Anyone that says that Linux will beat out Windows in every situation is a fool.
True, but IMHO Linux can beat Windows in a great many situations - mostly the exceptions are simply where you need to use some commercial Windows-only software.
That said, I have never seen Linux "reliably" core-dump at random except where there is dodgy hardware, some unusual hardware that has a not-well-tested driver or some propriatory driver (such as the older closed nVidia drivers) running.
Windows and Linux use hardware in different ways - it could well be that the Linux crashes were caused by some bad RAM in the machine and Linux was just happening to put some important executable code in that chunk of RAM whilest (by chance) Windows might just be using that memory for non-executable data. The result would simply be that Linux would crash whilest under Windows you'd end up with silently corrupted data.
Basically, if you've got some broken hardware then all bets are off - maybe Linux is pushing one bit of hardware slightly harder than Windows causing it to overheat or something (I've seen that before with nVidia graphics cards that don't have adequate cooling - they run fine until you fire up the nVidia closed source driver and then the whole machine comes crashing down as it overheats).
My old personal website actually rendered perfectly in Opera, nearly perfectly in Firefox, and with serious glitches in color and display elements in IE6. IE4 however, displayed it perfectly. I was mindboggled.
IE6 tries to implement a lot of stuff and gets it seriously wrong whereas IE4 would just ignore the stuff it doesn't understand.
With respect, what you just said wasn't relevent to the conversation at all. The original post was claiming that the Opera development cycle was better because it's easier to tell the general public they need _the latest experimental Opera_ to view the site than a custom FireFox build - neither of which is a valid thing to do for a public site.
Clearly you develop for the majority of modern browsers, which is of course the right thing to do and you do have to draw the line somewhere (especially when dealing with browsers that don't follow the standards and indeed often have behaviour that completely contradicts the standards).
My personal web site is designed to work in standards complient browsers and be _usable_ in IE6 (but it won't look nice in IE). When I redo it I expect I will drop support for IE6 completely because it just overcomplicates the code if I try and work around all the IE problems. I can get away with this because it's just a hobby site - I don't make money from it and if people don't use a sane browser then that's just their problem since they won't have access to the information on my site. On a commercial site I clearly wouldn't have this option and would need to spend time making it work almost as well in IE6 as it does in proper browsers - it's unlikely I'd bother making it work in IE5.
I used to say I would always support Lynx but it seems that it's failing to keep up with technology so support for that may soon have to go too (doesn't support XHTML, and no CSS, etc) - still, Elinks seems to do quite a good job in the text-only browser side these days.
IE doesn't fall into the "1 or 2 years old" category - IE is very old (it remains to be seen how successful IE7 is in fixing the problems). You can't expect even reasonably technical people to always use bleeding edge software. Using new features is fine but a well designed site must fall back gracefully when you are missing those features if they are reasonably new (so long as the browser is standards complient).
Stricter client requirements may often be acceptable in a internal environment, but as soon as the public are involved you realistically need to deal with older software. Certainly if your site is of commercial significance then you'll lose a lot of business if you don't support the world's crappest browser - IE6.
What if this on a website that clients use? It is a lot easier to say "Use the latest browers" than "If you want to use firefox, you have to use this custom built version I made so it would be compatible"?
Sorry, if you need to use a bleeding edge browser to view a public web site then that site is essentially broken - you need to provide support to browsers at least a year or so old if you want the site reachable to the masses.
My impression is that the real money was in licensing it to cell phone makers anyway.
I've not understood how this works - Sony Ericsson "recommend" using Opera on the P900, yet they bundle the crumby Symbian browser instead. Why don't they just bundle the devices with Opera on the ROM since presumably they've paid a licence fee for it (so their customers can install Opera for free).
Why would we need a 600dpi monitor when a 100dpi is quite good enought?
Well, without antialiasing I can still see the individual pixels in a curved line on my 120dpi monitor... I guess 600dpi isn't required though - 200dpi is probably enough.
However, this is not to say that either IE7 or Firefox necessarily cannot coexist as software for the advancement of the greater good.
I remain skeptical about IE7 (and will do until I actually see the finished product). A lot of the stuff I'm reading about it seems to show that a lot of stuff isn't being fixed or is being fixed in a very half-arsed way.
I agree with your point about font sizes though; if you specify in px, that's what you should get. If you specify in pt, it should resize when the user changes font size.
I don't agree with that I'm afraid:
"pt", "cm", etc are _all_ absolute sizes which should render those _physical_ dimensions.
