the burden of proof should be that a device needs to be proven safe, not that it needs to be proven hazardous.
Perhaps you should stop making up panicky, ridiculous statements like "the machine having a "mishap" because someone had to check twitter" and come up with something more sensible and, as the GP noted, based on empirical evidence instead of anecdotal evidence.
If personal electronics carried by a passenger are a threat to avionics, then the problem is in how the plane is constructed. Otherwise they'll need to start issuing EM scanners to detect if you have any active electronics on you before takeoff/landing.
Once you've signed the contract (by buying the good) you can't break it without criminal repercussions, rather than just civil repercussions.
Which is balls-to-the-wall fucked up. No one should be forced into agreeing to a contract filled with legalese just to buy a single item, much less one that stipulates criminal penalties for violating the contract.
His point was that it is unethical, if not outright wrong, to put people into a position where they must make the decision to give up freedoms for access to things.
Just because you're enraged that someone might be opposed to excessive corporate reach (to the point where you'd only have an unintelligent expletive-laced rant to blow in the face of someone who is concerned far more about your freedom than you are) doesn't mean he's in any way wrong.
Congratulations on being an over-emotional tool who can't construct a decent argument.
the alternatives Stallman is proposing are wildly impractical and would never happen.
That's fine. They in no way negate his point, and his concerns still stand. All the more so, considering how hard Apple and Microsoft are pushing for a locked down, restrictive future of computing for the average person.
Indeed. Money better spent padding the pockets of Wall Street, bailing out companies that are "too big to (be allowed to) fail", or making and dropping bombs.
Nonsense. We don't need coders in the US, that's like manufacturing. We'll just have someone in India or China do it. We're an information economy here in the States, where our information is enforced consumption of music, movies, and Apps (developed in India and China.)
I would like to see manufacturers release pure Android phones and compete on hardware.
They can't do that and they know it. Eventually they all reach a common point. Most have, pretty much every Honeycomb tablet has the exact same hardware.
Why don't they compete to see who can release the latest update first?
Updates don't sell more phones. They're an ongoing and unwanted cost.
it would be nice to see a Pentaband chip in something other than the Nokia N8.
Maybe if we got all the carriers to standardize on LTE, we could see multi-frequency chips in more handsets. And maybe if they all started dropping the price for no-contract, BYOH (bring your own handset) service (BHAHAHAHAHA) we would see more of a market for unlocked devices.
Who am I kidding. They'll act as aggressively as ever to lock users in with contracts, and make anything else mostly not worth it.
Comcast claims to be participating in World IPv6 day, and in response I have added the necessary IPv6 support packages to my router (OpenWRT FTW.) Currently all I get are link-local addresses, so hopefully something real will filter on down on June 8th.
If that's really the problem, then Microsoft should just pull an xbox and release a console-ized version of the OS on locked down laptop hardware and call it the "xbook" or someshit.
(And actually, it will help Android too as undoubtedly people will want to put Android on their over-powered tablet devices and with less variation in hardware, there will be fewer obstacles to overcome.)
The distrustful part of me suspects that there will be requirements that bar the ability to load other OSes on these devices, above and beyond the typical lack of video drivers and (in the case of windows-based machines) the complete lack of a compatible Linux kernel.
It seems Microsoft is jealous of Apple's ability to get people to accept heavy restrictions on mobile devices, and is attempting to enforce the same thing by leveraging their monopoly on Windows.
Sadly, now is better than ever for vendors to give Microsoft the finger and go for other options yet we probably won't see it happen. Precisely because Microsoft is still, ten years later, a monopoly that can crush a vendor if they don't do what Microsoft says.
Having the same OS as everyone else would now be a big improvement for them.
It would also have put them under Google's thumb. Had they not been weighed down by ineffective bureaucracy and allowed the Internet Tablet teams to execute with more support than they had with the N900, they might have had something worthwhile.
But alas, the Symbian teams kept pumping out more terrible devices. And with Elop on board I'd be shocked if it wasn't decided to move to WP7 as soon as he walked through the doors, but just delayed to prevent panic.
Like HP, Acer, Dell, Sony, Asus, HTC and tens of thousands of ISV's
The ISVs were bullied plenty by Microsoft. The past 10 years haven't been as bad because MS was under the microscope.
Not to mention that it was Microsoft which forced the prices of computers down(leading to the x86 takeover of the server environment on which Linux thrives) due to licensing to multiple OEMs so they became affordable to the general public and the rest of the world.
