during idle and otherwise when it gets around to it, just like any other data.
However they still need to be written some time, and even storing the fact that it needs to be written takes time and space. If a program kept writing different data to a file for no reason and that data was never used, it would certainly be obvious that removing the writing of that file would improve performance, even though that data is buffered.
3. Most government offices use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows for word processing, so Microsoft is the best format to use since the government is already integrated with their products.
Unless you are a shill, you have fallen for the #1 piece of FUD they have produced. You seem to believe that there is some technical obstacle so that it is impossible to use ODF with a Microsoft product, that somehow it is physically impossible to use Microsoft Word without using a format designed by Microsoft.
This is false. Microsoft only has to make Word save and load ODF files. Their engineers have even said this would be trivial to do.
Considering that you based your arguments on a completely false statement, I think your whole argument can be dismissed.
Slashdot Mirror
My god you have to be the stupidest person on earth.
Okay, please point me to some Warez that does NOT say "this is Adobe Photoshop" or whatever it is, and instead claims it is the Warez's sites own software that they personally wrote.
Why not rename the old folder to "old version of name" or something like that?
I agree with several posters here that the Mac is being more consistent but I also agree that it can destroy a lot of data.
Several have stated that dragging the contents of one folder to another will duplicate what Windows does, but this is not true. If there are subfolders it will replace them in the destination, while Windows (and rsync and cp and tar) will merge the contents of the subfolders.
Something that would be consistent would be to have any attempt to replace something of the same name pop up a question box that asks what to do. The exact same question would be asked for *both* folders and files:
replace = this is what the Mac does all the time, and Windows does with files
don't replace = don't make any change
rename old one = rename the old copy so it does not interfere with new one or any other files.
rename new one = rename the new copy
merge = this is what Windows does with folders. However this could be applied to *any* file, provided the program that owns the file knows what to do. I could imagine a user wants their Word documents by the same name concatenated. If merging is not possible then it does rename or something.
It will pop up this file for every file, and if merge is selected it will recursively pop up this box for files inside the merged folders. Add the Windows-style "do this for all files" checkmark so the user does not have to put up with this.
So you are saying there is no reason for a painting program to support CMYK, because if it has enough precision the conversion to RGB is sufficient? I wish you would explain that to all the people who say "gimp has no CMYK support and is thus useless for professional work". It sounds to me that if what you are saying is accurate, Gimp is "supporting" it just fine, because it does convert from RGB to CMYK on output, and that improving this conversion is all that is necessary. I always read "Gimp needs CMYK support" and "Photoshop has CMYK support" to mean that the actual buffer holding the image as it is edited has four channels in it, please correct me if wrong.
Having done quite a bit of work, but in film, which is rgb, I just want to make sure any attempt to support 16 bit integers is headed off. Any such effort should be put into supporting 16-bit floating point numbers, which can easily support all the useful values of 16 bit integers (it loses a few bits at the bright end, and gains many many bits at the dark end), plus it allows linear light levels to be efficiently represented and does not clamp to the 0-1 range and thus eliminates any gamut issues.
Quite right. The ability to represent linear light levels is another reason for using floating point (such as 16-bit half float).
Using linear light levels in 16 bit integers is not recommended. The resolution near zero is too coarse and up near 1 is much too fine, and multiplying by 2 halves your resolution (while is sRGB you need to multiply by more than 4 to halve your resolution, and in float you have to multiply by about 32000). So if you want linear light levels, I strongly recommend using 16-bit half float.
You seem to think CMYK is somehow 32 bit (8 bits of each?) and that because 8-bit rgb has 24 bits it can't represent it, but because 16-bit rgb has 48 bits it can.
This is wrong. CMYK has FOUR dimensions. It is completely impossible to represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You claim is like saying that if I put finer graduations on a ruler, it can suddenly measure 2 dimensions rather than one!
The converters you talk about (and incidentally are in Gimp already, and in printer drivers when you send them rgb colors) map the 3-D space into the 4-D space. But they cannot fill the 4-D space, any more than you could fill a room with a piece of paper (while keeping the paper's shape a non-fractal). Thus there are CMYK colors that are not output. This has NOTHING to do with color resolution. No useful RGB->CMYK converter will produce both CMY=0,K=1 and CMY=1,K=1 output. Even if the CMYK device was 1 bit per ink and thus only capable of printing 16 different colors, you could not represent all those 16 possibilities with 24, or even 48, or 96 bits, or an infinite number of bits of rgb!
