My point was that Apple removed any ability for OS X to send gui primitives down the wire. It currently isn't possible to remote an OS X desktop the way Windows and X can be. They have something that is slightly more efficient than VNC but operates on the same principle of sending bitmaps down the wire.
Maybe you could provide a reference for that, because I've always been under the impression that this was an urban legend. The constitutional purpose, of course, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not to enhance the public domain.
Then why didn't they last forever from the start? Why are copyrights secured for "a limited time" then? Before that SOB Bono wrapped himself around a tree, he was on record as wanting copyrights to last forever. My point was that you don't need patents if copyrights last forever. And anyway patents just cover "inventions". Infinitely extended copyright plus a large body of work and money to pay lawyers allows you to own all ideas period.
Various "similarity tests" can be employed and twisted if one owns a sufficiently large corpus of work. This is especially sinister when applied to music as the number of chord and note progressions that sound pleasant is limited. There is already a court precedent somewhere that says 4 notes of similarity suffices to establish a work as infringing. It would be very easy for any of current recording companies to abuse this into owning all Western music as most combinations of four notes are to be found in their libraries.
Also it would appear that Thomas Jefferson at the very least very much intended copyrights to be limited to prevent just such a scenario:
Copyright was intended to do both from the start. Very very little is truly completely and utterly original. The idea is that the creator of a work gets the first opportunity to profit from his work. Once he has had the chance to exercise that opportunity those ideas are then free to inspire the next generation of works. Disney profited extremely well from the public domain in it's early years but is now its most deadly enemy.
If copyrights last forever then it is only a matter of time before the right to even have an idea in the first place is concentrated in the hands of the very few. After all, the instant someone does create some "new" work, an existing large copyright holder can always mine his extensive repositories for works resembling the new one and use it a legal bludgeon to steal it. Where is the incentive in that?
I've tried Apple's Remote Desktop product. It isn't much of an improvement over VNC. Apple (I'm sure misinformed X-haters will love this.) COMPLETELY ripped sane remoting capabilitity out their desktop. There own remote admin products send bitmaps just like VNC. It is maybe slightly more efficient because they can hook in a bit lower but they can't do an X11 much less an rdesktop.
Low bandwidth responsive remote desktops is a bullet point that modern OSes should be able to meet. The capability most certainly isn't cruft to be ripped out to get a hypothetical 0.025% performance increase. Windows has it with RDC. Linux/BSD/Unix has it with NX. This is something I know Apple can do. It would help me immensely if they did.
It is still where most Linux advocates want to be, a world where you develop to standard crossplatform APIs that aren't controlled by an abusive monopoly. In that world it won't matter whether it is Linux or Mac or Windows or maybe even something very thin and tuned exclusively to accessing such applications.
If it's free... maybe, but what advantage is there of a Google-style online adware over a locally run program?
You're thinking like someone who actually knows how maintain his machine and fix it when something goes wrong. I know quite a few people who would happily go for this if it were several times more reliable than the experience they get now.
For the unitiated, Windows does Just Work on some level but it comes with irritations that pile up worse and worse over time. Even if you are religious about that list of dos and don'ts the friendly neighboorhood geek gave you, it only takes one teenager wanting to play a few games and do a little IMing to cause a forest of icons to appear on the right side of the taskbar.
Tivo is in the same situation as Apple. They absolutely control a limited number of hardware configurations. Just Making It Work is very easy under such circumstances and they can concentrate their efforts on implementing the results of usability and marketing studies.
MythTV on the other hand has support a multitude of configurations on J. Random Hardware. Furthermore it has to rely on "third party" software such as MySQL and X.Org because largely because of the first issue. It is a fairly mammoth amount of work keeping it Possible To Install on a galaxy of configurations much less making it all work in five clicks. There is also a pretty steady demand for new features and the time required to debug ones recently added. What you have is a limited amount of manpower trying to solve a much harder problem than the one Tivo Inc. has to solve.
