Only if you only install Debian packages. As soon as you install something from another source, you have to maintain it yourself. Just as you would on OS X.
Uh, huh. Except you skirt around the little detail that Debian and other distros package a massive set of packages, and Apple Update handles a tiny handful. It's quite reasonable to use a fully packaged system. I tend to poke at my system quite a bit, and I'd say that over 95% of the packages on my system are packaged by my distro vendor. Furthermore, I use checkinstall, and when the distro vendor *starts* packaging a package, it automatically starts handling that package if I have it installed. Finally, all the important stuff to keep up-to-date as closely as possible, like servers, on the systems I've used *are* packaged by the distro vendor. Be honest -- the automatic updating situation on Mac OS X sucks. It's roughly comparable to that of Windows.
no ugly klunky SysV init,
The only people that complain about SysV init are hardcore BSDites that don't like anything that differs from The Way They Are Used To Things Working. SysV init is hardly "clunky".
a classy signal handling mechanism,
This is a new one on me. What do you like so much about BSD signal handling? I don't see too much extra stuff you could do with it without violating POSIX.
Ceren
?
Marvel at the way you can compile a single binary that will run on multiple architectures.
(Granted, I was unaware that the OS X binary format supported multiple arches in-file.) And why exactly would this be of value? Oh, it was a sexy feature back in Mac OS classic days, when package management didn't exist and Apple wanted seamless transition to another architecture. However, it's not very frequently that I rip a binary out of my system and dump it on another.
Drool over the dynamic loader.
This is not an impressive feature. Anything that *didn't* would be pretty awful, I will give you that.
Whimper in awe at the Mach threading system.
I hope you mean the awful performance of OS X compared to Linux. Instead of making random, unsupported claims, why not take a look at some benchmarks? Note the context switching time of your vaunted Mach kernel.
OS X is a UNIXy system that gets fairly poor performance compared to its peers, uses a lot of memory, and lacks the GNU toolset. It runs on expensive hardware. As a matter of fact, in many ways, it's very much like Solaris. The only real draw to Mac OS X is that it happens to have a desktop environment with a lot of eye candy, something like Enlightenment tripled or so. If you like your eye candy, yes, OS X is a nice place to be. The problem is that there are a ton of people that spent a lot of money on their Apple hardware and feel the need to *constantly* justify it on Slashdot. If they can afford and like the eye candy, great. Claims of better performance/memory usage/bang-for-the-buck/etc can go to/dev/null, where they belong.
A coyote digging a couple of holes is going to probably displace more topsoil than these few vehicles.
If you *really* want to do something, go after the hordes of people driving SUVs and not carpooling. The air pollution emitted by these does a lot more damage than some faint tire tracks.
You know, I skipped to the last paragraph in your post, and just assummed that you were arguing the *other way*:
It is not about politics. It is about politeness. One does not ask people to do things that by their very nature are extremely hard if not impossible to accomplish at all, especially if people make it known in advance that they do not have the time nor the means (and hence no inclination) to even try.
Where I thought the task at subject was "releasing an open source driver.":-)
Unless you're really desperate for performance, xv is very comparable. What kind of system are you running, and at what percentage load when playing movies.
The only reason *I*'m not using 2.6 is that the unified Linux X10 driver (wish) has not been ported to 2.6, and apparently requires significant work. Everyone using Linux in an X10 environment is apparently sorry-out-of-luck at the moment.:-( I'm trying to do up a userspace app that will let me send X10 commands to my PowerLinc USB based on the code in the driver.
Feel free to drop your email address to the manager involved offering free advice if he needs it.
It's easy if it's the illusive "them" at issue to suggest that someone do something.
This one incident could slow or accelerate Linux deployment, but it won't stop it or beat Microsoft with a single move. Ultimately, there is no "just get this one incident through". What matters is overall how easy it is to transition to Linux, and how well Linux ultimately serves the needs of users.
You have a real, serious, caffine addiction. We joke about it, but it's not healthy, and not fun. I know someone that chugs down Coke like mad, all day long, along with strong coffee -- high, steady doses do bad things to people.
