The concept of patents is only valid if you buy into the obsolete idea that any kind of patents really serve the public interest. Propping up capitalist self interest by government interference this way is only justified by the idea that it serves the public interest. We are expected to believe that innovation will be stifled unless it feeds greed. Would the cotton gin not have been invented without patent protection? It seems perverse to think so. I certainly don't buy that idea.
That's absolutely true, but the DEFAULT face that Fedora presents the unsophisticated user is Gnome, and Gnome3 is a sad excuse for a DE (Gnome2 was fine). If Fedora doesn't care about unsophisticated users, that's fine; I have no quarrel with that; but it is something that could be fixed simply by demoting Gnome3 and making one of the other decent DE's the default.
VirtualBox is essentially an x86 host. Fedora is supposed to run on pretty much any x86 host (special hardware features aside). Please consider "supporting" VirtualBox.
You are dying of thirst, crawling in the desert, and come upon the dead carcass of a camel, the only sign of life you have encountered in two days. Instead of realizing that you are after all probably going to die of thirst very soon because there is no rescue, you remark that your problems are due to the camel's design being lacking, and the fact that their owners let camels die.
Face it. The desert is a hellhole, and you probably shouldn't have gone there to spend your summer vacation in the first place.
(The desert is Gnome3; the dead camel symbolizes what happened when Fedora 16 alpha met VirtualBox; I haven't figured out what this has to do with your comment, except you're implying VirtualBox is somehow at fault when a myriad of other linux distros work just fine under it)
Duh; there is no box. But Fedora is up front about telling you that it is essentially the testing sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise linux. If you don't like bleeding edge, and you don't want to pay for RHEL, just use one of the clones; PUIAS, Scientific Linux, or CentOS. They are absolutely free and absolutely stable, with a long supported life, and are supported with security updates and bug fixes.
Correctimundo. It is not anything "wrong" with Fedora. This is going to be rammed down everyone's throats in all distros for the simple reason that no one is going to be security patching Gnome2 any more.
The following is styled as if I am speaking to the Gnome developers, not the parent poster. If any of the following have been repaired since 3.0, I apologize, because 3.0 was so AWFUL it made me throw it on the floor within 5 minutes, and I haven't been inclined to waste any more time on the thing since then until I hear that all of the deficiencies noted below have been repaired.
You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?
The differences are actually significant and in the direction of LOSS of functionality. I guess you're not using the Drawer, Mini Commander, Weather, System Monitor, and CPU Freq Scaling applets, and I guess you don't have a simple compact digital clock with seconds and date in the upper right corner. Making it IMPOSSIBLE to set it up that way, and with control over the geometry, is NOT ACCEPTABLE because it is a GRATUITOUS loss of flexibility.
1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.
A stupid and pointless replacing of an intuitive and DISCOVERABLE operation by a HIDDEN and awkward one.
2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!
Allow? FORCE! That's not a feature, it's a bug. Give me CONTROL, dammit.
3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.
I'm not an apologist. I'm a USER. I DEPENDED on those applets. Don't bore me with details of why your stupid infrastructure changes have led you to drop them. Just bring them back. ALL of them!
4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.
It's a pointless and needless complication, but yeah, it's not the most egregious of the mistakes.
I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop.
That's nice for you, but I found that Gnome3 WOULDN'T LET me make a desktop that was even remotely like my old one.
Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2.
No, no, NO. It is NOT, and repeating that it IS, does not make it so.
Let's face it, it's a BAD idea. A STUPID idea. Keyboard mouse modifiers are BRAIN DEAD, awkward, and completely non necessary. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the old way. Most important, everything was intuitive and discoverable. "By-mistake applet moves," MY LEFT BALL! Every applet was individually lockable in position in Gnome2. Anyone obsessed with fear that he might move them by "mistake" could lock them down, while the rest of us with at least a kindergarten level of motor coordination could leave them bloody well alone.
