... and they're being total hypocrites when they do, because Stallman has publicly stated that anyone who writes closed code deserves to have their code pirated. "Do as I say, not as I do." And there's the irony - under current law, anyone can make a credible claim that the copyrights assigned to the FSF were obtained through fraud.
So yes, the OP was right, and has an excessive flamebait mod: Google is one of the biggest abusers of GPL. Legally, they are 100% in the clear. Morally, less so
How can you be an "abuser" of the GPL if you are adhering to the terms of the license? Oh wait, freetards want to take away even the freedoms granted by the GPL...
The BSD license is more free than the GPL, both for the coder, for the end user, and for everyone in between.
No, give it to ME. I have zero overhead - I can guarantee that 100% of the net you give me will go to the intended recipient.
I even accept chocolate!
Seriously though, if you don't know what to give or where, go ask at:
1. your local police or fire station. They get to see human misery every day, and they know about those "pockets of need"
2. your local hospital or clinic. Same thing.
3. your local animal shelter. Pets are people too, and they're going to need a lot of help dealing with the annual post-christmas "pet dump".
4. your local schools. The teachers know that there's always some kid who need a winter coat, warm boots, or something.
5. your local library. It's probably under-funded, and you can make a "donation" by buying old books from them so they can buy new books.
6. your local church, synagogue or temple - even if you're an atheist, these organizations are still good points of contact for the needy
7. your local homeless shelter. Obvious reasons
8. your local media - tv, radio, print...
9. your local city counselor, alderman, mayor, or whatever
10. your friends and neighbors.
What all these things have in common is that they're all local, they're all just an email or a phone call or a click away, and that they'll have an immediate impact - within days - and they all benefit your community. Charity begins at home.
If the freedom to deviate brought by the GNU licenses leads to fragmentation this severe that no one actually produces something then it is no freedom at all.
Try to explain that to everyone who continues to drink the purple flavor-aid. Fortunately, the message IS sinking in - almost nobody has moved to the AGPL or GPLv3 - it's pretty much dead. By the same token, there's more good stuff coming out that REALLY meets the definitions of free - under a bsd/mit/whatever license, so there is hope. The gpl, long-term, is a dead end. I give it another decade, 2 at most.
That's great news! And it's funny you should mention it - the original motherboard on this machine (a really fancy, high-end, big-name-brand $$$$ affair) died the week the warranty ended, so, since I didn't know if the cpu was any good, I bought the cheapest ASRock it would take... and it just works and works and works - and unlike the original motherboard, which flaked out when the PS caps went bang, this one survived the latest PS death.
So, congrats on your 6 cores - maybe if I'm a good girl over the next few months, the computer fairy will give me something nice in the spring. In the meantime, this is still "good enough" computing for writing code, so./me == happy:-)
probably set a few years ahead, just enough for the launching of the first colony in the solar system, but with the known challenges posed by the current technology.
The "known challenges" aren't technological, but social (economic and political). Unless you posit some global threat that forces people to "get their act together", you'll need to set it at least a generation in the future.
Even the certainty of a killer asteroid won't do it with this lot!
there are numerous Linux distros out that there help keep packages up-to-date on their users' systems, and they each have different ideas on how to do that.
... and they all break something on updates - that's why there's so much distro-hopping.
As for your reference to supercomputers, isn't it funny how not one of the almost 1,000 linux distros can make a desktop that gets even 1/10 of 1% market share... after all, is the desktop harder than a supercomputing cluster?
After all, if Apple could do it with the "dying" BSD and become the most valuable company in the world... oh, wait - the BSD license is business-friendly, so there's actually *REAL* money to be made developing products atop it (so the failure of linux on the desktop is, at least in part, due to a bad licensing scheme).