Ease yourself off it. Someone with a real caffine dependency can keep himself at a normal state by frequently drinking caffine. A person with no caffine dependency is in the same state, but without hassling with all the caffine and associated nastiness.
Good luck.:-(
Oh, and keep in mind that if you *do* want to use caffine as a "pep pill", it's *much* more effective if you aren't constantly consuming it.
Pharm advertising phenomenon
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Cyberchondria
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· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, I talked with a friend who is interested in this. It turns out that this is why many ads make no medical claims --- just show pictues of happy people and then mention the medicine's name. It turns out that if you make *any* medical claims in an ad, you also have to mention the side effects. However, if you simply reference the medicine's name, you don't.
Re:Pharmaceutical Industry?
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Cyberchondria
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· Score: 1
The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g....osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy.
Drink some milk. It's cheap, tastes good, and works better than a pill!
Re:The hypochondria pill...
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 1
They aren't "sugar pills", they're "Curaria"! You'll never make it in Pfizer marketing...;-)
Another source of reliable information
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 3, Informative
I've found that doing a site search for site:.gov in Google is a good way of filtering out bullshit. The US government may be slow and inefficient, but they hold research that they publish to pretty tough standards. I was interested at one point in the benefits of having lights with similar spectral profiles to sunlight, as my room is windowless. A lot of vendors claim that it's tough to sync yourself to waking at particular times without *sunlight*, rather than just any kind of light. The current take the government has on it is that most of these claims are pretty much overblown.
The government doesn't have everything out there, but when it does have studies, it usually puts them out there on the Internet, publically available. It's your money that paid for said tough standards and hours of someone shifting away bullshit. I'd suggest taking advantage of some of that.
Alternative medicine kooks
on
Cyberchondria
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The worst of it is that you *never* see people that just think that one particular form of alternative medicine might have some value, which would indicate that they're at least being rational. Say, maybe, acupuncture for pain relief. No, if acupuncture is useful, then they're certain that there has to be something in various herbal medicines and magnet healing has to also be useful.
It's really amazing how fraud is illegal, but alternative medicine gets a special pass -- and medicine is an area where one would think that we *should* have some form of tough regulation.
You know, Red Hat has been very pro-free software, even to significant short-term detriment, though the Debian people like to bill themselves as "the most free distro". RH moved from the Navigator 4.x releases Mozilla well before Mozilla was really ready to spur Mozilla development and interest. They dropped MP3 support in favor of Vorbis (that one they lost out on) and have made a lot of pro-free software decisions that went well beyond the other competing major distros of the time. They pushed GNOME instead of KDE, and were one of the largest backers, because of the Qt licensing situation.
I have to say that MS getting work done for them is a little unsettling. However, the problem is not A Decent Office Suite For Linux. We have at least a usable one, OpenOffice, though it isn't utopian.
The problem is A Decent Office Suite For Linux That Can Interoperate Flawlessly With Microsoft Office. There's a lot of content out there in Office format, and having darn near perfect support for the format is important for any adopters.
1) Intellisense... when you hit the open paren for a function, it brings up all the overloaded prototypes WITH the documentation on the screen!
Ah, okay I haven't gotten into this sort of thing, so I can't speak for how the two compare, but emacs can certainly do this.
2) Hit F1 while you're working on something and it searches for the word on which your cursor lies and automatically displays it to you.
Like, looking up a function? When you have the cursor on the symbol you want (say, printf), hit Meta-X and type info-lookup-symbol and hit enter (or bind that command to F1). You'll get documentation on that symbol. Or do you mean just having it use the current word in a search to a web brower?
And... the RAD Designers that are not integrated are not seamless like IDEs are.
Err...yes. That's by definition -- they are two different tools, as opposed to one large tool. I don't see what technical issues that causes.
Also, hardly anyone uses the POSIX or WIN32 APIs directly anymore, so, in Windows, those man pages would be useless.
I suppose it depends on the type of software you write. I do.
