I have a suggestion for you.. If you aren't interested in a story, don't follow the link and don't read it. It's very easy. I presume that noone is holding a gun to your head forcing you to read every slashdot story that comes up..
The project I have been looking at is "kmatplot". As someone involved in areas such as signal processing, this is a project that could be very useful combined with the numerical packages such as Octave, and combining it with a KDE frontend for Octave would produce a very useful numercial maths package.
For all those people who have been waiting for an XPC with socket A *and* AGP, it seems finally Shuttle are releasing one. I noticed the SK41G seems to have been released.. See the shuttle website
here and
here.
Why does this happen every time a video card related story comes along? Nvidia's Linux drivers are open source. You can download the source at nvidia.com as easily as downloading anything other drivers.
If you mean to say "Nvidia's drivers are not GPL code" then say that. BUT stop saying "Nvidia's drivers are not open source" because this is simply not true.
Unfortunately the British government are so in bed with Microsoft, something like this will never happen. Did you hear about the uk government portal, the development of which was swiped from a UK software house and given to Microsoft to develop (for £20 million I seem to recall). Consequently, everyone with a non IE browser was (and still is) unable to access any parts of the site requiring encription and signing technologies. Take a look at the article.
Fully document all windows libraries to allow third party OSes to run third party applications written using Windows APIs.
Fully document all file formats such as MS Office formats to enable people to use other office applications without encountering file conversion problems.
then i realized that there are a lot of retirees, mutual funds, credit unions, pensions etc... etc... that are vested into microsoft so heavily it is scary.
my friend, does it not occur to you that as soon as Microsoft's share price starts dropping and future indications are long term bleak, all the fund managers will pull out of MS stock in a flash and invest their money in other businesses with better future potential. The fact that the these investors have portfolios with a large MS content in the present moment is irrelevant - watch them sell it like rats abbandoning a sinking ship if MS's stock price starts diving long term..
My question to all North Americans: does it bother you that the USA legal system (as this case confirms) seems to consist of nothing more than 'who has more money eventually wins regardless'?
If Microsoft were a small company or individual with no substantial wealth, this case would have been concluded years ago and a more fair and justified judgement would have been in place. Just what is it that makes it possible for Microsoft and other huge companies to effectively stall and convolute the US legal system until the situation becomes favourable to them?
As a European, I practically dismiss the US legal system as merely a tool for large corporate bodies to use in a similar way as they use other available mechanisms for economic jousting. In a similar way, the 'lobbying' system the USA has in politics (we normally call this 'bribery' here) seems to be another fine tool for the comporations to use.
The most significant element in the settlement proposal, industry executives said, is the requirement that Microsoft share the technical information needed for other software or hardware products to work smoothly with Windows.
Think a little about this one. We all know that protocols, api libraries, and other interoperable standards are the real battle here. Go back and read the halloween documents if you've forgotton..
If this penalty was enforced properly (along with the additional requirement that MS comply with all protocols and standards and do not attempt to create their own incompatible ones), Microsoft would rapidly lose any advantages due to gaming incompatibility (DirectX), web standards, the.Net fiasco, Wine incompatibilities etc. etc.
Very soon, people would be free to choose Linux and other operating systems *knowing* that they *will* be able to run all their old applications, they *will* be able to browse and interact with the web without problems, they *will* be able to buy the latest games without having to keep a Win9x partition on their PCs.
This is the real battle. It only remains to be seen whether this proposed penalty is actually implemented. If it is not, any other likely action is unlikely to have any real effect.
Hey, maybe Mandrakesoft should give Mosfet a job to continue the development of the liquid skin..
This is a very cool theme and it would be a real, real shame if it ceased development.. Mandrakesoft would also keep a great programmer in a career developing open source.
Isn't it bizzare that one of the most talked about advantages of WinXP (in the mass media) is that "it doesn't crash all the time like previous versions". I have heard this phrase in one form or another a few times on the news today.
Microsoft seem to be trying to turn the biggest faults of the Win9x releases into a marketing campain. The question is, will the general public be taken in by this and run out to PC World (or what ever your country's big-chain computer supermarket is) to buy an upgrade? I fear they will..
Indeed we are a university.. Unfortunately, the more forward thinking of us are battling against short sighted lecturers (the majority) who think open source is for 'enthusiasts' only, and students who don't give a f*** about anything as long as they can access their hotmail accounts. Our university has just signed up to a campus agreement with MS and suddenly everybody is running win2k, IIs, outlook etc. (outlook and IIS at this point in time are really stupid considering all the viruses that have been around recently; many of our machines have recently been infected).
We seem to be progressing backwards. I have been trying to organise some lectures on open source philosophy for relevant staff, but faced with all this I sometimes just feel like walking away.
This seems to be a big problem in English Universities.. Academics seem to have lost their way somewhere, and now fail to understand that the open source model parallels their own sacred open peer-review research.
Maybe the meaning was lost in my hurried translation there.. the two subjects are kind of separate: The refusal of Mathworks to sell the Linux Student version is one of the reasons we (students) are unhappy. The lack of an open source Matlab replacement in the department is a philosophical issue with regard to where our university (and others) should be looking to go in the future with regard to I.T (i.e. open source to reflect the nature of academic research, or continue with the current situation where our university is slowly becoming a MS only network).
