Forking - Closed source software forks every bit as much as open source source software and in addition will always eventually no longer be supported. With open source software an customer can make their own choices about when to drop support and not be beholden to a vendor trying to maximise profit.
Just to add to that thought, the parent company goes under... or the staff all get hit by a car while their bus is off the the company picnic, or whatever. If the source is open, you can at least try to continue it yourself, or hire somebody with programming knowledge to continue development/fixes.
Anybody that dim couldn't possibly find their way to court let alone be the plaintiff in a three billin dollar lawsuit.
Sorry, but implying intelligence is required to go to court, often even win in court, is a bit off. I'd say that this is more sneakiness, using the "we were attacked by evil linux users, see how immature they are" to throw off the bad press of IBM's recent court victory and SCO's afterward stock-slide.
In that case, yes it's a bit dumb, but also fits the sleazy underhandedness that seems to have fit most of SCO's recent legal actions.
Dealing with bad feedback from the linux community gave Darl indigestion. He spent a little too much time on the can... it overflowed... and flooded their server room which was just below the men's washroom.
I was wondering how it was our fault... guess now I know.
That does'nt make sense considering just about anyone can look at Linux source.
Why doesn't it make sense. If I stated, even before court, that your software X is an illegal copy of my software Y, even with lines on Software X indicating infactions... would you immediately go change those lines on X?
Of course not. If I made such a statement, you would say "OK, show me what you've got and prove that it's the same as mine" (and thereafter prove you had ownership). The onus isn't on IBM to change their code, even if SCO points out lines. The onus is on SCO to provide adequare material for code on both sides to be compared, in which case a judgement may be render as to whether
a) SCO owned the code in the first place
b) The IBM code is duplicated from SCO code.
First, copying is not stealing, it's copyright violation
It's not stealing right now, nor is it theft. However, with the way the current RIAA/MPAA-friendly-politician-legal-bill theme is rolling, I wouldn't be in the least surprised to see introduction of laws that classify copyright violation as theft somehow, at least in relation to music or movies.
Of course, the flipside to that is that getting nailed for a bazillion-jillion dollars on copyright violations, plus the added criminal charges being introduce, may make whether it is theft or not a moral point only... as you'd be better off stealing a CD than copying/sharing one illegitimately.
A well-encoded divX file can be very high quality. Better picture than VHS, and while not quite the quality of a DVD it's still darn good.
Most of the DivX stuff you see are theatre rips, or cheap/fast jobs done. They have artifacts, file errors, audio issues, etc.
I have a DVD-Rip of "Orgazmo" (please, not jokes) which is of superb quality. Downloading it from Kazaa saved me the time of either ripping/re-encoding my own DVD, but with the price of drives being cheap I could probably have left my machine on whilst I was at work to get the job done as well.
The nicest part of having the rip? My laptop - which doesn't play DVD's can run them, as can most friends' PC's... and I don't have to worry about my original being scratched when I drag it over to a party involving alcohol and amusing movies.
Actually, if you count the whole process of demanding client information without a court order, etc... both sides are breaking the law.
Or, they were, but one side seems to be adept at having the law altered by pet politicians,etc to suit their needs. When simply having a device capable of recording around a theatre, etc is a crime, it points to a strong unbalance of power between the two factions.
But we must recall that not all (1Ghz or otherwise) processors are created equal, and other factors will affect this too (RAM speed/amount).
I have heard quite often that the VIA 1Ghz processor used in the mini-ITX is not directly comparable to an Athlon, and for that matter even comparing Mhz on AMD/Intel processors is more than a little skewed nowadays.
I remember an old story months (or years) ago about a spammer, got tracked down, the whole nine yards, the ISP refused to cut them off because they were paying the ISP over $50,000 a MONTH to send spam. These days they pay even more.
Because SPAM as a whole is becoming illegal in many areas, and much of what spammers do is already illegal. If the ISP is allowing the spammer to continue operation, and he is pumping illegal products/scams/etc then the ISP will be on the line.
It's one thing to profit for unscrupulous activity, it's another to knowingly allow an illegal one.
Making it easier to certifiably track spammers is part of the solution because if you can say with strong surety that an ISP is supporting the spammer... then you can take action against the ISP.
I think when dealing with SCO, you need to be neither Lawyer nor Linus... but simply have a brain to see how wrong they are. Seriously, even the village idiot seems to have more brains than the collective consciousness of SCO on legal/intellectual matters.
Try CTRL+T in evolution. It's had threads for awhile (I'm running 1.0.5).
It doesn't work quite the same (messages get put into a +/- expanding/contracting style threadlist), but the functionality is there.
