You're focusing on one very specific segment of the OS market, namely games. Even then, the problem isn't hardware, Linux has very good support for 3D accelaterated cards and sound. The problem is DirectX is an MS only toolkit. Cedega kind of addresses that but it's not in the best way possible. Ideally, an Open DirectX project would seek to implement the DirectX interface for non-Windows platforms. On that note, that's easier said than done. DirectX mixes in doses of Windows specific directly memory access routines which really only lend themselves to emulation a la Cedega. There are some DirectX-like toolkits out there, but they tend to be fragmented (OpenAL, SDL, etc) and not in the realm of a "define macro and recompile" solution. I find the whole DirectX / OpenGL "fight" a really interesting story.
Well... the difference is that (I don't think) the Dems never claimed moral superiority or that homosexuality was somehow wrong. If two consenting guys want to bump uglies, fine... knock yourselves out... please don't send pictures... but they shouldn't run around preaching how doing so is destroying America right after they get a chance to gargle with some Listerine.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"
I hope to hell you're trolling because if not you need to dig up a transcript of that speech and see what he really said before posting from Drudge and Newsmax, news organizations about as substantiative as The Onion. This snippet is taken so far out of context it's laughable. He was referring to the tobacco industry in the even broader context of agriculture. The statement you presented is about as accurate claiming he said: Gas powered skateboards are a "significant contributor to global warming!" when the original statement would more like "Transportation emissions are a significant contributor to global warming!".
I can't stand left wing nuts about as much as the next guy but right wing nuts are just as bad if not worse.
... a large proportion the US energy is used to power those mobility chairs the morbidly obese people use.
... and don't forget to power our 80 inch TVs so we can watch Springer and Oprah.... Jerry Jerry Jerry... in closing, fool me once shame on you... fool me... can't fool me again!
we're not even the size of America's smallest state
I think you were joking, Rhode Island (the smallest state) is only 1045 sq miles / 2700 sq km... the UK seemed much bigger than than from the plane last time I was over it!;-) Regardless, if what you said was right, I wonder what a population density of 60M people per 1045 sq miles / 57K people per sq mile would look like... 1 sq mile is about 28M sq feet... so 1 person per 500 sqft... in otherwords, everybody gets a 22 ft by 22 ft plot... it's tight, but nobody would be sleeping on top of anybody else. Manhattan (NYC) has the highest population density in the states at something like 70K people per sq mile... so it's not unheard of to cram that many people into a sq mile, even here.
Hey... I'm no supporter of protectionism, history has shown repeatedly that it simply doesn't work. However, you have to be VERY careful when you make a statement like "I'm sorry, but engineers (and all kinds of other white collar & blue collar jobs) are just not as valuable as they used to be to the market place" especially in in reference to the US economy where this class now provides the bulk of the tax revenues and consumer spending. The result of sustained income depression in the middle class would eventually lead the US economy into deflation which (according to the econ 101 class I took) would suck more than you could imagine. The only sane ways to correct the "cheaper" imbalance is either introduce inflation into the economies where work is being outsourced to -or- to devalue the US currency. As of late, US policy has shifted towards a weak dollar policy.
I'm not disagreeing with you, you're bang on, but you raise an interesting point in "MS has made it impossible for any program to run at a low enough level (except MS programs of course)" that I want to expand on. MS doesn't sell open source software. They've never once said "do whatever you want with our OS". They don't provide source code to build your own kernel. So why the big stink by these companies? This is the nature of closed source software platforms. You're at the mercy of their creators. This turn of events for the anti-V companies is EXACTLY the reason why I no longer use or recommend closed source software to my board. Microsoft has ALWAYS owned the key to Symantec's and McAfee's business models. They've just decided to close that door now and these guys will now have to pay the price for the choice of platform they made. This same fate could happen to ANY windows-only software maker. It's the nature of dealing with a platform over which you have zero control.
As a Linux only techie, I got a 30G iPod video recently as a gift and let me tell you that's it's a fun toy to play with on Linux. With the 1.2 firmware upgrade, you can use 640x480 h264 vids at up to around 2000kbps. iTunes doesn't digest those files, but gtkpod, as awkward as it is to use, uploads em without a hitch. It's a good MP3 player, but the "cool" is getting a video cable and bringing your video library with you. Vids encoded as described look surprisingly good, even on 42" sets. I also use the Photo (via gpixpod) and Notes feature quite a bit. For $250, I recommend it, even though I'd never have thought it could be worth it before owning one.
