Google could make a real boom if it supported more countries and made itself a more diverse market. I know it's a problem with banking and tax laws but there's money to be made with it:)
In case you are saying that it's somehow a "bad" or "unwanted" thing and, like, people don't realize that Big Evil Companies are going to !!steal!! their precious code if they put it under the BSD license and are just doing it because they are ignorant:
Wake up. That's what the BSDL is *created for*! If you don't agree with it, go use something else. Don't pretend you know the reasons behind people's actions better than they do.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France), France has a population of over 63 milion people! 165 thousand is probably the size of average village over there. It's nothing.
Since there were so little signatures, this could mean three things: a) there's and evil scheme to supress free speech and petition signing, b) people are not well educated on the subject or c) people simply don't agree with the petition. Choose one.
<sarcasm>But of course! Since Linux is the Open Source poster child, pretty soon all vendors and "distros" will create something like that! Of course, all of them will be 100% mutually compatible...</sarcasm>
The difference is that Europe still remembers the bad old days, the fascist goverments and how wars get started. America has had no war on its turf for so long the people cannot recognize the symptoms anymore.
The problem is that "appropriate safegaurds" simply cannot exist because it's so darn easy to get to any information once it is in digital form. Every day we hear about problems with worms, viruses & ineffective IT security (military plans on stolen laptops? sure - a dime a dozen) so it is hard to believe that a goverment agency (you know... bureucratic, inefficent, slow and almost stupid) will protect sensitive data "appropriately."
And "sensitive" data can be anything, it only depends on the "right" interpretation.
For a mass-market product such as Vista, three months is probably the time it takes to print the CD-s and move the enormous quantity of product boxes/packages to mom&pops computer stores everywhere. So, have they started printing CD-s just now?
Don't forget what population is the market drivers in the IT industry everywhere - it's not gamers, for the most part it isn't even home users. It's goverment and businesses. And this segment doesn't require high powered CPU's, memory or video cards - they need a computer to do their business on.
I doubt the target market for such cheep computers is families at home - as many people pointed out, it'd take 4-6 months pay for them. It's businesses that will make most use of this hardware, and in bulk orders of hundreds per company.
mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?
I'd say it's "human nature" - not many people want to create something that will be totally unknown and unused. In other words: modders of famous games become famous, modders or creators of unknown games gain nothing.
I'd say it's the other way round: DRM is Linux's crowds biggest fear. Consumers WILL NOT use Linux if they cannot do the things they do on other popular OSes.
But that's the point: Windows users don't have to worry about compatibility libraries and syscalls.
Compatibility libraries won't solve everything. Environments such as GNOME and KDE have lots of IPC messaging going on, and the protocols have changed. Unless the whole "desktop system" is from the era the application binary is, it won't work.
Issues with running binaries from foreign "distros" are also huge.
MAYBE you could if the application is statically linked (and who in their right mind staticaly linked applications 10 years ago when memory & disk were scare?) but the scope and quality of such binaries is somewhere in the range of "sendmail". Probably even 'ls' won't run because some brainiac made an incompatible syscall change along the way.
Sure you can... if your system is as old as the applications you wish to run. You should really compare apples and apples and try to run a GRAPHICAL application - you won't find a single early GNOME or KDE application binary that can run today (hell, even if you find a working "xclock" binary from that time it will be a miracle). Like it or not, when most people today say "Linux" they mean "that pretty desktop I always see screenshots of", not the console.
It's too late to whine now but I didn't mean the "pretty colors" bit literally - of course the overall consitency of look and feel is just as important, if not more. People would be acting dumb if they bought a computer as an art piece:)
I'd be first to advertise that a) Microsoft has really good JIT compilers and b) better algorithms always win over brute force speed but the fact is that using non-native code has at least two downsides:
Something sometime has to translate it to native code (so at best, the startup time of the app is increased)
It takes more memory to load the intermediate code, compile it and run it than to load and run native code
Additionally, Obj-C is not garbage collected, so it doesn't have "the usual suspects" issues of GC (application pause while collecting garbage, oportunity for bloat, etc.). In the absolute performance, native code will almost always win.
(BUT: it's true that with todays machines, memory configurations and the "usual" applications, most users probably won't distinguish between a hand-coded assembler application and a totaly interpreted one)
This is actually a nice indication of a (now not so) subtle shift in the industry. Ten years ago a company that produced a unix-like OS with so much lag in a core system would be loughed down and burn. Now, people don't even notice (for the most part). You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.