"px" is a bit of a funny one because depending on the display hardware it can be a bit arbitrary (think about printing - the size of a "px" is _not_ the size of your 1200dpi printer's individual dot - someone has picked an reasonably arbitrary value to use as the physical size of 1px).
Except in certain circumstances, text should really be specified in "em" since that is relative to a parent element. That way the browser just has to fiddle the physical dimensions in the top level style sheet and the changes cascade down through the document. (The top level element defaults to fint size "medium" although AFAICT the W3 don't recommend a default physical size for "medium" which seems a bit silly).
"px" should only really be used when you need the text to fit around/inside a fixed size bitmap. In which case resizing the text without the graphic would be very bad anyway. This is where SVG would be handy since then you just specify the images in "em" as well and let them resize automagically.:)
Of course the problem with all this is that a lot of web developers are stupid and just design a site which works in IE on it's default settings, which may indeed mean a random mixture of relative and absolute units which just become a complete mess when the relatively sized elements are rendered with anything other than the default initial size. I guess the more correct way to do it is to have separate "increase/decrease (relative) font size" and "magnify" (where magnify resizes absolutely everything including images), which I think is what Opera does - the problem here is that people get confused with having two separate options which do similar things.
The world will probably be a better place when we can buy 600dpi monitors, rendering the whole "px" unit rather meaningless.:)
The problem is how to define "useful" - I am inclined to say that IE6 is so broken it's not useful. It's continued existance just causes "real" web developers endless headaches. (where "real" means the ones that actually bother to write something that isn't IE specific).
You also need to do multiple passes to be sure because the heads do not always perfectly align over the track, leaving thin bands of data on the edges of the tracks.
Either your mishandling them, or you were unlucky enough to buy them in the "dark ages" when TDK (shortly) switched manufacturers, before discovering the crap they were getting, and switching back.
Rubbish - they are stored in normal dry room temperature conditions in jewl cases and were bought over a period of several years from a number of different suppliers.
This isn't magic. You can't sprinkle fairy dust on cheap crap technologies, and magically convert them into high-end equipment.
With development effort and popularity, technologies become cheap - just look at how cheap Flash memory is these days. IMHO most "normal people" who are doing digital photography would want a write-once long term media to store their photos on. ATM I suspect most of them are storing the data on a un-backed up hard drive or CD without any thought as to the safety of that data (when they come to look at their old photos in 15 years time I expect a lot of people will be shocked to see their CDs are unrecoverable).
How 'bout paying a few more bucks for quality CDs/DVDs instead of buying the cheapest shit that has started decaying at a hellish pace before you even opened the shrink wrap?
The problem is identifying _which_ brands are durable. I've not seen any independent tests that compares the life of the different brands that are on the market. And before you start saying that clearly the more expensive discs are better, this is clearly not true - I have many TDK discs (one of the higher cost brands at the time) which are degrading. I'm also not at all convinced that the discs that claim to last 100 years really will last that long.
I wish someone would come up with some _cheap_ write-once solid state storage, preferably in an existing format like Compact Flash or something, which could be used as "electronic film" for storing important long-lived data such as photos, etc. for guaranteed long periods of time (I'm talking 100 - 200 years here). I just don't trust *any* of the current technologies to store my data for a significant amount of time... maybe an option would be to construct such devices in an internal RAID style configuration for redundency too...
Well, I can only speak for myself here, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that is grossly unethical and has such an anti-FOSS (and indeed anti-standards) attitude. Wouldn't you have a problem with being part of something you consider very bad?
OTOH, I assume that most of the MS employees don't see the company in this light (whether that be because they haven't seen that side of the company or whatever).
Civilization has removed the engine through which drives the evolution of the species.
Yes, at the moment we are "managing" diseases that would, in the past, be bread out of the species. For example, without my contact lenses I can't see a thing - in nature, as a hunter-gatherer species, there's no way I'd survive since I wouldn't be able to see what I am hunting/gathering, nor would I be able to see any predators. Whereas now, because of corrective lenses and supermarkets I am not in danger of starving and can pass the crap-eyesight gene on to the next generation. (And this equally applies to many, often more debilitating, diseases)
I guess that the gene pool is now widening in all directions rather than only extending in the "positive" direction. Not necessarilly a wholly bad thing - characteristics that are not immediately positive could become positive in the future so having them sticking around in the gene pool is probably good in some cases.
