To you, Apple's DRM system is distinct from "other DRM" because it doesn't prevent you from doing the things you want. To me, Apple's DRM system is exactly like every other, because it does prevent me from doing what I want. (At least, as far as I've heard; I'm not going to pay for something that may or may not work, even if it is only a buck.)
Maybe the guy who did this project is like me. He needed to something with AAC that "FairPlay" wasn't allowing him to do, so he found a way around it. Or maybe he was just being a geek and wanted to see if it could be done.
Actually, US voters are too dumb to consider the pricetag of NOT having universal healthcare.
You apparently missed my point. Here it is, without any cutesy condescension for the voters: voters want government spending and low taxes. They see nothing contradictory about those two demands, and it's why we're running huge deficits. Voters claim they want a balanced budget, but they won't tolerate higher taxes to do it. From the other side, they won't tolerate reduced government spending either. You can realize gains from efficiency increases, but not on the scale required.
I deliberately chose two programs, one popular with each party, to emphasize that this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. Apparently you either missed that or just took it as an opportunity to go on a rant; either way, I felt it was important to clarify that your post has absolutely nothing to do with mine.
Oh, that's easy. Taxes are set by inertia. You start with a low tax rate, like 10%. Then something happens, like a war. You need to pay for the war, so you temporarily raise taxes to 25%. The war ends, your temporary tax runs out. But you still need to pay off the enormous debt you ran up during the mobilization, so you only lower taxes back to 15%. As the debts are paid off, they're replaced by popular government spending, like welfare or defense. Eventually ten years have passed and nobody even considers cutting those programs, so the tax rate stays unchanged. Then something else happens, there's another temporary tax increase... you can see where I'm going.
I really don't think there's any evil intent in Washington on taxes, they just can't say no to shortsighted voters who demand more and more services from the government. (And why should they? Politicians are supposed to do what their constituents want, at least mostly. If they didn't, they wouldn't get reelected.)
I guess you could say that taxes are set by the voters, since we're all too dumb to consider the price tag when we demand stuff like universal healthcare and a Department of Homeland Security.
You apparently don't understand the position of people who use binary drivers, hence your inability to predict their actions. So here's a short explanation: We use what works best for us. The open source NVIDIA drivers just don't cut it at this time. If, in the future, they become roughly comparable in quality to the binary drivers, then we will consider switching. But until then, we require functionality which is either unavailable or incomplete in the open source versions.
So the reaction of a "fanboy" here will be one of two things. In my case, as I don't watch DVDs on my computer, this doesn't affect me at all. So my reaction is disinterest, I guess. If this did affect me, I would consider alternatives. You see, this is why you got your "Flamebait" mod. It's not because your opinion is controversial, it's because you're deliberately mischaracterizing the position of your opponents to make their arguments seem weaker.
If you're looking for an open source precedent, Stallman is pretty much the only "OSS" developer[1] who holds his position for philosophical and not pragmatic reasons.
[1] I put it in quotes because RMS doesn't seem to like the term "Open Source Software." He prefers Free Software, so he wouldn't actually consider himself an OSS developer at all - for all that everyone else does, mostly because of an inability to tell the difference between RMS's philosophy and Linus Torvalds'.
It's not reasonable to require nontechnical users to compile their own software from source. They just don't know what they are doing, so as soon as something unexpected happens they have no idea how to deal with it. Considering how many open source projects totally or partially ignore --prefix (how would a newbie who's never compiled his own software discover that flag, by the way?) that's actually a pretty likely outcome.
The key thing here is that this was an out of court settlement. So there was no verdict, no ruling, no award... no precedent. Even if the judge had mandated this, many other countries don't attach the same sort of reverence to prior judicial decisions as the US does. Our reliance on precedence comes mainly from England (specifically common law). I don't know anything about Germany's judicial system so I have no idea what weight they give prior verdicts/rulings.
A way of escaping a difficulty, especially an omission or ambiguity in the wording of a contract or law that provides a means of evading compliance.
Whether you agree with the bill or not, whether you agree with its motivations or not, clearly it is designed expressly to prevent the sort of thing it turns out, by accident, to allow. That's why it's a loophole.
Don't read any political meaning into my words. I genuinely don't know how I feel on this issue.
