If the Matrix was one six hour long epic, you wouldn't be saying it sucked, now would you?
I'd probably walk out about the third or fourth hour. The first couple hours were cool, but then it got real boring and pointless. An epic can not stand on its first third; it has to be good all the way through.
I would like to see the Library of Congress start accepting digital books for copyright registration, however -- it's a drag to have to send them hardcopies.
The whole point of accepting hardcopies is so they have something to store (and the preservation of paper is well studied) and check out.
DVDs: can't copy them, can't fast-forward through ads public reaction: "great picture quality"
You can't copy them? Check your mailbox; I'm sure someone just sent you a message on how to "BAKUP YOUR DVD TO CD! AFJAF". And people aren't placid about ads either; I think the consumer backlash over ads is and will reduce the number of DVDs that come with ads.
And how would we notice? I've never had a problem with X's speed, on my four year old computer. Why do we want to throw out a tested program that everything runs on for speed improvements that don't matter to most of us and become more moot every day Moore's law is still in effect?
everyone knows they are also used to prevent google from indexing stuff people would rather keep (semi) private.
The US government has no buisness with semi-private material. Either don't put it on the website, or make it publicly available to everyone, including Google and friends.
The Sourceforge page for the forked project says, right up front, that the licensing is the "GNU General Public License (GPL)" (first!) followed by the "MIT License" (last), even though all of XFree86 is licensed under the MIT license.
What does this have to do with the forked project? The order of the licenses is chosen by Sourceforge, not Cygwin/Xfree86.
Is this the real reason they forked the project?
There is no cause to disbelieve their stated reasons, unless you enjoy being paranoid.
The GPL "faithful" claim that forking is a bad thing
I think GPL users have the same opinion on forking the rest of the open source world does; it can be necessary and useful, and it can be a pain in the ass. Usually the pain in the ass ones die.
their license prevents it
The GPL explicitly permits it. Only an idiot would say that the GPL prevents forking.
they certainly seem to have no compunctions about forking a project to bring it under the GPL!
When you work on the core of X, on programs such as the X server, Xlib, and Xt, there is a practical reason not to use copyleft. The XFree86 group does an important job for the community in maintaining these programs, and the benefit of copylefting our changes would be less than the harm done by a fork in development. So it is better to work with the XFree86 group and not copyleft our changes on these programs.
64bit CPU is a lot slower than 32bit CPU with the same technology anyway.
It depends on what you're doing. If you're handling a lot of 64 bit integers, then it isn't. In any case, AMD64 is not the same technology as ix86; the massive increase in registers and additional parallel processing units can add a lot of speed in certain situations.
Frank Carrier, the 3M dealer, says that's only fair. If Gow wants to compete, he should create his own system, including a receiver that can be locked as well, Carrier said. Providing only a transmitter as his business is parasitic, he said.
Did no one else notice this quote, that no one should be building third party attachments to systems?
any sane OS programmer would like to be free of most of the junk hardware they have to support.
Well, certainly. Laziness is part of human nature.
Yes, it's really lazy to be wanting to write some code that could improve the kernel for everyone rather then patching around stupid bugs (like this one) and dealing with hardware that has been massively overextended so we could have hardware compatability dating back 30 years.
Or use a boot CD if you're one of those people who hopped right to it and got rid of your floppy drive, the way Microsoft wants you to (Microsoft has tried long and hard to eliminate 'legacy' hardware from PCs)
It was Apple who started shipping floppy-free computers, not Microsoft. I've never heard of Microsoft standing in opposition to floppy drives. And it's not only Microsoft who doesn't want to handle 'legacy' hardware - any sane OS programmer would like to be free of most of the junk hardware they have to support.
Plagiarism is always a problem. Amazon, like the Web and Google before it, makes it easier to steal rather than harder.
Why? Any serious author/researcher is going to have other books about the subject at hand, making it trivial to copy from them. All Amazon and Google do is make it easier to find sources to copy from - which the author was already doing - and make it easier to discover plagerism without knowing what the original source was before hand.
