If netbsd was gpl licensed I would be Free to compile my own version of the OS to run on the Sidekick.
Yeah, but you probably wouldn't be able to install it on your device, which makes it kind of pointless. (Unless it were GPL3, which does guarantee you that right.)
All of the software on that web page is free. But I wonder how many of them reproduce the obnoxious feature of Acrobat that it won't let you print certain documents - with no way to override that. If I were the FSFE, I would promote only PDF readers that respect the user's rights (as fair use) to make printed copies of documents, and don't replicate the Adobe DRM.
I'd say for wangling such a huge sum out of the taxpayer, they'd deserve to get a huge bonus. Certainly if I were a shareholder I'd want to handsomely reward any executive who could look after the company's interests so well.
The precedent has already been established that the OS can be configured to require the local administrator to give explicit permission for each patch to be applied; the outrage here is that this time, that choice was not offered,
Well exactly. Microsoft installed whatever they wanted to install. Like I said, if you run Windows, you have to accept that Microsoft can push updates to your machine and there's very little you can do about it. I don't say that they *should* do it, or that the EULA allows for it; but undeniably they *can*.
It comes down to trust. Do you trust that Microsoft will not abuse this power? If you do not trust them then you should not run Windows.
(FWIW, I spotted the same extension on my Windows box last night, as soon as I started Firefox after getting updates - Firefox popped up a box listing the extensions installed. I wouldn't say it was hidden or secret in any way.)
I dunno, you could equally well say this shows that Microsoft is starting to accept a multi-browser world and distribute software that works with Firefox and not just IE. If there were no Firefox extension available and you had to use Internet Explorer instead to get this thing to work, there would equally be complaints on Slashdot...
Remember that the whole point of an extension mechanism is to let third parties modify Firefox. Linux distributions routinely ship patches and modifications to Firefox (and many other applications). And it's not as if no third party software ever installs extensions to Windows...
is it messing with other settings in firefox, reporting back to MS what other extensions I use, monitoring my web traffic, going to break my browser, new security holes?
If they wanted to do that, they wouldn't be so stupid as to make it an extension that's clearly visible in the Firefox preferences. Since Microsoft control the operating system and can push out updates for it, any trojan they wanted to install would be much more stealthy.
If you run Microsoft Windows then you accept that you run whatever software Microsoft chooses to put on your machine, and without source code you have little hope of finding out exactly what it's doing. If you do not trust Microsoft, I suggest you uninstall Windows from your computer right now.
For a counterexample, I quite liked the Doctor Who series set on Earth with Jon Pertwee, UNIT and the Brigadier. (Shown as repeats - I'm not that old!)
Thanks for the link. The pixel shader test runs like a dog under Linux, but apart from that the results are pretty respectable. Linux plus Wine is about half the speed of Windows or better. Video cards double in speed every couple of years, so if this means being able to run games from 2007 and earlier I'd be quite happy. Anyway, for the cost of a Windows licence you could buy a better video card that would partly or wholly compensate for the reduced performance under Wine. I know which I'd rather spend my money on.
I expect that 'gamers' will stick with Windows for now. But not everybody who plays computer games is a 'gamer'. For many people, the performance just has to be good enough, and combine with Linux's other advantages to make it not worth rebooting into that other OS just to play a game.
Disappointing that they did not test performance on Linux with Wine or Crossover Games. Not every game will run on that but for those that do, the performance comparison could be very interesting. They could also test the performance of the games under ReactOS. Comparing several releases all from the same company, always from the same one company, gets boring after a while.
Just get rid of the swap file - it is not needed if you have enough physical RAM. And get rid of Temporary Internet Files by telling IE not to use a disk cache (again, with enough physical RAM it can cache in memory instead). In both cases adding this device doesn't give you anything you can't get by adding real memory.
As I mentioned, if you really want a RAM disk, you can get your OS to create one from RAM...
Why would you spend your money on this device instead of just buying the equivalent amount of RAM and putting it on the motherboard where the processor can access it directly? Even if you had to upgrade to a more expensive motherboard you'd still get way better price-performance by doing that, rather than crippling the RAM by putting it on the other side of the SATA bottleneck.
If you insist on having a 'disk' you can save files to, well, all OSes support the idea of a RAM disk...
Can't predict the weather? Weather forecasting is one of the few areas where computers have been an undisputed improvement. Short-term forecasts these days are pretty good ( has some information on ways the accuracy of forecasts can be measured).