Again... why would you use a DSW file in Cygwin? If you want to put out a snapshot of a project, how hard is it to transfer it binary or put it in a Zip file? It's not like people don't know the difference between ASCII files on Unix and Windows...
I don't, but I check out files using Cygwin's CVS. And the problems come up when folks do checkouts on non-Windows platforms and then send snapshots around. The whole problem is partly because of CVS (it could contain a ton of special cases for extensions, but I've never had problems except for with VS), partly because of whoever neglected to manually specify binary usage when checking in a.dsw file, and mostly because the project file parser for VS 6 sucks -- the thing is a text file, for Chrissake. Parsing a text file without breaking on different newline formats is not rocket science.
I don't understand why a DJ would use mp3. I mean, for Chrissake. Uncompressed CD quality stereo wavs only have a bitrate of about 1400 kBps. That's, what, maybe five times a high bitrate mp3? You can pick up a 300GB hard drive. That's enough for, what, a thousand albums? And MP3 will buy you five thousand albums instead? Big deal! Why worry about artifacts if you're doing this professionally? Just go for quality!
I don't know about music production. I do know about computer software. A properly configured Linux system can stay below 3 ms audio latency, which I *really* doubt folks can pick up on. (if you notice under a three hundredth of a second of latency, I'm impressed). And that's just a general-purpose operating system, not audio hardware designed for low latency. Disk seeks would be significant, but are not part of the equation -- software for real-time audio use prebuffers the audio it's working with. There's *some* degree of buffering happening on a sound card, but that can be cut down to almost nothing if the app can feed the card fast enough.
Hell, there's some guy that hangs out in #linpeople that's a DJ that's been doing a digital scratch pad for BSD, which isn't even as low-latency as Linux is.
If I carry a rifle with me, and shoot every person I see wearing green pants, I may well happen to kill a crazy who is about to blow himself up in a crowded building. It's certainly not impossible.
That doesn't make my actions (blowing away people with green pants because I feel like it) justifiable or excusable. It doesn't mean that it's good for society to establish a prescedent of allowing actions like mine. I may have saved lives that day, but the institution itself is not a good one by any kind of a reasonable standpoint.
Same deal with laundered money. Someone may well do very ethical things with ten million dollars that they laundered. That doesn't mean that I want money laundering to be okay.
So, if this woman Nora is doing good things with some money, that's great, but it doesn't mean that I think that the institution giving her money is a good one.
Put a bit of GPL code in your router and everyone is up in arms.
When you can show me 50-year-old GPL code in someone's router, *then* I'll agree that copyright law should be letting people duplicate it.
It just doesn't make sense. I suspect that even very large companies don't plan and depend on profits of IP assets twenty years in advance when determining whether to fund production of something. It's just too far ahead. Most employees involved in such a decision will be gone by then, and markets are simply too unstable to let folks know what might happen.
That means that granting copyright in excess of twenty years does not encourage companies to grant capital to produce content. Since the only powers granted Congress by the Constitution to handle copyrights were specifically for the purpose of encouraging production of content, and it's pretty clear that the current length of copyright does not do that, current copyright law is unconstitutional.
Mind you to be fair to them they have to been seen to defend their copyright otherwise it in the future becomes undefendable. Catch 22 for them.
No. Required enforcement only applies to trademarkets. It does not apply to copyrights or patents. (Note: I believe that it *can* affect damages awarded, however.)
I don't think so. Case law at least has established that presentation is copyrightable. I know, I should go dig up a reference, but I'm tired, and pretty sure that I'm right. Danger Mouse added content in the form of arrangement, and that content is copyrighted by him.
I am a little surprised that translation isn't considered adding content, though, so maybe I'm wrong. I know someone that does translations, and it's hardly a simple, mechanical process. A translation is a highly direct interpretation of meaning of the original into a different thought system.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you only install Debian packages. As soon as you install something from another source, you have to maintain it yourself. Just as you would on OS X.
/dev/null, where they belong.