But overriding firmware is obviously a dangerous proposal and so labeled by both sides. In this case, the OS sent an flush write cache command, which the OS programmers had no reason to believe could cause hardware damage under any circumstances.
Current hardware is highly configurable by software, and if software damages hardware, it's software fault.
Anyone remember the Therarad fiasco? They took the hardware safetys off the new model, because it was so safe, and a bug that had been there for years started killing people. Maybe software should be bug-free, but the best way to make everything work right is to make sure your hardware can handle software failures, because they will exist.
Due to today's technology they don't even provide a needed service.
The technology to produce a high quality bound book still isn't cheap. Furthermore, I've seen a lot of stuff on the net, full of spellchecking errors and grammatical 'innovations' (I don't care who you are, use capital and lowercase letters, punctuations and the normal pronouns), and frequently with large chunks labeled "I need to get to this part". Good publishers don't publish that stuff; publishers offer at least some lower guarentee of quality. (Especially in fiction, where editors do a lot of filtering between the junk and the readable material.)
It is not that hard to pick up a respectable law review [...] and read an article about the topic you are interested in.
You're telling me unlike every other discipline I know of, a law journal is comprehensable to the outsider?
Go get a law school curriculum and buy a few of the books.
To understand the rules that govern me, I should invest hundreds of dollars in books? Something's screwed up here, and it's not the people who don't want to have to study the law.
As to why, if someone creates something, it should _ever_ have to go into the public domain? If I create/discover something...why shouldn't it be mine and my descendants for ever?
You're making any novel, any movie, any video game, any TV show based on Oz or Huckleberry Finn or Grimm's Fairy Tales or Cinderalla or Pinnochio or any character or setting currently or ever in the public domain impossible or very expensive. You're making schools and libraries pay out large sums of money to get the books that are necessary for students to learn about their culture.
In exchange, you're transferring money to those who never worked a day in their life on this book. For being distintly related to someone, they get a stream of cash, sort of like royalty. (Of course, in reality, the copyright was bought by BigCo, to whom it's merely another interest-bearing account.)
One problem with convergence of the general-purpose PDA and the calculator is that colleges ban the former from final exams because they can be used to store volumes of notes, even entire textbooks.
But all you change is the volume of notes - those calculators are more then sufficent to hold a few pages of notes.
The Septuagint was translated by 72 individual scholars for the library of Alexandria. Each was locked up and made his translation independently of the others, in order that the different versions could be compared and the best selected. But all 72 produced the exact same text--which to me seems the result of divine influence. Thus I'll take the Septuagint as error-free.
Assuming that actually you accept that old legend. There's no more reason to than there is to accept that the Book of Mormon was translated by divine power from the original golden plates.
Alright, that's true but of little interest to the majority of readers who are not collectors.
Really? If people don't want a hard-copy, why do they buy most new books at all? There's enough used book stores and libraries to avoid all but a few new book buys.
The on-line market can get you an initial step up when you can't find a publisher.
That's not why my examples show, though. Janis Ian is signed with a recording company; the authors at Baen.com all have published books with Baen.com. But even if you have a publisher, you need to get your name out to the audience, and that's what these sites do.
Why, if this was legal, would anyone pay for music ever again?
This is a different case. If all music were available online, live concerts would probably be a larger part of the music scene. In any case, the economics of music is different from that of books.
In the same way, I'd pay the author but I'm not a typical book-reader either.
Why do you think that you're all that untypical? Honestly, book reading in our society is no longer the common thing it was when preachers railed against the 'sinful' dime novels at the turn of the century; leisure reading is largely the audience of a much smaller group. True, a lot of the Star Trek novels might have a large read to pay ratio, but most of the more intellectual authors have a loving audience that would pay for hardcopy - which we can see, because they are already the audience who choses to frequent the new book stores instead of the used book stores or libraries.
there is no inherent advantage to the non-pirated version
A printed copy is easier to read and travels better. It also looks a lot better on a book shelf.
If books are available on-line for no cost then almost no one will be able to afford the luxury of being a writer. Simple fact of life.
It's not a simple fact of life; it's an prediction.