Weather is the odd one out because all the other variables are influenced by the prediction made. Expectations of risk (or correlation of currency movements, or default rates on loans) affect the actions of other players in the market. But weather forecasts do not affect the weather.
Part of the board's decision may be to promote a "do no evil" or environmentally friendly mentality. Don't get me wrong, the board may even genuinely believe such propaganda, but the stock holders don't care.
How do you know that they don't care? Have you asked them? A large amount of Google shares are owned by employees (of which the biggest chunk is the two founders and chief executive). Many of them are rich, and likely to care about more things than just making even more money.
Moonlight is open source, but the codecs are not - they are binary blobs written by (gulp) Microsoft. But for those living in patent-brain-damaged countries, it's about the least bad of several bad alternatives.
Adobe has done some 'evil' things but then so has every software company, even Google. I don't think that playing corporate melodrama, picking goodies and baddies, is a sensible way to decide what software to use. Judge whether you have freedom to use, share and change the software in each case. (For the Flash player the answer is clearly no, although Gnash is getting better.)
It has evolved - but not by natural selection. Some amount of evolution is accepted as a fact by everyone except young-earth creationists (those who believe the world is about 6000 years old). For example, we know that horses used to have toes and now they have hooves. But some believe this evolution is caused by natural selection and genetic variation, while others believe it was the act of a creator or designer. The evolution of wolves into domestic dogs is an example of evolution caused by man (you could call it artificial selection).
Are you sure? Modern dynamic-recompiling Javascript engines like Tracemonkey, Squirrelfish or V8 are much faster than traditional bytecode interpreters such as perl5 and CPython. (Other Python implementations like Psyco will be faster.)
I know about the ad hoc deployment but as you said it's limited to 100 devices! AFAIK, there is no way (without jailbreaking) to distribute an iPhone app to everyone without using the app store.
I expect for $200 I could be an enterprise dev with unlimited deploy.
I don't think that is true.
As I mentioned, if it were possible to distribute iPhone apps without Apple's agreement then there would be at least a few you can download from the web and run on your own phone. But none exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you probably wouldn't be able to install it on your device, which makes it kind of pointless. (Unless it were GPL3, which does guarantee you that right.)
All of the software on that web page is free. But I wonder how many of them reproduce the obnoxious feature of Acrobat that it won't let you print certain documents - with no way to override that. If I were the FSFE, I would promote only PDF readers that respect the user's rights (as fair use) to make printed copies of documents, and don't replicate the Adobe DRM.
Either way you take the summary, it's a ridiculous exaggeration. There is no way Wine is more compatible with Windows apps than Vista.
I'd say for wangling such a huge sum out of the taxpayer, they'd deserve to get a huge bonus. Certainly if I were a shareholder I'd want to handsomely reward any executive who could look after the company's interests so well.
Well exactly. Microsoft installed whatever they wanted to install. Like I said, if you run Windows, you have to accept that Microsoft can push updates to your machine and there's very little you can do about it. I don't say that they *should* do it, or that the EULA allows for it; but undeniably they *can*.
It comes down to trust. Do you trust that Microsoft will not abuse this power? If you do not trust them then you should not run Windows.
(FWIW, I spotted the same extension on my Windows box last night, as soon as I started Firefox after getting updates - Firefox popped up a box listing the extensions installed. I wouldn't say it was hidden or secret in any way.)
I dunno, you could equally well say this shows that Microsoft is starting to accept a multi-browser world and distribute software that works with Firefox and not just IE. If there were no Firefox extension available and you had to use Internet Explorer instead to get this thing to work, there would equally be complaints on Slashdot...
Remember that the whole point of an extension mechanism is to let third parties modify Firefox. Linux distributions routinely ship patches and modifications to Firefox (and many other applications). And it's not as if no third party software ever installs extensions to Windows...
If they wanted to do that, they wouldn't be so stupid as to make it an extension that's clearly visible in the Firefox preferences. Since Microsoft control the operating system and can push out updates for it, any trojan they wanted to install would be much more stealthy.
If you run Microsoft Windows then you accept that you run whatever software Microsoft chooses to put on your machine, and without source code you have little hope of finding out exactly what it's doing. If you do not trust Microsoft, I suggest you uninstall Windows from your computer right now.