Slashdot Mirror
I have a suggestion for you.. If you aren't interested in a story, don't follow the link and don't read it. It's very easy. I presume that noone is holding a gun to your head forcing you to read every slashdot story that comes up..
The project I have been looking at is "kmatplot". As someone involved in areas such as signal processing, this is a project that could be very useful combined with the numerical packages such as Octave, and combining it with a KDE frontend for Octave would produce a very useful numercial maths package.
I see.. If that's the case, Nvidia are providing a bit of misinformation on their website. Thanks for enlightening me on this though!
For all those people who have been waiting for an XPC with socket A *and* AGP, it seems finally Shuttle are releasing one. I noticed the SK41G seems to have been released.. See the shuttle website here and here.
Why does this happen every time a video card related story comes along? Nvidia's Linux drivers are open source. You can download the source at nvidia.com as easily as downloading anything other drivers.
If you mean to say "Nvidia's drivers are not GPL code" then say that. BUT stop saying "Nvidia's drivers are not open source" because this is simply not true.
why has this been modded down? It seems like a perfectly reasonable point of view!
Unfortunately the British government are so in bed with Microsoft, something like this will never happen. Did you hear about the uk government portal, the development of which was swiped from a UK software house and given to Microsoft to develop (for £20 million I seem to recall). Consequently, everyone with a non IE browser was (and still is) unable to access any parts of the site requiring encription and signing technologies. Take a look at the article.
Fully document all windows libraries to allow third party OSes to run third party applications written using Windows APIs.
Fully document all file formats such as MS Office formats to enable people to use other office applications without encountering file conversion problems.
then i realized that there are a lot of retirees, mutual funds, credit unions, pensions etc... etc... that are vested into microsoft so heavily it is scary.
my friend, does it not occur to you that as soon as Microsoft's share price starts dropping and future indications are long term bleak, all the fund managers will pull out of MS stock in a flash and invest their money in other businesses with better future potential. The fact that the these investors have portfolios with a large MS content in the present moment is irrelevant - watch them sell it like rats abbandoning a sinking ship if MS's stock price starts diving long term..
My question to all North Americans: does it bother you that the USA legal system (as this case confirms) seems to consist of nothing more than 'who has more money eventually wins regardless'?
If Microsoft were a small company or individual with no substantial wealth, this case would have been concluded years ago and a more fair and justified judgement would have been in place. Just what is it that makes it possible for Microsoft and other huge companies to effectively stall and convolute the US legal system until the situation becomes favourable to them?
As a European, I practically dismiss the US legal system as merely a tool for large corporate bodies to use in a similar way as they use other available mechanisms for economic jousting. In a similar way, the 'lobbying' system the USA has in politics (we normally call this 'bribery' here) seems to be another fine tool for the comporations to use.
The most significant element in the settlement proposal, industry executives said, is the requirement that Microsoft share the technical information needed for other software or hardware products to work smoothly with Windows.
Think a little about this one. We all know that protocols, api libraries, and other interoperable standards are the real battle here. Go back and read the halloween documents if you've forgotton..
If this penalty was enforced properly (along with the additional requirement that MS comply with all protocols and standards and do not attempt to create their own incompatible ones), Microsoft would rapidly lose any advantages due to gaming incompatibility (DirectX), web standards, the .Net fiasco, Wine incompatibilities etc. etc.
Very soon, people would be free to choose Linux and other operating systems *knowing* that they *will* be able to run all their old applications, they *will* be able to browse and interact with the web without problems, they *will* be able to buy the latest games without having to keep a Win9x partition on their PCs.
This is the real battle. It only remains to be seen whether this proposed penalty is actually implemented. If it is not, any other likely action is unlikely to have any real effect.
Hey, maybe Mandrakesoft should give Mosfet a job to continue the development of the liquid skin..
This is a very cool theme and it would be a real, real shame if it ceased development.. Mandrakesoft would also keep a great programmer in a career developing open source.
Isn't it bizzare that one of the most talked about advantages of WinXP (in the mass media) is that "it doesn't crash all the time like previous versions". I have heard this phrase in one form or another a few times on the news today.
Microsoft seem to be trying to turn the biggest faults of the Win9x releases into a marketing campain. The question is, will the general public be taken in by this and run out to PC World (or what ever your country's big-chain computer supermarket is) to buy an upgrade? I fear they will..
Indeed we are a university.. Unfortunately, the more forward thinking of us are battling against short sighted lecturers (the majority) who think open source is for 'enthusiasts' only, and students who don't give a f*** about anything as long as they can access their hotmail accounts. Our university has just signed up to a campus agreement with MS and suddenly everybody is running win2k, IIs, outlook etc. (outlook and IIS at this point in time are really stupid considering all the viruses that have been around recently; many of our machines have recently been infected). We seem to be progressing backwards. I have been trying to organise some lectures on open source philosophy for relevant staff, but faced with all this I sometimes just feel like walking away. This seems to be a big problem in English Universities.. Academics seem to have lost their way somewhere, and now fail to understand that the open source model parallels their own sacred open peer-review research.
Maybe the meaning was lost in my hurried translation there.. the two subjects are kind of separate: The refusal of Mathworks to sell the Linux Student version is one of the reasons we (students) are unhappy. The lack of an open source Matlab replacement in the department is a philosophical issue with regard to where our university (and others) should be looking to go in the future with regard to I.T (i.e. open source to reflect the nature of academic research, or continue with the current situation where our university is slowly becoming a MS only network).