Yeah, MICROSOFT did that. No one else, no other reason, but MICROSOFT. Thank you, MICROSOFT, for without you computing would have been impossible.
If you think Apple's prices are high now, imagine what they would be if there was minimal competition.
I think that without MS there would be more competition and more diversity.
Nokia's situation is in a major because not being able to implement Meego/Maemo(Linux, if it needs reminding) properly inspite of throwing a thousand devs and billions into it and the products were all Open Source.
So, Nokia is incompetent. There's nothing new here. They had an awesome set of technologies growing internally yet they dropped the ball completely.
If anything, it shows the dangers of the fallacies of expecting FOSS to be a magic cure-all without proper UI and architectural design etc. According to the wisdom on Slashdot,, A team of ninja developers descend by magic on any FOSS project and then make it the best, surpassing all the other offerings.
No, that's just you getting a FOSS hatefest rolling. We've seen Microsoft destroy partners before, with FOSS the only one who can undermine your success is yourself. Nokia's horribly thick bureaucracy populated by the old guard who didn't want to see things change refused to allow the company to bring up something new on the high end, stymieing and stalling things until it was too late.
Sounds like a public enough declaration of support for open-source drivers?
With respect only to development boards for the SoCs in question. Actual production devices rarely see their board support files upstreamed, instead rotting forever in some Android-specific kernel with Android-isms littered throughout the source, along with more feature-filled and capable drivers for many board peripherals.
This is to say absolutely nothing about video drivers, which are hellish to a degree unknown in the desktop space. They are completely closed source and operate entirely in userspace. As a result, they end up dependent on the system's libc and specific ABI, so were something built for Android using ARM softfp, it would not work with MeeGo built with hardfp. Hell the bionic/glibc difference alone makes it impossible. On top of that, the SoC vendors generally are loathe to support any platform outside a specially chosen set. So you could boot Fedora, Gentoo, or Debian but if there's anything that interferes with the video drivers, you're stuck with software rendered 2D instead of using the 3D facilities of the chip.
GP is right, sadly. I love that all of these ARM dev boards are coming out, but you're still extremely limited in the target OSes you can try them out fully on and it's all due to proprietary, closed source drivers.
It was quite apparent to me what the summary was talking about. Maybe it'd be handy to click the link and see what's being referred to. Perhaps working on your reading comprehension would help you, instead of asking to be talked down to because you don't instantly understand the subject matter.
Intel tried to keep Meego development on their hardware, which limited work towards others (Read: ARM)
Except development proceeded apace on both architectures. But Intel (obviously) didn't provide support for non-Intel platforms, even though they had no means nor right to block it.
Instead they brought in Qt and basically hit the big reset button on the whole project in order to get their brand up front.
They had been planning a shift to Qt some time before, and to a great degree it was a smart move due in no large part to how irritating using GLib and GTK+ are. Qt gives them a much better development environment that is available in a cross platform manner that GTK+ has never been able to offer.
The problem with the way hardware is handled in the ARM space is that the SGX drivers that work on one platform may not work on another, even if the SGX core is the same. On top of that, you'd need them built explicitly for Xorg 1.9 and compiled against glibc (so basically, the vendor would be shipping both Android and MeeGo, or using the same hardware as one shipping MeeGo.)
I'd like to see MeeGo become basically installable on any device that Android can reside and more.
This is not something MeeGo or its developers can fix, at least not on the mobile device (ARM-based) space. Google has worked very hard to make sure the user space is incompatible with more common Linux distributions and software, and vendors are loathe to merge their drivers and device support upstream (because that would require more work.)
However, it would be great if it could also load onto Nexus S, Nexus One, etc.. and a host of other higher end android offerings
A basic port should be possible, if not done already, but won't be part of MeeGo unless someone picks up the torch. You'd also have to harass Google to compile any binary only bits (namely the graphics drivers) for glibc and to work with Xorg 1.9.
The OS is open enough that users are more than empowered to make it happen (it's running on Qualcomm chips and Tegra 2) but whether hardware vendors will play ball to get it running is another question entirely.
this kind of thing is precisely why Nokia dropped Meego
On the contrary, Nokia never got to MeeGo. They were part way with their Maemo-derived, MeeGo compatible device when Elop announced a wholesale shift to being (effectively) a Microsoft OEM.