It probably didn't happen under the table. There is an enormous loophole that bypasses the restrictions entirely. The basic idea is that you can spend money which just happens to support a candidate, and as long as it never actually passes through that candidate's hands, it's not subject to campaign finance restrictions. George Soros, the billionaire Democrat, is the most well-known guy exploiting this loophole, but I doubt he's the only one. (Soros is the source of all those controversial ads suggesting Bush is worse than Hitler, and so on.)
The problem, of course, is that this new loophole results in donations being even harder to trace than they were before campaign finance reform. I think some politicians (like McCain) would actually try to get the bill extended through the courts to close this loophole, but he's justifiably afraid that the Supreme Court will squash the whole thing for being a restriction of free speech.
The theory that media can bring down dictators is based chiefly on one premise: that if people knew what was really going on, they would refuse to stand for it. Unfortunately this isn't really the case. The people of Iraq knew very well what Saddam was up to; they knew about the torturing, the disappearances, the corruption, etc. From the perspective of the rest of the world, maybe we haven't always known, but we sure know now - and now more people than ever are calling the war in Iraq a mistake.
It's sad, but no matter how horrific a dictator is, everyone will continue to look the other way because it's easier than taking risk to get rid of him. Dictators all know this and exploit it as best they can.
Of course coders don't like anything other than coding, but that doesn't make the other stuff any less necessary.
What are you talking about? I love writing documentation. It's like an outline or rough draft. I write out how I want my code to work and what it's supposed to do, which usually really helps me clarify in my own mind what I need to work on. Analytical writing skills also translate quite well to code analysis, so if you think about your project from that perspective you'll usually find some important stuff to think about. And finally, it gives me (or anyone else who reads it) the "big picture" since as coders we sometimes lose sight of the forest for all the stupid termite-filled trees we work with every day. It lets you focus on high-level ideas, which is where the real fun is - most programming is repetitive and dull.
(I know, programmers suck at documentation. But this is documentation written for other programmers, so it doesn't matter how technical it gets.)
Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S: The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
They might mean 6MB of L2 cache. I don't know what cache sizes are available for Xeons, but probably when you order 1000 CPUs at once Intel are willing to give you hard-to-find stuff.
Bandwidth demand for popular downloads is not linear, not by a long shot. People are suggesting BT because it deals much better with oversaturation than a straight client/server setup. It's not a way for companies to get out of providing bandwidth - it's a way for them to deal with periods of exceptionally high usage.
I have no problem giving back some of my otherwise-unused upstream bandwidth to get faster downloads. I do have a problem with companies feeding me ads when I'm doing it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for the download with my bandwidth. I refuse to pay twice and look at their idiotic ads too. This is why Bram Cohen going to Valve worries me. Steam already spams ads in every loading dialog.
Sexism is when you make a judgment based not on reason, but on a person's gender. We in agreement so far? So if you have a logical argument for a judgment, even if that judgment relates to people of a specific gender, then it's not sexism.
The logical argument here is real simple. The first people to get involved in computers were men. They made stuff other men would want. It's a feedback loop now, and it discourages female involvement.
And actually, as it happens, I assume that everyone I talk to knows nothing about computers. A person's age has far more to do with it than a person's sex. So when you say "we" (as in "we go to talk to another guy" and "we are more apt") I sure hope you aren't talking about all men, though that's certainly what it looks like.
HL2 requires Steam, period. What you are thinking of is Valve's intial proclamation that, once you patched HL2 or played online, you would thereafter always need to be connected to the Internet, even when playing the single-player game. This has already been dealt with - Steam has an "offline mode," so you connect once, disconnect, and then play single-player (or multiplayer on LAN) without an Internet connection. Probably HL2 will ship this way.
I don't really have anything to say about your actual point, just clearing up some facts.
You're right, but you are unclear in how you describe it. You may not distribute MySQL as part of the operating system in that case. You can distribute it as a clearly-distinct product. From the GPL, "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works." Clearly Windows and Solaris are not derived from MySQL, so all you need to do is package them such that a reasonable person would consider them independent and separate works. In the case of Windows, this would mean you put the MySQL installer in, say, the "EXTRA" folder on the install CD. Or you could include an extra CD labeled "Additional Non-Microsoft Software" that has MySQL on it.