I'd have to say though, that the title is extremely misleading. IBM isn't reinventing email (email in the minds of most=POP3/SMTP/IMAP/etc). In fact, they're not doing anything different to email, just making a new client with some additional features.
While the hardware is diverse, I thought that the aim of things like DirectX was to give them a common interface. I suppose the same might also apply to GL, though I'm only now delving into coding with it.
The question is, with the exception of hardware which just doesn't support certain effects, why should the game developer have to worry about it much at all? With a proper wrapper around the various hardware capabilities, the game designer should not have to be so concerned with compatability as gameplay.
And yes, I have had games that suck on certain hardware, but the fact is that they are not only the games that suck on that particular hardware (generally an overall DirectX looks like crap, crashes issue with many games).
Commander Keen, Wolf3d, Doom. All the major games I played were ID software. The only other name that I can think of at the moment is Apogee and a few others that made shareware. Can anyone else name some popular game-dev companies of old?
Emergency services are still an issue with VoIP. I'm expecting the first headline about someone dying because 911 wasn't available on VoIP anytime now
To heck with 911 availability. As mentioned by many, power outages aren't friendly to cable. In fact, they're not friendly to the internet at all.
Telephone lines have a voltage to them, which means that unless the phone line is severed, even having no power doesn't mean you can't call out.
The scenario I see is that somebody is *fixing* a bad wire, whatever. He makes himself a path to ground, blows a circuit, and takes out the power. With the power out, you can't call 911 or anything.
For the same reasons, they recommend that cordless phone users have at least one standard phone in the house, you can still call in an emergency.
For myself, I don't understand the whole VOIP concept. Couldn't you do something similar with a permament domain name/IP with voice software? I've been actually thinking of playing with VGETTY (voicemodem stuff) in order to patch my server in as an answering machine etc.... could probably modify this to patch into a live stream somehow? Maybe I could use this so that if somebody is "calling" me from online and I'm not home, it will relay through POTS and call my cell.
It would be nice for international calls... maybe with a Java applet available for that don't want to download an executable. I remember years ago getting very clear voice on a 33.6 modem to Australia... minimal lag and I think I was using video at the time too. Why do we need VOIP carrier for this?
Thankee greatly sir, looks very useful. Have you coded in SDL? Perhaps we can swap coding notes. I'm looking for eventual members to add to the coding-core:
That over time, any encryption alghorythm may be broken by superior computer. 50 years from now, normal computers will put anything we have to shame, and supercomputers will make current ones look like calculators.
Crypt is already supplantable by many improved techniques, but even if it is used, are they going to make these keys available to the world?
If not, now that it's known a really faster computer can solve then, perhaps the next step in spammy-crackers' arsenal will be to take their virussed drones away from attacking anti-spam sites and focus them at generating crypt or other password solutions? How many drones working P2P-style (you create these hashes, I'll create these ones) would it take to equal this supercomputer?
Ah, but sometimes deeds done with good intentions...
It's not to say that Arnold can't be good for California, or even that his decision to improve local jobs in the entertainment market was bad... just that if I were him I'd try to keep from getting too involved with movie-politics.
If I, as a IT worker, were to somehow be voted in... I'd try to avoid becoming too heavily involved in technology spending for fear of being biased, even unintentionally so. How many geeks might throw in linux to overhaul windows if they had a chance... heedless of possibly disruptions along that course?
Really, it depends on the vehicle you're driving, and whether you have your windows down.
I've found that most noise from subs seems to escape out of the trunk, speakers don't really escape the car even with my 180RMS/270Peak pumping out a lot of tunes. With the windows open in summer, of course, this is a different story.
If you like some boom in your stereo but don't want to be a nuisance, why not pad your trunk with a little soft absorbant foam? Not hard to do, and it will help deaden the noise escaping from your car.
Of course, with a decent car, your stereo still isn't go to travel as far (noise-wise) as the guy beside you with a souped-up 6cyl and a few quarter-sized holes in his muffler.
If you wanted to be real nice, or just abide by noise bylaws (10pm/11pm noise reduction bylaw around here), you could add a kill switch to your stereo. Assuming you use an amp (deck power in most cases won't put out enough to be a problem anyhow unless you like distortion), between the low-volt "wake" input on your amp and the deck. Flip the switch when it gets late or you're in quiet residentials, you can still listen to music on your deck speakers, but at least killing the subs helps detract from overall noise pollution
All it takes is closed-source drivers for motherboard devices, the manufacturer doesn't make a new version of the drivers to support a new kernel, and you're stuck buying a new computer or using Window
No, you're stuck with using an OS driver that doesn't quite run with 100% of the advanced-features (that you may not even use) of the binary, but that would sure-as-hell be worked on fervently by many if the binary were suddenly to become unusable leaving a large amount of linusers in need of an alternative.