Clearly he was just trying to announce NESARA.
For a counterexample, I quite liked the Doctor Who series set on Earth with Jon Pertwee, UNIT and the Brigadier. (Shown as repeats - I'm not that old!)
Three quarters of a million is an old-timer userid these days? Good grief. Get off my lawn, etc.
I think your nickname is in poor taste.
Thanks for the link. The pixel shader test runs like a dog under Linux, but apart from that the results are pretty respectable. Linux plus Wine is about half the speed of Windows or better. Video cards double in speed every couple of years, so if this means being able to run games from 2007 and earlier I'd be quite happy. Anyway, for the cost of a Windows licence you could buy a better video card that would partly or wholly compensate for the reduced performance under Wine. I know which I'd rather spend my money on.
I expect that 'gamers' will stick with Windows for now. But not everybody who plays computer games is a 'gamer'. For many people, the performance just has to be good enough, and combine with Linux's other advantages to make it not worth rebooting into that other OS just to play a game.
Worldwide, how many millions of jobs have been lost because of the computer automation that Microsoft and Dell promote?
Disappointing that they did not test performance on Linux with Wine or Crossover Games. Not every game will run on that but for those that do, the performance comparison could be very interesting. They could also test the performance of the games under ReactOS. Comparing several releases all from the same company, always from the same one company, gets boring after a while.
Just get rid of the swap file - it is not needed if you have enough physical RAM. And get rid of Temporary Internet Files by telling IE not to use a disk cache (again, with enough physical RAM it can cache in memory instead). In both cases adding this device doesn't give you anything you can't get by adding real memory.
As I mentioned, if you really want a RAM disk, you can get your OS to create one from RAM...
Really? I thought Apple were busy adding more DRM to their products.
Why would you spend your money on this device instead of just buying the equivalent amount of RAM and putting it on the motherboard where the processor can access it directly? Even if you had to upgrade to a more expensive motherboard you'd still get way better price-performance by doing that, rather than crippling the RAM by putting it on the other side of the SATA bottleneck.
If you insist on having a 'disk' you can save files to, well, all OSes support the idea of a RAM disk...
Can't predict the weather? Weather forecasting is one of the few areas where computers have been an undisputed improvement. Short-term forecasts these days are pretty good ( has some information on ways the accuracy of forecasts can be measured).
Weather is the odd one out because all the other variables are influenced by the prediction made. Expectations of risk (or correlation of currency movements, or default rates on loans) affect the actions of other players in the market. But weather forecasts do not affect the weather.
How do you know that they don't care? Have you asked them? A large amount of Google shares are owned by employees (of which the biggest chunk is the two founders and chief executive). Many of them are rich, and likely to care about more things than just making even more money.
Is any news source streaming the ceremony in a truly open format? (One that doesn't require binary blobs to watch legally in the US.)
Moonlight is open source, but the codecs are not - they are binary blobs written by (gulp) Microsoft. But for those living in patent-brain-damaged countries, it's about the least bad of several bad alternatives.
Adobe has done some 'evil' things but then so has every software company, even Google. I don't think that playing corporate melodrama, picking goodies and baddies, is a sensible way to decide what software to use. Judge whether you have freedom to use, share and change the software in each case. (For the Flash player the answer is clearly no, although Gnash is getting better.)
It has evolved - but not by natural selection. Some amount of evolution is accepted as a fact by everyone except young-earth creationists (those who believe the world is about 6000 years old). For example, we know that horses used to have toes and now they have hooves. But some believe this evolution is caused by natural selection and genetic variation, while others believe it was the act of a creator or designer. The evolution of wolves into domestic dogs is an example of evolution caused by man (you could call it artificial selection).
Are you sure? Modern dynamic-recompiling Javascript engines like Tracemonkey, Squirrelfish or V8 are much faster than traditional bytecode interpreters such as perl5 and CPython. (Other Python implementations like Psyco will be faster.)
I know about the ad hoc deployment but as you said it's limited to 100 devices! AFAIK, there is no way (without jailbreaking) to distribute an iPhone app to everyone without using the app store.
I don't think that is true.
As I mentioned, if it were possible to distribute iPhone apps without Apple's agreement then there would be at least a few you can download from the web and run on your own phone. But none exist.
Are you sure about that? Could you provide a link to some example iPhone applications that anybody can download and run without using the App Store?