That's a common argument people make for inferior products winning out, but I don't buy it. A lot of factors go into whether products are good or not, not just technological superiority. The fact is, VHS won because it did a better job of delivering what people wanted. If that doesn't make it a superior product, I don't know what does.
There's this tendency on Slashdot to think there's an OSS solution for every problem, but that's not true. Yes, advertising OSS is an important part of getting it to be adopted, but some of these companies may actually have good reasons for not going with OSS. Maybe they don't get the level or quality of support they need; maybe the OSS alternatives don't have the features or reliability they need; there are all sorts of possibilities.
So I would change your question a little. What groups are out there discovering companies' needs, then communicating those needs to OSS developers? We shouldn't fall into the trap so many companies do: writing software for the developer and not the customer. This is especially dangerous for OSS developers, because their own needs are usually the reason the software gets written in the first place.
From an average user's perspective, MacOS X has as much in common with UNIX as Windows XP does (absolutely nothing). It's extremely disingenuous to claim that casual familiary with MacOS X results in casual familiarity with UNIX. The similarities between the two are almost exclusively beneath the hood, so to speak, and far beyond the reach of all but the most advanced users.
Yeah, I'm not sure why PDA manufacturers aren't jumping all over this. People are willing to pay $300+ for an iPod, and all it does is play music! If you can make a $300 PDA with, say, 512MB of storage for music (or whatever), it seems it'd sell like hotcakes. I know I'd gladly buy one. You could go with a monochrome display or weaker processor to increase battery life.
Maybe there are PDAs like that now, but back when I was looking I didn't see any. The closest I got were some $300 PDAs that you could add a memory card to. (Not really satisfactory, a good-sized memory card would set me back another $300.)
The assumption behind #1 seems to be wrong. If you want to configure printers using the "easy" web interface, you need xinetd; but if you need xinetd, you should be proficient enough not to need the "easy" web interface.
Unless webmin is installed by default, under an easy-to-identify name, it's useless. The people who need it most won't even know it exists, nor will they have the tools to find it. Calling it "webmin" in some menu is worthless - you have to know what it does in order for the name to mean anything.
As for #3, if you need a tool to set up printers, you're already all wrong. It should "just happen." You plug in the printer, the system spots it, asks it to identify itself, locates the correct driver, installs it, and pops up an unintrusive balloon saying "The printer you just attached is ready to go." Wouldn't that be so much better? If you're worried about losing flexibility, you can always make detailed configuration available - the auto-installer would just go with good defaults - but really, when was the last time you needed to make printer configuration changes in Windows or MacOS?
If you look at the states with budget problems, you'll see a lot of states in the Northeast on the list. That's the reason for this particular offense. They won't (or can't) cut their programs, but voters are pretty overwhelmingly against tax increases, so they've got to find the money elsewhere.
I guess you could argue that these sorts of programs show up in the Northeast first because of its strong philosophical belief in "Government should be working for me." Hence lots of government programs. I'm not sure I really buy that - that philosophy is pretty universal nowadays - but it was my first thought, so I figured I'd mention it.
What I don't understand is why all the talk about percieved value and expected selling prices for institutional investors. If Disney is worth more than its current street price to these institutional investors then why hasn't the stock actually reached that valuation?
Well, my guess is that the recent troubles of the company have made investors jittery. They aren't so much afraid that Disney's going to go bust, they're more afraid that they'll get caught with their pants down. If they hold onto Disney shares, and suddenly everyone else starts selling, then they'll be screwed. But if they sell fast, even if everyone else is doing it at the same time, they'll at least minimize their losses. So what we have there, if I'm right, is that investors aren't worried about Disney, they're worried about other investors. And they're probably right. Disney's stock price shot up when news of this bid broke. It's normal for that to happen, of course, but the extent to which it happened here... It suggests, to me at least, that investors know damn well Disney is worth more than it's trading for. And now that they know the company's troubles won't doom it with shareholders, they want back in.
Is Disney worth more in the hands of some other company than as an independant entity?
Obviously Comcast thinks so. The issue here is that the cable market is essentially locked up. There aren't any more cable customers out there. So they are trying to expand into new fields where they can grow. But why reinvent the wheel, right? Buy out a struggling company with huge name recognition and try to turn it around. Disney isn't just Disney, it's also ABC (very weak) and ESPN (pretty much the sole corporate moneymaker).
