You make some very good points and you elucidate your perspective
clearly. I think this point is key:
[...] fair market wage is a fantasy. Until you homogenize the economies of the
world so everyone has the same cost of living, same tax burden, same access to
educational resources, medicine, and civil liberties, there can be no such
thing as a fair market because your trading apples and oranges.
What it all boils down to is whether we want to homogenize
the economies of the world or not. If we want them homogenized
then we must let workers compete globally for jobs. Unfortunately,
the only practical way to homogenize is to greatly reduce the affluence
of Americans -- the very process you are lamenting.
To many Americans the wisdom of keeping the barriers up is
obvious. To many non-Americans the wisdom of removing the
barriers is equally obvious. IMO, options are rapidly disappearing.
The only real choice left is whether the US empire is going to
go gentle into that good night or whether it is going to go down
kicking and screaming, making a very bad situation much worse.
I suspect that unclean umounts may trigger the bug too but that does not
contradict anything I said. I did not say there was no corruption when
you hit the bug once, I said there was catastrophic corruption when you hit it
twice in a row. If a bug can be triggered by a clean umount, it is not
very surprising if it also gets triggered by an unclean umount.
Your experience seems to confirm my correction. It is not about how *often* you
mount, it is about how you umount. This is a non-trivial distinction because
the misleading summary could tend to encourage some people who have been
safely using a buggy kernel to unwittingly engage in behavior that triggers the
bug, perhaps catastrophically.
Doing it at the application level does not help because a lower level is
slowing down and re-transmitting due to packet loss. The key is to transmit
redundant information at the lower level so you still get 100% of the data
received even if there is some packet loss. IOW the transmitter assumes
there will be some packet loss and always sends extra information. For
perfect channels you lose maybe 10% of the bandwidth by doing this but
for imperfect channels you get the great gains reported in the article.
The EXT4 file-system can experience data loss if the file-system is remounted (or the system rebooted) too often.
This is wrong. The problem occurs when the fs is unmounted too *soon*.
Twice in a row.
The bug only appears if the journal buffer does not wrap.
You only get catastrophic results if this happens twice in a row.
I agree that TFA's use of the "jerk" label is way over the top. OTOH,
I've been the "brilliant [whatever]" in a series of different companies
and I think the advice to get rid of them is sound.
The brilliant people want to (need to) create. Once their flurry of
massive creation is done in one company, they really should move on
to a different company where they can start creating from scratch
again. From the perspective of the brilliant creator the transition
from startup to growth is seen as a transition from creation to
maintenance.
IMO the problem is not that brilliant people are jerks (although
I admit some of the are), the problem is that our current corporate
culture does not deal with brilliant people well. In fact it seems
to assume that all people are not brilliant. It wants to treat people
like replaceable cogs so *management* can make all the important decisions.
That works great in maintenance mode but it is deadly in creative mode.
This is related to the Perlisism:
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
The highly creative people need free rein during the initial creative
period. After that, their creativity needs to be held in check and
the best solution for all concerned is to give them a bunch of money
and replace them with less creative people who will be happier working
in maintenance mode. Of course maintenance happens during the creative
phase and creativity happens during the longer maintenance phase. Also,
it is essential that what is created is easy to maintain.
This sounds like a fantastic project. I really hope they succeed.
My two main concerns are security and efficiency. Firefox really seems
to be a resource hog on my desktop system. They need to make
drastic improvements in efficiency in order to compete in the mobile
market. Sure, I have a lot of FF windows and tabs open but sometimes
I have to nuke FF because it is consuming a lot of CPU while it seems
to be doing nothing.
My other concern is security. FTFA:
Applications can for example, be installed directly from a website,
without going through the Marketplace. There will be several
application stores and applications can be submitted for free.
I sure hope they put a lot of thought and effort into security
otherwise it is going to be malware central. I think they are
going to need to provide the option of only running digitally
signed apps. As long as the user/owner has control of which
keys they are going to trust then this won't impinge on the
end-user/owner's freedom.
It would also be really good if there was some way for trusted
key-holder to disable apps remotely for cases where an app that
contains malware gets accidentally accepted. Again, user/owners
would have to be able to opt-in to this feature. There also needs
to be a way to lock the phones down so a business can have control
over what apps are allowed on the phones they give out to their employees.
