DRM and the GPL isn't incompatible is it? GPL 3 and DRM are relatively incompatible.
I really don't understand what all the fuss about DRM in an open source world is. Then you don't understand the impetus for Free Software. Among the many and diverse goals of free software developers, one particularly prominent goal is to break down IP barriers that have previously obstructed use and development of software. In the case of GNU, the specific IP encumbered product that was being avoided was AT&T Unix.
Implementing DRM in free software is in direct violation of that goal. DRM is a paradigm that, once again, is designed to build obstructions to the development and use of software and media. Asking OSS developers to build DRM solutions is like asking OSS developers to make "Linux Genuine Advantage" software to prevent Apt from working when the system is not "authorized", or activation software to brick your computer if you change the video card one too many times. Why in the world would an OSS developer do such a stupid thing? There simply isn't any utility.
So in short, the following question is purposeless: "is DRM compatible with OSS?" The question you should be asking: "why would an OSS developer donate his time to make his and everybody else's life harder?".
Absolutely, and given the choice, I would choose a forked community QT over compromising our values concerning DRM. However, it would be unfortunate to lose the support of a larger organization dedicated exclusively to improving QT. Do you remember the recent article on the the stalled XOrg development? People don't like doing low level, thankless, GUI stuff. They like making interfaces, not improving the speed of existing widgets. It would be difficult to get a sufficient number of people to work on the project reliably, IMHO.
I agree that the cost of QT is minor compared to our ideals, but it would be an unfortunate loss. QT is a great toolkit, and there are many projects that absorbed the regular updates that Trolltech issued.
I'm willing to bet that average end users get a much different experience then corporate customers, but I can provide my experience as a corporate customer.
The small business at which I work purchases Dells in low volume, and has a few smaller Dell servers (really, glorified NAS units). Their support for our company has been exceptional. Just troll through my posts to see that I am absolutely not a Dell shill - I dislike Windows, I dislike Dell supplied crapware, I think their systems are ugly, and I would never personally purchase a Dell. However, all those things aside, corporate and server support is truly excellent at Dell. When I have problems (which is comparatively rare), I get personally attention, overnight shipping of replacements, people who speak flawless English, and courteous follow-ups after the problem has presumably been solved.
One might claim that, by supporting their small-business clients well, it makes their poor consumer support all the more inexcusable - I won't argue that point one way or the other. All I can say that is that there are support sub-infrastructures at Dell that are excellent.
It could just be me, but they seem not to be pushing that option quite as hard as Asus. Their demo at Computex ran XP, and all these screenshots had Vista's dubious mugshot all over them. I agree that having the "Ready-To-Go" option is nice, but I really hope they push it at least a little.
Yep, not a bad assumption in general. There are several word intros that are evocative of particular platforms. Though, most of them are small/short enough that statistically speaking, there will be false positives.
Java - exception = Joomla
KDE, or Kernel (for Linux Kernel processes) - exception = Korn shell
After searching through the Joomla main page and the "What is Joomla?" page, I was still unable to find the underlying technology. Even the review doesn't mention it until the 5th paragraph, and then only as an afterthought. Why is it so hard to mention that the CMS is built on PHP? That is information that I really care about (as do many other website developers).
As a side note, this is why I like Wikipedia. Unlike the Joomla site and this review, it mentions "PHP" in the Joomla article header. Note to website developers; if your "about" page is less helpful than the Wikipedia article, simply take a snapshot of the Wikipedia article and make it your "about" page.
Here is proof that not all killing is wrong. I was never contesting this point. I was merely saying that I don't believe that violence has a place for Christians living under the New Covenant. Though most of the New Testament occurs well within the bounds of the New Covenant (as I mentioned), Revelation 4-22 is largely an exception to that rule. Also, Revelation is subject to wide and various interpretation, and probably shouldn't be used for diving Christian responsibility in the current church. For example, the verse that you pointed to describes the actions of Jesus and the heavenly army, not Christians living on Earth or even governments of Earth.
Many of your other points are very interesting. Most of my friends who hold anti-pacifism positions take up a very similar argument. Specifically, they argue that when a Christian is acting as an arm of the state, it is the state that is justly carrying out just violence through their God given authority (via Romans 13, which you mentioned).