For freight, ships and (conventional moderate speed) rail are both so far beyond anything else in transportation efficiency (tonne-km/l) that nothing else is even close. They are both at least ten times more efficient than trucks, and even further ahead of aircraft.
OTOH, high speed rail and ships are not really compatible with high volume freight.
Someone who actually gets it. Garbage collection is a crappy hack that caters to shitty, incompetent programmers. The kiddies should look up RAII. They might learn something.
Hey, nobody really expects anyone to RTFA, but you don't seem to have even read the short post you are replying to! Less than 1 of those 10 minutes has anything whatsoever to do with reading anything off them local hard drive, or writing to it.
Why would it do that? Seizures under the RICO act and similar measures without proper court proceedings are already plainly and boldly unconstitutional in the U.S. as it is. Why would American governmental thugs care about any other impediment if they are already getting foreign connivance in their thuggery as it is?
Oh ye of little cynicism. ANY government can do ANYTHING to its hapless citizens and most of them perform execrable acts against their citizens repeatedly. Governments have armies and marshals; U.S. State governments have state police; local governments have police. All of these entities and forces have more than ample power to get the job done, and break any number of constitutional clauses and similar restrictions every day.
Your optimistic idea that a court order is necessary for property to be seized by our overlords is a false if wistful one. It ain't true in North Korea, or Myanmar or Rhodesia - beg pardon, Zimbabwe - it for damn sure ain't true in the U.S., and I daresay it ain't true in Canada. They just make the right incantations - drug lord, RICO statute, terrorist, gang, organized crime, homeland security, disloyalty, dangerous element, etc, etc, vomitous etc.
So I doubt the U.S. and EU are going to see this as a blip on the radar. And I don't see why it would have any impact whatever on the mentioned issue of copyright when governments have that bit in their teeth.
It is, however, as you say, a very promising sign in terms of legal standing of mere people in relation to power establishments outside of governments (MAFIAA, ISPs, etc al). Oh wait. Leave the MAFIAA out of that. They already have the governments signed up to do their bidding.
I don't find this argument very convincing. If indeed, as you say, you can't just copy everything, then I guess the corporations will just have to research and innovate, patents or no. They will just have to get used to the idea of not having the sugar daddy patent system. They will still have trade secrets. The good thing from a policy point of view about trade secrets is that they don't stifle parallel invention or independent invention the way patents do.
The worst of the patent system is the seamy matter of drugs and medicine. This leads to egregious prices as corporations make large investments and then try to cash in before the patent runs out; after which the true cost of the item is reflected in vastly cheaper generics. No one with any humanity or common sense believes that drug development and medical research should be a matter of corporate investment. These ought to be matters of public policy and public funding for the common good.
Face it, patents are an obsolete idea, and as a matter of fact they were always on the hare-brained edge anyway. They helped get government and industry in bed together. Most of all, they are simply evil on the face of it. They are like paying tribute to the big bad corporate ogre so he won't eat us. The answer is not to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by fiddling with minor patent details. They have to go. Don't be timid. Clean house. Do something meaningful.
Trust me, saying "just look at communist countries" does not really do the job. One can come back with "well, look at China's enormous success," whereupon I would hazard a guess that you would say "oh, they're not really communist any more." It just gets us bogged down. If you look at the USSR, they actually achieved remarkable industrial gains from 1918 to the end in 1991. If they did concentrate too much on defense (and I'm not saying one way or the other whether I believe that) and not enough on consumer goods, that is a mere policy question. Anyway, the US, which in 1917 already enjoyed a high industrial level (which the USSR did not), has ended up in the same broke condition as the USSR, only 20 years later.
Comparing a gas to a liquid by volume is not very meaningful. Wikipedia's 35 mg/l is 0.0035% by weight, or 35 ppm. It's milligrams in one kilogram. Actually this source and this other source both give around 0.026 g/l or 26 mg/l , which is 0.0026% solubility of methane in water at 17 C and one atmosphere, or 26 ppm. Pretty much a trace.
