[Joe user isn't interested in the kernel], He wants a working system... The Linux Driver Project isn't targeted at Joe User. It was originally targeted at hardware manufacturers who wanted their hardware supported under Linux, for free. Since few manufacturers have responded, they're opening it up to general requests for 'raw' hardware support. The Project's purpose isn't total system integration -- that's what GNOME/KDE/Xfce and the 'middle layers' (like the HAL) are for. The purpose is to get the low-level bits working right so the upper levels can 'just work'.
Sure, but most people wouldn't call a big-iron Cisco (for example) router a "server". I'm not saying passing around clear-text email is a good idea if you're sending anything private, just saying that "it goes through lots of servers" isn't really the case.
email sent "in the clear" bounces around so many servers I wonder why everyone says this, because it's not really true. Look at mail headers from any email you've received. Usually there will just be a few servers in the 'Received' headers, and, even when there are several, they'll usually all belong to the same organisation. The simplest flow is this:
The sender's machine
The sender's SMTP server, often run by their ISP.
The receiver's MX host.
And that's it. Sometimes there are more servers on the receiver's end when the MX host is in a pool of servers and mail gets handed off to other servers for storage. If you have an address in there that is forwarded to another address, you'll get another host or two. If the sender uses webmail, there will usually be an entry for the webmail server connecting to an SMTP host in the same domain. Mailing lists add another hop or two.
Now, I'm not saying email sent 'in the clear' is secure -- far from it. But it's not true as many people say that email bounces through 'so many servers' -- the common case is 2 servers, and the next most common case is 3 or 4. Even in cases where a mail might bounce through several servers, rarely will mail be handled by machines outside 2 domains (3 in the case of forwarders and mailing lists).
No, it's a headless system -- if VRAM is actually being stored in a chunk of system RAM, the way to go here would be to just disable the VRAM entirely and reclaim it as normal system RAM.
But why? People don't really think hierarchically. When I visit a website, I usually don't care where it's located. Why should I have to type 'slashdot.org.us' in the browser? What about companies or other entities that change their national location (I would imagine this sort of thing might be more common in Europe than in the US)? Do they lose their country-specific domain?
I'd go the other way: eliminate the ccTLDs except for government-related entities. Then you could get rid of.gov and.mil, and have.gov.us,.gov.uk,.gov.es, etc. Only sites that are government-related would go into ccTLDs, and everything else would use the normal.com,.org, etc. TLDs we have now. We could then rethink the TLDs to be more topical and category-oriented than they are now, though that isn't really necessary.
This kind of phone/provider tying is bad for competition and probably does a lot to keep phone prices artificially high. Four months ago I bought a (nice, not default crappy free) phone in the US tied to a 2-year T-Mobile contract for negative $15. Yes, that's right, with rebates and discounts, I ended up $15 richer after all one-time initial fees were considered. My housemate got a better deal; he got $65. That's artificially high?
Spoken like a true American who doesn't have a clue about European law. Ooh, good one. If you don't like what someone's saying, insult their nationality. I'll have to remember that one.
Give me one example of the EU forcing a good product out of the market. Give me the definition of a 'good' product, and tell me what that has to do with the issue at hand. I think the parent was using the iPhone as just this example. Though I suppose it's a somewhat theoretical example, as we're not quite sure yet how Apple is going to deal with all countries in the EU market.
You think you have a good phone selection? I think we have an adequate phone selection, that works well for the majority of customers. Those who have different needs can always buy an unlocked phone direct from the manufacturer, on eBay, or imported through various means.
They're more expensive? Sure; you lose the carrier's subsidy that they gladly give you in exchange for your guarantee that you'll stick with their service for 2 years. And besides, aren't unlocked, contract-free phones in Europe similarly expensive? At least they were the last time I was in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, and England. (Yes, I was curious, and really did check, as I was thinking about buying a phone overseas, though admittedly I didn't look at an exhaustive sample of stores.)
We can use any phone we want on any network we want. So? I wouldn't expect the network I'm using to change so much for the worse in a 1- or 2-year period that I'd want to leave. If I did, it's likely I'd be able to get out of the contract. I know others who have been able to do so -- not that it's always easy.
