Actually the strands are not as mechanically separable as they might seem. Most GPL-centric licensing disputes come down to a fundamental conflict on one idea; whether software licenses cross dynamic linking boundaries or not. The FSF believes that they do, because when combined into a process that executes on a host, the whole combined piece of software can be observed to be a functional unit, and it would make no sense to have a license that only covers components of that unit. To keep the rest of the world at bay while maintaining this opinion, the LGPL was created, which (even in FSF's opinion) does not cross dynamic linking boundaries, and allows for static linking as long as the user is allowed to re-link the executable on demand.
The presiding view of the rest of the world is that license violations cannot occur at runtime without a EULA (i.e. a contract) that tells the user "You cannot do this". Instead, the usual view is that a license violation occurs when GPL source code is included in a separate GPL-incompatible distribution and the combined work is built together and distributed.
The difference between GPL violations occurring at the source level or at the binary one is a very fine one, but is the fundamental source of many emotional debates. It would be nice if once and for all we would get a judge's opinion on whether software licenses cross dynamic linking boundaries or not, to clear up whether e.g. dynamically linking a GPL program to Xlib has any license ramifications whatsoever.
It depends. Your Autozone Bosch +2's will probably only last a couple years at the most compared to +4's which will get changed with your timing belt:)
The better ignition components (esp. plugs and wires) you buy (within reason) the less maintenance you'll have to do over the long term.
Maxtor offers 3 years on their Maxline ATA drives, and also 3 years on certain 7200RPM Diamondmax ATA drives. I think the criteria is that they are OEM drives and sold with 120-160GB capacity. I don't know if retail Diamondmax drives have 3 years warranty; I doubt it.
Most "real" HDD manufacturers have an advance replacement policy for their customers' convenience. Why doesn't IBM? It is ludicrous to make me buy another drive to temporarily store any data I can recover, ship the old drive off, and wait 2 weeks to get a new one to transfer my data back, when I can just have a new one in my hands in 3 days, dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb, and send the duff drive off in the same packaging the replacement arrived in.
I have a 7200RPM IBM SCSI drive that does that, and I'm at a loss to explain why. The drive performs superbly and has never had a problem. OTOH, I have a 10K RPM IBM SCSI drive that does _not_ do that, so maybe something changed later on that eliminated the need for this recalibration noise or whatever it is.
it's definitely what I would describe as ear-piercing though! It can drive me up the wall if it strikes at the wrong moment.
What in the world are you talking about? Click of death is the noise made by excessive recalibration/retries when a sector on the disk cannot be read. It can very well be due to a defective storage media as well as a logic or mechanical problem. Frequently it occurs in the "power-up" section of the drive or at the first blocks of the drive, since these are read the most frequently and never re-written to refresh the data or address mark. That is why the click of death tends to occur when the drive is first powered on and it can no longer read its bootstrap data.
To develop your point further, the copyright holder only loses something when the downloaded media takes the place of a sale.
It is quite possible that one could download the media, check it out, and delete it in disgust. Or they might download it to check it out, not knowing what it's all about, and decide to keep it. In that case the copyright holder has lost out on nothing more than a _potential_ sale, because without downloading it, the person would arguably never have known they even wanted it.
Even with this loss, it is still a mixed bag for the copyright holder, because there is also the very real possibility that they might listen to this downloaded version for awhile, and either get tired of the poor quality or decide they like this artist, and they either run out to the store to get an album, or next time they go to the store they see an album by this artist sitting on the shelf and buy it because of the previous exposure. In that case the RIAA has _gained_ a sale that they would not have seen otherwise. I know this happens because I have done this myself.
The real problem is when I see an album in the store, check the price tag, decide I can't afford it or don't want to spend the money, and then go download it off P2P while laughing at how much money I saved. In that case, they have definitely lost out on a sale.
But in order to squash this case, their approach is to squash the aforementioned two cases as well, which are perfectly reasonable approaches IMO (both can be seen as try-before-you-buy measures). They would have many less opponents if they focused on the third case alone, instead of getting hungry for control and trying to destroy all of the cases I mentioned.
They'd have a tough time enforcing that against the right of first sale doctrine. Essentially, it is a EULA clause, and when I compile and install MAME I have agreed to no EULA. Only when I distribute it do I agree to their license, which means I can't sell it. But that doesn't mean the terms of their license are binding to me as a user, charging for play on my machine.
I see no reason Linus would have a problem with this from a tech perspective. It's just another driver. GPL drivers could avoid the wrapper and would remain prefered.
How have you in any way mitigated his primary concern, which is that bugs in binary modules will be reported as kernel bugs and increase the support load on the kernel maintainers?