Disregarding your straw horse that a typical linux user now has to worry about compiling source code, which is nonsense, your premise about lockstep uniformity (which you don't even attempt to justify) leaves me cold, and implying that Windows offers a rich experience that linux somehow doesn't has me utterly mystified. You imply that linux doesn't come with important pieces that are present in Windows and OSX. I will pass on OSX, which I don't have much experience with, but just comparing linux with Windows indicates the OPPOSITE of your complaint.
1) Want a word processor? All the common linux distros install an excellent one by default. Windows? Bzzzt. You're on your own. Gotta buy something.
2) Spreadsheet? Same thing.
3) Presentation authoring? Same thing.
4) PDF reading? Linux comes with evince and others. On Windows you have to download Acrobat.
5) Halfway decent text editor? Linux comes with excellent ones. On Windows you have to hunt one down.
6) CD and DVD burning? Linux comes with it. Windows may include a crude one now; it never used to, when I didn't know any better than to use Windows.
7) Any scanner I ever tried Just Worked out of the box on linux. On Windows you have to install special driver software. Some of them are no longer supported at all on recent versions of Windows, but work fine on linux. The same for a lot of other hardware (sound, chipsets, add-on cards, etc).
8) Anything else you want to do. A myriad of apps are a click away in the Add/Remove software menu on linux. Oh, and they're all free too. On Windows, every one has to be tracked down individually, and usually purchased.
Your desktop and mine both don't count, I guess. There's not a chance we could be using them. Boy, we must be really stupid not to know that we can't be using what we're using.
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The concept of patents is only valid if you buy into the obsolete idea that any kind of patents really serve the public interest. Propping up capitalist self interest by government interference this way is only justified by the idea that it serves the public interest. We are expected to believe that innovation will be stifled unless it feeds greed. Would the cotton gin not have been invented without patent protection? It seems perverse to think so. I certainly don't buy that idea.
This alone would be more than enough to make me contemplate installing cygwin and typing a proper "find" command at a shell prompt.
That's absolutely true, but the DEFAULT face that Fedora presents the unsophisticated user is Gnome, and Gnome3 is a sad excuse for a DE (Gnome2 was fine). If Fedora doesn't care about unsophisticated users, that's fine; I have no quarrel with that; but it is something that could be fixed simply by demoting Gnome3 and making one of the other decent DE's the default.
We don't support VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is essentially an x86 host. Fedora is supposed to run on pretty much any x86 host (special hardware features aside). Please consider "supporting" VirtualBox.
You are dying of thirst, crawling in the desert, and come upon the dead carcass of a camel, the only sign of life you have encountered in two days. Instead of realizing that you are after all probably going to die of thirst very soon because there is no rescue, you remark that your problems are due to the camel's design being lacking, and the fact that their owners let camels die.
Face it. The desert is a hellhole, and you probably shouldn't have gone there to spend your summer vacation in the first place.
(The desert is Gnome3; the dead camel symbolizes what happened when Fedora 16 alpha met VirtualBox; I haven't figured out what this has to do with your comment, except you're implying VirtualBox is somehow at fault when a myriad of other linux distros work just fine under it)
Duh; there is no box. But Fedora is up front about telling you that it is essentially the testing sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise linux. If you don't like bleeding edge, and you don't want to pay for RHEL, just use one of the clones; PUIAS, Scientific Linux, or CentOS. They are absolutely free and absolutely stable, with a long supported life, and are supported with security updates and bug fixes.
Mod parent up. It's a perfectly arguable point.
Correctimundo. It is not anything "wrong" with Fedora. This is going to be rammed down everyone's throats in all distros for the simple reason that no one is going to be security patching Gnome2 any more.
Took me 5 minutes to determine that it was such a regression functionally and in regard to flexibility, as to be garbage.