In reality the highest quality CMYK printing devices available have much less than 8 bit resolution in how much ink they lay down (once you take into account errors in ink delivery and spread). The resolution is so low that the volume represented by the RGB->CMYK conversion is over-sampled by many times when the source is 8 bit rgb. So actually 16 bits does not help one tiny bit in the area you are asking for.
The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero). If your screen shows 8 bits and the original was 8 bits, you have effectively reduced your screen to 6 bits. If the original was 16 bits (and your screen was showing the top 8 bits) then after the multiply your screen is still showing an 8 bit image (the top 8 bits of the remaining 14). (that is not real accurate, a correct program with knowledge of sRGB would do something more complex and you would lose more than 2 bits at the bright end, less at the dark end).
Also more than 8 bits should absolutely use 16 bit half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of effort. Float data has the advantage that it is not clamped (this eliminates gamut limitations), and that a vastly larger range of useful data. Even 16 bit data would start to lose resolution on an 8 bit screen if multiplied by more than 256 (actually somewhat larger if sRGB is correctly followed). But 16-bit float would allow a multplication by 65540 or so before there would be loss. The only reason for 16-bit integers was that older computers could not do float fast enough, but this is not a problem now, modern graphics cards even take half-float data directly.
Maybe they will skip all that nonsense and use 16 bits for half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of data space. Even in sRGB there are far too many samples at the bright end and not enough at the dark end, and it is still limited to the 0-1 range. Floating point data would allow an unlimited gamut as well as allowing lossless brightening/dimming of the image. The only useful and efficient forms for image data are 8-bit sRGB, and 16-bit half or 32-bit float linear representation. I have some hope that at least Gimp will realize this and not give in to the clueless people asking for 16-bit integers, any time wasted doing that would be better spent on float representations.
They consider the copies necessary to run the software fair use, so using it does not violate copyright or any other laws.
By that definition of fair use, a license (which only grants rights) cannot do anything about use of the software, anyway. Because not everybody agrees with their definition of fair use, it also explicitly says that use is allowed.
Since you are not violating the license by using the software, it does not matter whether you accept it or not.
You seem to be seriously confused.
You are correct that you cannot be forced to reveal your source code. However you will then not be in compliance with the GPL and remain able to be sued for copyright violations.
If copyright violations vanished after they happened, which seems to be your assumption, then copyright would be unenforcable.
In reality, even releasing the source code would be meaningless. They still violated the copyright and are liable. It is true that it is likely that releasing the source code would stop the copyright holder from suing, but legally it means nothing.
Obeying the GPL when you redistribute source code does require you to reveal your modifications to that code. However it is a logical fallacy to say that "the GPL forces you to reveal your modifications". That is because you are making the false assumption that "the GPL forces you to comply with the GPL". The true statement is that "copyright law forces you to either comply with the GPL or be liable for copyright infringement".
h.264 is the codec used by modern Quicktime movies. Perhaps you have heard of Quicktime? If not, it is a type of movie format made by a computer company called Apple. Perhaps you have heard of Apple? They make Macintoshes, a fairly popular type of computer.
And MS-DOS did a really lousy job of isolating hardware from software. Ironically, this fuckup assured lockin of the IBM-compatible/PC combination: software written for this platform was essential impossible to port to other platforms.
Actually this is not really accurate. Early MSDOS did just about as well as anybody else at being platform-independent, more of the blame is on IBM, who threw together the "bios" really quickly and badly. MSDOS actually did run on several 8086 machines that were not IBM-compatable. The "bios" is not to be confused with the rom that everybody calls the "bios" today, but instead a block of software added to MSDOS for a particular machine (in effect a single driver for the whole machine). Other machines had enormously faster and more useful bios code.
The biggest problem with MSDOS was the 1-character-at-a-time API to the "bios", which was the same as CP/M. This added an enormous amount of overhead to any I/O. This was addressed in MSDOS 2.0, where they copied the most obvious parts of Unix and made a driver api that took a whole block of characters at a time. However by then it was too late.
IBM screwed it up by making the "bios" interface incapable of even rudimentary things. The text output had no escape sequences and could do nothing other than spew text to the screen like a terminal. The text input was incapable of distinguishing all the keys you could hit on the keyboard. And the "bios", especially the BIOS code in rom, was unbelievably slow. The lower level rom code managed to make an interface that needed TWO calls to print a character (one to move the cursor, the other to set the character), which is twice as bad as the stupidest possible api I could imagine anybody writing!