At some point, you need to stick with what already works, and polish it, instead of dropping it for the latest shiny instead.
And had Nokia not stymied the group working on Maemo, then they would have gotten there, as you acknowledge. But in the end they would likely have gone MeeGo anyway, simply because building an entire OS internally is not terribly beneficial, when you can share the load across multiple companies (like Linux itself.)
MeeGo is a fully open source Linux OS under the Linux Foundation umbrella that seeks to be a reference baseline OS for all sorts of consumer electronics. Phones, Tablets, Netbooks (less these days), TVs, set top boxes, and in-car computers.
Progress to return to a point that people were suckered into walking away from. Back in 2009 I had my N900, which was never locked down in the slightest.
But they'll see the very vocal 5% who demand "unlocked bootloaders" and start asking. They may never do anything with it, but the noise level has obviously had an impact.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should stop making up panicky, ridiculous statements like "the machine having a "mishap" because someone had to check twitter" and come up with something more sensible and, as the GP noted, based on empirical evidence instead of anecdotal evidence.
If personal electronics carried by a passenger are a threat to avionics, then the problem is in how the plane is constructed. Otherwise they'll need to start issuing EM scanners to detect if you have any active electronics on you before takeoff/landing.
Which is balls-to-the-wall fucked up. No one should be forced into agreeing to a contract filled with legalese just to buy a single item, much less one that stipulates criminal penalties for violating the contract.
His point was that it is unethical, if not outright wrong, to put people into a position where they must make the decision to give up freedoms for access to things.
Just because you're enraged that someone might be opposed to excessive corporate reach (to the point where you'd only have an unintelligent expletive-laced rant to blow in the face of someone who is concerned far more about your freedom than you are) doesn't mean he's in any way wrong.
Congratulations on being an over-emotional tool who can't construct a decent argument.
That's fine. They in no way negate his point, and his concerns still stand. All the more so, considering how hard Apple and Microsoft are pushing for a locked down, restrictive future of computing for the average person.
Indeed. Money better spent padding the pockets of Wall Street, bailing out companies that are "too big to (be allowed to) fail", or making and dropping bombs.
Nonsense. We don't need coders in the US, that's like manufacturing. We'll just have someone in India or China do it. We're an information economy here in the States, where our information is enforced consumption of music, movies, and Apps (developed in India and China.)
Yup, that's fucked up. Nothing like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You're assuming it won't be integrated such that it's in the same sensor or behind the same lens as the optical CCD.
They can't do that and they know it. Eventually they all reach a common point. Most have, pretty much every Honeycomb tablet has the exact same hardware.
Updates don't sell more phones. They're an ongoing and unwanted cost.
Maybe if we got all the carriers to standardize on LTE, we could see multi-frequency chips in more handsets. And maybe if they all started dropping the price for no-contract, BYOH (bring your own handset) service (BHAHAHAHAHA) we would see more of a market for unlocked devices.
Who am I kidding. They'll act as aggressively as ever to lock users in with contracts, and make anything else mostly not worth it.
Comcast claims to be participating in World IPv6 day, and in response I have added the necessary IPv6 support packages to my router (OpenWRT FTW.) Currently all I get are link-local addresses, so hopefully something real will filter on down on June 8th.
If that's really the problem, then Microsoft should just pull an xbox and release a console-ized version of the OS on locked down laptop hardware and call it the "xbook" or someshit.
The distrustful part of me suspects that there will be requirements that bar the ability to load other OSes on these devices, above and beyond the typical lack of video drivers and (in the case of windows-based machines) the complete lack of a compatible Linux kernel.
It seems Microsoft is jealous of Apple's ability to get people to accept heavy restrictions on mobile devices, and is attempting to enforce the same thing by leveraging their monopoly on Windows.
Sadly, now is better than ever for vendors to give Microsoft the finger and go for other options yet we probably won't see it happen. Precisely because Microsoft is still, ten years later, a monopoly that can crush a vendor if they don't do what Microsoft says.
It would also have put them under Google's thumb. Had they not been weighed down by ineffective bureaucracy and allowed the Internet Tablet teams to execute with more support than they had with the N900, they might have had something worthwhile.
But alas, the Symbian teams kept pumping out more terrible devices. And with Elop on board I'd be shocked if it wasn't decided to move to WP7 as soon as he walked through the doors, but just delayed to prevent panic.