The following is styled as if I am speaking to the Gnome developers, not the parent poster. If any of the following have been repaired since 3.0, I apologize, because 3.0 was so AWFUL it made me throw it on the floor within 5 minutes, and I haven't been inclined to waste any more time on the thing since then until I hear that all of the deficiencies noted below have been repaired.
You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?
The differences are actually significant and in the direction of LOSS of functionality. I guess you're not using the Drawer, Mini Commander, Weather, System Monitor, and CPU Freq Scaling applets, and I guess you don't have a simple compact digital clock with seconds and date in the upper right corner. Making it IMPOSSIBLE to set it up that way, and with control over the geometry, is NOT ACCEPTABLE because it is a GRATUITOUS loss of flexibility.
1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.
A stupid and pointless replacing of an intuitive and DISCOVERABLE operation by a HIDDEN and awkward one.
2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!
Allow? FORCE! That's not a feature, it's a bug. Give me CONTROL, dammit.
3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.
I'm not an apologist. I'm a USER. I DEPENDED on those applets. Don't bore me with details of why your stupid infrastructure changes have led you to drop them. Just bring them back. ALL of them!
4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.
It's a pointless and needless complication, but yeah, it's not the most egregious of the mistakes.
I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop.
That's nice for you, but I found that Gnome3 WOULDN'T LET me make a desktop that was even remotely like my old one.
Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2.
No, no, NO. It is NOT, and repeating that it IS, does not make it so.
Let's face it, it's a BAD idea. A STUPID idea. Keyboard mouse modifiers are BRAIN DEAD, awkward, and completely non necessary. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the old way. Most important, everything was intuitive and discoverable. "By-mistake applet moves," MY LEFT BALL! Every applet was individually lockable in position in Gnome2. Anyone obsessed with fear that he might move them by "mistake" could lock them down, while the rest of us with at least a kindergarten level of motor coordination could leave them bloody well alone.
For freight, ships and (conventional moderate speed) rail are both so far beyond anything else in transportation efficiency (tonne-km/l) that nothing else is even close. They are both at least ten times more efficient than trucks, and even further ahead of aircraft.
OTOH, high speed rail and ships are not really compatible with high volume freight.
What do you think 3g is, and do you have any idea how many areas of the U.S. do not have it; not even wireless coverage at all for that matter?
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
- Mark Twain
You are forgiven. Now pick me and put me in some water.
If MABEL is not an acronym then why the fuck is it in all-caps?
Someone who actually gets it. Garbage collection is a crappy hack that caters to shitty, incompetent programmers. The kiddies should look up RAII. They might learn something.
Hey, nobody really expects anyone to RTFA, but you don't seem to have even read the short post you are replying to! Less than 1 of those 10 minutes has anything whatsoever to do with reading anything off them local hard drive, or writing to it.
Why would it do that? Seizures under the RICO act and similar measures without proper court proceedings are already plainly and boldly unconstitutional in the U.S. as it is. Why would American governmental thugs care about any other impediment if they are already getting foreign connivance in their thuggery as it is?
Oh ye of little cynicism. ANY government can do ANYTHING to its hapless citizens and most of them perform execrable acts against their citizens repeatedly. Governments have armies and marshals; U.S. State governments have state police; local governments have police. All of these entities and forces have more than ample power to get the job done, and break any number of constitutional clauses and similar restrictions every day.
Your optimistic idea that a court order is necessary for property to be seized by our overlords is a false if wistful one. It ain't true in North Korea, or Myanmar or Rhodesia - beg pardon, Zimbabwe - it for damn sure ain't true in the U.S., and I daresay it ain't true in Canada. They just make the right incantations - drug lord, RICO statute, terrorist, gang, organized crime, homeland security, disloyalty, dangerous element, etc, etc, vomitous etc.
So I doubt the U.S. and EU are going to see this as a blip on the radar. And I don't see why it would have any impact whatever on the mentioned issue of copyright when governments have that bit in their teeth.