At the time, directly writing to the hardware was always going to be a big win (until the multi-character api was added). But IBM made directly writing to the hardware a *requirement* to get a working program, and their existing code magnified the win by probably an order of magnitude. It is possible that things would be different if the bios had been intelligently designed (would have taken about 1 day by any copetent programmer of CP/M). Can't guarantee it. But I don't really think the blame lies on Microsoft.
Waaaahhh! Mommy! The cruel man put a dollar sign in Microsoft's initials!!!! All I did was say he was an Communist Open Sores loser who lives in his mom's basement who worships the General Public Virus and Linsux. And then he went and did this HORRIBLE insult. WAAAAHHHH!!!!
Seriously, the letters "MS" mean Multiple Sclerosis to anybody over 35, and I think this is a rather clever way to make an unambiguous abbreviation and hardly an insult. Perhaps you really don't have anything better to complain about to pick on this.
"GPL it" is really shorthand for "release the source in some way". I'm sure the people asking for it would be equally happy with MIT licensed or BSD or public domain. Or even some strange license from ATI as long as it allows the source to be modified and the result put onto a Linux distribution disk.
The advantage of the GPL for ATI is that others could not take the code and put it into closed source things (such as the NVidia driver...)
I can't understand why they don't want to don't want to do "Return to Arrogance", it sounds like a kewl game, though I am not familiar with the original game it is a sequel to...
I have written a lot of code under the BSD-style license and been happy about it. It has let me apply that code in places where corporate policies are too anal to allow GPL code.
That is YOUR code It does not in one bit matter whether you "GPL'd it", it is still yours, to dual license, or to redistribute as BSD, or to stop distributing it at all, and you can give copies to that corporation to do whatever they want, even if you have posted it everywhere with a GPL license. (I'm assumming you told the truth when you said "I have written a lot of code", as if it was somebody else's you are in much more trouble than a little copyright violation...)
Starting out your rant with such a bone-headed mistake was probably not a good idea.
And I don't understand your strange Motorola analogy. Plenty of people who have all kinds of different opinions on OSS would agree that Motorola has zero reason to complain.
Governments started to mandate that all software they purchase must read/write an "open standard" format.
There were 3 possible things Microsoft could do about this:
1. Not sell to governments. They did not want to do this, first they would lose a lot of sales. Far more important, the government would buy something else. Very quickly tens of thousands of government employees and millions working with the government would buy this alternative software for their home machines (as they want to read/write these documents) and Microsoft would lose a huge amount of their income. (this would not really happen, Microsoft would very quickly make Word read/write these documents, but that would lead to the same situation as #2).
2. Make Word read/write an open standard format. But if Microsoft Word could write an open standard format, then other programs, not written by Microsoft, could read the data from Word. And if Microsoft Word could read an open standard format, then other programs, not written by Microsoft, could write data to Word. This means it would be possible for another program to *process* Word documents, and people would be able to edit and work with documents without using Word. At least some would actually buy some competing product. Though this would be a tiny defection compared to #1, they apparently decided it was unpalatable.
3. Lie and cheat and try to stop or defuse this somehow.
Microsoft choose #3. First they flooded the world with a huge amount of disinformation, which basically amounted to "open standard means you must use Open Office and Open Office ONLY. It is physically impossible due to some basic laws of nature for a commercial piece of software, especially one written by the great and powerful Microsoft, to work with an open standard. Therefore every single tiny thing that is wrong with Open Office is an argument against open standards" This FUD was so pervasive that even defenders of ODF seem to fall for it. In fact though Open Office can be complete crap and it is irrelevant.
However eventually a few people realized that Microsoft was lying. It did not help that Microsoft's own engineers (who fortunatly still have a little bit of pride) wrote that it would be "trivial" to make Word read/write ODF.
So they decided they better get something else declared a standard. But designed such that other software not under their control cannot read/write it, thus removing the problems they have with solution #2. Also make sure they beat back their engineers and tell them not to write anything else and continue to pretend they are too stupid to do it. This is what they are attempting now.
That was stupid of me to reply to this. It's obviously a troll. The companies asked for DRM? That should have been an obvious hint.
Please mod him and my responses all down as troll and get rid of it.
Can't believe I fell for it. What an idiot. Have not had any coffee yet, that's my excuse...