Even if I grant this, there is a larger issue for me that is brought about by our current opt-in military system. If the government orders a Christian to do violence in order to advance justice (via a draft or similar mechanism), you could possibly make the case that he is obligated to do so (via Romans 13). However, the larger question still remains; should a Christian volunteer to be potentially thrust into that position.
I do appreciate your comments, and they do justice to the complexity of the situation. My posts was mostly a negative reaction to the position that Christian Pacifism should be dismissed out of hand. Rather, it should be taken very seriously; Christians who are considering doing violence for any reason (whether as apart of their job or not) should consider their situations very carefully and somberly.
I am genuinely surprised by the number of people who believe that the GP's claim is untenable on it's face.
If you want to disagree with the GP, you have to make a case for yourself, rather than simply insulting his beliefs. The fact is that the in the New Testament, there is no example of Christian violence that wasn't rebuffed by Jesus himself.
Most likely, the examples of war and "defending one's country" that you are referring to are all found in the Old Testament. Any of those are not such much examples of Christian theology ("Christian" == Christ Centered), but rather are part of God's interaction with the nation of Israel. The Bible makes it clear that participants of the New Covenant (read "things found in the New Testament") are called to a different standard. Many people (myself included) believe that the this standard incorporates the idea of Christian Pacifism.
As I've said in other posts, I know Christian soldiers who believe it is moral to defend one's country in war. I genuinely respect that belief, even if I disagree. All I'm saying is that you should set aside your haughtiness and actually make a case for yourself, rather than simply accusing your idealogical opponent of being ignorant.
The grandparent made two claims: "A gun is a machine designed to kill", and "This is a morally dubious proposition and incompatible with the Christian theology I grew up with". I will defend the second claim.
Sorry, you are wrong. I think it's fairly arrogant of you to make an assertion like that about somebody's beliefs. Honestly, this is a matter of interpretation for a Christian. Being a Christian myself, this particular issue has weighed heavily on me for the last decade or so.
Re-read the Bible and spend time thinking about it. A very good suggestion. After a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, I have decided that I would not feel morally comfortable in a position where I could potentially be required to kill (even if for a "good" cause). This is not the proper forum to go into my biblical arguments for that position. However, you should understand that very many intelligent and thoughtful people have come to this exact conclusion. Suffice it to say, after my best and most thorough analysis of the Bible, violence seems to me to have no place in a Christian's life under the new covenant. There are two quick caveats to this statement:
1. This is not a criticism of Christian Military men. I know some of these people and have a great deal of respect for them though we disagree on the issue of Christian Pacifism. They hold their beliefs in good conscience, just as I do.
2. Also, I hope that this viewpoint doesn't make Christian Pacifists sound like cowards; many of us genuinely have no problem risking or giving our lives for our country in other capacities - for instance, being a non-violent field medic (as you suggested).
As a side note, I agree with you concerning the GP's other claim; "A gun is a machine designed to kill" is a fairly trite and unhelpful statement.
how anything resembling investment money still flowing If it doesn't look like investment money, then perhaps it isn't. There are a lot of non-investment related reasons that one might want to give money to SCO. Pro-lawyer, pro-Microsoft, pro-time-wasting, and pro-evil groups are probably all interested in seeing SCO continue its lawsuits.
I'm not necessarily saying that this is the case here, but it couldn't hurt to check out Stephen Norris Capital Partners: maybe they are infusing SCO with money on behalf of some [evil] third party.
The Cell processor can be said to be 7.5. Given how you have described the processor, attaching the "7.5" quality is probably misleading. You really shouldn't combine processors of different architectures into the same number. Even if you should combine them, I'm not sure that it would be fair to quantify the Power processor has half of an SPE - from what I've read, they actually have very similar performance. Also, while I did leave it unsaid, I assumed that we were talking about cores operating in an SMP environment. Different architectures, by their very nature, are asymmetrical. Of course, so are fractional cores (whether by cache or by clock frequency), making them quite unlikely - this was my point.
almost-equal power to 4-bangers Whoah there. The Insights were definitely cool, but at 67 horsepower, they aren't even close to moderately powered 4 cylinder engines. Four cylinder engines are in some really fast cars. Consider the Subaru WRX STI, the Dodge Neon SRT-4, or the Lotus Elise.