That said there ARE easier ways. Knoppmyth will do it as painlessly as it is possible to do. It is based on Knoppix and will do most of the icky hardware configuration for you. It also includes an installer that asks a minimum of questions to give you a functional PVR. The only catch is that it has to know about all of the hardware you are using.
If you think of MythTV as a upstream project rather than the All Knowing Source then you can see where the polish can come from. MythTV is an application that implements PVR functionality. That's it. It takes a distribution to bring the rest of the drivers and dependencies into a coherent polished whole. KnoppMyth is one attempt to do this.
Wal-Mart is just about the only retailer big enough to NOT be pushed by MS. I think of that old koan that asks what happens if an irrestible force encounters an immovable object. Wal-Mart thinks they are the only ones who have the right to be pushy and obnoxious. If push came to shove, they'd probably give MS a taste of no access to their stores for a few months just to make the point. Not because of any love for the penguin mind but just to school them.
IE 6 is basically a collection of COM objects. Those objects have not remained static as Windows proceeds through Service Packs, 2000, XP, and now Vista. Major new developments in seemingly unrelated parts of Windows can introduce new holes to IE.
Non-sequiter. F/OSS isn't a monolith. Individual projects can and do get too big for their britches. The nice thing is that nobody has to live with the products of such if they really don't want to.
Unless real leadership steps are taken to control the dynamics involved, this type of thing can happen to any large organization. The guy had a penchant for naming his little observations after himself but this explains what happens pretty well. The path of least resistance to solving large organizational problems is throwing layers of managers and bureauracy at them. In the process, efficient ways of solving the problems are totally foreclosed.
The mentioned book was by the same guy who came up with The Peter Principle. Organizations as a whole can also reach their level of incompentence. You know that this has happened when internal concerns (like the infamous 'TPS reports') outweigh the original purpose for which the organization was founded.
The record publishers still get to ding artists for things like "breakage". In the early days, you could reliably count on about 9% of the stock being broken in shipping. Recording company contracts charged the artists that fee. As shipping methods grew more reliable, the artists continued to be charged for "breakage". When vinyl was replaced by CDs which are hardly ever damaged in shipment, yep you guessed it! The artists still get dinged.
Physical distribution systems offer the labels a million ways to skim off the top. I think they fear that they won't be able to bring their scams into the 21st century if they discontinue physical media.
If we are talking about shared drives then NTFS doesn't enter into it. Linux can both mount and share Windows network fileshares.
If you are taking a USB harddrive or some such back and forth then NTFS might come into play. Out of the box, Linux can read ntfs easily and can do limited writing on already in place files. If you don't mind mucking about with wrapped drivers from Windows, there is also Captive which gives you the ability to read and write NTFS but it is slow. There is also at least one commercial solution that allows this.
In other words, ignore RIAA, and go straight to the musicians, who, I'm almost positive, are more reasonable.
Only very very big name acts that have managed to be around for a very very long time own their copyrights. Such artists also tend to aspire to be producers and owners. Basically such artists are junior members of the cartel proper. Most are no position to be more "reasonable". If anything they are in debt to the record compaines that have profited from their work and are contractually prevented from being any sort of mitigating voice.
Most music published by RIAA record companies is done as a work for hire. If the songwriters were savvy enough then they may own the copyrights to the lyrics and sheet music. In any case, record companies tend to insist on owning particular recordings. They also tend to insist on contractual restrictions on how, when, and where the music can be recorded and performed regardless of who owns the copyrights.
Think of the position a software developer working in a cubicle for a large software house is in. Most do not own the copyrights and most have no voice in how the business is conducted. The recording industry worked that way long before PCs came onto the scene. That isn't to say software industry "innovations" like EULAs haven't set these vampires to simultaneously drooling and masturbating in public.
They won't permit "going straight to the musicians" to work. This can only work with those few musicians who refuse to have any truck with the cartel.
