Why do people confuse articles with editorials? He's not reporting news, he's voicing his opinion.
Yep. And with an opinion like that, he's a real cocksucker. That's my opinion.
Of course, most of us have known for a long time that Dvorak is a dick. He's been trolling professionally for a long, long time. Most of this doesn't come as a surprise to me....but I'll admit that I was caught completely off-gaurd by his nonchalant attitude toward MOG's article. I guess I just didn't expect him to come right out and say "I'm the kind of guy who thinks a journalist can and should do absolutely anything to get readers." I mean...I knew from reading his articles and columns that he believed that, but I really didn't expect him to admit it.
And in other news, Nike might purchase Birkenstock. Don't get me wrong, I've got no reason to think that'll happen, but hey, anything's possible, right? That's a good enough excuse for a story!
Seriously...where's the evidence here? This guy just throws out this outlandishly wild conjecture, and has absolutely dick to back it up. What an asshole.
Of course, that's not the only abject idiocy here...anyone who thinks IBM might settle with SCO has totally lost his marbles. And IBM won't ever release its own version of Linux under any circumstances....if AIX didn't prove to them that nobody wanted an IBM operating system, OS2 did. Those guys are shouting from the mountaintops about open systems and standards, and are making big money selling the services to go with them. They don't want to own the distro.
But the big thing from my perspective is that this dickhead just totally made this story up based on some wild acid hallucination he had...there isn't a story here, but that's not stopping ZD.
Surprisingly (controversially?) enough, some EULAs forbid public criticism - I wonder if such clauses would ever be found valid in court, I seriously hope not - judges should declare void in whole any EULA that includes any anticonstitutional demands.
Sorry, guy, but you have no idea what you're talking about. The first amendment begins, "Congress shall make no law..." A company's EULA forbidding certain speech does not constitute Congress making a law against it. Non-disclosure agreements, celebrity endorsement deals, and other contractual obligations to speak or not to speak a certain way are perfectly legal and the Constitution does not forbid them. Any two entities can enter into a contract which forbids either of them to speak, with specified (civil) legal action as a consequence of breaching the contract.
Section 212 -- Permits ISP (Internet service providers) and other electronic communication and remote computing service providers to hand over records and e-mails to federal officials in emergency situations.
Um, ISPs were already "permitted" to hand over records or anything else they wanted to federal officials, assuming their contracts and terms of service with their customers allowed it. I think what you meant to say is that now federal authorities can require them to hand this information over for a much broader range of reasons, and in secret.
Thank you for posting this. Most people don't get past a knee jerk reaction and bother to look at what is really in Patriot beyond the FUD.
Man. We must be reading two different sets of provisions....because this shit makes my knees jerk all over the damn place. Roving wiretaps? Changing FISA so that they can have purposes other than foreign surveillence? Allowing secret searches of innocent third-parties, and threatening them with prison if they tell anyone?
Well, I'll grant you the malice. But I think we've got enough evidence elsewhere of it that we're past having to assume it. It's pretty much right there in front of us. Those cocksuckers are just flat out lying nearly every single time they open their mouths.
Why would they? If they have to give their product away for free, they lose the basis for their entire business model.
Right. Tell that to the crack dealers using the exact same strategy. Giving software away to elementry schools is an obvious way to get a large future-paying-customer base to know your software and not know the competition's. Same goes for universities and students studying to be computer professionals.
All the push for invading Iraq because of the presence of WMDs came from the US administration and their suspiciously secret and unconvincing "evidence".
Dude! They had hollow aluminum tubes!!!! You KNOW what that shit is used for! Terrible death weapons, man!
AMD is and always has been a U.S. corporation, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA from the very first year of its existence. They do have a fab in Dresden, but that makes them German about as much as Nike's sweatshops make them Chinese.
I think this kind of misses the point. Your son has acquired functional skills for manipulating the computer. This does not correspond to a gain in IQ points. In fact, TFA suggests that children who spend time (and by extension brainpower) on gaining these skills tend to lose IQ points as measured by our standard methods.