It was actually *three* chances at gaining market share -
1. the squandered time while XP was getting long in the tooth and virus-encrusted;
2. the missed opportunity that Vista gave all competitors - Apple sure made hay with their "I'm a PC - I'm a Mac" ads in 2007;
3. the upcoming XP EOL date - anyone wanting to capture that business (and there ARE businesses who are stuck on XP and would be willing to pay $$$) would have to get serious about making something (much) better than WINE and crossover. Instead, everyone's tinkering with the desktop UIs, chasing after the sexier (if you're trying to create an "exit strategy" to recoup some of your investment in a money-losing distro) but far less profitable (unless you're an iPad manufacturer or Samsung - just ask RIM and HP) tablet market.
Funny how the only serious competition to Windows is based on the "dying" *BSD. For the over $1 billion that HP blew on Palm and WebOS, they could have made a much better bsd-based system that would have, because it could be closed off, allowed them to dictate that vendors maintain compatibility. Because Apple sure didn't spend a billion on developing Darwin.
with the usual disclaimers that the new.ko files are untested, unwarranted, will cause birth defects, and might make you hunting for chocolate at 3am.
... mmm... chocolate!
The real problem is that there's a financial disincentive to carriers who do NOT break things, so don't expect this problem to be worked out any time soon (with "any time soon" being ~ the time the sun goes nova).
The real solution will be the same as we're now seeing on the desktop - the problem will go away when smartphones are obsolete (give it ~20 years). When every device you're near, from your car to your watch to your tv to the display on the shopping cart at the mall can route your calls and handle all the functionality of a smartphone (your data and applications just "follow you around" like a loyal puppydog), who's going to need a smartphone? They'll be the equivalent of a landline.
Your counter-argument is a weak argument. My argument was not attacking the original claims, but what the GP wrote about how somehow even clothes are a lie, so we should all go around naked.
However, my argument also defeats yours - cosmetics "enhance" nature less than soap and water does, in terms of overall attractiveness. After all, who is more attractive, someone who uses make-up, but hasn't had a bath in a year, or someone who's clean?
The picture was an exaggeration. At what point does it pass from exaggeration to a lie? It depends on the message that was meant to be conveyed. In the case of the cosmetic, the message was "you can draw attention to your eyes and make them more attractive with this product." Is it true? I guess it depends on your eyes - beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Contrast that to your claim that it is "the equivalent of a Ford Taurus ad saying it can do 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds." First, given a decent budget and access to one of these tracks, I probably *can* make a Ford Taurus do 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds. Second, it's easy to test whether the claim is true or not - it's not a judgment call. Now if someone claimed that the Ford Taurus was "the best car in its class" - that would be a judgment call, dependent on, among other things. how you define the class of cars it's a member of.
In real life, you *could* achieve the effects promised in the ad - the only problem is that such heavy use is UGLY! Really - unless you want to look like a punk rocker on stage, 2x, unless you have "super-skinny" eyelashes, is way out there... so while they faked the pics, it's the same as faking a picture of you in a moon landing photo - it doesn't mean that they were all fake, of that it was impossible (unless you're a fan of Capricoron 1:-)
On a related note - one thing I've never been able to figure out is why almost everyone really over-does the wedding day makeup and hair styling - why would anyone want to look like their (real or hypothetical) ugly evil step-sister? And yet...
blame that on your state. i can walk into any gun store and walk out with as many rifles as i can afford, and as many pistols as i can afford six days later.
You're doing it wrong. Walk into any gun store with a rifle, walk out with as many pistols as you can carry the same day*
(*note for the humour-impared - it's a joke, already!)
the main question seems, to me, to be whether 3rd parties would rather have Apache-licensed access to Android at some delay, after Google's official Special Bestest Launch Buddy has been shipping it for some time, or whether they would rather have open-development access to a more restrictively licensed WebOS more or less immediately:
The manufacturers don't care - the vast majority of phones out there are running obsolete software, rarely get updates, and support for updating is usually dropped while the phone is still under contract, so that they can now up-sell you a newer phone.
WebOS as open source is just the latest "redshirt guy" - the only significant difference is that it has already assumed room temperature before making it's stage debut. I give this latest announcement two palms down.