No kidding. I don't understand who could possibly play games on a 9" black and white screen with a one-button mouse anyway. Maybe some Mac people here can provide us with more information.
OT, but did you ever get anywhere with your Z64 BIOS replacement from here? There is another project called ZeOS on sourceforge aiming to do the same thing. Nobody uploaded any code yet though.:( I'm starting from dextrose hw1/hw2 sources but they specifically claim not to work with a hw3 unit.
Haha, I should have known better than to criticize the BSD zealots in a BSD story. The BSD mods all hang out here after all, with nothing better to do with their spare time than to silence criticism.
Try implementing a MP system with hardware snooping. Then try it again with a software-controlled cache. See which one scales better, and get back to me on that.
Caching is controlled completely by the CPU, transparent of the programmer.
Only in some designs. Architectures like MIPS allow for both a cache-coherent or non-cache-coherent design. In a non-cache-coherent design, the cache is not transparent, and the kernel programmer is responsible for cache management; marking pages as dirty, flushing cache, etc. These designs are significantly more difficult to program and are present on some SGI machines, making porting to those machines a significant task.
Theoretically, higher performance can be achieved in a non-cache-coherent design, since the programmer would ostensibly know more about which data is most frequently used on his system and be able to customize his kernel for that. Also, it requires less glue logic on the board. However, the intent may be thwarted if the programmer doesn't have all the documentation (or skills) necessary to make efficient use of a software controlled cache.
Huh? The whole problem with the patent system today is that patents are _not_ awarded solely to processes. The fact that you can have a half-baked idea, patent it, and then use that patent as an anti-competitive and anti-progress measure is exactly why we have all these problems!
The worst part is that society gains nothing from such patents. The intent of patents was to encourage publication of ideas so they would not be lost, in exchange for protecting the inventor so he is free to commercialize his idea. A patented idea with no associated method adds nothing to society, and is only usable by the patent holder as a lottery ticket; hoping someone else will show up and create a successful business using similar ideas, so he can sue for damages, having created no wealth and made no useful contribution to society through that patent.
DOS, and the 8086, are fully 16-bit in design and operation. The only thing 8-bit about them is the 8088's peripheral bus. The decision to use the 8088 rather than the 8086 in the IBM PC was made in order to cut costs for peripheral manufacturers.
Isn't it fun marginalizing your opponents? It couldn't possibly be that anyone used common sense and rational thought of their own to reach a different conclusion than yours, is it now? It is a sad but common approach to argumentation to label the position you agree with as "rational thought" and your opposition as "religious".
Perhaps if you sought to actually understand your opponents' reasoning instead of trying to undermine it with weak personal attacks, you would be less frustrated in advancing your own agenda.
As much as I love AMD, I would recommend against the Athlon64 chipsets, unless you *must* have a 64 bit chip.
Why? They are much faster at running even 32-bit code than Athlons. They dissipate less power. They have safety features built in to prevent overheating, and power throttling built in to prevent less wasted energy when idle.
Perhaps the only reason not to move to the AMD 64 platform is the entry price, currently. The early adopters will take care of knocking that down for the rest of us.
Some things that the BIOS does can't be re-done. For instance, Athlon 64 SMP configuration must be done by the BIOS and cannot be done after the kernel has been booted, like x86 MPS can. Other types of things absolutely have to be done at initialization time for you to even get to the kernel.
LinuxBIOS project has the right idea by ideally cutting out as much cruft from the system firmware as possible and leaving it up to the OS to perform initialization, but in reality some tasks are forced onto the firmware by design.
You are also an idiot, even though you have a good point. This background story tells us that X was initially released in 1986, and later XFree86 was released as a free implementation of X. That could very well have been the basis for the name, just as easily as the x86 that people tend to assume is the basis.
PS/2 is not hotpluggable. It is possibly to short-circuit your motherboard and fry your controller (not likely, but I saw at least one broken mobo after a failed hotplug attempt)
No, at worst you would destroy the fuse. That is why the fuse is there after all. Most decent mb's have healing fuses on those ports anyway.
The best part about PS/2 is that it is assigned its own interrupt and does not have to share with anything else. Frequently you will end up having your USB controller shared with your video, SCSI, etc, and thus causing more latency whenever a USB event arrives. With PS/2, it's the mouse, and just the mouse, on that interrupt.
GPL is a distribution license, not a EULA. It is therefore using copyright law instead of contract law. There is no case history to suggest that EULAs are binding contracts, just as there is nothing to suggest that the GPL is an invalid copyright license. They are orthogonal.
Slashdot Mirror
The presiding view of the rest of the world is that license violations cannot occur at runtime without a EULA (i.e. a contract) that tells the user "You cannot do this". Instead, the usual view is that a license violation occurs when GPL source code is included in a separate GPL-incompatible distribution and the combined work is built together and distributed.