Uh, huh. Except you skirt around the little detail that Debian and other distros package a massive set of packages, and Apple Update handles a tiny handful. It's quite reasonable to use a fully packaged system. I tend to poke at my system quite a bit, and I'd say that over 95% of the packages on my system are packaged by my distro vendor. Furthermore, I use checkinstall, and when the distro vendor *starts* packaging a package, it automatically starts handling that package if I have it installed. Finally, all the important stuff to keep up-to-date as closely as possible, like servers, on the systems I've used *are* packaged by the distro vendor. Be honest -- the automatic updating situation on Mac OS X sucks. It's roughly comparable to that of Windows.
no ugly klunky SysV init,
The only people that complain about SysV init are hardcore BSDites that don't like anything that differs from The Way They Are Used To Things Working. SysV init is hardly "clunky".
a classy signal handling mechanism,
This is a new one on me. What do you like so much about BSD signal handling? I don't see too much extra stuff you could do with it without violating POSIX.
Ceren
?
Marvel at the way you can compile a single binary that will run on multiple architectures.
(Granted, I was unaware that the OS X binary format supported multiple arches in-file.) And why exactly would this be of value? Oh, it was a sexy feature back in Mac OS classic days, when package management didn't exist and Apple wanted seamless transition to another architecture. However, it's not very frequently that I rip a binary out of my system and dump it on another.
Drool over the dynamic loader.
This is not an impressive feature. Anything that *didn't* would be pretty awful, I will give you that.
Whimper in awe at the Mach threading system.
I hope you mean the awful performance of OS X compared to Linux. Instead of making random, unsupported claims, why not take a look at some benchmarks? Note the context switching time of your vaunted Mach kernel.
OS X is a UNIXy system that gets fairly poor performance compared to its peers, uses a lot of memory, and lacks the GNU toolset. It runs on expensive hardware. As a matter of fact, in many ways, it's very much like Solaris. The only real draw to Mac OS X is that it happens to have a desktop environment with a lot of eye candy, something like Enlightenment tripled or so. If you like your eye candy, yes, OS X is a nice place to be. The problem is that there are a ton of people that spent a lot of money on their Apple hardware and feel the need to *constantly* justify it on Slashdot. If they can afford and like the eye candy, great. Claims of better performance/memory usage/bang-for-the-buck/etc can go to
Note that Fedora and modern Linux distros include anacron, and OS X does not.
A coyote digging a couple of holes is going to probably displace more topsoil than these few vehicles.
If you *really* want to do something, go after the hordes of people driving SUVs and not carpooling. The air pollution emitted by these does a lot more damage than some faint tire tracks.
Almost all Linux applications work just fine under different kernels.
Not on different distributions, though. And not once libraries have been moved from, say, glibc-2.0 to glibc-2.1.
You know, I skipped to the last paragraph in your post, and just assummed that you were arguing the *other way*:
:-)
It is not about politics. It is about politeness. One does not ask people to do things that by their very nature are extremely hard if not impossible to accomplish at all, especially if people make it known in advance that they do not have the time nor the means (and hence no inclination) to even try.
Where I thought the task at subject was "releasing an open source driver."
Drivers are complicated in Linux.
If you're claiming this, you've never been involved with Windows driver development. Windows driver development is far, far worse.
Unless you're really desperate for performance, xv is very comparable. What kind of system are you running, and at what percentage load when playing movies.
:-( I'm trying to do up a userspace app that will let me send X10 commands to my PowerLinc USB based on the code in the driver.
The only reason *I*'m not using 2.6 is that the unified Linux X10 driver (wish) has not been ported to 2.6, and apparently requires significant work. Everyone using Linux in an X10 environment is apparently sorry-out-of-luck at the moment.
Feel free to drop your email address to the manager involved offering free advice if he needs it.
It's easy if it's the illusive "them" at issue to suggest that someone do something.
This one incident could slow or accelerate Linux deployment, but it won't stop it or beat Microsoft with a single move. Ultimately, there is no "just get this one incident through". What matters is overall how easy it is to transition to Linux, and how well Linux ultimately serves the needs of users.
You have a real, serious, caffine addiction. We joke about it, but it's not healthy, and not fun. I know someone that chugs down Coke like mad, all day long, along with strong coffee -- high, steady doses do bad things to people.