After all, by your logic, cleaning yourself up is "fake" as well. Humans don't naturally smell "clean" without the application of soap and water. So, if you're going to argue that women who use makeup are "faking stuff", since they don't really look that way naturally, by the same logic, so are people who take a bath. Or brush their teeth. Or trim their toenails. Or cut their hair.
Not everyone wants to go around looking and smelling like this guy.
Even cheapie non-military INS systems running in "open-loop" mode (no feedback for corrections applied after initially set) have only 1 km/hour of accumulated error. So there is no way that you'd be able to trick an INS-based system of being even 20km outside it's actual position after 12 hours of flight.
Now combine that with some feedback (for example, the position of the sun once an hour during the day, or a couple of stars at night), and you can pretty much do without gps. In fact, you HAVE to be able to do without GPS in any sane system, since it can fail.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial"...
The problem with craigslist is that a *lot* of that stuff is stolen, and I'm not going to bother, even at 99% off. So I'm just going to wait. This machine works, and it's not like I was using the laptop as a portable anyway...
And of course, the longer I wait, the cheaper a replacement gets:-)
Well, I just got bit by the Nvidia cpu unsoldering from the motherboard problem in my hp laptop this afternoon, so I swapped out the power supply in my desktop that died last week... fortunately, I only lost todays' work (since I had been using my "simplified version control system" to keep a backup of everything on a usb key.
I go thte laptop part-way apart (both hard drives, dvd, wireless, ram, keyboard removed) but it's going to take more work to actually get to the gpu and try to reflow the solder with a heat gun, so for the time being, it's going to sit partly disassembled.
And of course, it would cost almost as much for a new motherboard as it would to just buy another machine... which I am NOT going to do right now...
Oh well - I guess the next time I'm near an electronics store, I'll pick up an external 2.5" hd enclosure or two (it might be fun trying to boot vista on my old desktop and watch it complain that the hardware has changed:-)
at this point, it's Android and iPhone fanboys versus stupid Nokia exec.
I'd go further wrt the smartphone wars - at this point, it's Android and iPhone, period. WinPhones aren't even on the radar (and the insiders are already saying that WinPhone7 sucks, and they're waiting for WinPhone8 to make a decision).
Why FreeBSD? Because I'm not going to want to use it as a standard desktop machine, and because it's what I'm used to (never underestimate the value of inertia:-)
It's possible to build a complete system w/o having to worry about the GNUstapo Nazis. You know how FOSS detractors go on about how the gpl is "viral"? "So what - this is BSD/MIT licensed... you can build a business atop it, same as Apple did." And pretty much all linux software will run on it if you want, since it also has a linux ABI. I'm surprised that the businesses trying to sell "linux on the desktop" solutions don't sell "bsd on the desktop" solutions instead. They could make the core of their product (a modified BSD OS and any add-in tools and apps they make) closed, giving them a revenue stream that's based on the quality of their work, instead of support (the problem with that model is obvious - because if it sucks, you need support, but if it sucks, why would you want it in the first place - it sucks!)
As to your present to yourself - I've had "one of those days..." - iirc it lasted a decade or so. Such is life, but what can you do, except what you're doing - live and learn, because the alternative sucks more.
Just a quick note - if the board supports raid in the bios, set it on and if you're lucky that will enable ahci support as well. It's only a minute to try it, and they may have disabled it in non-raid configurations for backwards compatibility...
So you never saw the trifectas - 3 copies of the same story on the front page... (there was even one double trifecta - but not 6 dupes were on the front page... THAT took some doing... )
And certainly not from an iPhone app spamming them with "Eat at Joe's".
That's better than a busted neon sign that flashes Ea a oe's.
False dichotomy. Those aren't the only two choices, so it's wrong to argue that an iPhone App spamming people is somehow good, for "any" value of good.