If the only possible way to use a piece of hardware is a binary-only driver, then I'd say at least partial blame belongs to all those that decided to use said binary without attempting to reproduce its functionality in an open-source component.
Having binary modules only stops developers from trying to make their own
No. I don't think so. What it might do, is give lazy developers a reason not to make a driver, or time to work on a different driver while the current binary is working. Neither NVidia nor anyone else who released binary-format drivers is "stopping" developers. Do they have a court-order out asking for a cease-and-decist on all non-NVidia endorsed source drivers? No? Didn't think so.
You might also want to consider that there are drivers to interface with NVidia boards that aren't binary. They don't do everything the binaries do, but they get the job done in many cases.
Say if you want that the linux world would be a nicer play with full-source NVidia drivers, I'll agree with you. But if you want to argue that by providing "Y" NVidia is at fault for reducing development on "X," I'd say your blame is misplaced and your arguement flawed.
Conspiracy theorize as you may, but I believe the NVidia driver release is more about getting their hardware sold to linux users than it is about slowing/stopping any attempt at making open-source drivers.
I'd pay to see Darl getting whacked over the head with a chair, though. In the case of IBM Vs SCO being Springer-like, I'd say it would probably be a heavy iron chair... possibly with sharp protrusions.
One thing that many people might want to consider when comparing DirectX and OpenGL is that DirectX is a suite, and GL an interface to the 3d extensions (and 2d) of your video card.
However, with that in mind, is there an equivilent suite that incorporates GL? 3D graphics are nice, but I do remember thinking nice things about DirectMusic (situation-themable audio events) and DirectSound. Is there anything we can use to compare to directX as a whole?
Being that I'm currently working on learning/developing using C++/GL in linux, it would be nice if anyone could point out any extensions aside from just graphics (which, while they may be a large portion of a game/multimedia-app, are not always all of it).
Slashdot Mirror
Which brings me to the question: whereabouts would you look for good pricing on a mini-itx nowadays? How about for a mini-LCD (7")
Forking - Closed source software forks every bit as much as open source source software and in addition will always eventually no longer be supported. With open source software an customer can make their own choices about when to drop support and not be beholden to a vendor trying to maximise profit.
Just to add to that thought, the parent company goes under... or the staff all get hit by a car while their bus is off the the company picnic, or whatever. If the source is open, you can at least try to continue it yourself, or hire somebody with programming knowledge to continue development/fixes.
Anybody that dim couldn't possibly find their way to court let alone be the plaintiff in a three billin dollar lawsuit.
Sorry, but implying intelligence is required to go to court, often even win in court, is a bit off. I'd say that this is more sneakiness, using the "we were attacked by evil linux users, see how immature they are" to throw off the bad press of IBM's recent court victory and SCO's afterward stock-slide.
In that case, yes it's a bit dumb, but also fits the sleazy underhandedness that seems to have fit most of SCO's recent legal actions.
Dealing with bad feedback from the linux community gave Darl indigestion. He spent a little too much time on the can ... it overflowed... and flooded their server room which was just below the men's washroom.
I was wondering how it was our fault... guess now I know.
That does'nt make sense considering just about anyone can look at Linux source.
Why doesn't it make sense. If I stated, even before court, that your software X is an illegal copy of my software Y, even with lines on Software X indicating infactions... would you immediately go change those lines on X?
Of course not. If I made such a statement, you would say "OK, show me what you've got and prove that it's the same as mine" (and thereafter prove you had ownership). The onus isn't on IBM to change their code, even if SCO points out lines. The onus is on SCO to provide adequare material for code on both sides to be compared, in which case a judgement may be render as to whether
a) SCO owned the code in the first place
b) The IBM code is duplicated from SCO code.
First, copying is not stealing, it's copyright violation
It's not stealing right now, nor is it theft. However, with the way the current RIAA/MPAA-friendly-politician-legal-bill theme is rolling, I wouldn't be in the least surprised to see introduction of laws that classify copyright violation as theft somehow, at least in relation to music or movies.
Of course, the flipside to that is that getting nailed for a bazillion-jillion dollars on copyright violations, plus the added criminal charges being introduce, may make whether it is theft or not a moral point only... as you'd be better off stealing a CD than copying/sharing one illegitimately.
A well-encoded divX file can be very high quality. Better picture than VHS, and while not quite the quality of a DVD it's still darn good.
Most of the DivX stuff you see are theatre rips, or cheap/fast jobs done. They have artifacts, file errors, audio issues, etc.