Novels, which can be extremely disturbing and violent (see: American Psycho) have never had a self-regulation system, and they're entirely ignored by politicians and the press. Why?
You have to be able to read in the first place. Novels don't get burned but I suspect a lot of redneck types sublimate their illiteracy by having a spot of book burning now and again.
Anyone intelligent enough to read for their entertainment has already been written off by the "family values" freaks. Although now that I think of it, I seem to recall more than one fundy getting publically cheesed off about Harry Potter.
If Novell plays their cards right then they can eke some minor wins out of Vista. I suppose RH and other Linux vendors can get some small but tasty slices of pie of it too. I think Novell's management knows this but are just hyping their wares same as any other business.
The "technology" and "developers" underlying the two distros are largely identical. That is correct. The rules developers must follow to get packages accepted and the philosophy behind ARE different.
Ubuntu emphasises the x86 and PowerPC arches and for high profile pieces of software, changing over very very quickly. Debian insists where possible on code that is bit and endian clean that will work correctly on as many arches as possible. This incidently often results in better upstream projects for everyone. When frameworks, APIs, and compilers change they move a little slower and try to catch the interlocked dependencies simultaneously rather than piecemeal. This means that Ubuntu gets things like X.Org more quickly but you can count on things breaking.
I've run my personal workstations on Debian Unstable for years. I would update those machines at least once a week and only rarely would anything be broken. I had one major X hoseup and maybe 7 or 8 annoyances that didn't break anything major in all that time. We're talking years here. Tracking Ubuntu's Unstable is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, weeks or months of stability at best.
While they sometimes cause frustration, the plain fact of the matter is that Debian's policies result in less breakage and smoother transistions when frameworks and compilers change. There is some tension between having the latest and greatest and working systems. Debian's Unstable policies seems to manage that tension better.
I'm also not calling this a bad thing. The product Ubuntu stakes their reputation on the Stable release that sees a major update every 6 months or so. Their policies are intended to result in fairly up-to-date Stable releases. No arguments. I like having the most recent software as long as it is working at least fairly well...and I don't want to have recompile or fiddle with a source based distro. Debian's Unstable is often a better choice for the type of user I am.
Ubuntu is pretty much done with their library transition. It is essentially a GCC-4.x distro now. They are shooting for a Breezy release in October. While I'm on the subject, I'll mention that tracking Ubuntu's unstable has been waaaaaaay more painful than tracking Debian's unstable. It has been stabilizing lately. The modularization of X.Org hurt worse than anything. For awhile it seemed like they were breaking X every other day. I tracked Debian's unstable for years and rarely got burned. Once Debian completes their x.org packages and finished their GCC transitions, I'm seriously considering changing my apt sources back. Unless a stable release is imminent, Debian's anal retentive ways do a decent job of providing late-model software that isn't broken.
If a Hoary user tries to pin Gnome or even just major Gnome apps then the parent post is correct. It will pretty much result in upgrading to Breezy. The only other way out is to pull down the source debs and build them against Hoary's -dev libraries. You can avoid some hair pulling here by using your friend checkinstall to have renamed versions of some upgraded libraries under/usr/local. It is basically what backports.org does for Debian stable (minus the alt libraries part) and it is an undertaking.
I'd just wait for Breezy to release and stabilize and get it then if a working system with a minimum of effort is important to you.
A finite but large number of patches will exist for various players. I'll read and research and only buy kit that has been hacked to the dogs and back.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that Apple removed any ability for OS X to send gui primitives down the wire. It currently isn't possible to remote an OS X desktop the way Windows and X can be. They have something that is slightly more efficient than VNC but operates on the same principle of sending bitmaps down the wire.
Maybe you could provide a reference for that, because I've always been under the impression that this was an urban legend. The constitutional purpose, of course, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not to enhance the public domain.
Then why didn't they last forever from the start? Why are copyrights secured for "a limited time" then? Before that SOB Bono wrapped himself around a tree, he was on record as wanting copyrights to last forever. My point was that you don't need patents if copyrights last forever. And anyway patents just cover "inventions". Infinitely extended copyright plus a large body of work and money to pay lawyers allows you to own all ideas period.