One guy had a sign in his window with a typo - people would come in to tell him about it, and he'd say "I know - it gets people in the store who wouldn't ordinarily stop in." They'd talk for a bit, and often ended up becoming repeat customers. All because of a cheap sign with a typo. Ingenuity and understanding human nature - in this case, that people want to have some sort of connection with the people they do business with, even if it's just some chit-chat over a badly-worded sign - beats spam every time.
1. Both of them. Pete got back up.
2. Neither of them. Pete was so fat the vibrations shattered the ice, and everyone fell down.
Now, on the subject of dupe stories - I don't mind the occasional one (stuff happens, people are busy, some stories are worth repeating b/c some people will have missed it before).
Why does it happen? I've seen plenty of stories in the firehose, and when they finally appear, I'm thinking "isn't this a dupe, or old news?" So I can see how anyone can slip up. It's not that big a deal - it's slashdot, not reddit:-p
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't trust your local politicians, then vote them out! It's a lot easier to do at the municipal than the state or federal level.
... and they're being total hypocrites when they do, because Stallman has publicly stated that anyone who writes closed code deserves to have their code pirated. "Do as I say, not as I do." And there's the irony - under current law, anyone can make a credible claim that the copyrights assigned to the FSF were obtained through fraud.
How can you be an "abuser" of the GPL if you are adhering to the terms of the license? Oh wait, freetards want to take away even the freedoms granted by the GPL ...
The BSD license is more free than the GPL, both for the coder, for the end user, and for everyone in between.
No, give it to ME. I have zero overhead - I can guarantee that 100% of the net you give me will go to the intended recipient.
I even accept chocolate!
Seriously though, if you don't know what to give or where, go ask at:
1. your local police or fire station. They get to see human misery every day, and they know about those "pockets of need" ...
2. your local hospital or clinic. Same thing.
3. your local animal shelter. Pets are people too, and they're going to need a lot of help dealing with the annual post-christmas "pet dump".
4. your local schools. The teachers know that there's always some kid who need a winter coat, warm boots, or something.
5. your local library. It's probably under-funded, and you can make a "donation" by buying old books from them so they can buy new books.
6. your local church, synagogue or temple - even if you're an atheist, these organizations are still good points of contact for the needy
7. your local homeless shelter. Obvious reasons
8. your local media - tv, radio, print
9. your local city counselor, alderman, mayor, or whatever
10. your friends and neighbors.
What all these things have in common is that they're all local, they're all just an email or a phone call or a click away, and that they'll have an immediate impact - within days - and they all benefit your community. Charity begins at home.
Try to explain that to everyone who continues to drink the purple flavor-aid. Fortunately, the message IS sinking in - almost nobody has moved to the AGPL or GPLv3 - it's pretty much dead. By the same token, there's more good stuff coming out that REALLY meets the definitions of free - under a bsd/mit/whatever license, so there is hope. The gpl, long-term, is a dead end. I give it another decade, 2 at most.
That's great news! And it's funny you should mention it - the original motherboard on this machine (a really fancy, high-end, big-name-brand $$$$ affair) died the week the warranty ended, so, since I didn't know if the cpu was any good, I bought the cheapest ASRock it would take ... and it just works and works and works - and unlike the original motherboard, which flaked out when the PS caps went bang, this one survived the latest PS death.
So, congrats on your 6 cores - maybe if I'm a good girl over the next few months, the computer fairy will give me something nice in the spring. In the meantime, this is still "good enough" computing for writing code, so ./me == happy :-)
The "known challenges" aren't technological, but social (economic and political). Unless you posit some global threat that forces people to "get their act together", you'll need to set it at least a generation in the future.
Even the certainty of a killer asteroid won't do it with this lot!
As for your reference to supercomputers, isn't it funny how not one of the almost 1,000 linux distros can make a desktop that gets even 1/10 of 1% market share ... after all, is the desktop harder than a supercomputing cluster?
After all, if Apple could do it with the "dying" BSD and become the most valuable company in the world ... oh, wait - the BSD license is business-friendly, so there's actually *REAL* money to be made developing products atop it (so the failure of linux on the desktop is, at least in part, due to a bad licensing scheme).