IOW, control should be in the hands of the owner, not the user.
If I lend my phone to someone, I don't want them to be able to
install apps.
Just because the OS is Free as in Freedom should not mean that
all contributors are automatically trusted. ISTM it is important
to give user/owners the option of using a web of trust from the
get-go. As long as the end user/owner has control over which
keys are trusted and whether keys are used at all will keep this
security feature from impinging on the Freedom of the device.
Someone must have patents on that technology. Will East
Texas continue to be so patent friendly when they are going
to be receiving the sharp end of the stick?
When sharing, there is one item that is apportioned between people. Whether
that be a toy that you play with sometimes and another child plays with
sometimes or a pizza where you eat some slices and other people eat other
slices. Sharing does not (and never has) meant to take something and make
unlimited exact duplicates and give them to people (including complete
strangers).
Great news! Kudos to Apple for stepping up to the plate
and releasing OSX under an open source license. Maybe this
will encourage Microsoft to release Windows under the GPL-3.
He could individually sign the copies he distributes and include
the recipient's name in the signature so the donors also receive
a digitally signed certificate of authentication.
In general (I'm now talking about the RIAA, MPAA, etcAA), signing
is a much more sane approach than DRM because you are giving paying
customers something extra, instead of giving them something
broken by design.
Years ago I got good support from Nvidia. I had a problem and sent
a bug report and got a response late on a Saturday night (West Coast)
that involved a kernel patch to fix a bug in the kernel that was
causing the problem. I was an Nvidia fanboy for many years after
that. I helped dozens of people get things like Twinview working.
In recent years, working with Nivida has been very frustrating
and I can no longer recommend them for Linux systems. For example
some interaction between closed-source Flash and the closed-source
Nvidia drivers turns people blue in Youtube videos but not other
sites.
There has also been a heart breaking struggle to remove video "tearing" (vsync
problem) when watching dvds and blurays. The last time I checked I needed to
use the GL video to remove tearing when watching dvds but I still have some
tearing when watching blurays which is kind of heart breaking. At the very
least Nvidia should have a sticky post in the Linux forum explaining all the
hoops one must jump through to try to get rid of video tearing. Also, having
the sticky posts show up on all pages, not just the first page is a big PITA.
It wastes my time and attention. It is disrepectful.
I don't understand why video tearing is such a recurring problem. Are
these environment variables still needed?
When an nvidia driver update causes tearing to start again, or worse,
if it causes X (or the entire machine) to crash, it feels like you
are telling me "F- you!"
I get it that opening up your drivers is not an option. The problem
is that this decision causes a lot of breakage and you do not make it easy
to fix this breakage. Please just make it easy for me to get your drivers
to work. Is Twinview plus non-tearing video playback really too much
to ask for? Also, what about the problem with non-tearing and composite?
Has that ever been fixed? If not, maybe that's something you could
help with.
Years ago I felt like I was getting support.
Nowadays I'm not feeling the love.
1. No Windows phone for ONE YEAR. No product in one year is a lifetime in the smartphone market. 2. Killed off Symbian
AC parent replied:
Sorry, but you don't know shit about mobile market. A year is very short time to bring out a phone...
Apple meet orange. It is true that it takes longer than a year to bring out
a phone which is exactly why Elsop's policy was a disaster. Companies
that actually want to stay in business keep pushing their old products
while they develop new products. For example, it would be a disaster
for AMD or Intel to have no new products for a year even though developing
a new CPU line can (I imagine) take more than a year.
Thank you for the clarification. I will stop spreading misinformation about
e17 stability.
BTW: I greatly admire your work. I even went so far as to suggest to my
uncle that he invest in Samsung when he asked for tech stock suggestions
shortly after I heard they had hired you. IMO they showed extremely good
taste in hiring developers which I think is a very good sign.
As I may have mentioned above, e16 is the most configurable software I've
ever encountered. It took me a while to configure it the way I wanted.
This included making some Perl modules to interact with eesh and the
windows list which let me do things like automatically save and restore
terminal and editor sessions and to write e16-launch:
Opens "command arg1 arg2..." in a new window and then places that window
according to the placement parameters, all of which are optional.
I also wrote some code to automatically add all my browser
bookmarks to the e16 menus.
Now that it is configured it is an absolute joy to use.