In the case of the Insight, my understanding is the the hybrid design supplements for the shortcomings of the combustion engine, so it might feel peppier than a 3 cylinder usually would.
Along the same lines, give the Acura Vigor a look. Mid 90s 5 cylinder engine. My friend had one at one point. It was pretty cool
That's what I remembered. Really though, the GP's post still stands; there isn't an amazing reason why we shouldn't have non-integer powers of two as our core count - or odd numbers, or prime numbers (3 is all of the above). I say, bring on the 7 core CPUs! Plus, marketing people might think that "5000" has a better ring to it than "8192".
The only thing I don't see happening is fractional counts - 7.5 cores (7 full, and one "handicapped"). The OS would then have to learn to avoid the "gimpy" cores for CPU hungry processes.
Just so I know; is this supposed to be parody? I'm pretty sure that whatever it is, I don't get it.
Nobody knows nothin' We know that Ebay sued Craigslist.
But of course we're going to discuss it fully here at slashdot! Indeed, as we should. Speculation is a valid component of discussion.
Yes, you are correct; my mistake. The fact that these were exclusively kernel contributions was momentarily lost on me.
Its worth noting, however, that the Linux kernel as it stands simply doesn't work with any compiler other than GCC. Have you every read the kernel source code? Fully 20% of the damn thing is GCC-specific preprocessor directives (I might be exaggerating a bit). I think that at one point, there was an effort to make it compile with the Intel compiler (which, performance-wise, it much superior to GCC), but I haven't heard about it since; I'm sure that it failed. Either way, Linux, even the kernel itself, wouldn't exist without the foundation provided by GNU packages. I have no interested in referring to the kernel itself with the "GNU/Linux" moniker, but I just find it interesting how important the GNU platform really is.
True enough, but when one changes only a single letter (or the word is too short), one usually chooses the appropriate symbol to replace that character. For instance, one would never see "A!!". It would always be filtered "A$$". Alternatively, an asterisk (*) can be substituted for a single letter; e.g. Un*x (in that case, to bypass trademark infringement). As in your example, random characters are usually only used when they fill the entire interior (and that interior is more than 1 character long) of the word: e.g. F#%K!
Of course, this is immaterial to the subject at hand; in general, X drivers are implemented in userspace rather than the kernel. Did they also develop kernel drivers frequently?
Frankly, I would love to see statistics from the Linux Foundation on Linux contributions going back a decade or so. Also, I would definitely love a breakdown of the kernel sections to which each company contributed. My guess is that these days, many of those piddly 0.3-0.7% contributions are from hardware manufacturers supporting their own hardware. The large software company contributions are probably more feature and performance oriented, like schedulers, virtual machines, etc.
I may get b$tch slapped for this OK, prepare yourself.
First, Novell announced their acquisition of SUSE in 2003, the same year that that they bought Ximian. At this point, its difficult to tell which acquisition is responsible for more of their GNU/Linux work.
Secondly, from the article: "while Novell has jumped from an anemic 3.6 percent in 2007 to a robust 8.9 percent in 2008". Which means that their recent surge in productivity has nothing to do with their acquisitions of SUSE or Ximian. It has to do with their allocation of resources to their GNU/Linux software development divisions.
Thirdly, I'm not sure what "forefront" means (does that just mean you like it?), but availability of drivers in a default install is not necessarily a sign of internal development. Its a sign of their ability to include more drivers in their default installation (this should be unsurprising). It can also be a sign of a companies willingness to include proprietary or legally encumbered drivers in their pool. While it might mean that they are doing more in-house driver development, that is usually not the case.
Fourthly, what the heck is with "b$tch"? The '$' sign is substituted for 'S', not 'I'. And that practice is annoying even when done correctly. Where you perhaps thinking of "b!tch"?