Various "similarity tests" can be employed and twisted if one owns a sufficiently large corpus of work. This is especially sinister when applied to music as the number of chord and note progressions that sound pleasant is limited. There is already a court precedent somewhere that says 4 notes of similarity suffices to establish a work as infringing. It would be very easy for any of current recording companies to abuse this into owning all Western music as most combinations of four notes are to be found in their libraries.
Also it would appear that Thomas Jefferson at the very least very much intended copyrights to be limited to prevent just such a scenario:
http://users.vnet.net/alight/jefferson.html
Copyright was intended to do both from the start. Very very little is truly completely and utterly original. The idea is that the creator of a work gets the first opportunity to profit from his work. Once he has had the chance to exercise that opportunity those ideas are then free to inspire the next generation of works. Disney profited extremely well from the public domain in it's early years but is now its most deadly enemy.
If copyrights last forever then it is only a matter of time before the right to even have an idea in the first place is concentrated in the hands of the very few. After all, the instant someone does create some "new" work, an existing large copyright holder can always mine his extensive repositories for works resembling the new one and use it a legal bludgeon to steal it. Where is the incentive in that?
Perhaps so but RDP is still miles better than VNC or Apple's version of it.
I've tried Apple's Remote Desktop product. It isn't much of an improvement over VNC. Apple (I'm sure misinformed X-haters will love this.) COMPLETELY ripped sane remoting capabilitity out their desktop. There own remote admin products send bitmaps just like VNC. It is maybe slightly more efficient because they can hook in a bit lower but they can't do an X11 much less an rdesktop.
Low bandwidth responsive remote desktops is a bullet point that modern OSes should be able to meet. The capability most certainly isn't cruft to be ripped out to get a hypothetical 0.025% performance increase. Windows has it with RDC. Linux/BSD/Unix has it with NX. This is something I know Apple can do. It would help me immensely if they did.
It is still where most Linux advocates want to be, a world where you develop to standard crossplatform APIs that aren't controlled by an abusive monopoly. In that world it won't matter whether it is Linux or Mac or Windows or maybe even something very thin and tuned exclusively to accessing such applications.
If it's free... maybe, but what advantage is there of a Google-style online adware over a locally run program?
You're thinking like someone who actually knows how maintain his machine and fix it when something goes wrong. I know quite a few people who would happily go for this if it were several times more reliable than the experience they get now.
For the unitiated, Windows does Just Work on some level but it comes with irritations that pile up worse and worse over time. Even if you are religious about that list of dos and don'ts the friendly neighboorhood geek gave you, it only takes one teenager wanting to play a few games and do a little IMing to cause a forest of icons to appear on the right side of the taskbar.
Tivo is in the same situation as Apple. They absolutely control a limited number of hardware configurations. Just Making It Work is very easy under such circumstances and they can concentrate their efforts on implementing the results of usability and marketing studies.
MythTV on the other hand has support a multitude of configurations on J. Random Hardware. Furthermore it has to rely on "third party" software such as MySQL and X.Org because largely because of the first issue. It is a fairly mammoth amount of work keeping it Possible To Install on a galaxy of configurations much less making it all work in five clicks. There is also a pretty steady demand for new features and the time required to debug ones recently added. What you have is a limited amount of manpower trying to solve a much harder problem than the one Tivo Inc. has to solve.
That said there ARE easier ways. Knoppmyth will do it as painlessly as it is possible to do. It is based on Knoppix and will do most of the icky hardware configuration for you. It also includes an installer that asks a minimum of questions to give you a functional PVR. The only catch is that it has to know about all of the hardware you are using.
If you think of MythTV as a upstream project rather than the All Knowing Source then you can see where the polish can come from. MythTV is an application that implements PVR functionality. That's it. It takes a distribution to bring the rest of the drivers and dependencies into a coherent polished whole. KnoppMyth is one attempt to do this.