If Comcast can make it work, it's a big win for everybody. Well, by "everybody" I mean the companies and their shareholders. It may turn out to be a bad thing for everybody else, but that's a subject for a different post.
They certainly consider it a good thing. Their goal is to maximize their profit. They can try raising prices, but they're already at the breaking point: if they raise prices much more they will see a dropoff in sales that more than offsets the increase in per-sale profit. They can try lowering prices to go increase sales - decreasing per-sale profit but hopefully increasing overall profit - but obviously they feel that won't be effective either. That leaves them one area for improvement, cost cutting. Since prices will remain relatively fixed, every little bit they save is extra profit.
That's not a problem with "Win-Live CD," it's a problem with anything that installs on any readonly medium. All patches are applied by making a copy of the image, applying the patch, and then making a new disc of the patched version. And Windows supports that just fine.
If all you want is read-only access, use NTFS. Explicitly deny write permission to the Everyone pseudo-group. Deny supersedes permit, as it should, and not even Administrators can bypass it automatically. They have to take ownership of the file and grant themselves the permissions they need. It's about as secure as mounting writeable hardware readonly (or nosuid or noexec) in Linux.
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Maybe the guy who did this project is like me. He needed to something with AAC that "FairPlay" wasn't allowing him to do, so he found a way around it. Or maybe he was just being a geek and wanted to see if it could be done.
I deliberately chose two programs, one popular with each party, to emphasize that this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. Apparently you either missed that or just took it as an opportunity to go on a rant; either way, I felt it was important to clarify that your post has absolutely nothing to do with mine.
I really don't think there's any evil intent in Washington on taxes, they just can't say no to shortsighted voters who demand more and more services from the government. (And why should they? Politicians are supposed to do what their constituents want, at least mostly. If they didn't, they wouldn't get reelected.)
I guess you could say that taxes are set by the voters, since we're all too dumb to consider the price tag when we demand stuff like universal healthcare and a Department of Homeland Security.
So the reaction of a "fanboy" here will be one of two things. In my case, as I don't watch DVDs on my computer, this doesn't affect me at all. So my reaction is disinterest, I guess. If this did affect me, I would consider alternatives. You see, this is why you got your "Flamebait" mod. It's not because your opinion is controversial, it's because you're deliberately mischaracterizing the position of your opponents to make their arguments seem weaker.
If you're looking for an open source precedent, Stallman is pretty much the only "OSS" developer[1] who holds his position for philosophical and not pragmatic reasons.
[1] I put it in quotes because RMS doesn't seem to like the term "Open Source Software." He prefers Free Software, so he wouldn't actually consider himself an OSS developer at all - for all that everyone else does, mostly because of an inability to tell the difference between RMS's philosophy and Linus Torvalds'.
It's not reasonable to require nontechnical users to compile their own software from source. They just don't know what they are doing, so as soon as something unexpected happens they have no idea how to deal with it. Considering how many open source projects totally or partially ignore --prefix (how would a newbie who's never compiled his own software discover that flag, by the way?) that's actually a pretty likely outcome.
The key thing here is that this was an out of court settlement. So there was no verdict, no ruling, no award... no precedent. Even if the judge had mandated this, many other countries don't attach the same sort of reverence to prior judicial decisions as the US does. Our reliance on precedence comes mainly from England (specifically common law). I don't know anything about Germany's judicial system so I have no idea what weight they give prior verdicts/rulings.
Don't read any political meaning into my words. I genuinely don't know how I feel on this issue.
The problem, of course, is that this new loophole results in donations being even harder to trace than they were before campaign finance reform. I think some politicians (like McCain) would actually try to get the bill extended through the courts to close this loophole, but he's justifiably afraid that the Supreme Court will squash the whole thing for being a restriction of free speech.
It's sad, but no matter how horrific a dictator is, everyone will continue to look the other way because it's easier than taking risk to get rid of him. Dictators all know this and exploit it as best they can.
(I know, programmers suck at documentation. But this is documentation written for other programmers, so it doesn't matter how technical it gets.)