It was actually *three* chances at gaining market share -
1. the squandered time while XP was getting long in the tooth and virus-encrusted;
2. the missed opportunity that Vista gave all competitors - Apple sure made hay with their "I'm a PC - I'm a Mac" ads in 2007;
3. the upcoming XP EOL date - anyone wanting to capture that business (and there ARE businesses who are stuck on XP and would be willing to pay $$$) would have to get serious about making something (much) better than WINE and crossover. Instead, everyone's tinkering with the desktop UIs, chasing after the sexier (if you're trying to create an "exit strategy" to recoup some of your investment in a money-losing distro) but far less profitable (unless you're an iPad manufacturer or Samsung - just ask RIM and HP) tablet market.
Funny how the only serious competition to Windows is based on the "dying" *BSD. For the over $1 billion that HP blew on Palm and WebOS, they could have made a much better bsd-based system that would have, because it could be closed off, allowed them to dictate that vendors maintain compatibility. Because Apple sure didn't spend a billion on developing Darwin.
The real problem is that there's a financial disincentive to carriers who do NOT break things, so don't expect this problem to be worked out any time soon (with "any time soon" being ~ the time the sun goes nova).
The real solution will be the same as we're now seeing on the desktop - the problem will go away when smartphones are obsolete (give it ~20 years). When every device you're near, from your car to your watch to your tv to the display on the shopping cart at the mall can route your calls and handle all the functionality of a smartphone (your data and applications just "follow you around" like a loyal puppydog), who's going to need a smartphone? They'll be the equivalent of a landline.
Your counter-argument is a weak argument. My argument was not attacking the original claims, but what the GP wrote about how somehow even clothes are a lie, so we should all go around naked.
However, my argument also defeats yours - cosmetics "enhance" nature less than soap and water does, in terms of overall attractiveness. After all, who is more attractive, someone who uses make-up, but hasn't had a bath in a year, or someone who's clean?
The picture was an exaggeration. At what point does it pass from exaggeration to a lie? It depends on the message that was meant to be conveyed. In the case of the cosmetic, the message was "you can draw attention to your eyes and make them more attractive with this product." Is it true? I guess it depends on your eyes - beauty IS in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Contrast that to your claim that it is "the equivalent of a Ford Taurus ad saying it can do 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds." First, given a decent budget and access to one of these tracks, I probably *can* make a Ford Taurus do 0 to 60 in 1.7 seconds. Second, it's easy to test whether the claim is true or not - it's not a judgment call. Now if someone claimed that the Ford Taurus was "the best car in its class" - that would be a judgment call, dependent on, among other things. how you define the class of cars it's a member of.
In real life, you *could* achieve the effects promised in the ad - the only problem is that such heavy use is UGLY! Really - unless you want to look like a punk rocker on stage, 2x, unless you have "super-skinny" eyelashes, is way out there ... so while they faked the pics, it's the same as faking a picture of you in a moon landing photo - it doesn't mean that they were all fake, of that it was impossible (unless you're a fan of Capricoron 1 :-)
On a related note - one thing I've never been able to figure out is why almost everyone really over-does the wedding day makeup and hair styling - why would anyone want to look like their (real or hypothetical) ugly evil step-sister? And yet ...
You're doing it wrong. Walk into any gun store with a rifle, walk out with as many pistols as you can carry the same day*
(*note for the humour-impared - it's a joke, already!)
The manufacturers don't care - the vast majority of phones out there are running obsolete software, rarely get updates, and support for updating is usually dropped while the phone is still under contract, so that they can now up-sell you a newer phone.
WebOS as open source is just the latest "redshirt guy" - the only significant difference is that it has already assumed room temperature before making it's stage debut. I give this latest announcement two palms down.