Again, if you don't want a contract in the US, you buy an unlocked phone via the means I described above, and buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card separately.
We have locked phones too of course, but the providers are required to unlock them if the contract with the customer has expired and the customer asks for it. This is to ensure that you can take your phone with you to another provider. We don't have laws to that effect, but I know that both T-Mobile and Cingular (at least before the AT&T merger) would unlock phones after the contract was over. A friend of mine also got her phone unlocked by T-Mobile before her contract expired just by asking them.
If all else fails, most phone models have unlock codes posted on the web if you look hard enough (though sometimes you have to pay a few dollars to get them).
I bet you Apple didn't even know that a few months ago. I'd bet you they did. Do you seriously believe a high-profile international company wouldn't understand how their target markets work?
The European GSM market is at least twice as big as the market Apple will ever reach if they continue the way they are going in America, so I hope they come to their senses soon and start getting their priorities right. Who are you to set their priorities? They may believe they can maximise their profit, even given the issues selling in Europe, just as they are now. And hell, maybe their goals aren't even so simple. They could theoretically profit more by offering very-low-end MacBooks and MacBook Pros (i.e., sub-$1000), but they choose not to. While you or I may not understand their motives or priorities, it doesn't make them wrong.
The only reason they have so many problems here is because of the new sophisticated voice mail they have invented. They were too far ahead of the time with that, so why not remove that feature and make the iPhone compatible with all providers? Sure, remove a new innovative feature because technology is behind, great idea. Or, what they've already done: give networks an incentive to make themselves compatible with a useful and interesting feature.
Where is it codified that people have a "right" to make a their living solely by making and selling music? If you can make it work, great. If not... well, there are plenty of other fields of work in the world where you can work enough to keep yourself clothed, fed, and sheltered while giving you the spare time and resources to work on your music. Just because you want to be able to make a living selling sound waves over and over again doesn't mean you have a right to.
Artists who take the gamble and sign with a major label, only to get screwed over later, get very little sympathy from me. The label gives them the contract; they're the ones who sign it. It's up to the artist to make sure the terms are reasonable to them, no matter how deceptive and slimy the record company is trying to be to get them to sign that paper.
You can do something very similar using hard links on just about any unix/linux filesystem. Though I know that doesn't work across devices -- you can only make a hard link to a file (actually, an inode) if it's on the same filesystem. I'm not sure if the same is true for MacOS aliases. The cool thing about hard links is that, after you create one, you essentially have two 'files' that point to exactly the same data on the disk, and you can't even tell them apart afterwards. One isn't an alias of the other, they're just the same file with different names.
Though, really you could probably implement cross-device hard links (in a non-portable way) by storing both the target device name and inode number in the file entry. Or maybe some kind of UUID assigned to the device to protect against device names changing due to moving the disks around on the cable or whatever.
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I was under the impression that there was nothing you couldn't store in a resource fork that you couldn't also store in a 'normal' extended attribute that file systems like ext3, xfs, reiser, etc. have supported for some time. Is this not the case? Obviously there would need to be some 'conversion mechanism' in OSX to preserve your resfork/extattrs when moving between file systems, but that's just a detail.
I already adressed that. The System is broken. Abolish patents now. Not gonna happen? I'll ignore them and never sell anything save from countries that don't imagine that ideas can be monopolized. I don't disagree that the system is broken, but while you're doing that, the rest of us will be living here in the real world. Patents, copyrights, corporate secrecy, etc. won't go away (or be reformed) overnight, and ignoring them won't make them go away.
You're still missing the point. The act of "writing the driver" is often the *smallest* cost to the company. Supporting users of the driver, release management, providing updates, security fixes, etc. -- that's where the cost is. If a company doesn't think supporting an alternative OS will generate enough extra revenue (e.g., from increased sales of their hardware) to offset these costs, they probably won't support alternative OSes.