Now, there's a major argument to be made that these skills in current society may actually be much more valuable than the lost IQ points (which, in my opinion, have dubious value anyway), but it's really a different issue. Point is, you can't say your son is gaining IQ points faster than other children because he knows how to minimize windows.
And certainly not because he knows you run Linux.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
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GCC 4.0.0 Released
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According to Gartner, we shipped more copies of our operating system in 2004 than all other vendors of Unix-based operating systems worldwide, combined. In point of fact, Apple represents the majority of the Unix world.
Sorry, man, but that's just absolute bullshit. The vast majority of Linux machines have no vendor at all, and Apple never has been and never will represent the majority of Unix machines. Get the fuck over yourselves.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
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GCC 4.0.0 Released
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I can say with reasonable certainty that at this moment, the majority of people running gcc 4.0.0 are not concurrently running an operating system produced by Apple. I also do not expect that fact to change on or near April 29.
I also believe that the majority of people running software compiled with gcc 4.0.0 are currently not Apple users. This may change, temporarily, shortly after the 29th. But in the long run it will not.
Specious arguments centered on what Steve Jobs said at some Mac conference, and what fallacious conclusions about Apple's market share we can draw from it, don't change the facts; Apple represents a small part of the *nix world. We're all happy to have them on board, but this dominant, overbearing attitude has got to go.
Re:GCC 4.0's biggest winner is probably KDE
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I'm a gentoo user who would like to have both USE and binary packages
Don't forget, you can make binary packages any time you want, either when you're building from source (with emerge --buildpkg), alone for a non-installed package (with emerge --buildpkgonly), or from a previously-installed package (with quickpkg). Obviously, somebody's still got to compile it once, and it freezes the USE flags in place, but if you've got a bunch of machines, or if a bunch of people want to get together and agree on their USE flags, you can save a lot of time.
As for the "why not have builds of all the options on the mirrors" question, do an 'emerge -pv php' some time and look at that list of USE flags. I'm showing 43 different options that can each be on or off. That's 2^43, or 8796093020000 different binary packages to store. Good enough reason?
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
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GCC 4.0.0 Released
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Mac OS X itself is compiled with GCC 4. That was the point. Hence, all Mac users depend on GCC 4. That's 40 million and counting according to the latest figures.
No, no, and no, jackass! Max OS X Tiger was compiled with gcc 4. Hence all Mac users do not depend on gcc 4. That is not 40 million and counting...it is currently zero. Give it a rest!
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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Steve Jobs said in 2002 (IIRC) that Apple was the largest "Unix" vendor in the world. This would suggest that there are more Mac OS X boxes than Linux boxes. And... only about 60% of all Macs run Mac OS X. So how can there be more linux desktops than Macs?:-)
No, sorry, that does not follow. Apple can easily be the largest single Unix vendor in the world and still have a tiny slice of the Unix market share; not all markets are dominated by the largest player. If Apple sells 10% of the Unix machines, and 30 other vendors each sell 3%, OSX would have 10% of the Unix market while Apple would be the largest Unix vendor.
Also consider that quite a large chunk of Linux machines aren't sold as such. They may come with Windows (further screwing up reporting) or simply as whiteboxes. This is probably more pronounced in the desktop space than in servers. The Linux desktop market has a few extremely small vendors, but market share that outshines those vendors dramatically.
The desktop numbers I've seen from several sources are inconclusive. Some have Macs ahead, some Linux. But at this point I would say it's a real close. I tend to think Linux is ahead simply because I doubt most of the studies are adequately accounting for the points I mention above, but I don't really know that.
That said, I'll be dollars to donuts that there are vastly more Linux computers total (desktop + server) than Macs. And I'll bet the percentage of Macs that at some point in their lives run gcc is not even comparable to that of Linux, BSD, or any of the commercial Unixes. So, at least in the context of this discussion, the Mac community is indeed "paltry."