VPNs are needlessly painful. Why not make an appropriate single protocol that fulfills the requirements? If this kind of technology was infrequently needed, maybe we could make do with NFS through VPN or SSH tunnels. But we need it all the time:
The shocking thing is that almost every network is untrusted. Consider a business. The server will almost always have to have access privileges to prevent everybody's privacy. Thus, the network is untrusted - not everybody is allowed to view all data. You are proposing that every employee use a VPN to connect to a server while inside the building? Completely inefficient and unjustified.
The only networks that are truly ever "trusted" are server farm/cluster subnets that are behind a firewall and/or NAT. Unsurprisingly, these kind of environments are where NFS is used the most.
I just like keeping my systems free of any possible "patent issues" A worthy goal.
or other FUD avenues Not as big a deal for me. I've been vaccinated against FUD.
The Samba/CIFS team is simply awesome. IMHO, they are open source heroes. By blindly reverse engineering the samba protocol, they gave us a stable and legally safe implementation of the protocol. How do I know this? Because Debian includes it in their main repository. The same Debian whose anality makes Nurse Ratched look like a hippie.
If you truly are concerned with Samba future legality and encumberance, I suggest you mention that fact next time. At the very least, avoid making slanderous implications about the protocol or its users, or dismissing it as useless.
Since you want to split hairs, SSH isn't a file transfer protocol. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that when you said "ssh", you meant "sftp/scp". These, by the way, are trivially different. They both use SSH has a delivery mechanism. In my experience, servers and clients that support one probably support the other. Read the following for more information Overview of SFTP, FTPS, SCP, FTP.
As for FISH (another protocol using the SSH delivery mechanism), you still have the obscurity problem (worse than ever).
people using Mr. Softie I'm confused; are you talking about Samba here? Do you think that avoiding Samba makes you "harder" or something? Simply, Samba/CIFS is often the best tool for the job, even when Microsoft systems are not in play. Maybe you think it makes you more hardcore to use a huge hammer when you should be using a screwdriver, but it doesn't. It makes you a moron.
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Implementing DRM in free software is in direct violation of that goal. DRM is a paradigm that, once again, is designed to build obstructions to the development and use of software and media. Asking OSS developers to build DRM solutions is like asking OSS developers to make "Linux Genuine Advantage" software to prevent Apt from working when the system is not "authorized", or activation software to brick your computer if you change the video card one too many times. Why in the world would an OSS developer do such a stupid thing? There simply isn't any utility.
So in short, the following question is purposeless: "is DRM compatible with OSS?" The question you should be asking: "why would an OSS developer donate his time to make his and everybody else's life harder?".
Absolutely, and given the choice, I would choose a forked community QT over compromising our values concerning DRM. However, it would be unfortunate to lose the support of a larger organization dedicated exclusively to improving QT. Do you remember the recent article on the the stalled XOrg development? People don't like doing low level, thankless, GUI stuff. They like making interfaces, not improving the speed of existing widgets. It would be difficult to get a sufficient number of people to work on the project reliably, IMHO.
I agree that the cost of QT is minor compared to our ideals, but it would be an unfortunate loss. QT is a great toolkit, and there are many projects that absorbed the regular updates that Trolltech issued.
Interesting. I read it as more of a ransom note:
"We have QT, and unless you give us DRM software in 6 months, you can kiss future GPL releases goodbye!"
I'm willing to bet that average end users get a much different experience then corporate customers, but I can provide my experience as a corporate customer.
The small business at which I work purchases Dells in low volume, and has a few smaller Dell servers (really, glorified NAS units). Their support for our company has been exceptional. Just troll through my posts to see that I am absolutely not a Dell shill - I dislike Windows, I dislike Dell supplied crapware, I think their systems are ugly, and I would never personally purchase a Dell. However, all those things aside, corporate and server support is truly excellent at Dell. When I have problems (which is comparatively rare), I get personally attention, overnight shipping of replacements, people who speak flawless English, and courteous follow-ups after the problem has presumably been solved.
One might claim that, by supporting their small-business clients well, it makes their poor consumer support all the more inexcusable - I won't argue that point one way or the other. All I can say that is that there are support sub-infrastructures at Dell that are excellent.