For non-tech users... this is a very effective method. We know to look for an SSL lock and to make certain the the URL matches the site, but this is total jibberish to non-techs who have no idea what a URL is supposed to look like, much less how SSL works. My advice is usually, if it comes in an email... do not click on it. Whomever invented HTML email should be shot, it's almost as if it was purposely invented for this purpose.
Well, I can assure you that if the DRM is based solely on a hardware key or checksum, it will be cracked at some point. The only difference is that the crack will happen at the BIOS firmware level rather than the OS level, all this assuming that the BIOS can be flashed... even then, there may be pure hardware hacks available.
Though possible, it's hard to infect a Mac, Linux, HP, Solaris, AIX, or BSD box with a virus or trojan designed to infect Windows XP.
This is only theoretically possible and then really only in circumstances where the virus or trojan is not an OS specific binary but a script of some sort. It is virtually impossible to have a cross platform OS binary work on more than one OS. For this to work, the exploit would need to leverage similar flaws in both OS binary loaders such as the Windows PXE loader and the Linux ELF loader. The odds of the planets lining up this way are very slim and even then, the window of opportunity would likely be very short lived. Cross platform exploits based on scripts (eg. Perl) or portable binary formats (eg. Java) are possible but they all involve writing a OS specific payload to an executable, so it's not a true cross platform virus in the sense that it propagates itself between platforms. Rather, a they're cross platform scripts that deliver a platform specific payload... boring and highly unlikely to succeed in even a primary infection, let alone propagate.
Yeah well many of us don't like BSD licensing, not because it's not free (it is), but because it doesn't guarantee that source code will be made available. Personally, I like the LGPL best. That's the ideal license in my mind. Use it in your closed app if you like, but if you change anything in the supplied code, you have to show what you changed. No "forced" opening, but a guarantee that improvements make their way back to the project.
Yeah well... you know what... screw Symantec and Adobe. They *chose* tie their wares to Windows, they can pay the price as a result. This is what MS does, they've done it in the past, they'll do it in the future. Now they can pay the piper just like Netscape, Real, Corel, Sybase, Citrix, etc... all had to.
Don't underestimate the power of your first point "IE on your box". Ask any media player vendor, disk defragmenter, or email software vendor the power of having that luxury. NS may not have been as good as IE at the time, but it wasn't so much worse as to explain the massive shift in user mindshare.
They opened their API, not their code, even MS supplies their APIS. This is no more open than eBay's public dev APIs, Google Map's public APIs, or Amazon's public APIs. I don't seem to recall any Open ***API*** "cheering squad" or movement.
I use GTKPod which compiles on pretty much any platform that has GTK. Yeah, it's not ideal, but it certainly works and it does a good job of actually organizing the files on the iPod. On that note, I just got an iPod Video and it's really cool. I've transcoded a bunch of my DVDs for it and they actually look great on the TV. I also like the Notes feature on which I put all my technical notes on various subjects, that's probaly my favorite feature since I've got hundreds of these things.
Most EU countries are more productive thatn US workers
I don't know where you got that idea. US workers are still by far the most productive in the world (source). Now, don't confuse productivity -or- standard of living with quality of life. In QOL, I understand that the US is behind other countries.
You can LOOK at the source all you want, but why don't you make a change, say renaming the util package to utility, post your source code, and send Sun an email with a link to your modified source code. You'll be asked to remove your modified code lickity split. The SCSL is open source but NOT redistributable. So why a less restrictive license? Say I have a KDE based distro, I want to package Java with that distro, but there's a bug in java that breaks the clipboard under KDE but not GTK (this is a real life bug) and Sun refuses to address it because they only support GTK. Under the SCSL, you're toast. Under something less restrictive, you can patch the affected class, and distribute your "fixed" rt.jar.
Ditto. I put my money where my mouth is. I haven't bought a Windows game since AOE2, but I have bought a dozen or so Linux games since. Ditto with ALL Windows software. I have a license for Nero Linux for the same reason.