:-(
Ease yourself off it. Someone with a real caffine dependency can keep himself at a normal state by frequently drinking caffine. A person with no caffine dependency is in the same state, but without hassling with all the caffine and associated nastiness.
Good luck.
Oh, and keep in mind that if you *do* want to use caffine as a "pep pill", it's *much* more effective if you aren't constantly consuming it.
Actually, I talked with a friend who is interested in this. It turns out that this is why many ads make no medical claims --- just show pictues of happy people and then mention the medicine's name. It turns out that if you make *any* medical claims in an ad, you also have to mention the side effects. However, if you simply reference the medicine's name, you don't.
The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. ...osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy.
Drink some milk. It's cheap, tastes good, and works better than a pill!
They aren't "sugar pills", they're "Curaria"! You'll never make it in Pfizer marketing... ;-)
I've found that doing a site search for site:.gov in Google is a good way of filtering out bullshit. The US government may be slow and inefficient, but they hold research that they publish to pretty tough standards. I was interested at one point in the benefits of having lights with similar spectral profiles to sunlight, as my room is windowless. A lot of vendors claim that it's tough to sync yourself to waking at particular times without *sunlight*, rather than just any kind of light. The current take the government has on it is that most of these claims are pretty much overblown.
The government doesn't have everything out there, but when it does have studies, it usually puts them out there on the Internet, publically available. It's your money that paid for said tough standards and hours of someone shifting away bullshit. I'd suggest taking advantage of some of that.
The worst of it is that you *never* see people that just think that one particular form of alternative medicine might have some value, which would indicate that they're at least being rational. Say, maybe, acupuncture for pain relief. No, if acupuncture is useful, then they're certain that there has to be something in various herbal medicines and magnet healing has to also be useful.
It's really amazing how fraud is illegal, but alternative medicine gets a special pass -- and medicine is an area where one would think that we *should* have some form of tough regulation.
You know, Red Hat has been very pro-free software, even to significant short-term detriment, though the Debian people like to bill themselves as "the most free distro". RH moved from the Navigator 4.x releases Mozilla well before Mozilla was really ready to spur Mozilla development and interest. They dropped MP3 support in favor of Vorbis (that one they lost out on) and have made a lot of pro-free software decisions that went well beyond the other competing major distros of the time. They pushed GNOME instead of KDE, and were one of the largest backers, because of the Qt licensing situation.
I have to say that MS getting work done for them is a little unsettling. However, the problem is not A Decent Office Suite For Linux. We have at least a usable one, OpenOffice, though it isn't utopian.
The problem is A Decent Office Suite For Linux That Can Interoperate Flawlessly With Microsoft Office. There's a lot of content out there in Office format, and having darn near perfect support for the format is important for any adopters.
I have to agree. WINE is cool, but not a solution for the general public. I don't think it ever will be, just by nature of the project.
Of course, if they do a native release, then they have several widget sets to choose from:
1) GTK/GNOME -- piss off the KDE adherents.
2) Qt/KDE -- piss off the GNOME adherents.
3) Proprietary a la OpenOffice -- piss off everyone and have graphical glitches and be slow.
John Dvorak is roughly equivalent to a Slashdot troll in both accuracy of his analyses and his attempts to produce controversy.
1) Intellisense... when you hit the open paren for a function, it brings up all the overloaded prototypes WITH the documentation on the screen!
.dsw file, and mostly because the project file parser for VS 6 sucks -- the thing is a text file, for Chrissake. Parsing a text file without breaking on different newline formats is not rocket science.
Ah, okay I haven't gotten into this sort of thing, so I can't speak for how the two compare, but emacs can certainly do this.
2) Hit F1 while you're working on something and it searches for the word on which your cursor lies and automatically displays it to you.
Like, looking up a function? When you have the cursor on the symbol you want (say, printf), hit Meta-X and type info-lookup-symbol and hit enter (or bind that command to F1). You'll get documentation on that symbol. Or do you mean just having it use the current word in a search to a web brower?
