Does anybody else wish that Bruce Perens would stop expounding conspiracy theories involving Redmond at every possible opportunity? It just makes him, and by extension us, look rather childish. The evidence is circumstantial at best, and that simply isn't good enough to go around making unsupportable claims.
Well, I just took a look at my developer build of Wine, and the DLLs alone take up an astonishing 113Mb. Yes, you read that correctly. Over one hundred megs of DLL. I suspect the vast majority of that code is debug symbols however, and for most apps not all of the DLLs would be needed.
Considering that most RPMs are perhaps a few megs, I suspect you could trim Wine down quite a bit. Certainly feasable.
I don't know how large embedded linux distros are though.
I was talking about stock icons/artwork, not widget themes. I don't think Qt implements the stock icon theming specs yet, but the KDE libs do. (does qt even have stock icons that aren't ripoffs of win95?)
First, iTunes streaming and limitations thereof have nothing to do with DRM.
Hmm? The music is digital, normally you would be able to send it anywhere you liked, as many times as you liked. Clearly iTMS stops you doing that, so it's DRM.
Second, while Apple could impose more restrictions on future music purchases, they can't retroactively add restrictions to music you've already bought.
Ah, I think they can. Sure, they might have to upgrade iTunes in order to do it, but if the next version of MacOS X comes out with the upgraded version bundled, that won't let you run the old version, or they alter iTMS to provide songs only in the new format, the majority of people will upgrade. Maybe you'd cease to become an Apple customer, sure, but then as "timestamp DRM" has only been talked about rather than rolled out, this is the same as with Microsofts Windows Media DRM (just disconnect it from the network if you worry about it phoning home).
you'll always be able to burn CDs or transcode to uncrippled formats to permanently eliminate the DRM
Well that's like saying "You can always play your WMA files to MiniDisc, all you need is a minijack-to-minijack cable". Pretty much any DRM can be defeated at some point, slighting raising or lowering that point doesn't make it not DRM.
Unlike some of the subscription services, Apple does not have the capability to hold your files hostage.
It's inherantly unstable. Only Apple give you the ability to play the encrypted files. That gives them a lot of power.
At the moment there's too much work to do to guarantee a completely stable platform on the home user desktop. Red Hat will do this soon with the corporate desktop I believe, if they don't already.
Regardless, compatability is not broken as frequently as people think. NPTL was a cock up, but it had to happen eventually. It could have been better handled for sure though.
"Will i use GNOME/GTK? Will i use QT/KDE? What will prevail?"
Probably neither at this point in the game. It doesn't matter either. Use whichever you prefer. If the user is on a sane distro like Red Hat 9 or Mandrake, the apps will look virtually identical anyway.
I'm sick of having to recompile piles of diferent libs because aplication "A" uses QT 3.xx and then it's new version already uses QT 4.xx that completely deprecates it's previous version API..
Qt breaks compatability rarely. And besides, you can have both installed at once. This should not be an issue with proper packaging (the lack of which is an entirely separate issue).
Damnit.. there are 5 year old aplications that still run in new windows versions.. talking about compatibility.. (and don't talk to me about dos because i can still run many dos games in my winXP box.. )
You can run 5 year old apps on Linux. Oh sure, you'll need to install compat libs, but then that's true of Windows apps too (ever found an app that needs IE5.0 but you have 6? fun).
Linux doesn't need a consistent look.. linux needs a stable and unified framework
Why? I haven't seen any real arguments for this other than, it's what other platforms do so it must be a good idea (and in fact that's wrong too, Windows versions libs just like linux apps do).
know that this might lead to stupid "wars" between gnome and kde groupies.. but for linux to advance we have to choose.. advanced studies must be made to know wich one of the API is really the more stable, faster and 100% free (hi there QT !!)
I thought as much. For some reason, people calling for "unification" always seem to conveniently decide it must be on KDE and Qt. Meanwhile, the people who are living in reality and have a clue are getting on with solving real problems and working on standards to get integration, leaving those without to rant on the sidelines.
Most people who think that the community has to "choose" are generally not developers familiar with many different environments I've found.
but if the program works, i could care less what its called....
which is why in BlueCurve all the menu items are renamed to things like "Text Editor", "Music Player" and so on. In stock GNOME they are "Evolution Email Client", "Rhythmbox Music Organizer and Player" etc etc. I'd be surprised if Mandrake didn't do something similar.