The people that do support the notion are generally [...] the Stephen Kings and such like that have already made more money than they can spend. It's no big deal for them to throw away the odd title here and there.
That doesn't match with what I've seen. Baen.com has a lot of books available free by authors, like say Paul Chafe and Ellen Guon, who I don't recognize and given my knowledge of the scifi genre, I'd be surprised if they're even paying the bills by their writing, as well as authors who are fairly well known and authors like Larry Niven who are closer to Stephen King then to starving. Another example would by Janis Ian, who gave PG a copy of "Society's Child". According to her website, she does private performances, not the sign of a rich performer. Cory Doctorow sold at least one copy of his book to someone who never would have heard of him without him posting it on a website.
Do you know how long it takes to type and proofread a book
Yes, but most of PG's books were made with OCR even then.
how little time it takes to learn ".it" (or whatever) means italics?
Why not use "_"? Plain text gives us decent markup for italics, and paragraphs, and chapter headings. You've got to do better then that to make a switch worth it, and then it starts getting complex.
I just explained how to deal with that by archiving the markup.
Right, let's do all this work and then basically throw it away because we might need it in 20 years. I don't know about your work philosophy, but I don't like doing things like that.
In fact, most of the works that can be considered classics are not in the public domain because of copyrights having expired but rather because copyrights are a pretty recent thing.
If Shakespeare, Ibsen and Milton could do without them, so can we.
Even if Shakespeare himself didn't benefit from copyrights (most of his plays weren't published until after his death, anyway), his publishers claimed eternal copyright over Shakespeare's text. Ibsen didn't do without them; by the 19th century, copyrights were a pretty established thing. Note that they were provided for in the US constitution and legislation for them was fairly quickly passed. Twain, for one, argued for the extension of copyright from the then-current (in the US) flat 50 years.
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If the Matrix was one six hour long epic, you wouldn't be saying it sucked, now would you?
I'd probably walk out about the third or fourth hour. The first couple hours were cool, but then it got real boring and pointless. An epic can not stand on its first third; it has to be good all the way through.
I would like to see the Library of Congress start accepting digital books for copyright registration, however -- it's a drag to have to send them hardcopies.
The whole point of accepting hardcopies is so they have something to store (and the preservation of paper is well studied) and check out.
DVDs: can't copy them, can't fast-forward through ads
public reaction: "great picture quality"
You can't copy them? Check your mailbox; I'm sure someone just sent you a message on how to "BAKUP YOUR DVD TO CD! AFJAF". And people aren't placid about ads either; I think the consumer backlash over ads is and will reduce the number of DVDs that come with ads.
Face it, X is not goddamned Speedy Gonzalez,
And how would we notice? I've never had a problem with X's speed, on my four year old computer. Why do we want to throw out a tested program that everything runs on for speed improvements that don't matter to most of us and become more moot every day Moore's law is still in effect?
Is their problem with X that they don't release under the GPL?
Their problem is probably exactly what they said.
Why is it that GNU sees the need to fork *everything*?
Like what? Cygwin is not a particularly GNU project, and XFree86 has always explicitly been given support under its current license by RMS.
And who are these myriad other developers that have been turned off by the X group?
How many times does Xouvert need to be mentioned in this thread?
I can see arguments that X is unwieldy and archaic, fine
RTFA. That has nothing to do with it; it's a management problem, not codebase problem.
everyone knows they are also used to prevent google from indexing stuff people would rather keep (semi) private.
The US government has no buisness with semi-private material. Either don't put it on the website, or make it publicly available to everyone, including Google and friends.
What does this have to do with the forked project? The order of the licenses is chosen by Sourceforge, not Cygwin/Xfree86.
Is this the real reason they forked the project?
There is no cause to disbelieve their stated reasons, unless you enjoy being paranoid.
The GPL "faithful" claim that forking is a bad thing
I think GPL users have the same opinion on forking the rest of the open source world does; it can be necessary and useful, and it can be a pain in the ass. Usually the pain in the ass ones die.
their license prevents it
The GPL explicitly permits it. Only an idiot would say that the GPL prevents forking.
they certainly seem to have no compunctions about forking a project to bring it under the GPL!