Wal-Mart is just about the only retailer big enough to NOT be pushed by MS. I think of that old koan that asks what happens if an irrestible force encounters an immovable object. Wal-Mart thinks they are the only ones who have the right to be pushy and obnoxious. If push came to shove, they'd probably give MS a taste of no access to their stores for a few months just to make the point. Not because of any love for the penguin mind but just to school them.
That could be awfully fun to watch.
IE 6 is basically a collection of COM objects. Those objects have not remained static as Windows proceeds through Service Packs, 2000, XP, and now Vista. Major new developments in seemingly unrelated parts of Windows can introduce new holes to IE.
They will find him, and when they go, I expect he will have a meeting with Ballmer. It will not be pretty.
Ballmer will probably shove an Aeron up his ass. Sideways. "I LOVE this COMPANY!"
You're right. This could get seriously ugly.
Better hope F/OSS stays small then.
Non-sequiter. F/OSS isn't a monolith. Individual projects can and do get too big for their britches. The nice thing is that nobody has to live with the products of such if they really don't want to.
Unless real leadership steps are taken to control the dynamics involved, this type of thing can happen to any large organization. The guy had a penchant for naming his little observations after himself but this explains what happens pretty well. The path of least resistance to solving large organizational problems is throwing layers of managers and bureauracy at them. In the process, efficient ways of solving the problems are totally foreclosed.
The mentioned book was by the same guy who came up with The Peter Principle. Organizations as a whole can also reach their level of incompentence. You know that this has happened when internal concerns (like the infamous 'TPS reports') outweigh the original purpose for which the organization was founded.
The record publishers still get to ding artists for things like "breakage". In the early days, you could reliably count on about 9% of the stock being broken in shipping. Recording company contracts charged the artists that fee. As shipping methods grew more reliable, the artists continued to be charged for "breakage". When vinyl was replaced by CDs which are hardly ever damaged in shipment, yep you guessed it! The artists still get dinged.
Physical distribution systems offer the labels a million ways to skim off the top. I think they fear that they won't be able to bring their scams into the 21st century if they discontinue physical media.
If we are talking about shared drives then NTFS doesn't enter into it. Linux can both mount and share Windows network fileshares.
If you are taking a USB harddrive or some such back and forth then NTFS might come into play. Out of the box, Linux can read ntfs easily and can do limited writing on already in place files. If you don't mind mucking about with wrapped drivers from Windows, there is also Captive which gives you the ability to read and write NTFS but it is slow. There is also at least one commercial solution that allows this.
In other words, ignore RIAA, and go straight to the musicians, who, I'm almost positive, are more reasonable.
Only very very big name acts that have managed to be around for a very very long time own their copyrights. Such artists also tend to aspire to be producers and owners. Basically such artists are junior members of the cartel proper. Most are no position to be more "reasonable". If anything they are in debt to the record compaines that have profited from their work and are contractually prevented from being any sort of mitigating voice.
Most music published by RIAA record companies is done as a work for hire. If the songwriters were savvy enough then they may own the copyrights to the lyrics and sheet music. In any case, record companies tend to insist on owning particular recordings. They also tend to insist on contractual restrictions on how, when, and where the music can be recorded and performed regardless of who owns the copyrights.
Think of the position a software developer working in a cubicle for a large software house is in. Most do not own the copyrights and most have no voice in how the business is conducted. The recording industry worked that way long before PCs came onto the scene. That isn't to say software industry "innovations" like EULAs haven't set these vampires to simultaneously drooling and masturbating in public.
They won't permit "going straight to the musicians" to work. This can only work with those few musicians who refuse to have any truck with the cartel.
I'll give you not one but 19.
http://secunia.com/product/11/
Watch what you ask for, you just might get it.
Novels, which can be extremely disturbing and violent (see: American Psycho) have never had a self-regulation system, and they're entirely ignored by politicians and the press. Why?