It's not thermal energy displacement per se that's the cause of the problem, it's the CO2 used to create the energy needed to displace that thermal energy. Make one place hotter to make another cooler and you still have the same amount of thermal energy. Mix in the CO2 discharge, and then there's the start of a problem. Add a fresh daily batch of solar heat, have CO2 prevent thermal radiation into space thanks to the green house effect, and you get rising avergage temps. There's also the problem of higher temps creating more H2O vapor which leads to higher temps but, CO2 is a bit more difficult to get rid of than H2O vapor at the temps range we have on this planet.
Hmmm... ever try to play a DVD on a vanilla Windows install? Yeah, SuSE doesn't let you play MP3s or other goodies of that ilk out of the box. You need to update against a few choice repositories before you can use that goodness. That said, it's VERY easy to create a super-install DVD from Yast with all those "omitted" packages. As for the CD and USB thumbdrive issue, you need to run SuSEPlugger, it handles all that mount / unmount stuff for you. I don't use it personally, I like to mount shit when I need it rather than have it automounted, but for non-techs, it works just as well as Winders auto-detection mech.
With respect to SuSE, you got that wrong. OpenSUSE (the free SuSE), is ONLY free software. Nothing that doesn't have source is included in there. Non-open SuSE (the pay for DVD one) contains all the binary only bits that make GPL folks cringe.
Are you on fucking crack? Have you EVER sold Linux to an executive oversight committee? That's rhetorical question because you haven't. There are only 2 names that non-tech senior execs recognize, RedHat and Novell. You put Ubuntu on a powerpoint slide and your sales pitch is in the drink. The fact is, what you use at home has very little to do with what is used in the enterprise. I brefly tried to sell SuSE to the same types of people before the Novell acquisition and it was always a "we know what RedHat is, we'll sign off on that" situation. With the Novell aquisition, SuSE finally managed to get traction. Ubuntu will never get there unless they find a way to sell their brand to non-geeks, the ones who sign the POs.
Ohhhh... haven't tried any RDP servers for Lin, there's xrdp... but it's based on VNC. Depending on your network setup, you can use XDCMP with a sound server and it should give you the functionality you want but if you're not on the same subnet, forget it... and again... it's not RDP. Got me there, sounds like an interesting project for RDP buffs to take up.
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You're focusing on one very specific segment of the OS market, namely games. Even then, the problem isn't hardware, Linux has very good support for 3D accelaterated cards and sound. The problem is DirectX is an MS only toolkit. Cedega kind of addresses that but it's not in the best way possible. Ideally, an Open DirectX project would seek to implement the DirectX interface for non-Windows platforms. On that note, that's easier said than done. DirectX mixes in doses of Windows specific directly memory access routines which really only lend themselves to emulation a la Cedega. There are some DirectX-like toolkits out there, but they tend to be fragmented (OpenAL, SDL, etc) and not in the realm of a "define macro and recompile" solution. I find the whole DirectX / OpenGL "fight" a really interesting story.
Well ... the difference is that (I don't think) the Dems never claimed moral superiority or that homosexuality was somehow wrong. If two consenting guys want to bump uglies, fine ... knock yourselves out ... please don't send pictures ... but they shouldn't run around preaching how doing so is destroying America right after they get a chance to gargle with some Listerine.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"
I hope to hell you're trolling because if not you need to dig up a transcript of that speech and see what he really said before posting from Drudge and Newsmax, news organizations about as substantiative as The Onion. This snippet is taken so far out of context it's laughable. He was referring to the tobacco industry in the even broader context of agriculture. The statement you presented is about as accurate claiming he said: Gas powered skateboards are a "significant contributor to global warming!" when the original statement would more like "Transportation emissions are a significant contributor to global warming!".
I can't stand left wing nuts about as much as the next guy but right wing nuts are just as bad if not worse.
... a large proportion the US energy is used to power those mobility chairs the morbidly obese people use.
... and don't forget to power our 80 inch TVs so we can watch Springer and Oprah .... Jerry Jerry Jerry ... in closing, fool me once shame on you ... fool me ... can't fool me again!
... I think)
(+1 Funny
we're not even the size of America's smallest state
... the UK seemed much bigger than than from the plane last time I was over it! ;-) Regardless, if what you said was right, I wonder what a population density of 60M people per 1045 sq miles / 57K people per sq mile would look like ... 1 sq mile is about 28M sq feet ... so 1 person per 500 sqft ... in otherwords, everybody gets a 22 ft by 22 ft plot ... it's tight, but nobody would be sleeping on top of anybody else. Manhattan (NYC) has the highest population density in the states at something like 70K people per sq mile ... so it's not unheard of to cram that many people into a sq mile, even here.