However, since we have now lost the evolutionary drive away from negative characteristics, I strongly believe that genetic engineering is now the way forward for our evolution. Yes, we need to be very careful of course, but without some way of removing the negative characteristics from the gene pool we're going to end up with a lot more of the population having genetic diseases.
I'm in a similar boat here in the UK as I'm one of the 1% who do not have a TV. Currently this means I don't have to pay $180 p.a. for a license, but I use the BBC web site and radio services, and might use view program content online when they make it available, so I guess I wouldn't gripe too much about paying the license if they changed the rules and decoupled it from physical TVs.
I'm also in the UK... My view on the licence fee is that it might be a good idea in theory but it's poorly targetted. As you say, the BBC website and radio stations are available to anyone, even people who don't have a TV (so don't pay the licence) and they take a sizable chunk of the BBC's funds so why should they be funded purely by TV watchers.
I think I probably do watch the beeb more than I used to - I like stuff like Rough Science and the Ray Mears programs, and I certainly see a place for them - the point of the licence fee is to let them put on minority shows that commercial stations wouldn't show (that's not to say the minority programs should be unpopular - they should be popular shows that commercial channels wouldn't touch because they can get higher ratings from other stuff. The thing that annoys me is that the BBC seem to chase ratings as much as a commercial channel, spending my licence fee on rubbish like Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc - i.e. exactly the same as a commercial channel would run!
That said, I haven't seen a decent single piece of comedy come out of the BBC since Red Dwarf, and that's a real shame. (Don't get me started about cringeworthy stuff like The Office - it's not funny).
The alternate evil is that the community is policed to ensure that only those who have paid get to share, but then we're back to DRM again.
I'm not at all convinced that such policing is necessary. It is my experience that most people will buy stuff for a _reasonable price_ rather than getting stuff from, what is essentially a black market. A lot of the indepentent studies show that people who infringe copyright on music by downloading from P2P networks actually spend _more_ money on legal music than people who don't download. If for one don't buy CDs these days unless I've downloaded a few tracks to see how good it is. And then because I'm not taking a chance on buying a crap CD I'm more likely to buy more of them - the only people who are losing out here are the artists that release a couple of good singles to get people interested and then fill the rest of their album with rubbish.
So the least worst option is for a tax, as long as it is small (relative to average total spent on content)
Hold on, the original idea was to fund the content _entirely_ from the tax, so the tax _is_ the total spent on content.
I'm afraid I believe in freedom of choice - at the moment if I can't afford to buy a CD I won't buy a CD. With taxation I'm essentially forced to regularly buy that CD. Nolonger do I have the option of choosing to go without some fun stuff for a while so that I can afford a holiday, new car, whatever.
Nothing wrong with that, but this discussion is about funding content that is not commoditized.
My point was that, given that I want to buy a CD with music on it and I do _not_ want to buy downloadable music from the internet, why should I by forced to pay a tax for this material I don't want?
If the only use for the internet were to download music then a tax _may_ be fair, but forcing people who use the internet to pay for music they may not be downloading is akin to forcing people who drink water to pay a fruit juice manufacturer, just incase they happen to be adding fruit juice to the water.
Put in a context that's more familiar to Slashdot, what if you were forced to pay Microsoft money when you bought a blank PC, just incase you were going to put Windows on it?
I can take the code as it exists today, not change a single line other than the comments which state the license, and re-release it as non-GPL code. How is that not retrospectively changing the license on that code? I can even dig up previous versions and re-release them under a different license.
The licence forms part of a package - you are releasing a new package with a different licence - you are not retrospectively changing the licence on an existing package. The old package is still available under the old licence, people who are using the old package are still using it under the old licence - you haven't retrospectively changed the licence theya re using that code under.
The licence is a contract between the author and a second party - both parties have agreed to that licence and neither can change it without the conscent of the other.
Infact, I think under GPL you are required to put a licence header in each source code file.
If license A lets you do "X but not Y" and license B lets you to "Y but not X", code offered under a dual license allows you to do "X or Y, but not both, depending on which license you accept." (When code gets offered under a dual license, the end users essentially get to pick which one they accept.
However, I think in many cases it would be difficult to enforce this - with free (beer) licences there is usually nothing stopping someone from "purchasing" more than one licence at the selling price (£0) and using both at the same time.
Much of the time it's actually the bad people who win. Does your large corporation need to break the law? A few big payoffs in the right places should get people looking the other way - you're not telling me those are _good_ people winning there?
If I want to take my GPL'd stuff private and proprietary, I can. Any GPL'd copies floating about are fully legit. But, if you want any features from newer versions, you're ponying up for the proprietary version.