It may well top my list of the most enjoyable software I've ever used.
Here is the announcement that went out on the mail list over a
year ago.
From: Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) xxx
To: xxx xxx xxx
Subject: [e-users] 1.0 Release of core EFL
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:43:25 +0900
Finally after a lkong time coming, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release
of the core EFL libraries (With the exception of Eet at 1.4). This has been
many years coming. The following libraries have been released:
Eina - 1.0.0
Eet - 1.4.0
Evas - 1.0.0
Ecore - 1.0.0
Embryo - 1.0.0
Edje - 1.0.0
E_Dbus - 1.0.0
Efreet - 1.0.0
Eeze - 1.0.0
You can download the respective libraries from our Download Page:
It has also shipped in a commercial product (a smart refrigerator).
I wouldn't be surprised if it has been used in other products but
the e17 activity on the list skyrocketed so much after that announcement,
the signal to noise ratio for e16 messages got so bad I unsubscribed.
I don't want to quibble over whether this means e17 was "stable" or
not. This is the event I was referring to, please feel free to
interpret it however you want.
E16 is being actively maintained. You might want to download the latest and
greatest from
here if your distro does not provide such. You would have to
compile it but IIRC, compiles only take a minute or two.
I find it hard to believe that e16 screwed up your system. Were
you running it as root? When I test a new window manager I usually
boot to terminal mode, edit my.xinitrc and then run "startx $WM".
I was also able to get e16 to start up inside a window which made
it very easy to test and tweak while running another window manager.
IMO, the key thing is that the default configuration is very minimal.
You need to download some themes.
Someday you may want to start tweaking themes but that is a bit of
a deep dive. E16 is the most configurable program I've ever
encountered. It takes a while to learn how to configure it. There
may be some useful guides over on the Gentoo forums.
The next version, e17, has gone stable and many people love it.
You might want to give that a try if you haven't already.
Another +1 for this. It took me a while to customize e16 to my
liking but now that I have there is no reason for me to go back
to KDE. The lack of decent multi-monitor support in KDE4 was
also a deal breaker for me. Being called a whiner and worse
when I complained about the problems I encountered makes me
even less interested in ever going back.
I was actually a KDE developer when all this happened. The
horrible end user experience and the way the transition was
mishandled for years caused me to lose all interest in working
with those folks ever again.
Perhaps Oracle didn't read the ruling carefully. Judge Alsup ruled:
That interoperability is at the heart of the command structure is
illustrated by Oracle's preoccupation with what it calls "fragmentation,"
meaning the problem of having imperfect interoperability among platforms. When
this occurs, Java-based applications may not run on the incompatible platforms.
For example, Java-based code using the replicated parts of the 37 API packages
will run on Android but will not if a 38th package is needed. Such imperfect
interoperability leads to a "fragmentation" -- a Balkanization -- of platforms, a
circumstance which Sun and Oracle have tried to curb via their licensing
programs. In this litigation, Oracle has made much of this problem, at times
almost leaving the impression that if only Google had replicated all 166 Java
API packages, Oracle would not have sued. While fragmentation is a
legitimate business consideration, it begs the question whether or not a
license was required in the first place to replicate some or all of the command
structure. (This is especially so inasmuch as Android has not carried the Java
trademark, and Google has not held out Android as fully compatible.) The
immediate point is this: fragmentation, imperfect interoperability, and
Oracle's angst over it illustrate the character of the command structure as a
functional system or method of operation.
[...] In Sony, the accused product implemented only 137 of the
Playstation BIOS's 242 functions because those were the only functions invoked
by the games tested. Connectixâ(TM)s Opening Appellate Brief at 18, available at
1999 WL 33623860, (9th Cir. May 27, 1999). Our court of appeals held that the
accused product "itself infringe[d] no copyright." Sony, 203 F.3d at 608
n.11. This parallels Google's decision to implement some but not all of
the Java API packages in Android.
Oracle's obsession over fragmentation was turned against them because
it showed they agree that the APIs are functional and hence
not copyrightable. They seem oblivious to the fact that they were
hoist by their own petard. Like the dinosaur they are, there is
a long time delay before signals get transmitted to their tiny brains.
The low dose risk estimates are basically based on that,
extrapolated downwards linearly.