I think you were joking, Rhode Island (the smallest state) is only 1045 sq miles / 2700 sq km
Hey ... I'm no supporter of protectionism, history has shown repeatedly that it simply doesn't work. However, you have to be VERY careful when you make a statement like "I'm sorry, but engineers (and all kinds of other white collar & blue collar jobs) are just not as valuable as they used to be to the market place" especially in in reference to the US economy where this class now provides the bulk of the tax revenues and consumer spending. The result of sustained income depression in the middle class would eventually lead the US economy into deflation which (according to the econ 101 class I took) would suck more than you could imagine. The only sane ways to correct the "cheaper" imbalance is either introduce inflation into the economies where work is being outsourced to -or- to devalue the US currency. As of late, US policy has shifted towards a weak dollar policy.
I'm not disagreeing with you, you're bang on, but you raise an interesting point in "MS has made it impossible for any program to run at a low enough level (except MS programs of course)" that I want to expand on. MS doesn't sell open source software. They've never once said "do whatever you want with our OS". They don't provide source code to build your own kernel. So why the big stink by these companies? This is the nature of closed source software platforms. You're at the mercy of their creators. This turn of events for the anti-V companies is EXACTLY the reason why I no longer use or recommend closed source software to my board. Microsoft has ALWAYS owned the key to Symantec's and McAfee's business models. They've just decided to close that door now and these guys will now have to pay the price for the choice of platform they made. This same fate could happen to ANY windows-only software maker. It's the nature of dealing with a platform over which you have zero control.
As a Linux only techie, I got a 30G iPod video recently as a gift and let me tell you that's it's a fun toy to play with on Linux. With the 1.2 firmware upgrade, you can use 640x480 h264 vids at up to around 2000kbps. iTunes doesn't digest those files, but gtkpod, as awkward as it is to use, uploads em without a hitch. It's a good MP3 player, but the "cool" is getting a video cable and bringing your video library with you. Vids encoded as described look surprisingly good, even on 42" sets. I also use the Photo (via gpixpod) and Notes feature quite a bit. For $250, I recommend it, even though I'd never have thought it could be worth it before owning one.
For non-tech users ... this is a very effective method. We know to look for an SSL lock and to make certain the the URL matches the site, but this is total jibberish to non-techs who have no idea what a URL is supposed to look like, much less how SSL works. My advice is usually, if it comes in an email ... do not click on it. Whomever invented HTML email should be shot, it's almost as if it was purposely invented for this purpose.
Well, I can assure you that if the DRM is based solely on a hardware key or checksum, it will be cracked at some point. The only difference is that the crack will happen at the BIOS firmware level rather than the OS level, all this assuming that the BIOS can be flashed ... even then, there may be pure hardware hacks available.
Though possible, it's hard to infect a Mac, Linux, HP, Solaris, AIX, or BSD box with a virus or trojan designed to infect Windows XP.
... boring and highly unlikely to succeed in even a primary infection, let alone propagate.
This is only theoretically possible and then really only in circumstances where the virus or trojan is not an OS specific binary but a script of some sort. It is virtually impossible to have a cross platform OS binary work on more than one OS. For this to work, the exploit would need to leverage similar flaws in both OS binary loaders such as the Windows PXE loader and the Linux ELF loader. The odds of the planets lining up this way are very slim and even then, the window of opportunity would likely be very short lived. Cross platform exploits based on scripts (eg. Perl) or portable binary formats (eg. Java) are possible but they all involve writing a OS specific payload to an executable, so it's not a true cross platform virus in the sense that it propagates itself between platforms. Rather, a they're cross platform scripts that deliver a platform specific payload
Yeah well many of us don't like BSD licensing, not because it's not free (it is), but because it doesn't guarantee that source code will be made available. Personally, I like the LGPL best. That's the ideal license in my mind. Use it in your closed app if you like, but if you change anything in the supplied code, you have to show what you changed. No "forced" opening, but a guarantee that improvements make their way back to the project.
Yeah well ... you know what ... screw Symantec and Adobe. They *chose* tie their wares to Windows, they can pay the price as a result. This is what MS does, they've done it in the past, they'll do it in the future. Now they can pay the piper just like Netscape, Real, Corel, Sybase, Citrix, etc ... all had to.