If the people who use Debian wanted those things they would create them.
Assuming they can create Debian packages, and that the software is not closed source etc etc
What seems broken about that method? It works well for me and all the systems I manage
Well look how out of date some software can get. If the maintainers of that software themselves were releasing binary packages like they do source tarballs, that would not happen.
I think what you really mean is that it should be as easy to install things in other distros as it is in Debian, in which case, I would have to agree with you.
Yeah, I suppose this is one reading of it. What I mean is, I don't like seeing people recommend one distro over another because one happens to have more packages available for it. That smacks of network effects, which are a bad idea....
Sure, I just don't think reponsibility for installing software is the distributions job. Especially when the only distros to really have enough software packaged to even attempt this, are the very ones that are hard to setup, install, use in the first place.
You have distros in BSD land, the only difference being that they are called OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin etc and none of them are ever used on the desktop, as opposed to FreeBSD which occasionaly is.
That's not an obvious solution to me. I use Red Hat, despite the lack of huge apt repositories, and I'm not stupid. The fact is that a model in which you attempt to centrally package every piece of software your users could ever need has been tried, it was a cool idea, but it seems broken to me.
Perhaps if the Debian teams spent less time on packaging everything (and managing all the interactions) and more time on the distro itself, it might have things like graphical installers, unified themes and all the other things that Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE are doing. Yes, that sounds like a troll, maybe it is but the parent was just as bad.
I mean really, the whole situation is just absurd. You shouldn't need to decide which distro to use on the basis of how easy it is to install things. Period.
Well, I think they're a little less comprehensive than BlueCurve was (bluecurve is an entire rebranding of red hat linux basically), but Mandrake does ship with a unified widget theme, called Galaxy.
So basically you can use GTK or Qt and things will look consistant. If you use GTK you can use the themed stock artwork for extra consistancy, if you use Qt AFAIK you must link against KDE to get that.
How is such a market "promising" if no sales are made?
People normally mix up market share and installed user base, primarily because installed user bases of software tend to do things like upgrade on a semi-regular basis. So, if Linux has a 5% installed use base, then those people will continue to "buy" Linux until they move to something else (on average).
How is there even what could be called a "market" for something that is free? Doesn't one have to buy or sell in a market?
You're thinking too narrowly. A market is just a flow of goods and services between economic entities. There doesn't have to be money exchanged at every stage of the game - companies compete in the market for free stuff all the time.
I think the Free Software people are just jealous because Microsoft, too, figured out that giving away their software for free is a good idea.
Yawn. Larry the cow is a more interesting troll. Free software isn't given away for free to make more people use it, it's given away for free because that is a fundamental part of the motivation for writing it.
God, it's like you people want to see non-profits be deprived of choices or special benefits in the market.
Oh, so there is a market now? Anyway, this is a somewhat dubious statement. We're in this mess in the first place because software is not something you can just pick up and drop as and when you please, once you start using proprietary software, it has momentum (same for free software but the consequences are less drastic). So being pleased that Redmond are giving NPOs lots of their software for free is rather shallow, you'd be foolish to assume it will always be free when there is no legal guarantee of that.
I don't know what you are talking about. I have been using OS X as a server OS for some time now.......
Nonetheless, the user base of MacOS as a server OS is trace. There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated. These guys don't mess around - they expect to have industrial strength support during the upgrade, and they expect there to be no regressions.
Apple is in an entirely different league - they can ship a trivial OS update that accidentally deletes entire hard disks worth of data and can get off by paying for a few hundred disk recoveries and having an "everybody makes mistakes" attitude. That kind of thing isn't really acceptable for the desktop, but the extreme loyalty of Apples customers means they can essentially get away with it. That simply doesn't fly when you run most of the worlds servers.
2003 is a server OS. MacOS X is not, despite Apples best attempts. The only parts of MacOS that are used for serving stuff is the open source code, which effectively is built and tested by the community. MS include things like IIS/Active Directory as part of the Windows product, so more testing is needed.
This might be useful for when trying to make apps run in Wine. Occasionally disassembly is the only way to figure out why the app crashes light years away from the nearest API call etc.
you are, in fact, able to do anything you like with the bits. You just have to do a lossless format conversion first.