This is false. What you are describing is the
linear no-threshold model which was proposed by rabid anti-nuke
fanatics years ago and rejected by the industry and by regulators
alike. The threshold below which radiation levels were considered
to be safe has decreased by orders of magnitude as more information
was gleaned about health effects of low level radiation.
The assumption by the industry has almost always been that
adverse health effects magically vanish unless there is scientific
proof that they don't.
There has been a battle waged for many years trying to
get the nuclear industry and government regulators to accept
the linear no-threshold model as the best and safest way to
extropolate from high dose health effects to low dose effects.
The 9 copied lines were in addition to re-implementing the APIs.
The author of the 9 lines testified that he copied them into Android
after he switched from working at Sun to working at Google. A moral
victory for Google but technically it was infringment unless it was
de minimus or fair-use.
I think Oracle included the 9 lines in their complaint to demonstrate
to the jury that Google's clean-room had been contaminated. The
fact that they only found 9 infringing lines out of millions was
actually proof that the clean-room was pretty damned good.
IMO the 9 lines demonstrated to the jury that Oracle is run by
a bunch of petty pricks.
That was an arbitration in a different circuit so it does
not provide a precendent for this case. That is the problem
here which is actually quite ironic. Since everyone has
assumed that APIs cannot be copyrighted, no one has raised
the issue in court in the 9th circuit for decades so there
is no clear precedent from the 9th or from the Supreme Court
that applies to the current case.
This is the same BS from BS&F that we got in SCO vs. the
world and her dog. They make up outrageous, fanciful,
ridiculous claims and there is no precedent because no one
was stupid enough to pour millions of dollars into a case
base on such total BS before.
It is a bit more subtle than that. The higher courts do
not rule on issues of fact. They only deal with matters
of law. Juries are the opposite, they only deal with
facts, not law. It would have been more correct for
the grandparent post to have said that jury verdicts
cannot be appealed directly. Oracle would have to
say that the judge erred on a matter of law that led
to the incorrect jury decision.
If that judge had just ruled that APIs cannot be copyrighted
as a matter of law then a upper court could directly overturn
that decision if they did not beleive it was true in all
cases. The way it looks now, whoever loses will try to
appeal. While it is possible for an upper court to remand
a decision made by a jury, they try to avoid doing that
unless there was a very clear and significant error made
by the judge in the process that led to the jury verdict.
Slashdot Mirror
You make some very good points and you elucidate your perspective clearly. I think this point is key:
[...] fair market wage is a fantasy. Until you homogenize the economies of the world so everyone has the same cost of living, same tax burden, same access to educational resources, medicine, and civil liberties, there can be no such thing as a fair market because your trading apples and oranges.
What it all boils down to is whether we want to homogenize the economies of the world or not. If we want them homogenized then we must let workers compete globally for jobs. Unfortunately, the only practical way to homogenize is to greatly reduce the affluence of Americans -- the very process you are lamenting.
To many Americans the wisdom of keeping the barriers up is obvious. To many non-Americans the wisdom of removing the barriers is equally obvious. IMO, options are rapidly disappearing. The only real choice left is whether the US empire is going to go gentle into that good night or whether it is going to go down kicking and screaming, making a very bad situation much worse.
I suspect that unclean umounts may trigger the bug too but that does not contradict anything I said. I did not say there was no corruption when you hit the bug once, I said there was catastrophic corruption when you hit it twice in a row. If a bug can be triggered by a clean umount, it is not very surprising if it also gets triggered by an unclean umount.
Your experience seems to confirm my correction. It is not about how *often* you mount, it is about how you umount. This is a non-trivial distinction because the misleading summary could tend to encourage some people who have been safely using a buggy kernel to unwittingly engage in behavior that triggers the bug, perhaps catastrophically.
Doing it at the application level does not help because a lower level is slowing down and re-transmitting due to packet loss. The key is to transmit redundant information at the lower level so you still get 100% of the data received even if there is some packet loss. IOW the transmitter assumes there will be some packet loss and always sends extra information. For perfect channels you lose maybe 10% of the bandwidth by doing this but for imperfect channels you get the great gains reported in the article.
The EXT4 file-system can experience data loss if the file-system is remounted (or the system rebooted) too often.