Assuming you meant to address whomever this first human test subject was, you should seperate your clauses, like "You happened to be there, first human test subject?"
Oh, and where exactly is the "there" in question?
Re:GCC 4.0's biggest winner is probably KDE
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GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Yes, I've always found that to be the case also. But if so, then the GP's point is right on target; the shrinking and optimization of all those libs should dramatically improve the load times.
It will also make prelinking more attractive, as it should decrease the extra diskspace used. And that should *seriously* cut the loads.
That came out roughly six years before the original Metal Gear and featured stealth as an integral game mechanic.
Stealth? In Wolfenstein? Seriously? I can't wrap my head around this one; I consider that game the start of a completely different genre, that of the run-and-gun kill-everything FPS. I can honestly say I don't recall the stealth element.
Now, L-I-M on the other hand.....that was an integral game mechanic!
You are so unbelievably full of shit it's outrageous. Obviously, you (and whatever mods called this informative) have absolutely no understanding of the GPL or what it tries to do. I'll go ahead and take it all apart for you.
Well, because the primary thing the GPL wants you as the user to be able to have is the ability to modify and share. Without copyright, you would always be able to modify any software you had a copy of, and you would be free to share that software -- with or without your modifications -- with anyone you chose. So without copyright the primary rights the GPL grants to you would be available all the time. The case we have here of a company taking free code and making it proprietary (i.e. taking away your rights) simply could not happen.
Ridiculous. You can't just up and modify programs for which you lack the source code. You can try and decompile and reverse-engineer, but you're not going to have the code. It's not the same. These companies that are getting sued for their GPL infringements are perfect examples. They had the code, then they packaged it and distributed it in a way that "took away your rights." It can happen. Your very first sentence is flawed; the GPL's goal is the perpetual free availability of the licensed work....which is the source code.
Now, just because you would have the right to modify and distribute, say, Photoshop, doesn't mean you would have the source code to Photoshop. it would be perfectly legal to disassemble/decompile Photoshop and distribute the result, but that's not exactly the same thing. This is a big benefit of the GPL that you wouldn't get automatically without copyright. On the other hand, in the current situation we don't have the right to modify Photoshop at all.;)
Now just what the hell are you talking about? First, you completely admit that the situation for a piece of code-unavailable software in a copyrightless world would not be the same as the situation for a GPL'd program today. So, in other words, you completely contradict everything you've said up to this point, and agreed with what I said in the first place. And then you come right back and say, "but that's great, because now we can't modify the proprietary software." This requires a level of cognitive dissonance that I'm not sure I can get my head around right now.
Now, not having copyright may not mean that we wouldn't have source code. First off, the whole proprietary model of selling individual copies that must therefore be protected would die overnight. Since decompiling, disassembly, and outright copying of blocks of code would be legal, there would be very little reason to try to prevent it by hiding your source code. In fact I think it wouldn't take long in a copyright-free world for people to expect source code so that they could more easily perform their completely legal modifications/redistributions.
You obviously have never decompiled or disassembled a piece of software with the intent of modifying it. Let me clue you in; on a project of any significant complexity, this is non-trivial and does not typically produce any kind of results without serious effort on the part of the hacker. It's just not the same, and that's that. Saying the GPL would be unnecessary because you could decompile software is like saying blueprints for a skyscraper are unnecessary, because you can just dismantle the skyscraper and write down what all you take off. It's silly to act like that's the same as having the blueprints.
That's just speculation, though. I'm in favor of copyright in its original limited form, and the GPL requirements for source work well with that. I think it's a positive thing. But on the other hand, if copyright went away entirely I don't think it would be that bad either, even (especially) from a free software perspective.
If all you want is software anarchy, you'll get it. In your hypothetical no-copyright world, everything for which the source code w
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Why do people confuse articles with editorials? He's not reporting news, he's voicing his opinion.
Yep. And with an opinion like that, he's a real cocksucker. That's my opinion.