I have a DVD-Rip of "Orgazmo" (please, not jokes) which is of superb quality. Downloading it from Kazaa saved me the time of either ripping/re-encoding my own DVD, but with the price of drives being cheap I could probably have left my machine on whilst I was at work to get the job done as well.
The nicest part of having the rip? My laptop - which doesn't play DVD's can run them, as can most friends' PC's... and I don't have to worry about my original being scratched when I drag it over to a party involving alcohol and amusing movies.
Actually, if you count the whole process of demanding client information without a court order, etc... both sides are breaking the law.
Or, they were, but one side seems to be adept at having the law altered by pet politicians,etc to suit their needs. When simply having a device capable of recording around a theatre, etc is a crime, it points to a strong unbalance of power between the two factions.
But we must recall that not all (1Ghz or otherwise) processors are created equal, and other factors will affect this too (RAM speed/amount).
I have heard quite often that the VIA 1Ghz processor used in the mini-ITX is not directly comparable to an Athlon, and for that matter even comparing Mhz on AMD/Intel processors is more than a little skewed nowadays.
http://www.windowsupdate.com
To some extent, you did, at least in the way of some minor updates, etc (few for 98 compared to XP, but there were some)
You can also expect new hardware to support 98 even less than it already does. Guess what that means you get to use?
I remember an old story months (or years) ago about a spammer, got tracked down, the whole nine yards, the ISP refused to cut them off because they were paying the ISP over $50,000 a MONTH to send spam. These days they pay even more.
Because SPAM as a whole is becoming illegal in many areas, and much of what spammers do is already illegal. If the ISP is allowing the spammer to continue operation, and he is pumping illegal products/scams/etc then the ISP will be on the line.
It's one thing to profit for unscrupulous activity, it's another to knowingly allow an illegal one.
Making it easier to certifiably track spammers is part of the solution because if you can say with strong surety that an ISP is supporting the spammer... then you can take action against the ISP.
It's illegal to sell crack too, but some people do it because they can profit from it... just like some people are dumb enough to buy it.
Really, the drug/user market isn't that much different from the spam/buyer market...except perhaps more people hate the spammers...
I think when dealing with SCO, you need to be neither Lawyer nor Linus... but simply have a brain to see how wrong they are. Seriously, even the village idiot seems to have more brains than the collective consciousness of SCO on legal/intellectual matters.
Try CTRL+T in evolution. It's had threads for awhile (I'm running 1.0.5).
It doesn't work quite the same (messages get put into a +/- expanding/contracting style threadlist), but the functionality is there.
I'd have to say though, that the title is extremely misleading. IBM isn't reinventing email (email in the minds of most=POP3/SMTP/IMAP/etc). In fact, they're not doing anything different to email, just making a new client with some additional features.
While the hardware is diverse, I thought that the aim of things like DirectX was to give them a common interface. I suppose the same might also apply to GL, though I'm only now delving into coding with it.
The question is, with the exception of hardware which just doesn't support certain effects, why should the game developer have to worry about it much at all? With a proper wrapper around the various hardware capabilities, the game designer should not have to be so concerned with compatability as gameplay.
And yes, I have had games that suck on certain hardware, but the fact is that they are not only the games that suck on that particular hardware (generally an overall DirectX looks like crap, crashes issue with many games).
Commander Keen, Wolf3d, Doom. All the major games I played were ID software. The only other name that I can think of at the moment is Apogee and a few others that made shareware. Can anyone else name some popular game-dev companies of old?
Emergency services are still an issue with VoIP. I'm expecting the first headline about someone dying because 911 wasn't available on VoIP anytime now
To heck with 911 availability. As mentioned by many, power outages aren't friendly to cable. In fact, they're not friendly to the internet at all.
Telephone lines have a voltage to them, which means that unless the phone line is severed, even having no power doesn't mean you can't call out.
The scenario I see is that somebody is *fixing* a bad wire, whatever. He makes himself a path to ground, blows a circuit, and takes out the power. With the power out, you can't call 911 or anything.
For the same reasons, they recommend that cordless phone users have at least one standard phone in the house, you can still call in an emergency.
For myself, I don't understand the whole VOIP concept. Couldn't you do something similar with a permament domain name/IP with voice software? I've been actually thinking of playing with VGETTY (voicemodem stuff) in order to patch my server in as an answering machine etc.... could probably modify this to patch into a live stream somehow? Maybe I could use this so that if somebody is "calling" me from online and I'm not home, it will relay through POTS and call my cell.
It would be nice for international calls... maybe with a Java applet available for that don't want to download an executable. I remember years ago getting very clear voice on a 33.6 modem to Australia... minimal lag and I think I was using video at the time too. Why do we need VOIP carrier for this?