It could just be me, but they seem not to be pushing that option quite as hard as Asus. Their demo at Computex ran XP, and all these screenshots had Vista's dubious mugshot all over them. I agree that having the "Ready-To-Go" option is nice, but I really hope they push it at least a little.
That would have been reasonably funny if you had used HURD or "HIRD" (the other half of the mutually recursive acronym.
After searching through the Joomla main page and the "What is Joomla?" page, I was still unable to find the underlying technology. Even the review doesn't mention it until the 5th paragraph, and then only as an afterthought. Why is it so hard to mention that the CMS is built on PHP? That is information that I really care about (as do many other website developers).
As a side note, this is why I like Wikipedia. Unlike the Joomla site and this review, it mentions "PHP" in the Joomla article header. Note to website developers; if your "about" page is less helpful than the Wikipedia article, simply take a snapshot of the Wikipedia article and make it your "about" page.
Many of your other points are very interesting. Most of my friends who hold anti-pacifism positions take up a very similar argument. Specifically, they argue that when a Christian is acting as an arm of the state, it is the state that is justly carrying out just violence through their God given authority (via Romans 13, which you mentioned).
Even if I grant this, there is a larger issue for me that is brought about by our current opt-in military system. If the government orders a Christian to do violence in order to advance justice (via a draft or similar mechanism), you could possibly make the case that he is obligated to do so (via Romans 13). However, the larger question still remains; should a Christian volunteer to be potentially thrust into that position.
I do appreciate your comments, and they do justice to the complexity of the situation. My posts was mostly a negative reaction to the position that Christian Pacifism should be dismissed out of hand. Rather, it should be taken very seriously; Christians who are considering doing violence for any reason (whether as apart of their job or not) should consider their situations very carefully and somberly.
I am genuinely surprised by the number of people who believe that the GP's claim is untenable on it's face.
If you want to disagree with the GP, you have to make a case for yourself, rather than simply insulting his beliefs. The fact is that the in the New Testament, there is no example of Christian violence that wasn't rebuffed by Jesus himself.
Most likely, the examples of war and "defending one's country" that you are referring to are all found in the Old Testament. Any of those are not such much examples of Christian theology ("Christian" == Christ Centered), but rather are part of God's interaction with the nation of Israel. The Bible makes it clear that participants of the New Covenant (read "things found in the New Testament") are called to a different standard. Many people (myself included) believe that the this standard incorporates the idea of Christian Pacifism.
As I've said in other posts, I know Christian soldiers who believe it is moral to defend one's country in war. I genuinely respect that belief, even if I disagree. All I'm saying is that you should set aside your haughtiness and actually make a case for yourself, rather than simply accusing your idealogical opponent of being ignorant.
1. This is not a criticism of Christian Military men. I know some of these people and have a great deal of respect for them though we disagree on the issue of Christian Pacifism. They hold their beliefs in good conscience, just as I do.
2. Also, I hope that this viewpoint doesn't make Christian Pacifists sound like cowards; many of us genuinely have no problem risking or giving our lives for our country in other capacities - for instance, being a non-violent field medic (as you suggested).
As a side note, I agree with you concerning the GP's other claim; "A gun is a machine designed to kill" is a fairly trite and unhelpful statement.
And best of all, you don't have to worry about minutiae like hardware video acceleration! Only standard definition videos for us in Linux, please!
In the case of the Insight, my understanding is the the hybrid design supplements for the shortcomings of the combustion engine, so it might feel peppier than a 3 cylinder usually would.
Along the same lines, give the Acura Vigor a look. Mid 90s 5 cylinder engine. My friend had one at one point. It was pretty cool
That's what I remembered. Really though, the GP's post still stands; there isn't an amazing reason why we shouldn't have non-integer powers of two as our core count - or odd numbers, or prime numbers (3 is all of the above). I say, bring on the 7 core CPUs! Plus, marketing people might think that "5000" has a better ring to it than "8192".
The only thing I don't see happening is fractional counts - 7.5 cores (7 full, and one "handicapped"). The OS would then have to learn to avoid the "gimpy" cores for CPU hungry processes.
Yes, you are correct; my mistake. The fact that these were exclusively kernel contributions was momentarily lost on me.