You have to be able to read in the first place. Novels don't get burned but I suspect a lot of redneck types sublimate their illiteracy by having a spot of book burning now and again.
Anyone intelligent enough to read for their entertainment has already been written off by the "family values" freaks. Although now that I think of it, I seem to recall more than one fundy getting publically cheesed off about Harry Potter.
As you go about proactive internalization into the core compentencies, will you think outside of the box while using a result-driven paradigm?
If Novell plays their cards right then they can eke some minor wins out of Vista. I suppose RH and other Linux vendors can get some small but tasty slices of pie of it too. I think Novell's management knows this but are just hyping their wares same as any other business.
It is a bad choice of words. Messman is talking about locked down machines that you can't download J. Random Shareware Screensaver for.
The "technology" and "developers" underlying the two distros are largely identical. That is correct. The rules developers must follow to get packages accepted and the philosophy behind ARE different.
Ubuntu emphasises the x86 and PowerPC arches and for high profile pieces of software, changing over very very quickly. Debian insists where possible on code that is bit and endian clean that will work correctly on as many arches as possible. This incidently often results in better upstream projects for everyone. When frameworks, APIs, and compilers change they move a little slower and try to catch the interlocked dependencies simultaneously rather than piecemeal. This means that Ubuntu gets things like X.Org more quickly but you can count on things breaking.
I've run my personal workstations on Debian Unstable for years. I would update those machines at least once a week and only rarely would anything be broken. I had one major X hoseup and maybe 7 or 8 annoyances that didn't break anything major in all that time. We're talking years here. Tracking Ubuntu's Unstable is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, weeks or months of stability at best.
While they sometimes cause frustration, the plain fact of the matter is that Debian's policies result in less breakage and smoother transistions when frameworks and compilers change. There is some tension between having the latest and greatest and working systems. Debian's Unstable policies seems to manage that tension better.
I'm also not calling this a bad thing. The product Ubuntu stakes their reputation on the Stable release that sees a major update every 6 months or so. Their policies are intended to result in fairly up-to-date Stable releases. No arguments. I like having the most recent software as long as it is working at least fairly well...and I don't want to have recompile or fiddle with a source based distro. Debian's Unstable is often a better choice for the type of user I am.
Ubuntu is pretty much done with their library transition. It is essentially a GCC-4.x distro now. They are shooting for a Breezy release in October. While I'm on the subject, I'll mention that tracking Ubuntu's unstable has been waaaaaaay more painful than tracking Debian's unstable. It has been stabilizing lately. The modularization of X.Org hurt worse than anything. For awhile it seemed like they were breaking X every other day. I tracked Debian's unstable for years and rarely got burned. Once Debian completes their x.org packages and finished their GCC transitions, I'm seriously considering changing my apt sources back. Unless a stable release is imminent, Debian's anal retentive ways do a decent job of providing late-model software that isn't broken.
/usr/local. It is basically what backports.org does for Debian stable (minus the alt libraries part) and it is an undertaking.
If a Hoary user tries to pin Gnome or even just major Gnome apps then the parent post is correct. It will pretty much result in upgrading to Breezy. The only other way out is to pull down the source debs and build them against Hoary's -dev libraries. You can avoid some hair pulling here by using your friend checkinstall to have renamed versions of some upgraded libraries under
I'd just wait for Breezy to release and stabilize and get it then if a working system with a minimum of effort is important to you.
http://lwn.net/Articles/150464/
To summarize:
"Until that draft has been published, everything is pure speculation and your guess is as good as mine.
.
.
.
So the best thing you can do is to ignore that article.
It is FUD and I am deeply sorry for this, for I have been centrally (if falsely) quoted as the contributor of it.
That has been a most unpleasant experience."
Regards,
Georg Greve
FSFE, President
A finite but large number of patches will exist for various players. I'll read and research and only buy kit that has been hacked to the dogs and back.