That's like saying, well you own a time-expired WMA file because all you have to do is download this cracking tool. The people who made the file did not really intend for you to do that, even though they probably knew it was possible.
Well, I found their trance section and signed up for the trial. So far not really impressed, their download client failed to download the album yet still counted the tracks against my 50! We'll see what tech support say about it.
eMusic does look good...... but they have no trance:( Searches for "Chicane" or "Paul Van Dyk" give only compilation albums. Is there a way to request music to be added? Or does that kind of stuff fall under the "clear channel bullshit" banner?
Ironically, the appeal of the Apple music store is that you "own" the titles that you buy for.
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
On the other hand, a music subscription service, for me, is full of hassles. I need an Internet connection to have my right to listen confirmed;
I would note that you need this for Apples service as well, you need to log in to listen to music on another computer...
I might need to stream stuff, at potentially low quality
No, they give you a DRM wrapped music file that will be played by compliant players for a timed period....
I can't use the devices I want to
Many more players support WMA than Apples DRM wrapped AAC, in fact, with Apple you can use the iPod and that's it.
In essence, I don't "own" the music.
Nobody owns music today, if you did it would be legal to copy it and give it to your friends.
with my personal interest in music, I want to be able to "own" a recording, and rest calmly knowing that I can listen to it when I want, not when some commerical service deems appropriate.
That's fine, not everybody is like you. I listen to the radio a lot. I don't mind if a track is here one minute and gone the next. Maybe I hear a track and like it, and want to listen again. This service would let me do so in a reasonably cheap way.
This almost certainly wouldn't work with Linux, but I'd have no real problems with subscribing to something like this if it did. The main problem is finding one that stocks plenty of music in a timely fashion in my interests, mostly trance, chill and jazz. eMusic doesn't seem to have that.... besides I can't really justify a subscription to any non-essential service right now, I'm supposed to be saving money:) But in principle I'd like such a thing.
And if this subscripton doesn't have the music you want? What are you supposed to do - SWITCH and lose your existing collection.
So? Most people have CDs that they loved 3 years ago but have since forgotten about. You don't have to continue paying - why not rent for a month or two, and when you've got bored of a song or album let it go.
People are yelling about this because it's from Microsoft, and because Apple do something vaguely related and the current vogue is that Apple are perfect. Rental works in many other industries, why not here?
The iTunes Music Store restricts what you can do with a song you have bought, as it has DRM. Ergo, you do not own the bits, because if you did, you could do whatever you liked with them.
I don't see how making music expire is any different to limiting it to 3 computers at once really. No matter which service you use, a set of restrictions are placed upon what you can do with the music.
Considering that when I find a new track I really love, I tend to pig out on listening to it, then forget about it, I see no reason why a subscription/rental service would not work. It works OK for videos, DVDs, and books. Why not music too? As long as it's cheaper for me to rent than it is to buy, that's fine by me.
Of course, it'd be hard to get much cheaper than 99c per track. But it could probably be done.
Is anybody else slightly concerned that so far, more than 50% of the comments have been from people pointing out how much easier this would make mugging? I have to admit, the thought didn't even cross my mind.
I knew there were some shady characters here on the dot, but still. A tad extreme.
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Does anybody else wish that Bruce Perens would stop expounding conspiracy theories involving Redmond at every possible opportunity? It just makes him, and by extension us, look rather childish. The evidence is circumstantial at best, and that simply isn't good enough to go around making unsupportable claims.
Considering that most RPMs are perhaps a few megs, I suspect you could trim Wine down quite a bit. Certainly feasable.
I don't know how large embedded linux distros are though.
I was talking about stock icons/artwork, not widget themes. I don't think Qt implements the stock icon theming specs yet, but the KDE libs do. (does qt even have stock icons that aren't ripoffs of win95?)
Hmm? The music is digital, normally you would be able to send it anywhere you liked, as many times as you liked. Clearly iTMS stops you doing that, so it's DRM.
Second, while Apple could impose more restrictions on future music purchases, they can't retroactively add restrictions to music you've already bought.