I have no problem giving back some of my otherwise-unused upstream bandwidth to get faster downloads. I do have a problem with companies feeding me ads when I'm doing it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for the download with my bandwidth. I refuse to pay twice and look at their idiotic ads too. This is why Bram Cohen going to Valve worries me. Steam already spams ads in every loading dialog.
The logical argument here is real simple. The first people to get involved in computers were men. They made stuff other men would want. It's a feedback loop now, and it discourages female involvement.
And actually, as it happens, I assume that everyone I talk to knows nothing about computers. A person's age has far more to do with it than a person's sex. So when you say "we" (as in "we go to talk to another guy" and "we are more apt") I sure hope you aren't talking about all men, though that's certainly what it looks like.
I don't really have anything to say about your actual point, just clearing up some facts.
You're right, but you are unclear in how you describe it. You may not distribute MySQL as part of the operating system in that case. You can distribute it as a clearly-distinct product. From the GPL, "If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works." Clearly Windows and Solaris are not derived from MySQL, so all you need to do is package them such that a reasonable person would consider them independent and separate works. In the case of Windows, this would mean you put the MySQL installer in, say, the "EXTRA" folder on the install CD. Or you could include an extra CD labeled "Additional Non-Microsoft Software" that has MySQL on it.
That's a common argument people make for inferior products winning out, but I don't buy it. A lot of factors go into whether products are good or not, not just technological superiority. The fact is, VHS won because it did a better job of delivering what people wanted. If that doesn't make it a superior product, I don't know what does.
So I would change your question a little. What groups are out there discovering companies' needs, then communicating those needs to OSS developers? We shouldn't fall into the trap so many companies do: writing software for the developer and not the customer. This is especially dangerous for OSS developers, because their own needs are usually the reason the software gets written in the first place.
From an average user's perspective, MacOS X has as much in common with UNIX as Windows XP does (absolutely nothing). It's extremely disingenuous to claim that casual familiary with MacOS X results in casual familiarity with UNIX. The similarities between the two are almost exclusively beneath the hood, so to speak, and far beyond the reach of all but the most advanced users.
Maybe there are PDAs like that now, but back when I was looking I didn't see any. The closest I got were some $300 PDAs that you could add a memory card to. (Not really satisfactory, a good-sized memory card would set me back another $300.)
For what it's worth, participation is voluntary. So you were right to ask, wrong to be sure, right to be doubtful, and ultimately a waste of my time.
Unless webmin is installed by default, under an easy-to-identify name, it's useless. The people who need it most won't even know it exists, nor will they have the tools to find it. Calling it "webmin" in some menu is worthless - you have to know what it does in order for the name to mean anything.
As for #3, if you need a tool to set up printers, you're already all wrong. It should "just happen." You plug in the printer, the system spots it, asks it to identify itself, locates the correct driver, installs it, and pops up an unintrusive balloon saying "The printer you just attached is ready to go." Wouldn't that be so much better? If you're worried about losing flexibility, you can always make detailed configuration available - the auto-installer would just go with good defaults - but really, when was the last time you needed to make printer configuration changes in Windows or MacOS?
I guess you could argue that these sorts of programs show up in the Northeast first because of its strong philosophical belief in "Government should be working for me." Hence lots of government programs. I'm not sure I really buy that - that philosophy is pretty universal nowadays - but it was my first thought, so I figured I'd mention it.
If Comcast can make it work, it's a big win for everybody. Well, by "everybody" I mean the companies and their shareholders. It may turn out to be a bad thing for everybody else, but that's a subject for a different post.
They certainly consider it a good thing. Their goal is to maximize their profit. They can try raising prices, but they're already at the breaking point: if they raise prices much more they will see a dropoff in sales that more than offsets the increase in per-sale profit. They can try lowering prices to go increase sales - decreasing per-sale profit but hopefully increasing overall profit - but obviously they feel that won't be effective either. That leaves them one area for improvement, cost cutting. Since prices will remain relatively fixed, every little bit they save is extra profit.
If all you want is read-only access, use NTFS. Explicitly deny write permission to the Everyone pseudo-group. Deny supersedes permit, as it should, and not even Administrators can bypass it automatically. They have to take ownership of the file and grant themselves the permissions they need. It's about as secure as mounting writeable hardware readonly (or nosuid or noexec) in Linux.