RMS on the subject:
64bit CPU is a lot slower than 32bit CPU with the same technology anyway.
It depends on what you're doing. If you're handling a lot of 64 bit integers, then it isn't. In any case, AMD64 is not the same technology as ix86; the massive increase in registers and additional parallel processing units can add a lot of speed in certain situations.
Frank Carrier, the 3M dealer, says that's only fair. If Gow wants to compete, he should create his own system, including a receiver that can be locked as well, Carrier said. Providing only a transmitter as his business is parasitic, he said.
Did no one else notice this quote, that no one should be building third party attachments to systems?
any sane OS programmer would like to be free of most of the junk hardware they have to support.
Well, certainly. Laziness is part of human nature.
Yes, it's really lazy to be wanting to write some code that could improve the kernel for everyone rather then patching around stupid bugs (like this one) and dealing with hardware that has been massively overextended so we could have hardware compatability dating back 30 years.
Or use a boot CD if you're one of those people who hopped right to it and got rid of your floppy drive, the way Microsoft wants you to (Microsoft has tried long and hard to eliminate 'legacy' hardware from PCs)
It was Apple who started shipping floppy-free computers, not Microsoft. I've never heard of Microsoft standing in opposition to floppy drives. And it's not only Microsoft who doesn't want to handle 'legacy' hardware - any sane OS programmer would like to be free of most of the junk hardware they have to support.
Plagiarism is always a problem. Amazon, like the Web and Google before it, makes it easier to steal rather than harder.
Why? Any serious author/researcher is going to have other books about the subject at hand, making it trivial to copy from them. All Amazon and Google do is make it easier to find sources to copy from - which the author was already doing - and make it easier to discover plagerism without knowing what the original source was before hand.
OS can e.g. override firmware of the disk drive.
But overriding firmware is obviously a dangerous proposal and so labeled by both sides. In this case, the OS sent an flush write cache command, which the OS programmers had no reason to believe could cause hardware damage under any circumstances.
Current hardware is highly configurable by software, and if software damages hardware, it's software fault.
Anyone remember the Therarad fiasco? They took the hardware safetys off the new model, because it was so safe, and a bug that had been there for years started killing people. Maybe software should be bug-free, but the best way to make everything work right is to make sure your hardware can handle software failures, because they will exist.
Due to today's technology they don't even provide a needed service.
The technology to produce a high quality bound book still isn't cheap. Furthermore, I've seen a lot of stuff on the net, full of spellchecking errors and grammatical 'innovations' (I don't care who you are, use capital and lowercase letters, punctuations and the normal pronouns), and frequently with large chunks labeled "I need to get to this part". Good publishers don't publish that stuff; publishers offer at least some lower guarentee of quality. (Especially in fiction, where editors do a lot of filtering between the junk and the readable material.)
LG doesn't support Linux, so this problem doesn't exist in their eyes.
When I bought my LG CD burner, they claimed compatibility with Linux - Slackware 2.0, but Linux - on the box.
It is not that hard to pick up a respectable law review [...] and read an article about the topic you are interested in.
You're telling me unlike every other discipline I know of, a law journal is comprehensable to the outsider?
Go get a law school curriculum and buy a few of the books.
To understand the rules that govern me, I should invest hundreds of dollars in books? Something's screwed up here, and it's not the people who don't want to have to study the law.
As to why, if someone creates something, it should _ever_ have to go into the public domain? If I create/discover something...why shouldn't it be mine and my descendants for ever?
You're making any novel, any movie, any video game, any TV show based on Oz or Huckleberry Finn or Grimm's Fairy Tales or Cinderalla or Pinnochio or any character or setting currently or ever in the public domain impossible or very expensive. You're making schools and libraries pay out large sums of money to get the books that are necessary for students to learn about their culture.
In exchange, you're transferring money to those who never worked a day in their life on this book. For being distintly related to someone, they get a stream of cash, sort of like royalty. (Of course, in reality, the copyright was bought by BigCo, to whom it's merely another interest-bearing account.)