Releasing specs is another matter. Some companies may have patent concerns, or may have licensed technology from other companies under terms that don't allow them to release specs. And sometimes it's just simple "turf protection." They're afraid -- reasonably or unreasonably -- that releasing specs might give their competitors some kind of advantage. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but that's not really up to us. They spent the time and money to develop the hardware; it's really their choice whether or not to release specs. Fortunately, for most classes of hardware, Linux users can go elsewhere when we encounter this sort of company. Even now we're making inroads into video hardware, and there's an increasing number of well-supported wireless chipsets. Most other hardware has been "open" in one form or another for some time.
How fuckin' EASY it is to write a driver in Linux... You're ignoring support costs. They're not zero. You also need release management, testing/QA, etc., and people with experience in these things (which may or may not all overlap with current staff). And regardless of how easy it may be to write a driver, it requires non-zero work (money).
There's also the somewhat grey area of binary-only kernel modules. Some companies may consider it a legal minefield not worth navigating, and they may not want to GPL their driver. Most companies (esp. large companies) are very conservative where legal issues are concerned.
I'm not saying they're "right" to have this attitude: I'd love to see more vendors acknowledge Linux as a desktop OS. But these are valid concerns and issues to corporate types, for better or worse. The question boils down to: "what does supporting Linux users give us?" If the answer is only "a warm fuzzy feeling plus support headaches," what do you think they'll do?
But why should a company support linux just because their gadget has linux running inside it? Because they are benefiting from a mature, open source, and well understood pre-established operating system. If there was no Linux they would have to spend much more development costs in building their own OS for their devices. You're assuming that corporations, in general, exist to "do good" and aren't generally motivated solely by the desire to generate a profit. Using OSS in their product is great for them; they get to avoid a large amount of development costs. Supporting Linux users is completely orthogonal; some companies may decide that supporting Linux users generates them a net profit they wouldn't otherwise have, and some won't.
I've come to think that comments on/. get modded up/down not for their insightful value or lack thereof, but based on whether people "like it or not." A few possible responses come to mind:
You must be new here.
If this were Fark, your post would get the 'obvious' tag.
Duh.
Sigh.
Sadly, this has been the status quo for quite some time now.
That's the big problem with FOSSies: they don't have an actual moral compass, they are simply contrarian to anything Microsoft. While I would never call myself a "FOSSie", since it looks and sounds pretty stupid, I guess you could label me as one. I'm not on anyone's side, per se. A frivolous lawsuit is a frivolous lawsuit, regardless of who's bringing it against whom.
Uh, what? Did *you* read your own post? It was about overblown privacy invasions that have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I don't know what constitutes more of a "black and white" viewpoints more than "drawing a line," as you suggested should be done by an "industry leader."
You want a good reason why people should have a right to privacy? Look at the teacher who lost her job over that stupid drunken Myspace photo. How many people are doing things that might be frowned on in those photos? Lose your job because you're seen to be doing something "wrong"? I see it in quite a different way. I don't think there's anything wrong with the photo being posted to Myspace. The problem is that the teacher got fired over it. The idiots who fired her are the problem, not the photo, nor the ability of the photographer to post that photo online without permission. Hell, if my boss saw a picture of me acting like an idiot, he'd think it was funny. That's the kind of person I want to work for, not a moron who believes that relaxing and having fun through perfectly legal activities is a firing offense.
Or maybe some of us are just completely ok with these static images, and don't think there's a privacy issue at all. Maybe if Google were to mount video cameras all over and let people view real-time feeds any time, anywhere, we'd get upset, because we *do* think that's a problem.
Not everything is a "then they came for me, but by that time there was no one left to speak up for me" progression of events. If you're not comfortable with Google's street view, make a fuss. If enough people care about it, then something will happen. If not, well, sorry, that just means the prevailing opinion is that it's no big deal. If "Google Cam View" came into being, I'd be right next to you complaining about it, but I have no problem with Street View -- quite the contrary; I think it's great.
What happened to "Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should"?
By the kind of argument you (and, to be fair, many others in this discussion) make, we should just ignore all laws and societal conventions, and be mercenary about doing anything that advances our personal interests. If you are disadvantaged when someone else does this, well, you should have defended yourself better, taken out more insurance, hidden away more, not gone out, paid in cash, not walked past the front of the adult movie store and coincidentally looked over your shoulder just when the photo was taken, not bought three items on the same day which in combination coincidentally trigger a terrorist threat warning...