The ISVs were bullied plenty by Microsoft. The past 10 years haven't been as bad because MS was under the microscope.
Yeah, MICROSOFT did that. No one else, no other reason, but MICROSOFT. Thank you, MICROSOFT, for without you computing would have been impossible.
I think that without MS there would be more competition and more diversity.
So, Nokia is incompetent. There's nothing new here. They had an awesome set of technologies growing internally yet they dropped the ball completely.
No, that's just you getting a FOSS hatefest rolling. We've seen Microsoft destroy partners before, with FOSS the only one who can undermine your success is yourself. Nokia's horribly thick bureaucracy populated by the old guard who didn't want to see things change refused to allow the company to bring up something new on the high end, stymieing and stalling things until it was too late.
With respect only to development boards for the SoCs in question. Actual production devices rarely see their board support files upstreamed, instead rotting forever in some Android-specific kernel with Android-isms littered throughout the source, along with more feature-filled and capable drivers for many board peripherals.
This is to say absolutely nothing about video drivers, which are hellish to a degree unknown in the desktop space. They are completely closed source and operate entirely in userspace. As a result, they end up dependent on the system's libc and specific ABI, so were something built for Android using ARM softfp, it would not work with MeeGo built with hardfp. Hell the bionic/glibc difference alone makes it impossible. On top of that, the SoC vendors generally are loathe to support any platform outside a specially chosen set. So you could boot Fedora, Gentoo, or Debian but if there's anything that interferes with the video drivers, you're stuck with software rendered 2D instead of using the 3D facilities of the chip.
GP is right, sadly. I love that all of these ARM dev boards are coming out, but you're still extremely limited in the target OSes you can try them out fully on and it's all due to proprietary, closed source drivers.
It was quite apparent to me what the summary was talking about. Maybe it'd be handy to click the link and see what's being referred to. Perhaps working on your reading comprehension would help you, instead of asking to be talked down to because you don't instantly understand the subject matter.
Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager. The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.
Except development proceeded apace on both architectures. But Intel (obviously) didn't provide support for non-Intel platforms, even though they had no means nor right to block it.
They had been planning a shift to Qt some time before, and to a great degree it was a smart move due in no large part to how irritating using GLib and GTK+ are. Qt gives them a much better development environment that is available in a cross platform manner that GTK+ has never been able to offer.
The problem with the way hardware is handled in the ARM space is that the SGX drivers that work on one platform may not work on another, even if the SGX core is the same. On top of that, you'd need them built explicitly for Xorg 1.9 and compiled against glibc (so basically, the vendor would be shipping both Android and MeeGo, or using the same hardware as one shipping MeeGo.)
It's all about vendor-dependence.
We are not at war. Just remember that.
This is not something MeeGo or its developers can fix, at least not on the mobile device (ARM-based) space. Google has worked very hard to make sure the user space is incompatible with more common Linux distributions and software, and vendors are loathe to merge their drivers and device support upstream (because that would require more work.)
A basic port should be possible, if not done already, but won't be part of MeeGo unless someone picks up the torch. You'd also have to harass Google to compile any binary only bits (namely the graphics drivers) for glibc and to work with Xorg 1.9.
The OS is open enough that users are more than empowered to make it happen (it's running on Qualcomm chips and Tegra 2) but whether hardware vendors will play ball to get it running is another question entirely.
this kind of thing is precisely why Nokia dropped Meego
On the contrary, Nokia never got to MeeGo. They were part way with their Maemo-derived, MeeGo compatible device when Elop announced a wholesale shift to being (effectively) a Microsoft OEM.
And had Nokia not stymied the group working on Maemo, then they would have gotten there, as you acknowledge. But in the end they would likely have gone MeeGo anyway, simply because building an entire OS internally is not terribly beneficial, when you can share the load across multiple companies (like Linux itself.)
That's at best a pale explanation.
MeeGo is a fully open source Linux OS under the Linux Foundation umbrella that seeks to be a reference baseline OS for all sorts of consumer electronics. Phones, Tablets, Netbooks (less these days), TVs, set top boxes, and in-car computers.
Progress to return to a point that people were suckered into walking away from. Back in 2009 I had my N900, which was never locked down in the slightest.
But they'll see the very vocal 5% who demand "unlocked bootloaders" and start asking. They may never do anything with it, but the noise level has obviously had an impact.