Don't underestimate the power of your first point "IE on your box". Ask any media player vendor, disk defragmenter, or email software vendor the power of having that luxury. NS may not have been as good as IE at the time, but it wasn't so much worse as to explain the massive shift in user mindshare.
They opened their API, not their code, even MS supplies their APIS. This is no more open than eBay's public dev APIs, Google Map's public APIs, or Amazon's public APIs. I don't seem to recall any Open ***API*** "cheering squad" or movement.
I use GTKPod which compiles on pretty much any platform that has GTK. Yeah, it's not ideal, but it certainly works and it does a good job of actually organizing the files on the iPod. On that note, I just got an iPod Video and it's really cool. I've transcoded a bunch of my DVDs for it and they actually look great on the TV. I also like the Notes feature on which I put all my technical notes on various subjects, that's probaly my favorite feature since I've got hundreds of these things.
Most EU countries are more productive thatn US workers
I don't know where you got that idea. US workers are still by far the most productive in the world (source). Now, don't confuse productivity -or- standard of living with quality of life. In QOL, I understand that the US is behind other countries.
You can LOOK at the source all you want, but why don't you make a change, say renaming the util package to utility, post your source code, and send Sun an email with a link to your modified source code. You'll be asked to remove your modified code lickity split. The SCSL is open source but NOT redistributable. So why a less restrictive license? Say I have a KDE based distro, I want to package Java with that distro, but there's a bug in java that breaks the clipboard under KDE but not GTK (this is a real life bug) and Sun refuses to address it because they only support GTK. Under the SCSL, you're toast. Under something less restrictive, you can patch the affected class, and distribute your "fixed" rt.jar.
Diff-ing shows some new tests on Topic.find, including this aptly named test: test_sql_injection_via_find
Ditto. I put my money where my mouth is. I haven't bought a Windows game since AOE2, but I have bought a dozen or so Linux games since. Ditto with ALL Windows software. I have a license for Nero Linux for the same reason.
It's not thermal energy displacement per se that's the cause of the problem, it's the CO2 used to create the energy needed to displace that thermal energy. Make one place hotter to make another cooler and you still have the same amount of thermal energy. Mix in the CO2 discharge, and then there's the start of a problem. Add a fresh daily batch of solar heat, have CO2 prevent thermal radiation into space thanks to the green house effect, and you get rising avergage temps. There's also the problem of higher temps creating more H2O vapor which leads to higher temps but, CO2 is a bit more difficult to get rid of than H2O vapor at the temps range we have on this planet.
Hmmm ... ever try to play a DVD on a vanilla Windows install? Yeah, SuSE doesn't let you play MP3s or other goodies of that ilk out of the box. You need to update against a few choice repositories before you can use that goodness. That said, it's VERY easy to create a super-install DVD from Yast with all those "omitted" packages. As for the CD and USB thumbdrive issue, you need to run SuSEPlugger, it handles all that mount / unmount stuff for you. I don't use it personally, I like to mount shit when I need it rather than have it automounted, but for non-techs, it works just as well as Winders auto-detection mech.
With respect to SuSE, you got that wrong. OpenSUSE (the free SuSE), is ONLY free software. Nothing that doesn't have source is included in there. Non-open SuSE (the pay for DVD one) contains all the binary only bits that make GPL folks cringe.
Are you on fucking crack? Have you EVER sold Linux to an executive oversight committee? That's rhetorical question because you haven't. There are only 2 names that non-tech senior execs recognize, RedHat and Novell. You put Ubuntu on a powerpoint slide and your sales pitch is in the drink. The fact is, what you use at home has very little to do with what is used in the enterprise. I brefly tried to sell SuSE to the same types of people before the Novell acquisition and it was always a "we know what RedHat is, we'll sign off on that" situation. With the Novell aquisition, SuSE finally managed to get traction. Ubuntu will never get there unless they find a way to sell their brand to non-geeks, the ones who sign the POs.
Ohhhh ... haven't tried any RDP servers for Lin, there's xrdp ... but it's based on VNC. Depending on your network setup, you can use XDCMP with a sound server and it should give you the functionality you want but if you're not on the same subnet, forget it ... and again ... it's not RDP. Got me there, sounds like an interesting project for RDP buffs to take up.