This is wrong. The problem occurs when the fs is unmounted too *soon*. Twice in a row. The bug only appears if the journal buffer does not wrap. You only get catastrophic results if this happens twice in a row.
I agree that TFA's use of the "jerk" label is way over the top. OTOH, I've been the "brilliant [whatever]" in a series of different companies and I think the advice to get rid of them is sound.
The brilliant people want to (need to) create. Once their flurry of massive creation is done in one company, they really should move on to a different company where they can start creating from scratch again. From the perspective of the brilliant creator the transition from startup to growth is seen as a transition from creation to maintenance.
IMO the problem is not that brilliant people are jerks (although I admit some of the are), the problem is that our current corporate culture does not deal with brilliant people well. In fact it seems to assume that all people are not brilliant. It wants to treat people like replaceable cogs so *management* can make all the important decisions. That works great in maintenance mode but it is deadly in creative mode. This is related to the Perlisism:
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
The highly creative people need free rein during the initial creative period. After that, their creativity needs to be held in check and the best solution for all concerned is to give them a bunch of money and replace them with less creative people who will be happier working in maintenance mode. Of course maintenance happens during the creative phase and creativity happens during the longer maintenance phase. Also, it is essential that what is created is easy to maintain.
Hilarious and understated. Wish I had mod points for you.
I figured someone on Slashdot might direct me to the info. Thank you very much.
This sounds like a fantastic project. I really hope they succeed. My two main concerns are security and efficiency. Firefox really seems to be a resource hog on my desktop system. They need to make drastic improvements in efficiency in order to compete in the mobile market. Sure, I have a lot of FF windows and tabs open but sometimes I have to nuke FF because it is consuming a lot of CPU while it seems to be doing nothing.
My other concern is security. FTFA:
Applications can for example, be installed directly from a website, without going through the Marketplace. There will be several application stores and applications can be submitted for free.
I sure hope they put a lot of thought and effort into security otherwise it is going to be malware central. I think they are going to need to provide the option of only running digitally signed apps. As long as the user/owner has control of which keys they are going to trust then this won't impinge on the end-user/owner's freedom.
It would also be really good if there was some way for trusted key-holder to disable apps remotely for cases where an app that contains malware gets accidentally accepted. Again, user/owners would have to be able to opt-in to this feature. There also needs to be a way to lock the phones down so a business can have control over what apps are allowed on the phones they give out to their employees. IOW, control should be in the hands of the owner, not the user. If I lend my phone to someone, I don't want them to be able to install apps.
Just because the OS is Free as in Freedom should not mean that all contributors are automatically trusted. ISTM it is important to give user/owners the option of using a web of trust from the get-go. As long as the end user/owner has control over which keys are trusted and whether keys are used at all will keep this security feature from impinging on the Freedom of the device.
Someone must have patents on that technology. Will East Texas continue to be so patent friendly when they are going to be receiving the sharp end of the stick?
When sharing, there is one item that is apportioned between people. Whether that be a toy that you play with sometimes and another child plays with sometimes or a pizza where you eat some slices and other people eat other slices. Sharing does not (and never has) meant to take something and make unlimited exact duplicates and give them to people (including complete strangers).
Thanks for sharing!
OSX is BSD.
Great news! Kudos to Apple for stepping up to the plate and releasing OSX under an open source license. Maybe this will encourage Microsoft to release Windows under the GPL-3.
He could individually sign the copies he distributes and include the recipient's name in the signature so the donors also receive a digitally signed certificate of authentication.
In general (I'm now talking about the RIAA, MPAA, etcAA), signing is a much more sane approach than DRM because you are giving paying customers something extra, instead of giving them something broken by design.
However, America was no higher than 5th in executions per capita in 2011.
Well, that makes it perfectly all right then. As long as there are a few countries that are worse then there is nothing for us to worry about.
Years ago I got good support from Nvidia. I had a problem and sent a bug report and got a response late on a Saturday night (West Coast) that involved a kernel patch to fix a bug in the kernel that was causing the problem. I was an Nvidia fanboy for many years after that. I helped dozens of people get things like Twinview working.
In recent years, working with Nivida has been very frustrating and I can no longer recommend them for Linux systems. For example some interaction between closed-source Flash and the closed-source Nvidia drivers turns people blue in Youtube videos but not other sites.