Of course, most of us have known for a long time that Dvorak is a dick. He's been trolling professionally for a long, long time. Most of this doesn't come as a surprise to me....but I'll admit that I was caught completely off-gaurd by his nonchalant attitude toward MOG's article. I guess I just didn't expect him to come right out and say "I'm the kind of guy who thinks a journalist can and should do absolutely anything to get readers." I mean...I knew from reading his articles and columns that he believed that, but I really didn't expect him to admit it.
And in other news, Nike might purchase Birkenstock. Don't get me wrong, I've got no reason to think that'll happen, but hey, anything's possible, right? That's a good enough excuse for a story!
Seriously...where's the evidence here? This guy just throws out this outlandishly wild conjecture, and has absolutely dick to back it up. What an asshole.
Of course, that's not the only abject idiocy here...anyone who thinks IBM might settle with SCO has totally lost his marbles. And IBM won't ever release its own version of Linux under any circumstances....if AIX didn't prove to them that nobody wanted an IBM operating system, OS2 did. Those guys are shouting from the mountaintops about open systems and standards, and are making big money selling the services to go with them. They don't want to own the distro.
But the big thing from my perspective is that this dickhead just totally made this story up based on some wild acid hallucination he had...there isn't a story here, but that's not stopping ZD.
We wanted to start small as we were concerned that servers wouldn't be able to handle the load.
Well, you've come to the right place...
Surprisingly (controversially?) enough, some EULAs forbid public criticism - I wonder if such clauses would ever be found valid in court, I seriously hope not - judges should declare void in whole any EULA that includes any anticonstitutional demands.
Sorry, guy, but you have no idea what you're talking about. The first amendment begins, "Congress shall make no law..." A company's EULA forbidding certain speech does not constitute Congress making a law against it. Non-disclosure agreements, celebrity endorsement deals, and other contractual obligations to speak or not to speak a certain way are perfectly legal and the Constitution does not forbid them. Any two entities can enter into a contract which forbids either of them to speak, with specified (civil) legal action as a consequence of breaching the contract.
Nice try, though.
Section 212 -- Permits ISP (Internet service providers) and other electronic communication and remote computing service providers to hand over records and e-mails to federal officials in emergency situations.
Um, ISPs were already "permitted" to hand over records or anything else they wanted to federal officials, assuming their contracts and terms of service with their customers allowed it. I think what you meant to say is that now federal authorities can require them to hand this information over for a much broader range of reasons, and in secret.
Thank you for posting this. Most people don't get past a knee jerk reaction and bother to look at what is really in Patriot beyond the FUD.
Man. We must be reading two different sets of provisions....because this shit makes my knees jerk all over the damn place. Roving wiretaps? Changing FISA so that they can have purposes other than foreign surveillence? Allowing secret searches of innocent third-parties, and threatening them with prison if they tell anyone?Are you fucking crazy!?
Well, I'll grant you the malice. But I think we've got enough evidence elsewhere of it that we're past having to assume it. It's pretty much right there in front of us. Those cocksuckers are just flat out lying nearly every single time they open their mouths.
Why would they? If they have to give their product away for free, they lose the basis for their entire business model.
Right. Tell that to the crack dealers using the exact same strategy. Giving software away to elementry schools is an obvious way to get a large future-paying-customer base to know your software and not know the competition's. Same goes for universities and students studying to be computer professionals.
Oh, that must've been it....Bush thought they said "bombs."
All the push for invading Iraq because of the presence of WMDs came from the US administration and their suspiciously secret and unconvincing "evidence".
Dude! They had hollow aluminum tubes!!!! You KNOW what that shit is used for! Terrible death weapons, man!
Shouldn't they start with a computer that won't crash?
AMD is German!
Um, no.
AMD is and always has been a U.S. corporation, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA from the very first year of its existence. They do have a fab in Dresden, but that makes them German about as much as Nike's sweatshops make them Chinese.