The difference between GPL violations occurring at the source level or at the binary one is a very fine one, but is the fundamental source of many emotional debates. It would be nice if once and for all we would get a judge's opinion on whether software licenses cross dynamic linking boundaries or not, to clear up whether e.g. dynamically linking a GPL program to Xlib has any license ramifications whatsoever.
The better ignition components (esp. plugs and wires) you buy (within reason) the less maintenance you'll have to do over the long term.
it's definitely what I would describe as ear-piercing though! It can drive me up the wall if it strikes at the wrong moment.
What in the world are you talking about? Click of death is the noise made by excessive recalibration/retries when a sector on the disk cannot be read. It can very well be due to a defective storage media as well as a logic or mechanical problem. Frequently it occurs in the "power-up" section of the drive or at the first blocks of the drive, since these are read the most frequently and never re-written to refresh the data or address mark. That is why the click of death tends to occur when the drive is first powered on and it can no longer read its bootstrap data.
It is quite possible that one could download the media, check it out, and delete it in disgust. Or they might download it to check it out, not knowing what it's all about, and decide to keep it. In that case the copyright holder has lost out on nothing more than a _potential_ sale, because without downloading it, the person would arguably never have known they even wanted it.
Even with this loss, it is still a mixed bag for the copyright holder, because there is also the very real possibility that they might listen to this downloaded version for awhile, and either get tired of the poor quality or decide they like this artist, and they either run out to the store to get an album, or next time they go to the store they see an album by this artist sitting on the shelf and buy it because of the previous exposure. In that case the RIAA has _gained_ a sale that they would not have seen otherwise. I know this happens because I have done this myself.
The real problem is when I see an album in the store, check the price tag, decide I can't afford it or don't want to spend the money, and then go download it off P2P while laughing at how much money I saved. In that case, they have definitely lost out on a sale.
But in order to squash this case, their approach is to squash the aforementioned two cases as well, which are perfectly reasonable approaches IMO (both can be seen as try-before-you-buy measures). They would have many less opponents if they focused on the third case alone, instead of getting hungry for control and trying to destroy all of the cases I mentioned.
They'd have a tough time enforcing that against the right of first sale doctrine. Essentially, it is a EULA clause, and when I compile and install MAME I have agreed to no EULA. Only when I distribute it do I agree to their license, which means I can't sell it. But that doesn't mean the terms of their license are binding to me as a user, charging for play on my machine.
No kidding. I don't understand who could possibly play games on a 9" black and white screen with a one-button mouse anyway. Maybe some Mac people here can provide us with more information.
BTW, s/mark pages dirty/invalidate cache lines/ in case you couldn't figure that out.
Theoretically, higher performance can be achieved in a non-cache-coherent design, since the programmer would ostensibly know more about which data is most frequently used on his system and be able to customize his kernel for that. Also, it requires less glue logic on the board. However, the intent may be thwarted if the programmer doesn't have all the documentation (or skills) necessary to make efficient use of a software controlled cache.
The worst part is that society gains nothing from such patents. The intent of patents was to encourage publication of ideas so they would not be lost, in exchange for protecting the inventor so he is free to commercialize his idea. A patented idea with no associated method adds nothing to society, and is only usable by the patent holder as a lottery ticket; hoping someone else will show up and create a successful business using similar ideas, so he can sue for damages, having created no wealth and made no useful contribution to society through that patent.
Perhaps if you sought to actually understand your opponents' reasoning instead of trying to undermine it with weak personal attacks, you would be less frustrated in advancing your own agenda.
Perhaps the only reason not to move to the AMD 64 platform is the entry price, currently. The early adopters will take care of knocking that down for the rest of us.
LinuxBIOS project has the right idea by ideally cutting out as much cruft from the system firmware as possible and leaving it up to the OS to perform initialization, but in reality some tasks are forced onto the firmware by design.
You are also an idiot, even though you have a good point. This background story tells us that X was initially released in 1986, and later XFree86 was released as a free implementation of X. That could very well have been the basis for the name, just as easily as the x86 that people tend to assume is the basis.
The best part about PS/2 is that it is assigned its own interrupt and does not have to share with anything else. Frequently you will end up having your USB controller shared with your video, SCSI, etc, and thus causing more latency whenever a USB event arrives. With PS/2, it's the mouse, and just the mouse, on that interrupt.
GPL is a distribution license, not a EULA. It is therefore using copyright law instead of contract law. There is no case history to suggest that EULAs are binding contracts, just as there is nothing to suggest that the GPL is an invalid copyright license. They are orthogonal.
There is 1 port on the board and 3 headers for serial port brackets. Look at the pic.