I don't think anyone's saying that they should do something just because they can. People are saying, "They took a photo of your house, you had your blinds open and the inside of your house can be seen. So what?" What's the big deal? How does this really harm the person who lives there? If it *did* actually harm them in some way, I'm sure they could get in touch with Google, and Google would likely remove it. Hell, I'm sure Google goes over the photos before they get posted. If there's something obviously obscene or illegal, I'd bet they discard that shot and have it retaken.
Regardless, the question still remains: in this *specific case*, what harm has been done? Really, go click the link, maximise your browser window, and click the 'full screen' button. You can vaguely see the cat, and the cat-tower-thing it's sitting on, and maybe you can see what appear to be curtains(?) on the right edge of the window, but external reflections block any kind of deeper view. So: no harm done.
Sure, you can say, "But what if you could see inside, and there was someone naked?" Well, you can't, and there isn't. We don't have that situation, so it's entirely hypothetical, and it's possible and likely that either a) Google would have noticed and never published the photo (or maybe would have blurred it and published it), or b) Google would remove the photo after being contacted. No, I don't know if either (a) or (b) is true, but no one really knows if they aren't either.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see this as a privacy issue at all. The other crap you mention about going "mercenary" is just a straw man, and is unrelated to this discussion.
That's the strange thing -- I have had many packages sent to addresses that are not my billing address (gifts for family and friends, usually), and I've never had a problem. Even when the online store says that they will check the card's billing address and compare it to the shipping address, they never do. I haven't noticed any unusual delays either.
do you really think only poor black people get aids? what kind of racist prick are you? Funny, the parent poster didn't say anything about race, black or otherwise. Troll much?
Regardless, it is a fact that the areas of highest AIDS incidence in the world are also some of the poorest areas. Sure, well-off people get AIDS too, but they're the minority.
Having a problem like that can have a severe inpact on your chances of reproducing so I'd say they're no minor issues.
Titusjan, this is Mr Darwin... Darwinian concepts like natural selection don't completely apply to humans. We artificially circumvent natural selection via things like laws against murder, and modern medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but most people wouldn't call a big-iron Cisco (for example) router a "server". I'm not saying passing around clear-text email is a good idea if you're sending anything private, just saying that "it goes through lots of servers" isn't really the case.
- The sender's machine
- The sender's SMTP server, often run by their ISP.
- The receiver's MX host.
And that's it. Sometimes there are more servers on the receiver's end when the MX host is in a pool of servers and mail gets handed off to other servers for storage. If you have an address in there that is forwarded to another address, you'll get another host or two. If the sender uses webmail, there will usually be an entry for the webmail server connecting to an SMTP host in the same domain. Mailing lists add another hop or two.Now, I'm not saying email sent 'in the clear' is secure -- far from it. But it's not true as many people say that email bounces through 'so many servers' -- the common case is 2 servers, and the next most common case is 3 or 4. Even in cases where a mail might bounce through several servers, rarely will mail be handled by machines outside 2 domains (3 in the case of forwarders and mailing lists).
... likely based on data from their retailers.
No, it's a headless system -- if VRAM is actually being stored in a chunk of system RAM, the way to go here would be to just disable the VRAM entirely and reclaim it as normal system RAM.
But why? People don't really think hierarchically. When I visit a website, I usually don't care where it's located. Why should I have to type 'slashdot.org.us' in the browser? What about companies or other entities that change their national location (I would imagine this sort of thing might be more common in Europe than in the US)? Do they lose their country-specific domain?
.gov and .mil, and have .gov.us, .gov.uk, .gov.es, etc. Only sites that are government-related would go into ccTLDs, and everything else would use the normal .com, .org, etc. TLDs we have now. We could then rethink the TLDs to be more topical and category-oriented than they are now, though that isn't really necessary.