Excellent job at confusing server and desktop. This is all about servers, Microsoft is not attacking Linux on the desktop because they see it (perhaps correctly) as an insiginificantly tiny threat. For servers, "familiarity" and "applications" tend to favor Linux/Unix somewhat. Microsoft's arguments are more that it is easier to run Windows servers or that it somehow costs less, and also the truthful fact that their servers integrate better with their desktops (which is it assummed everybody uses).
In addition I very much suspect that companies installing servers do not want DRM. At best they don't care, but saying they requested it is really stupid.
Too bad, because you are obviously intelligent and worked hard on this post. But you do have to be careful to not make whoppers of mistakes like this.
You can use BSD code in GPL licensed software. This is not true of these MS licenses. BIG difference.
I am downloading AdBlocker right now. I have been using Firefox for years but never tried that out, until I heard all this publicity. Got me interested in it enough to go through the installation, and once that is done I'm probably going to leave it on all the time (provided it works as well as his rant makes it sound).
Unfortunatly making any scheme of "testing" a file for a watermark available makes it easy to remove the watermark (keep trying, running the test after each try, until you succeed). Still what you propose might work, but there has to be a lot of roadblocks before you can check the watermark on a file, ie only very trusted people have access to those filtering programs. A design where knowing how to add the watermark does not help you remove it would also be very helpful (so all those companies required to add them don't have the ability to remove it), but I'm not sure that is possible.
This would work if the detection tools are secret. Oddly enough this is an example where security through obscurity works, the reason being that even the answer is secret, so there is no possible reverse engineering.
The big hole is that there are stupid people in charge of the RIAA/etc. They will immediately say "can't we make a machine that refuses to play the music without the correct watermark", or (as in this post) "can't we use it to control ads?". There you go, idiots, you have just made the detector tool public, your watermark is worthless and will be removed in seconds.
It is certainly a pleasure to see *somebody* who still knows what "FUD" means. I clicked on your response, expecting to find a link to a "microsoft sucks", but you actually limited yourself to a real example of Linux FUD.
Unfortunately far too many people seem today to think FUD means "lie", or even "anything negative said about the competition".
In fact FUD could be perfectly truthful or a fabrication. What it means is spinning some fact (or falsehood) into *fear*, where you say "yea that might seem ok, but just maybe, in the future, it could change into this horribly contrived scenario that I will now state...". Saying anything bad about *right now*, whether it is true or false, is NOT "FUD".
If you limit to true examples of FUD, Microsoft is way ahead in number of statements. In particular almost everything they say about the GPL is FUD, and the patent stuff is FUD. I don't think most of what they say about Linux itself is FUD, even the cost arguments, as they typically just state the immediate cost of changing from Windows to Linux (obviously non-zero), rather than any kind of prediction of future costs, which would be FUD. Sometimes they insert the cost of switching back from Linux to Windows as a cost of using Linux, that just maybe is FUD.
Best example I think of FUD on the Linux side is the dire warnings about what DRM will do. It probably is not going to be anywhere near as bad as stated, worst is that it probably means you have to buy Windows and new hardware if you want to watch any popular entertainment. Your example is also quite good, saying that this feature of Windows could be used for evil purposes, is certainly FUD as well.
I believe this will literally recieve THOUSANDS of times as much publicity as any real information about global warming.
Check in another week. Find out how many mainstream articles have been written about global warming. This mistake is going to be in 95% of the mainstream articles, almost definately.
It is always amusing how the denyers cry that they are being censored. So literally having THOUSANDS of times more chances of having their opinions being published, compared to a study supporting global warming, is "censorship", huh?
Yes, the atime updates are stored in buffers and only flushed to disk on a sync and during idle and otherwise when it gets around to it, just like any other data.
However they still need to be written some time, and even storing the fact that it needs to be written takes time and space. If a program kept writing different data to a file for no reason and that data was never used, it would certainly be obvious that removing the writing of that file would improve performance, even though that data is buffered.
3. Most government offices use Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows for word processing, so Microsoft is the best format to use since the government is already integrated with their products.
Unless you are a shill, you have fallen for the #1 piece of FUD they have produced. You seem to believe that there is some technical obstacle so that it is impossible to use ODF with a Microsoft product, that somehow it is physically impossible to use Microsoft Word without using a format designed by Microsoft.
This is false. Microsoft only has to make Word save and load ODF files. Their engineers have even said this would be trivial to do.
Considering that you based your arguments on a completely false statement, I think your whole argument can be dismissed.