There has also been a heart breaking struggle to remove video "tearing" (vsync problem) when watching dvds and blurays. The last time I checked I needed to use the GL video to remove tearing when watching dvds but I still have some tearing when watching blurays which is kind of heart breaking. At the very least Nvidia should have a sticky post in the Linux forum explaining all the hoops one must jump through to try to get rid of video tearing. Also, having the sticky posts show up on all pages, not just the first page is a big PITA. It wastes my time and attention. It is disrepectful.
I don't understand why video tearing is such a recurring problem. Are these environment variables still needed?
export VDPAU_NVIDIA_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export __VDPAU_NVIDIA_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1
export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1
export GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
export __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE="DFP-0"
When an nvidia driver update causes tearing to start again, or worse, if it causes X (or the entire machine) to crash, it feels like you are telling me "F- you!"
I get it that opening up your drivers is not an option. The problem is that this decision causes a lot of breakage and you do not make it easy to fix this breakage. Please just make it easy for me to get your drivers to work. Is Twinview plus non-tearing video playback really too much to ask for? Also, what about the problem with non-tearing and composite? Has that ever been fixed? If not, maybe that's something you could help with.
Years ago I felt like I was getting support. Nowadays I'm not feeling the love.
GP said:
1. No Windows phone for ONE YEAR. No product in one year is a lifetime in the smartphone market. 2. Killed off Symbian
AC parent replied:
Sorry, but you don't know shit about mobile market. A year is very short time to bring out a phone ...
Apple meet orange. It is true that it takes longer than a year to bring out a phone which is exactly why Elsop's policy was a disaster. Companies that actually want to stay in business keep pushing their old products while they develop new products. For example, it would be a disaster for AMD or Intel to have no new products for a year even though developing a new CPU line can (I imagine) take more than a year.
Thank you for the clarification. I will stop spreading misinformation about e17 stability.
BTW: I greatly admire your work. I even went so far as to suggest to my uncle that he invest in Samsung when he asked for tech stock suggestions shortly after I heard they had hired you. IMO they showed extremely good taste in hiring developers which I think is a very good sign.
As I may have mentioned above, e16 is the most configurable software I've ever encountered. It took me a while to configure it the way I wanted. This included making some Perl modules to interact with eesh and the windows list which let me do things like automatically save and restore terminal and editor sessions and to write e16-launch:
I also wrote some code to automatically add all my browser bookmarks to the e16 menus. Now that it is configured it is an absolute joy to use. It may well top my list of the most enjoyable software I've ever used.
Here is the announcement that went out on the mail list over a year ago.
From: Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) xxx
To: xxx xxx xxx
Subject: [e-users] 1.0 Release of core EFL
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:43:25 +0900
Finally after a lkong time coming, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the core EFL libraries (With the exception of Eet at 1.4). This has been many years coming. The following libraries have been released:
You can download the respective libraries from our Download Page:
http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=download&l=en
It has also shipped in a commercial product (a smart refrigerator). I wouldn't be surprised if it has been used in other products but the e17 activity on the list skyrocketed so much after that announcement, the signal to noise ratio for e16 messages got so bad I unsubscribed.
I don't want to quibble over whether this means e17 was "stable" or not. This is the event I was referring to, please feel free to interpret it however you want.
E16 is being actively maintained. You might want to download the latest and greatest from here if your distro does not provide such. You would have to compile it but IIRC, compiles only take a minute or two.
I find it hard to believe that e16 screwed up your system. Were you running it as root? When I test a new window manager I usually boot to terminal mode, edit my .xinitrc and then run "startx $WM".
I was also able to get e16 to start up inside a window which made
it very easy to test and tweak while running another window manager.
IMO, the key thing is that the default configuration is very minimal. You need to download some themes. Someday you may want to start tweaking themes but that is a bit of a deep dive. E16 is the most configurable program I've ever encountered. It takes a while to learn how to configure it. There may be some useful guides over on the Gentoo forums.
The next version, e17, has gone stable and many people love it. You might want to give that a try if you haven't already.
Another +1 for this. It took me a while to customize e16 to my liking but now that I have there is no reason for me to go back to KDE. The lack of decent multi-monitor support in KDE4 was also a deal breaker for me. Being called a whiner and worse when I complained about the problems I encountered makes me even less interested in ever going back.