Its worth noting, however, that the Linux kernel as it stands simply doesn't work with any compiler other than GCC. Have you every read the kernel source code? Fully 20% of the damn thing is GCC-specific preprocessor directives (I might be exaggerating a bit). I think that at one point, there was an effort to make it compile with the Intel compiler (which, performance-wise, it much superior to GCC), but I haven't heard about it since; I'm sure that it failed. Either way, Linux, even the kernel itself, wouldn't exist without the foundation provided by GNU packages. I have no interested in referring to the kernel itself with the "GNU/Linux" moniker, but I just find it interesting how important the GNU platform really is.
True enough, but when one changes only a single letter (or the word is too short), one usually chooses the appropriate symbol to replace that character. For instance, one would never see "A!!". It would always be filtered "A$$". Alternatively, an asterisk (*) can be substituted for a single letter; e.g. Un*x (in that case, to bypass trademark infringement). As in your example, random characters are usually only used when they fill the entire interior (and that interior is more than 1 character long) of the word: e.g. F#%K!
Interesting. Is this still the case today?
Of course, this is immaterial to the subject at hand; in general, X drivers are implemented in userspace rather than the kernel. Did they also develop kernel drivers frequently?
Frankly, I would love to see statistics from the Linux Foundation on Linux contributions going back a decade or so. Also, I would definitely love a breakdown of the kernel sections to which each company contributed. My guess is that these days, many of those piddly 0.3-0.7% contributions are from hardware manufacturers supporting their own hardware. The large software company contributions are probably more feature and performance oriented, like schedulers, virtual machines, etc.
First, Novell announced their acquisition of SUSE in 2003, the same year that that they bought Ximian. At this point, its difficult to tell which acquisition is responsible for more of their GNU/Linux work.
Secondly, from the article: "while Novell has jumped from an anemic 3.6 percent in 2007 to a robust 8.9 percent in 2008". Which means that their recent surge in productivity has nothing to do with their acquisitions of SUSE or Ximian. It has to do with their allocation of resources to their GNU/Linux software development divisions.
Thirdly, I'm not sure what "forefront" means (does that just mean you like it?), but availability of drivers in a default install is not necessarily a sign of internal development. Its a sign of their ability to include more drivers in their default installation (this should be unsurprising). It can also be a sign of a companies willingness to include proprietary or legally encumbered drivers in their pool. While it might mean that they are doing more in-house driver development, that is usually not the case.
Fourthly, what the heck is with "b$tch"? The '$' sign is substituted for 'S', not 'I'. And that practice is annoying even when done correctly. Where you perhaps thinking of "b!tch"?
VPNs are needlessly painful. Why not make an appropriate single protocol that fulfills the requirements? If this kind of technology was infrequently needed, maybe we could make do with NFS through VPN or SSH tunnels. But we need it all the time:
The shocking thing is that almost every network is untrusted. Consider a business. The server will almost always have to have access privileges to prevent everybody's privacy. Thus, the network is untrusted - not everybody is allowed to view all data. You are proposing that every employee use a VPN to connect to a server while inside the building? Completely inefficient and unjustified.
The only networks that are truly ever "trusted" are server farm/cluster subnets that are behind a firewall and/or NAT. Unsurprisingly, these kind of environments are where NFS is used the most.
The Samba/CIFS team is simply awesome. IMHO, they are open source heroes. By blindly reverse engineering the samba protocol, they gave us a stable and legally safe implementation of the protocol. How do I know this? Because Debian includes it in their main repository. The same Debian whose anality makes Nurse Ratched look like a hippie.
If you truly are concerned with Samba future legality and encumberance, I suggest you mention that fact next time. At the very least, avoid making slanderous implications about the protocol or its users, or dismissing it as useless.
As for FISH (another protocol using the SSH delivery mechanism), you still have the obscurity problem (worse than ever). people using Mr. Softie I'm confused; are you talking about Samba here? Do you think that avoiding Samba makes you "harder" or something? Simply, Samba/CIFS is often the best tool for the job, even when Microsoft systems are not in play. Maybe you think it makes you more hardcore to use a huge hammer when you should be using a screwdriver, but it doesn't. It makes you a moron.