I'd go the other way: eliminate the ccTLDs except for government-related entities. Then you could get rid of
They're more expensive? Sure; you lose the carrier's subsidy that they gladly give you in exchange for your guarantee that you'll stick with their service for 2 years. And besides, aren't unlocked, contract-free phones in Europe similarly expensive? At least they were the last time I was in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, and England. (Yes, I was curious, and really did check, as I was thinking about buying a phone overseas, though admittedly I didn't look at an exhaustive sample of stores.) We can use any phone we want on any network we want. So? I wouldn't expect the network I'm using to change so much for the worse in a 1- or 2-year period that I'd want to leave. If I did, it's likely I'd be able to get out of the contract. I know others who have been able to do so -- not that it's always easy.
Again, if you don't want a contract in the US, you buy an unlocked phone via the means I described above, and buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card separately. We have locked phones too of course, but the providers are required to unlock them if the contract with the customer has expired and the customer asks for it. This is to ensure that you can take your phone with you to another provider. We don't have laws to that effect, but I know that both T-Mobile and Cingular (at least before the AT&T merger) would unlock phones after the contract was over. A friend of mine also got her phone unlocked by T-Mobile before her contract expired just by asking them.
If all else fails, most phone models have unlock codes posted on the web if you look hard enough (though sometimes you have to pay a few dollars to get them). I bet you Apple didn't even know that a few months ago. I'd bet you they did. Do you seriously believe a high-profile international company wouldn't understand how their target markets work? The European GSM market is at least twice as big as the market Apple will ever reach if they continue the way they are going in America, so I hope they come to their senses soon and start getting their priorities right. Who are you to set their priorities? They may believe they can maximise their profit, even given the issues selling in Europe, just as they are now. And hell, maybe their goals aren't even so simple. They could theoretically profit more by offering very-low-end MacBooks and MacBook Pros (i.e., sub-$1000), but they choose not to. While you or I may not understand their motives or priorities, it doesn't make them wrong. The only reason they have so many problems here is because of the new sophisticated voice mail they have invented. They were too far ahead of the time with that, so why not remove that feature and make the iPhone compatible with all providers? Sure, remove a new innovative feature because technology is behind, great idea. Or, what they've already done: give networks an incentive to make themselves compatible with a useful and interesting feature.
Where is it codified that people have a "right" to make a their living solely by making and selling music? If you can make it work, great. If not... well, there are plenty of other fields of work in the world where you can work enough to keep yourself clothed, fed, and sheltered while giving you the spare time and resources to work on your music. Just because you want to be able to make a living selling sound waves over and over again doesn't mean you have a right to.
Artists who take the gamble and sign with a major label, only to get screwed over later, get very little sympathy from me. The label gives them the contract; they're the ones who sign it. It's up to the artist to make sure the terms are reasonable to them, no matter how deceptive and slimy the record company is trying to be to get them to sign that paper.
You can do something very similar using hard links on just about any unix/linux filesystem. Though I know that doesn't work across devices -- you can only make a hard link to a file (actually, an inode) if it's on the same filesystem. I'm not sure if the same is true for MacOS aliases. The cool thing about hard links is that, after you create one, you essentially have two 'files' that point to exactly the same data on the disk, and you can't even tell them apart afterwards. One isn't an alias of the other, they're just the same file with different names.
Though, really you could probably implement cross-device hard links (in a non-portable way) by storing both the target device name and inode number in the file entry. Or maybe some kind of UUID assigned to the device to protect against device names changing due to moving the disks around on the cable or whatever.
Pardon my potential ignorance, but I was under the impression that there was nothing you couldn't store in a resource fork that you couldn't also store in a 'normal' extended attribute that file systems like ext3, xfs, reiser, etc. have supported for some time. Is this not the case? Obviously there would need to be some 'conversion mechanism' in OSX to preserve your resfork/extattrs when moving between file systems, but that's just a detail.
You're still missing the point. The act of "writing the driver" is often the *smallest* cost to the company. Supporting users of the driver, release management, providing updates, security fixes, etc. -- that's where the cost is. If a company doesn't think supporting an alternative OS will generate enough extra revenue (e.g., from increased sales of their hardware) to offset these costs, they probably won't support alternative OSes.