I think this kind of misses the point. Your son has acquired functional skills for manipulating the computer. This does not correspond to a gain in IQ points. In fact, TFA suggests that children who spend time (and by extension brainpower) on gaining these skills tend to lose IQ points as measured by our standard methods.
Now, there's a major argument to be made that these skills in current society may actually be much more valuable than the lost IQ points (which, in my opinion, have dubious value anyway), but it's really a different issue. Point is, you can't say your son is gaining IQ points faster than other children because he knows how to minimize windows.
And certainly not because he knows you run Linux.
According to Gartner, we shipped more copies of our operating system in 2004 than all other vendors of Unix-based operating systems worldwide, combined. In point of fact, Apple represents the majority of the Unix world.
Sorry, man, but that's just absolute bullshit. The vast majority of Linux machines have no vendor at all, and Apple never has been and never will represent the majority of Unix machines. Get the fuck over yourselves.
I can say with reasonable certainty that at this moment, the majority of people running gcc 4.0.0 are not concurrently running an operating system produced by Apple. I also do not expect that fact to change on or near April 29.
I also believe that the majority of people running software compiled with gcc 4.0.0 are currently not Apple users. This may change, temporarily, shortly after the 29th. But in the long run it will not.
Specious arguments centered on what Steve Jobs said at some Mac conference, and what fallacious conclusions about Apple's market share we can draw from it, don't change the facts; Apple represents a small part of the *nix world. We're all happy to have them on board, but this dominant, overbearing attitude has got to go.
I'm a gentoo user who would like to have both USE and binary packages
Don't forget, you can make binary packages any time you want, either when you're building from source (with emerge --buildpkg), alone for a non-installed package (with emerge --buildpkgonly), or from a previously-installed package (with quickpkg). Obviously, somebody's still got to compile it once, and it freezes the USE flags in place, but if you've got a bunch of machines, or if a bunch of people want to get together and agree on their USE flags, you can save a lot of time.
As for the "why not have builds of all the options on the mirrors" question, do an 'emerge -pv php' some time and look at that list of USE flags. I'm showing 43 different options that can each be on or off. That's 2^43, or 8796093020000 different binary packages to store. Good enough reason?
Mac OS X itself is compiled with GCC 4. That was the point. Hence, all Mac users depend on GCC 4. That's 40 million and counting according to the latest figures.
No, no, and no, jackass! Max OS X Tiger was compiled with gcc 4. Hence all Mac users do not depend on gcc 4. That is not 40 million and counting...it is currently zero. Give it a rest!
Steve Jobs said in 2002 (IIRC) that Apple was the largest "Unix" vendor in the world. This would suggest that there are more Mac OS X boxes than Linux boxes. And... only about 60% of all Macs run Mac OS X. So how can there be more linux desktops than Macs? :-)
No, sorry, that does not follow. Apple can easily be the largest single Unix vendor in the world and still have a tiny slice of the Unix market share; not all markets are dominated by the largest player. If Apple sells 10% of the Unix machines, and 30 other vendors each sell 3%, OSX would have 10% of the Unix market while Apple would be the largest Unix vendor.
Also consider that quite a large chunk of Linux machines aren't sold as such. They may come with Windows (further screwing up reporting) or simply as whiteboxes. This is probably more pronounced in the desktop space than in servers. The Linux desktop market has a few extremely small vendors, but market share that outshines those vendors dramatically.
The desktop numbers I've seen from several sources are inconclusive. Some have Macs ahead, some Linux. But at this point I would say it's a real close. I tend to think Linux is ahead simply because I doubt most of the studies are adequately accounting for the points I mention above, but I don't really know that.
That said, I'll be dollars to donuts that there are vastly more Linux computers total (desktop + server) than Macs. And I'll bet the percentage of Macs that at some point in their lives run gcc is not even comparable to that of Linux, BSD, or any of the commercial Unixes. So, at least in the context of this discussion, the Mac community is indeed "paltry."
Assuming you meant to address whomever this first human test subject was, you should seperate your clauses, like "You happened to be there, first human test subject?"