It is, however, as you say, a very promising sign in terms of legal standing of mere people in relation to power establishments outside of governments (MAFIAA, ISPs, etc al). Oh wait. Leave the MAFIAA out of that. They already have the governments signed up to do their bidding.
Do you ever watch concerts on TV?
I don't find this argument very convincing. If indeed, as you say, you can't just copy everything, then I guess the corporations will just have to research and innovate, patents or no. They will just have to get used to the idea of not having the sugar daddy patent system. They will still have trade secrets. The good thing from a policy point of view about trade secrets is that they don't stifle parallel invention or independent invention the way patents do.
The worst of the patent system is the seamy matter of drugs and medicine. This leads to egregious prices as corporations make large investments and then try to cash in before the patent runs out; after which the true cost of the item is reflected in vastly cheaper generics. No one with any humanity or common sense believes that drug development and medical research should be a matter of corporate investment. These ought to be matters of public policy and public funding for the common good.
Face it, patents are an obsolete idea, and as a matter of fact they were always on the hare-brained edge anyway. They helped get government and industry in bed together. Most of all, they are simply evil on the face of it. They are like paying tribute to the big bad corporate ogre so he won't eat us. The answer is not to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by fiddling with minor patent details. They have to go. Don't be timid. Clean house. Do something meaningful.
Trust me, saying "just look at communist countries" does not really do the job. One can come back with "well, look at China's enormous success," whereupon I would hazard a guess that you would say "oh, they're not really communist any more." It just gets us bogged down. If you look at the USSR, they actually achieved remarkable industrial gains from 1918 to the end in 1991. If they did concentrate too much on defense (and I'm not saying one way or the other whether I believe that) and not enough on consumer goods, that is a mere policy question. Anyway, the US, which in 1917 already enjoyed a high industrial level (which the USSR did not), has ended up in the same broke condition as the USSR, only 20 years later.
Comparing a gas to a liquid by volume is not very meaningful. Wikipedia's 35 mg/l is 0.0035% by weight, or 35 ppm. It's milligrams in one kilogram. Actually this source and this other source both give around 0.026 g/l or 26 mg/l , which is 0.0026% solubility of methane in water at 17 C and one atmosphere, or 26 ppm. Pretty much a trace.
I'm perfectly fine with stupid people continuing to use Winblows and everybody with a working brain switching to linux.
Disregarding your straw horse that a typical linux user now has to worry about compiling source code, which is nonsense, your premise about lockstep uniformity (which you don't even attempt to justify) leaves me cold, and implying that Windows offers a rich experience that linux somehow doesn't has me utterly mystified. You imply that linux doesn't come with important pieces that are present in Windows and OSX. I will pass on OSX, which I don't have much experience with, but just comparing linux with Windows indicates the OPPOSITE of your complaint.
1) Want a word processor? All the common linux distros install an excellent one by default. Windows? Bzzzt. You're on your own. Gotta buy something.
2) Spreadsheet? Same thing.
3) Presentation authoring? Same thing.
4) PDF reading? Linux comes with evince and others. On Windows you have to download Acrobat.
5) Halfway decent text editor? Linux comes with excellent ones. On Windows you have to hunt one down.
6) CD and DVD burning? Linux comes with it. Windows may include a crude one now; it never used to, when I didn't know any better than to use Windows.
7) Any scanner I ever tried Just Worked out of the box on linux. On Windows you have to install special driver software. Some of them are no longer supported at all on recent versions of Windows, but work fine on linux. The same for a lot of other hardware (sound, chipsets, add-on cards, etc).
8) Anything else you want to do. A myriad of apps are a click away in the Add/Remove software menu on linux. Oh, and they're all free too. On Windows, every one has to be tracked down individually, and usually purchased.
Your desktop and mine both don't count, I guess. There's not a chance we could be using them. Boy, we must be really stupid not to know that we can't be using what we're using.