One problem with convergence of the general-purpose PDA and the calculator is that colleges ban the former from final exams because they can be used to store volumes of notes, even entire textbooks.
But all you change is the volume of notes - those calculators are more then sufficent to hold a few pages of notes.
No! Holy crap! How many times do I have to tell people that simply because the mean is 100, that doesn't mean half the people are below it.
But IQ is normally distributed, and hence the median is the mean.
The Septuagint was translated by 72 individual scholars for the library of Alexandria. Each was locked up and made his translation independently of the others, in order that the different versions could be compared and the best selected. But all 72 produced the exact same text--which to me seems the result of divine influence. Thus I'll take the Septuagint as error-free.
Assuming that actually you accept that old legend. There's no more reason to than there is to accept that the Book of Mormon was translated by divine power from the original golden plates.
Alright, that's true but of little interest to the majority of readers who are not collectors.
Really? If people don't want a hard-copy, why do they buy most new books at all? There's enough used book stores and libraries to avoid all but a few new book buys.
The on-line market can get you an initial step up when you can't find a publisher.
That's not why my examples show, though. Janis Ian is signed with a recording company; the authors at Baen.com all have published books with Baen.com. But even if you have a publisher, you need to get your name out to the audience, and that's what these sites do.
Why, if this was legal, would anyone pay for music ever again?
This is a different case. If all music were available online, live concerts would probably be a larger part of the music scene. In any case, the economics of music is different from that of books.
In the same way, I'd pay the author but I'm not a typical book-reader either.
Why do you think that you're all that untypical? Honestly, book reading in our society is no longer the common thing it was when preachers railed against the 'sinful' dime novels at the turn of the century; leisure reading is largely the audience of a much smaller group. True, a lot of the Star Trek novels might have a large read to pay ratio, but most of the more intellectual authors have a loving audience that would pay for hardcopy - which we can see, because they are already the audience who choses to frequent the new book stores instead of the used book stores or libraries.
You have correctly identified the reason that my joke is funny.
For him to do that, it'd have to be funny, and with all due respect, it wasn't.
there is no inherent advantage to the non-pirated version
A printed copy is easier to read and travels better. It also looks a lot better on a book shelf.
If books are available on-line for no cost then almost no one will be able to afford the luxury of being a writer. Simple fact of life.
It's not a simple fact of life; it's an prediction.
The people that do support the notion are generally [...] the Stephen Kings and such like that have already made more money than they can spend. It's no big deal for them to throw away the odd title here and there.
That doesn't match with what I've seen. Baen.com has a lot of books available free by authors, like say Paul Chafe and Ellen Guon, who I don't recognize and given my knowledge of the scifi genre, I'd be surprised if they're even paying the bills by their writing, as well as authors who are fairly well known and authors like Larry Niven who are closer to Stephen King then to starving. Another example would by Janis Ian, who gave PG a copy of "Society's Child". According to her website, she does private performances, not the sign of a rich performer. Cory Doctorow sold at least one copy of his book to someone who never would have heard of him without him posting it on a website.
Do you know how long it takes to type and proofread a book
Yes, but most of PG's books were made with OCR even then.
how little time it takes to learn ".it" (or whatever) means italics?
Why not use "_"? Plain text gives us decent markup for italics, and paragraphs, and chapter headings. You've got to do better then that to make a switch worth it, and then it starts getting complex.
I just explained how to deal with that by archiving the markup.
Right, let's do all this work and then basically throw it away because we might need it in 20 years. I don't know about your work philosophy, but I don't like doing things like that.
In fact, most of the works that can be considered classics are not in the public domain because of copyrights having expired but rather because copyrights are a pretty recent thing.
If Shakespeare, Ibsen and Milton could do without them, so can we.
Even if Shakespeare himself didn't benefit from copyrights (most of his plays weren't published until after his death, anyway), his publishers claimed eternal copyright over Shakespeare's text. Ibsen didn't do without them; by the 19th century, copyrights were a pretty established thing. Note that they were provided for in the US constitution and legislation for them was fairly quickly passed. Twain, for one, argued for the extension of copyright from the then-current (in the US) flat 50 years.