Releasing specs is another matter. Some companies may have patent concerns, or may have licensed technology from other companies under terms that don't allow them to release specs. And sometimes it's just simple "turf protection." They're afraid -- reasonably or unreasonably -- that releasing specs might give their competitors some kind of advantage. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but that's not really up to us. They spent the time and money to develop the hardware; it's really their choice whether or not to release specs. Fortunately, for most classes of hardware, Linux users can go elsewhere when we encounter this sort of company. Even now we're making inroads into video hardware, and there's an increasing number of well-supported wireless chipsets. Most other hardware has been "open" in one form or another for some time.
There's also the somewhat grey area of binary-only kernel modules. Some companies may consider it a legal minefield not worth navigating, and they may not want to GPL their driver. Most companies (esp. large companies) are very conservative where legal issues are concerned.
I'm not saying they're "right" to have this attitude: I'd love to see more vendors acknowledge Linux as a desktop OS. But these are valid concerns and issues to corporate types, for better or worse. The question boils down to: "what does supporting Linux users give us?" If the answer is only "a warm fuzzy feeling plus support headaches," what do you think they'll do?
I don't know... RMS wields a katana now. That's gotta count for something ^_^ .
- You must be new here.
- If this were Fark, your post would get the 'obvious' tag.
- Duh.
- Sigh.
Sadly, this has been the status quo for quite some time now.Uh, what? Did *you* read your own post? It was about overblown privacy invasions that have nothing to do with what we're talking about. I don't know what constitutes more of a "black and white" viewpoints more than "drawing a line," as you suggested should be done by an "industry leader."
Or maybe some of us are just completely ok with these static images, and don't think there's a privacy issue at all. Maybe if Google were to mount video cameras all over and let people view real-time feeds any time, anywhere, we'd get upset, because we *do* think that's a problem.
Not everything is a "then they came for me, but by that time there was no one left to speak up for me" progression of events. If you're not comfortable with Google's street view, make a fuss. If enough people care about it, then something will happen. If not, well, sorry, that just means the prevailing opinion is that it's no big deal. If "Google Cam View" came into being, I'd be right next to you complaining about it, but I have no problem with Street View -- quite the contrary; I think it's great.
What happened to "Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should"?
By the kind of argument you (and, to be fair, many others in this discussion) make, we should just ignore all laws and societal conventions, and be mercenary about doing anything that advances our personal interests. If you are disadvantaged when someone else does this, well, you should have defended yourself better, taken out more insurance, hidden away more, not gone out, paid in cash, not walked past the front of the adult movie store and coincidentally looked over your shoulder just when the photo was taken, not bought three items on the same day which in combination coincidentally trigger a terrorist threat warning...
I don't think anyone's saying that they should do something just because they can. People are saying, "They took a photo of your house, you had your blinds open and the inside of your house can be seen. So what?" What's the big deal? How does this really harm the person who lives there? If it *did* actually harm them in some way, I'm sure they could get in touch with Google, and Google would likely remove it. Hell, I'm sure Google goes over the photos before they get posted. If there's something obviously obscene or illegal, I'd bet they discard that shot and have it retaken.Regardless, the question still remains: in this *specific case*, what harm has been done? Really, go click the link, maximise your browser window, and click the 'full screen' button. You can vaguely see the cat, and the cat-tower-thing it's sitting on, and maybe you can see what appear to be curtains(?) on the right edge of the window, but external reflections block any kind of deeper view. So: no harm done.
Sure, you can say, "But what if you could see inside, and there was someone naked?" Well, you can't, and there isn't. We don't have that situation, so it's entirely hypothetical, and it's possible and likely that either a) Google would have noticed and never published the photo (or maybe would have blurred it and published it), or b) Google would remove the photo after being contacted. No, I don't know if either (a) or (b) is true, but no one really knows if they aren't either.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see this as a privacy issue at all. The other crap you mention about going "mercenary" is just a straw man, and is unrelated to this discussion.
That's the strange thing -- I have had many packages sent to addresses that are not my billing address (gifts for family and friends, usually), and I've never had a problem. Even when the online store says that they will check the card's billing address and compare it to the shipping address, they never do. I haven't noticed any unusual delays either.
Regardless, it is a fact that the areas of highest AIDS incidence in the world are also some of the poorest areas. Sure, well-off people get AIDS too, but they're the minority.