Um, just for clarification sake, FreeBSD has never skipped a major version number. Going from 5.5 to 6.0 doesn't count as version bloat. (see here if you have an hour to spare: http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html). If anything, the BSD projects went backwards: from 4.4BSD to (Free|Net)BSD 1.0.
One more difference: Cocoa's default language (Objective C) is not interpreted at runtime (though it has dynamic properties that make it almost so:) ) and is not a garbage collected language. This makes it almost as fast as raw C.
What's the problem with using programmable keyboards? AFAIK, the only thing you might do in WoW with those is to record macros of often-used key sequences. What's the problem with that? If the server validly accepts fast keypresses, why should it matter if they were generated with a keyboard macro or a human hand?
Also, how did they detect it was a programmable keyboard on the client side and not a very repetitive human?
Maybe it is time to ask that AMD gets out of the Trusted alliance before their chips are like that?
Either that or start buying "independant" products such as VIA's processors, which even have hardware AES and hardware random number generators, for that added safety when you're feeling paranoid.
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Um, because money doesn't grow on trees?
Google could make a real boom if it supported more countries and made itself a more diverse market. I know it's a problem with banking and tax laws but there's money to be made with it :)
Wake up. That's what the BSDL is *created for*! If you don't agree with it, go use something else. Don't pretend you know the reasons behind people's actions better than they do.
Since there were so little signatures, this could mean three things: a) there's and evil scheme to supress free speech and petition signing, b) people are not well educated on the subject or c) people simply don't agree with the petition. Choose one.
The difference is that Europe still remembers the bad old days, the fascist goverments and how wars get started. America has had no war on its turf for so long the people cannot recognize the symptoms anymore.
And "sensitive" data can be anything, it only depends on the "right" interpretation.
For a mass-market product such as Vista, three months is probably the time it takes to print the CD-s and move the enormous quantity of product boxes/packages to mom&pops computer stores everywhere. So, have they started printing CD-s just now?
Has anyone else interpreted this as a parody of Intel's "VIIV" brand? :)
I doubt the target market for such cheep computers is families at home - as many people pointed out, it'd take 4-6 months pay for them. It's businesses that will make most use of this hardware, and in bulk orders of hundreds per company.
"Linux crowd" != "Linux developers" :)
I'd say it's the other way round: DRM is Linux's crowds biggest fear. Consumers WILL NOT use Linux if they cannot do the things they do on other popular OSes.
If his friend could install OpenOffice on his computer at work, then his company's system administrator is not doing his job very well.
Compatibility libraries won't solve everything. Environments such as GNOME and KDE have lots of IPC messaging going on, and the protocols have changed. Unless the whole "desktop system" is from the era the application binary is, it won't work.
Issues with running binaries from foreign "distros" are also huge.
MAYBE you could if the application is statically linked (and who in their right mind staticaly linked applications 10 years ago when memory & disk were scare?) but the scope and quality of such binaries is somewhere in the range of "sendmail". Probably even 'ls' won't run because some brainiac made an incompatible syscall change along the way.
Sure you can... if your system is as old as the applications you wish to run. You should really compare apples and apples and try to run a GRAPHICAL application - you won't find a single early GNOME or KDE application binary that can run today (hell, even if you find a working "xclock" binary from that time it will be a miracle). Like it or not, when most people today say "Linux" they mean "that pretty desktop I always see screenshots of", not the console.
Yes very much - ls doesn't exist in any unix that has its filesystem hosed or mount fails...
It's too late to whine now but I didn't mean the "pretty colors" bit literally - of course the overall consitency of look and feel is just as important, if not more. People would be acting dumb if they bought a computer as an art piece :)
Additionally, Obj-C is not garbage collected, so it doesn't have "the usual suspects" issues of GC (application pause while collecting garbage, oportunity for bloat, etc.). In the absolute performance, native code will almost always win.
(BUT: it's true that with todays machines, memory configurations and the "usual" applications, most users probably won't distinguish between a hand-coded assembler application and a totaly interpreted one)
This is actually a nice indication of a (now not so) subtle shift in the industry. Ten years ago a company that produced a unix-like OS with so much lag in a core system would be loughed down and burn. Now, people don't even notice (for the most part). You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.
Also, how exactly did "NetBSD did it"? As is stated here: http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/history.html the version numbering is clean.
One more difference: Cocoa's default language (Objective C) is not interpreted at runtime (though it has dynamic properties that make it almost so :) ) and is not a garbage collected language. This makes it almost as fast as raw C.
Also, how did they detect it was a programmable keyboard on the client side and not a very repetitive human?