Ah, I think they can. Sure, they might have to upgrade iTunes in order to do it, but if the next version of MacOS X comes out with the upgraded version bundled, that won't let you run the old version, or they alter iTMS to provide songs only in the new format, the majority of people will upgrade. Maybe you'd cease to become an Apple customer, sure, but then as "timestamp DRM" has only been talked about rather than rolled out, this is the same as with Microsofts Windows Media DRM (just disconnect it from the network if you worry about it phoning home).
you'll always be able to burn CDs or transcode to uncrippled formats to permanently eliminate the DRM
Well that's like saying "You can always play your WMA files to MiniDisc, all you need is a minijack-to-minijack cable". Pretty much any DRM can be defeated at some point, slighting raising or lowering that point doesn't make it not DRM.
Unlike some of the subscription services, Apple does not have the capability to hold your files hostage.
It's inherantly unstable. Only Apple give you the ability to play the encrypted files. That gives them a lot of power.
Regardless, compatability is not broken as frequently as people think. NPTL was a cock up, but it had to happen eventually. It could have been better handled for sure though.
Probably neither at this point in the game. It doesn't matter either. Use whichever you prefer. If the user is on a sane distro like Red Hat 9 or Mandrake, the apps will look virtually identical anyway.
I'm sick of having to recompile piles of diferent libs because aplication "A" uses QT 3.xx and then it's new version already uses QT 4.xx that completely deprecates it's previous version API..
Qt breaks compatability rarely. And besides, you can have both installed at once. This should not be an issue with proper packaging (the lack of which is an entirely separate issue).
Damnit .. there are 5 year old aplications that still run in new windows versions .. talking about compatibility .. (and don't talk to me about dos because i can still run many dos games in my winXP box.. )
You can run 5 year old apps on Linux. Oh sure, you'll need to install compat libs, but then that's true of Windows apps too (ever found an app that needs IE5.0 but you have 6? fun).
Linux doesn't need a consistent look .. linux needs a stable and unified framework
Why? I haven't seen any real arguments for this other than, it's what other platforms do so it must be a good idea (and in fact that's wrong too, Windows versions libs just like linux apps do).
know that this might lead to stupid "wars" between gnome and kde groupies .. but for linux to advance we have to choose .. advanced studies must be made to know wich one of the API is really the more stable, faster and 100% free (hi there QT !!)
I thought as much. For some reason, people calling for "unification" always seem to conveniently decide it must be on KDE and Qt. Meanwhile, the people who are living in reality and have a clue are getting on with solving real problems and working on standards to get integration, leaving those without to rant on the sidelines.
Most people who think that the community has to "choose" are generally not developers familiar with many different environments I've found.
which is why in BlueCurve all the menu items are renamed to things like "Text Editor", "Music Player" and so on. In stock GNOME they are "Evolution Email Client", "Rhythmbox Music Organizer and Player" etc etc. I'd be surprised if Mandrake didn't do something similar.
Assuming they can create Debian packages, and that the software is not closed source etc etc
What seems broken about that method? It works well for me and all the systems I manage
Well look how out of date some software can get. If the maintainers of that software themselves were releasing binary packages like they do source tarballs, that would not happen.
I think what you really mean is that it should be as easy to install things in other distros as it is in Debian, in which case, I would have to agree with you.
Yeah, I suppose this is one reading of it. What I mean is, I don't like seeing people recommend one distro over another because one happens to have more packages available for it. That smacks of network effects, which are a bad idea....
Sure, I just don't think reponsibility for installing software is the distributions job. Especially when the only distros to really have enough software packaged to even attempt this, are the very ones that are hard to setup, install, use in the first place.
You have distros in BSD land, the only difference being that they are called OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin etc and none of them are ever used on the desktop, as opposed to FreeBSD which occasionaly is.
Perhaps if the Debian teams spent less time on packaging everything (and managing all the interactions) and more time on the distro itself, it might have things like graphical installers, unified themes and all the other things that Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE are doing. Yes, that sounds like a troll, maybe it is but the parent was just as bad.
I mean really, the whole situation is just absurd. You shouldn't need to decide which distro to use on the basis of how easy it is to install things. Period.
So basically you can use GTK or Qt and things will look consistant. If you use GTK you can use the themed stock artwork for extra consistancy, if you use Qt AFAIK you must link against KDE to get that.
People normally mix up market share and installed user base, primarily because installed user bases of software tend to do things like upgrade on a semi-regular basis. So, if Linux has a 5% installed use base, then those people will continue to "buy" Linux until they move to something else (on average).