You need to look up what "retrospective" means - you're talking about changing the licence on _future_ versions, hence you're not retrospectively changing the licence.
I guess I worded it badly though - you can retrospectively loosen the licence but you can't restrict it. (I.e. code that's been released GPLed is going to stay GPLed but you can add an additional licencing condition which allows stuff that GPL excludes).
This means that people who were using older GPL'd software are free from obligations of the upcoming license.
You can't retrospectively change licences. And indeed, software authors can happilly still release software under the old GPL if they want.
The whole idea of free software is that it gives people the freedom to do what they want with it.
No, really it doesn't (in the case of the GPL). GPL'd software gives people the freedom to do what they want with it within limits. If I was allowed to do what I want with it with no limits then it would be fine for me to include "free" code in a closed product and sell it, which clearly the GPL forbids.
I do worry though that this new licence may make the FSF look like raving loonies to a lot of the world (more than they do already). They will need to word it very carefully. The current GPL is there to protect the authors of the software from companies ripping it off - it sounds like the new licence will be designed to protect parties who are completely unrelated to the project that is being licenced and that doesn't sound like a particularly sane idea to me.
"We're fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think it's a dead end for society," Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the kind of freedom being espoused here necessitate doing away with WiFi? I mean, how can you tax the connection if it's available to anyone, anonymously, at any time?
This is the bit that's got me worried too - seems to go against the ideals of the FSF. Why should I be forced to pay an artist through taxation if I think their work truely sucks? Especially since I prefer my music on physical media so I buy the CDs anyway (after downloading the tracks to see if they're any good). Doesn't sound like freedom to me. Infact it sounds like the varous parts of the world who charge a "copyright tax" on blank media just incase you're going to use it to infringe copyright (even though in my case pretty much all the blank CDs I buy are used for backups of my own data).
Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.
For extra bandwidth savings they should also think about using client-side XSLT. Send all the styling XHTML data to the clients as an XSLT stylesheet along with the CSS stylesheet, both the XSLT and CSS get cached by the browser and from then on you're just shifting the actual _content_ over the network. Definately a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone that says that Linux will beat out Windows in every situation is a fool.
True, but IMHO Linux can beat Windows in a great many situations - mostly the exceptions are simply where you need to use some commercial Windows-only software.
That said, I have never seen Linux "reliably" core-dump at random except where there is dodgy hardware, some unusual hardware that has a not-well-tested driver or some propriatory driver (such as the older closed nVidia drivers) running.
Windows and Linux use hardware in different ways - it could well be that the Linux crashes were caused by some bad RAM in the machine and Linux was just happening to put some important executable code in that chunk of RAM whilest (by chance) Windows might just be using that memory for non-executable data. The result would simply be that Linux would crash whilest under Windows you'd end up with silently corrupted data.
Basically, if you've got some broken hardware then all bets are off - maybe Linux is pushing one bit of hardware slightly harder than Windows causing it to overheat or something (I've seen that before with nVidia graphics cards that don't have adequate cooling - they run fine until you fire up the nVidia closed source driver and then the whole machine comes crashing down as it overheats).
I think you'll find the majority of sites work fine in IE6 and probably Firebird too, neither of which can be considered bleeding edge
My old personal website actually rendered perfectly in Opera, nearly perfectly in Firefox, and with serious glitches in color and display elements in IE6. IE4 however, displayed it perfectly. I was mindboggled.
IE6 tries to implement a lot of stuff and gets it seriously wrong whereas IE4 would just ignore the stuff it doesn't understand.
With respect, what you just said wasn't relevent to the conversation at all. The original post was claiming that the Opera development cycle was better because it's easier to tell the general public they need _the latest experimental Opera_ to view the site than a custom FireFox build - neither of which is a valid thing to do for a public site.
Clearly you develop for the majority of modern browsers, which is of course the right thing to do and you do have to draw the line somewhere (especially when dealing with browsers that don't follow the standards and indeed often have behaviour that completely contradicts the standards).
My personal web site is designed to work in standards complient browsers and be _usable_ in IE6 (but it won't look nice in IE). When I redo it I expect I will drop support for IE6 completely because it just overcomplicates the code if I try and work around all the IE problems. I can get away with this because it's just a hobby site - I don't make money from it and if people don't use a sane browser then that's just their problem since they won't have access to the information on my site. On a commercial site I clearly wouldn't have this option and would need to spend time making it work almost as well in IE6 as it does in proper browsers - it's unlikely I'd bother making it work in IE5.