Oh, and where exactly is the "there" in question?
Yes, I've always found that to be the case also. But if so, then the GP's point is right on target; the shrinking and optimization of all those libs should dramatically improve the load times.
It will also make prelinking more attractive, as it should decrease the extra diskspace used. And that should *seriously* cut the loads.
Oh, right. Yeah, before my time I think. Sorry 'bout that.
At least in my mindshare, it was Thief that started it.
Uh, ok....fair enough. One out of one MBraynard agree.
That came out roughly six years before the original Metal Gear and featured stealth as an integral game mechanic.
Stealth? In Wolfenstein? Seriously? I can't wrap my head around this one; I consider that game the start of a completely different genre, that of the run-and-gun kill-everything FPS. I can honestly say I don't recall the stealth element.
Now, L-I-M on the other hand.....that was an integral game mechanic!
Surely he meant to say, "which started to gain attention with the likes of Metal Gear."
Tenchu? Late and lame if you ask me. MG (even the old 8 bit jobs) was what made the genre.
You are so unbelievably full of shit it's outrageous. Obviously, you (and whatever mods called this informative) have absolutely no understanding of the GPL or what it tries to do. I'll go ahead and take it all apart for you.
Well, because the primary thing the GPL wants you as the user to be able to have is the ability to modify and share. Without copyright, you would always be able to modify any software you had a copy of, and you would be free to share that software -- with or without your modifications -- with anyone you chose. So without copyright the primary rights the GPL grants to you would be available all the time. The case we have here of a company taking free code and making it proprietary (i.e. taking away your rights) simply could not happen.
Ridiculous. You can't just up and modify programs for which you lack the source code. You can try and decompile and reverse-engineer, but you're not going to have the code. It's not the same. These companies that are getting sued for their GPL infringements are perfect examples. They had the code, then they packaged it and distributed it in a way that "took away your rights." It can happen. Your very first sentence is flawed; the GPL's goal is the perpetual free availability of the licensed work....which is the source code.
Now, just because you would have the right to modify and distribute, say, Photoshop, doesn't mean you would have the source code to Photoshop. it would be perfectly legal to disassemble/decompile Photoshop and distribute the result, but that's not exactly the same thing. This is a big benefit of the GPL that you wouldn't get automatically without copyright. On the other hand, in the current situation we don't have the right to modify Photoshop at all. ;)
Now just what the hell are you talking about? First, you completely admit that the situation for a piece of code-unavailable software in a copyrightless world would not be the same as the situation for a GPL'd program today. So, in other words, you completely contradict everything you've said up to this point, and agreed with what I said in the first place. And then you come right back and say, "but that's great, because now we can't modify the proprietary software." This requires a level of cognitive dissonance that I'm not sure I can get my head around right now.
Now, not having copyright may not mean that we wouldn't have source code. First off, the whole proprietary model of selling individual copies that must therefore be protected would die overnight. Since decompiling, disassembly, and outright copying of blocks of code would be legal, there would be very little reason to try to prevent it by hiding your source code. In fact I think it wouldn't take long in a copyright-free world for people to expect source code so that they could more easily perform their completely legal modifications/redistributions.
You obviously have never decompiled or disassembled a piece of software with the intent of modifying it. Let me clue you in; on a project of any significant complexity, this is non-trivial and does not typically produce any kind of results without serious effort on the part of the hacker. It's just not the same, and that's that. Saying the GPL would be unnecessary because you could decompile software is like saying blueprints for a skyscraper are unnecessary, because you can just dismantle the skyscraper and write down what all you take off. It's silly to act like that's the same as having the blueprints.
That's just speculation, though. I'm in favor of copyright in its original limited form, and the GPL requirements for source work well with that. I think it's a positive thing. But on the other hand, if copyright went away entirely I don't think it would be that bad either, even (especially) from a free software perspective.
If all you want is software anarchy, you'll get it. In your hypothetical no-copyright world, everything for which the source code w