Thankee greatly sir, looks very useful. Have you coded in SDL? Perhaps we can swap coding notes. I'm looking for eventual members to add to the coding-core:
slashdot2REMOVE_THIS@phormixDOTcom
That over time, any encryption alghorythm may be broken by superior computer. 50 years from now, normal computers will put anything we have to shame, and supercomputers will make current ones look like calculators.
Crypt is already supplantable by many improved techniques, but even if it is used, are they going to make these keys available to the world?
If not, now that it's known a really faster computer can solve then, perhaps the next step in spammy-crackers' arsenal will be to take their virussed drones away from attacking anti-spam sites and focus them at generating crypt or other password solutions? How many drones working P2P-style (you create these hashes, I'll create these ones) would it take to equal this supercomputer?
Ah, but sometimes deeds done with good intentions...
It's not to say that Arnold can't be good for California, or even that his decision to improve local jobs in the entertainment market was bad... just that if I were him I'd try to keep from getting too involved with movie-politics.
If I, as a IT worker, were to somehow be voted in... I'd try to avoid becoming too heavily involved in technology spending for fear of being biased, even unintentionally so. How many geeks might throw in linux to overhaul windows if they had a chance... heedless of possibly disruptions along that course?
Really, it depends on the vehicle you're driving, and whether you have your windows down.
I've found that most noise from subs seems to escape out of the trunk, speakers don't really escape the car even with my 180RMS/270Peak pumping out a lot of tunes. With the windows open in summer, of course, this is a different story.
If you like some boom in your stereo but don't want to be a nuisance, why not pad your trunk with a little soft absorbant foam? Not hard to do, and it will help deaden the noise escaping from your car.
Of course, with a decent car, your stereo still isn't go to travel as far (noise-wise) as the guy beside you with a souped-up 6cyl and a few quarter-sized holes in his muffler.
If you wanted to be real nice, or just abide by noise bylaws (10pm/11pm noise reduction bylaw around here), you could add a kill switch to your stereo. Assuming you use an amp (deck power in most cases won't put out enough to be a problem anyhow unless you like distortion), between the low-volt "wake" input on your amp and the deck. Flip the switch when it gets late or you're in quiet residentials, you can still listen to music on your deck speakers, but at least killing the subs helps detract from overall noise pollution
All it takes is closed-source drivers for motherboard devices, the manufacturer doesn't make a new version of the drivers to support a new kernel, and you're stuck buying a new computer or using Window
No, you're stuck with using an OS driver that doesn't quite run with 100% of the advanced-features (that you may not even use) of the binary, but that would sure-as-hell be worked on fervently by many if the binary were suddenly to become unusable leaving a large amount of linusers in need of an alternative.
If the only possible way to use a piece of hardware is a binary-only driver, then I'd say at least partial blame belongs to all those that decided to use said binary without attempting to reproduce its functionality in an open-source component.
Having binary modules only stops developers from trying to make their own
No. I don't think so. What it might do, is give lazy developers a reason not to make a driver, or time to work on a different driver while the current binary is working. Neither NVidia nor anyone else who released binary-format drivers is "stopping" developers. Do they have a court-order out asking for a cease-and-decist on all non-NVidia endorsed source drivers? No? Didn't think so.
You might also want to consider that there are drivers to interface with NVidia boards that aren't binary. They don't do everything the binaries do, but they get the job done in many cases.
Say if you want that the linux world would be a nicer play with full-source NVidia drivers, I'll agree with you. But if you want to argue that by providing "Y" NVidia is at fault for reducing development on "X," I'd say your blame is misplaced and your arguement flawed.
Conspiracy theorize as you may, but I believe the NVidia driver release is more about getting their hardware sold to linux users than it is about slowing/stopping any attempt at making open-source drivers.
I'd pay to see Darl getting whacked over the head with a chair, though. In the case of IBM Vs SCO being Springer-like, I'd say it would probably be a heavy iron chair... possibly with sharp protrusions.
One thing that many people might want to consider when comparing DirectX and OpenGL is that DirectX is a suite, and GL an interface to the 3d extensions (and 2d) of your video card.
However, with that in mind, is there an equivilent suite that incorporates GL? 3D graphics are nice, but I do remember thinking nice things about DirectMusic (situation-themable audio events) and DirectSound. Is there anything we can use to compare to directX as a whole?
Being that I'm currently working on learning/developing using C++/GL in linux, it would be nice if anyone could point out any extensions aside from just graphics (which, while they may be a large portion of a game/multimedia-app, are not always all of it).