After all, by your logic, cleaning yourself up is "fake" as well. Humans don't naturally smell "clean" without the application of soap and water. So, if you're going to argue that women who use makeup are "faking stuff", since they don't really look that way naturally, by the same logic, so are people who take a bath. Or brush their teeth. Or trim their toenails. Or cut their hair.
Not everyone wants to go around looking and smelling like this guy.
Good luck :-)
Now combine that with some feedback (for example, the position of the sun once an hour during the day, or a couple of stars at night), and you can pretty much do without gps. In fact, you HAVE to be able to do without GPS in any sane system, since it can fail.
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial" ...
The problem with craigslist is that a *lot* of that stuff is stolen, and I'm not going to bother, even at 99% off. So I'm just going to wait. This machine works, and it's not like I was using the laptop as a portable anyway ...
And of course, the longer I wait, the cheaper a replacement gets :-)
PS: Good luck with your chip-swapping.
I go thte laptop part-way apart (both hard drives, dvd, wireless, ram, keyboard removed) but it's going to take more work to actually get to the gpu and try to reflow the solder with a heat gun, so for the time being, it's going to sit partly disassembled.
And of course, it would cost almost as much for a new motherboard as it would to just buy another machine ... which I am NOT going to do right now ...
Oh well - I guess the next time I'm near an electronics store, I'll pick up an external 2.5" hd enclosure or two (it might be fun trying to boot vista on my old desktop and watch it complain that the hardware has changed :-)
I'd go further wrt the smartphone wars - at this point, it's Android and iPhone, period. WinPhones aren't even on the radar (and the insiders are already saying that WinPhone7 sucks, and they're waiting for WinPhone8 to make a decision).
Why FreeBSD? Because I'm not going to want to use it as a standard desktop machine, and because it's what I'm used to (never underestimate the value of inertia :-)
It's possible to build a complete system w/o having to worry about the GNUstapo Nazis. You know how FOSS detractors go on about how the gpl is "viral"? "So what - this is BSD/MIT licensed ... you can build a business atop it, same as Apple did." And pretty much all linux software will run on it if you want, since it also has a linux ABI. I'm surprised that the businesses trying to sell "linux on the desktop" solutions don't sell "bsd on the desktop" solutions instead. They could make the core of their product (a modified BSD OS and any add-in tools and apps they make) closed, giving them a revenue stream that's based on the quality of their work, instead of support (the problem with that model is obvious - because if it sucks, you need support, but if it sucks, why would you want it in the first place - it sucks!)
As to your present to yourself - I've had "one of those days ..." - iirc it lasted a decade or so. Such is life, but what can you do, except what you're doing - live and learn, because the alternative sucks more.
Just a quick note - if the board supports raid in the bios, set it on and if you're lucky that will enable ahci support as well. It's only a minute to try it, and they may have disabled it in non-raid configurations for backwards compatibility ...
So you never saw the trifectas - 3 copies of the same story on the front page ... (there was even one double trifecta - but not 6 dupes were on the front page ... THAT took some doing ... )
Sorry about that - I never heard of them.
False dichotomy. Those aren't the only two choices, so it's wrong to argue that an iPhone App spamming people is somehow good, for "any" value of good.
One guy had a sign in his window with a typo - people would come in to tell him about it, and he'd say "I know - it gets people in the store who wouldn't ordinarily stop in." They'd talk for a bit, and often ended up becoming repeat customers. All because of a cheap sign with a typo. Ingenuity and understanding human nature - in this case, that people want to have some sort of connection with the people they do business with, even if it's just some chit-chat over a badly-worded sign - beats spam every time.
2. Neither of them. Pete was so fat the vibrations shattered the ice, and everyone fell down.
Now, on the subject of dupe stories - I don't mind the occasional one (stuff happens, people are busy, some stories are worth repeating b/c some people will have missed it before).
Why does it happen? I've seen plenty of stories in the firehose, and when they finally appear, I'm thinking "isn't this a dupe, or old news?" So I can see how anyone can slip up. It's not that big a deal - it's slashdot, not reddit :-p