And... the RAD Designers that are not integrated are not seamless like IDEs are.
Err...yes. That's by definition -- they are two different tools, as opposed to one large tool. I don't see what technical issues that causes.
Also, hardly anyone uses the POSIX or WIN32 APIs directly anymore, so, in Windows, those man pages would be useless.
I suppose it depends on the type of software you write. I do.
Again... why would you use a DSW file in Cygwin? If you want to put out a snapshot of a project, how hard is it to transfer it binary or put it in a Zip file? It's not like people don't know the difference between ASCII files on Unix and Windows...
I don't, but I check out files using Cygwin's CVS. And the problems come up when folks do checkouts on non-Windows platforms and then send snapshots around. The whole problem is partly because of CVS (it could contain a ton of special cases for extensions, but I've never had problems except for with VS), partly because of whoever neglected to manually specify binary usage when checking in a
I don't understand why a DJ would use mp3. I mean, for Chrissake. Uncompressed CD quality stereo wavs only have a bitrate of about 1400 kBps. That's, what, maybe five times a high bitrate mp3? You can pick up a 300GB hard drive. That's enough for, what, a thousand albums? And MP3 will buy you five thousand albums instead? Big deal! Why worry about artifacts if you're doing this professionally? Just go for quality!
I don't know about music production. I do know about computer software. A properly configured Linux system can stay below 3 ms audio latency, which I *really* doubt folks can pick up on. (if you notice under a three hundredth of a second of latency, I'm impressed). And that's just a general-purpose operating system, not audio hardware designed for low latency. Disk seeks would be significant, but are not part of the equation -- software for real-time audio use prebuffers the audio it's working with. There's *some* degree of buffering happening on a sound card, but that can be cut down to almost nothing if the app can feed the card fast enough.
Hell, there's some guy that hangs out in #linpeople that's a DJ that's been doing a digital scratch pad for BSD, which isn't even as low-latency as Linux is.
That isn't a counterargument.
If I carry a rifle with me, and shoot every person I see wearing green pants, I may well happen to kill a crazy who is about to blow himself up in a crowded building. It's certainly not impossible.
That doesn't make my actions (blowing away people with green pants because I feel like it) justifiable or excusable. It doesn't mean that it's good for society to establish a prescedent of allowing actions like mine. I may have saved lives that day, but the institution itself is not a good one by any kind of a reasonable standpoint.
Same deal with laundered money. Someone may well do very ethical things with ten million dollars that they laundered. That doesn't mean that I want money laundering to be okay.
So, if this woman Nora is doing good things with some money, that's great, but it doesn't mean that I think that the institution giving her money is a good one.
Put a bit of GPL code in your router and everyone is up in arms.
When you can show me 50-year-old GPL code in someone's router, *then* I'll agree that copyright law should be letting people duplicate it.
It just doesn't make sense. I suspect that even very large companies don't plan and depend on profits of IP assets twenty years in advance when determining whether to fund production of something. It's just too far ahead. Most employees involved in such a decision will be gone by then, and markets are simply too unstable to let folks know what might happen.
That means that granting copyright in excess of twenty years does not encourage companies to grant capital to produce content. Since the only powers granted Congress by the Constitution to handle copyrights were specifically for the purpose of encouraging production of content, and it's pretty clear that the current length of copyright does not do that, current copyright law is unconstitutional.
Mind you to be fair to them they have to been seen to defend their copyright otherwise it in the future becomes undefendable. Catch 22 for them.
No. Required enforcement only applies to trademarkets. It does not apply to copyrights or patents. (Note: I believe that it *can* affect damages awarded, however.)
I don't think so. Case law at least has established that presentation is copyrightable. I know, I should go dig up a reference, but I'm tired, and pretty sure that I'm right. Danger Mouse added content in the form of arrangement, and that content is copyrighted by him.
I am a little surprised that translation isn't considered adding content, though, so maybe I'm wrong. I know someone that does translations, and it's hardly a simple, mechanical process. A translation is a highly direct interpretation of meaning of the original into a different thought system.