How is there even what could be called a "market" for something that is free? Doesn't one have to buy or sell in a market?
You're thinking too narrowly. A market is just a flow of goods and services between economic entities. There doesn't have to be money exchanged at every stage of the game - companies compete in the market for free stuff all the time.
I think the Free Software people are just jealous because Microsoft, too, figured out that giving away their software for free is a good idea.
Yawn. Larry the cow is a more interesting troll. Free software isn't given away for free to make more people use it, it's given away for free because that is a fundamental part of the motivation for writing it.
God, it's like you people want to see non-profits be deprived of choices or special benefits in the market.
Oh, so there is a market now? Anyway, this is a somewhat dubious statement. We're in this mess in the first place because software is not something you can just pick up and drop as and when you please, once you start using proprietary software, it has momentum (same for free software but the consequences are less drastic). So being pleased that Redmond are giving NPOs lots of their software for free is rather shallow, you'd be foolish to assume it will always be free when there is no legal guarantee of that.
Nonetheless, the user base of MacOS as a server OS is trace. There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated. These guys don't mess around - they expect to have industrial strength support during the upgrade, and they expect there to be no regressions.
Apple is in an entirely different league - they can ship a trivial OS update that accidentally deletes entire hard disks worth of data and can get off by paying for a few hundred disk recoveries and having an "everybody makes mistakes" attitude. That kind of thing isn't really acceptable for the desktop, but the extreme loyalty of Apples customers means they can essentially get away with it. That simply doesn't fly when you run most of the worlds servers.
It's also a lot more popular.
This might be useful for when trying to make apps run in Wine. Occasionally disassembly is the only way to figure out why the app crashes light years away from the nearest API call etc.
That's like saying, well you own a time-expired WMA file because all you have to do is download this cracking tool. The people who made the file did not really intend for you to do that, even though they probably knew it was possible.
Well, I found their trance section and signed up for the trial. So far not really impressed, their download client failed to download the album yet still counted the tracks against my 50! We'll see what tech support say about it.
eMusic does look good...... but they have no trance :( Searches for "Chicane" or "Paul Van Dyk" give only compilation albums. Is there a way to request music to be added? Or does that kind of stuff fall under the "clear channel bullshit" banner?
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
I would note that you need this for Apples service as well, you need to log in to listen to music on another computer...
No, they give you a DRM wrapped music file that will be played by compliant players for a timed period....
Many more players support WMA than Apples DRM wrapped AAC, in fact, with Apple you can use the iPod and that's it.
Nobody owns music today, if you did it would be legal to copy it and give it to your friends.
That's fine, not everybody is like you. I listen to the radio a lot. I don't mind if a track is here one minute and gone the next. Maybe I hear a track and like it, and want to listen again. This service would let me do so in a reasonably cheap way.
This almost certainly wouldn't work with Linux, but I'd have no real problems with subscribing to something like this if it did. The main problem is finding one that stocks plenty of music in a timely fashion in my interests, mostly trance, chill and jazz. eMusic doesn't seem to have that.... besides I can't really justify a subscription to any non-essential service right now, I'm supposed to be saving money :) But in principle I'd like such a thing.
So? Most people have CDs that they loved 3 years ago but have since forgotten about. You don't have to continue paying - why not rent for a month or two, and when you've got bored of a song or album let it go.
People are yelling about this because it's from Microsoft, and because Apple do something vaguely related and the current vogue is that Apple are perfect. Rental works in many other industries, why not here?
The iTunes Music Store restricts what you can do with a song you have bought, as it has DRM. Ergo, you do not own the bits, because if you did, you could do whatever you liked with them.
I don't see how making music expire is any different to limiting it to 3 computers at once really. No matter which service you use, a set of restrictions are placed upon what you can do with the music.
Considering that when I find a new track I really love, I tend to pig out on listening to it, then forget about it, I see no reason why a subscription/rental service would not work. It works OK for videos, DVDs, and books. Why not music too? As long as it's cheaper for me to rent than it is to buy, that's fine by me.
Of course, it'd be hard to get much cheaper than 99c per track. But it could probably be done.
Or I think you can host Windows in VMware and use that instead.
Why? It's a story in the Financial Times, I'd say it warrants interest. Especially considering the timing.
I knew there were some shady characters here on the dot, but still. A tad extreme.