I was actually a KDE developer when all this happened. The horrible end user experience and the way the transition was mishandled for years caused me to lose all interest in working with those folks ever again.
Perhaps Oracle didn't read the ruling carefully. Judge Alsup ruled:
That interoperability is at the heart of the command structure is illustrated by Oracle's preoccupation with what it calls "fragmentation," meaning the problem of having imperfect interoperability among platforms. When this occurs, Java-based applications may not run on the incompatible platforms. For example, Java-based code using the replicated parts of the 37 API packages will run on Android but will not if a 38th package is needed. Such imperfect interoperability leads to a "fragmentation" -- a Balkanization -- of platforms, a circumstance which Sun and Oracle have tried to curb via their licensing programs. In this litigation, Oracle has made much of this problem, at times almost leaving the impression that if only Google had replicated all 166 Java API packages, Oracle would not have sued. While fragmentation is a legitimate business consideration, it begs the question whether or not a license was required in the first place to replicate some or all of the command structure. (This is especially so inasmuch as Android has not carried the Java trademark, and Google has not held out Android as fully compatible.) The immediate point is this: fragmentation, imperfect interoperability, and Oracle's angst over it illustrate the character of the command structure as a functional system or method of operation.
[...] In Sony, the accused product implemented only 137 of the Playstation BIOS's 242 functions because those were the only functions invoked by the games tested. Connectixâ(TM)s Opening Appellate Brief at 18, available at 1999 WL 33623860, (9th Cir. May 27, 1999). Our court of appeals held that the accused product "itself infringe[d] no copyright." Sony, 203 F.3d at 608 n.11. This parallels Google's decision to implement some but not all of the Java API packages in Android.
Oracle's obsession over fragmentation was turned against them because it showed they agree that the APIs are functional and hence not copyrightable. They seem oblivious to the fact that they were hoist by their own petard. Like the dinosaur they are, there is a long time delay before signals get transmitted to their tiny brains.
Here is a simple solution to the problem which should keep Fox happy.
The low dose risk estimates are basically based on that, extrapolated downwards linearly.
This is false. What you are describing is the linear no-threshold model which was proposed by rabid anti-nuke fanatics years ago and rejected by the industry and by regulators alike. The threshold below which radiation levels were considered to be safe has decreased by orders of magnitude as more information was gleaned about health effects of low level radiation. The assumption by the industry has almost always been that adverse health effects magically vanish unless there is scientific proof that they don't.
There has been a battle waged for many years trying to get the nuclear industry and government regulators to accept the linear no-threshold model as the best and safest way to extropolate from high dose health effects to low dose effects.
The 9 copied lines were in addition to re-implementing the APIs.
The author of the 9 lines testified that he copied them into Android after he switched from working at Sun to working at Google. A moral victory for Google but technically it was infringment unless it was de minimus or fair-use.
I think Oracle included the 9 lines in their complaint to demonstrate to the jury that Google's clean-room had been contaminated. The fact that they only found 9 infringing lines out of millions was actually proof that the clean-room was pretty damned good.
IMO the 9 lines demonstrated to the jury that Oracle is run by a bunch of petty pricks.
That was an arbitration in a different circuit so it does not provide a precendent for this case. That is the problem here which is actually quite ironic. Since everyone has assumed that APIs cannot be copyrighted, no one has raised the issue in court in the 9th circuit for decades so there is no clear precedent from the 9th or from the Supreme Court that applies to the current case.
This is the same BS from BS&F that we got in SCO vs. the world and her dog. They make up outrageous, fanciful, ridiculous claims and there is no precedent because no one was stupid enough to pour millions of dollars into a case base on such total BS before.
It is a bit more subtle than that. The higher courts do not rule on issues of fact. They only deal with matters of law. Juries are the opposite, they only deal with facts, not law. It would have been more correct for the grandparent post to have said that jury verdicts cannot be appealed directly. Oracle would have to say that the judge erred on a matter of law that led to the incorrect jury decision.
If that judge had just ruled that APIs cannot be copyrighted as a matter of law then a upper court could directly overturn that decision if they did not beleive it was true in all cases. The way it looks now, whoever loses will try to appeal. While it is possible for an upper court to remand a decision made by a jury, they try to avoid doing that unless there was a very clear and significant error made by the judge in the process that led to the jury verdict.