I used to say I would always support Lynx but it seems that it's failing to keep up with technology so support for that may soon have to go too (doesn't support XHTML, and no CSS, etc) - still, Elinks seems to do quite a good job in the text-only browser side these days.
IE doesn't fall into the "1 or 2 years old" category - IE is very old (it remains to be seen how successful IE7 is in fixing the problems). You can't expect even reasonably technical people to always use bleeding edge software. Using new features is fine but a well designed site must fall back gracefully when you are missing those features if they are reasonably new (so long as the browser is standards complient).
Stricter client requirements may often be acceptable in a internal environment, but as soon as the public are involved you realistically need to deal with older software. Certainly if your site is of commercial significance then you'll lose a lot of business if you don't support the world's crappest browser - IE6.
What if this on a website that clients use? It is a lot easier to say "Use the latest browers" than "If you want to use firefox, you have to use this custom built version I made so it would be compatible"?
Sorry, if you need to use a bleeding edge browser to view a public web site then that site is essentially broken - you need to provide support to browsers at least a year or so old if you want the site reachable to the masses.
My impression is that the real money was in licensing it to cell phone makers anyway.
I've not understood how this works - Sony Ericsson "recommend" using Opera on the P900, yet they bundle the crumby Symbian browser instead. Why don't they just bundle the devices with Opera on the ROM since presumably they've paid a licence fee for it (so their customers can install Opera for free).
Why would we need a 600dpi monitor when a 100dpi is quite good enought?
Well, without antialiasing I can still see the individual pixels in a curved line on my 120dpi monitor... I guess 600dpi isn't required though - 200dpi is probably enough.
However, this is not to say that either IE7 or Firefox necessarily cannot coexist as software for the advancement of the greater good.
I remain skeptical about IE7 (and will do until I actually see the finished product). A lot of the stuff I'm reading about it seems to show that a lot of stuff isn't being fixed or is being fixed in a very half-arsed way.
I agree with your point about font sizes though; if you specify in px, that's what you should get. If you specify in pt, it should resize when the user changes font size.
:)
:)
I don't agree with that I'm afraid:
"pt", "cm", etc are _all_ absolute sizes which should render those _physical_ dimensions.
"px" is a bit of a funny one because depending on the display hardware it can be a bit arbitrary (think about printing - the size of a "px" is _not_ the size of your 1200dpi printer's individual dot - someone has picked an reasonably arbitrary value to use as the physical size of 1px).
Except in certain circumstances, text should really be specified in "em" since that is relative to a parent element. That way the browser just has to fiddle the physical dimensions in the top level style sheet and the changes cascade down through the document. (The top level element defaults to fint size "medium" although AFAICT the W3 don't recommend a default physical size for "medium" which seems a bit silly).
"px" should only really be used when you need the text to fit around/inside a fixed size bitmap. In which case resizing the text without the graphic would be very bad anyway. This is where SVG would be handy since then you just specify the images in "em" as well and let them resize automagically.
Of course the problem with all this is that a lot of web developers are stupid and just design a site which works in IE on it's default settings, which may indeed mean a random mixture of relative and absolute units which just become a complete mess when the relatively sized elements are rendered with anything other than the default initial size. I guess the more correct way to do it is to have separate "increase/decrease (relative) font size" and "magnify" (where magnify resizes absolutely everything including images), which I think is what Opera does - the problem here is that people get confused with having two separate options which do similar things.
The world will probably be a better place when we can buy 600dpi monitors, rendering the whole "px" unit rather meaningless.
May all useful software prosper in some fashion.
The problem is how to define "useful" - I am inclined to say that IE6 is so broken it's not useful. It's continued existance just causes "real" web developers endless headaches. (where "real" means the ones that actually bother to write something that isn't IE specific).
You also need to do multiple passes to be sure because the heads do not always perfectly align over the track, leaving thin bands of data on the edges of the tracks.
Either your mishandling them, or you were unlucky enough to buy them in the "dark ages" when TDK (shortly) switched manufacturers, before discovering the crap they were getting, and switching back.
Rubbish - they are stored in normal dry room temperature conditions in jewl cases and were bought over a period of several years from a number of different suppliers.
This isn't magic. You can't sprinkle fairy dust on cheap crap technologies, and magically convert them into high-end equipment.
With development effort and popularity, technologies become cheap - just look at how cheap Flash memory is these days. IMHO most "normal people" who are doing digital photography would want a write-once long term media to store their photos on. ATM I suspect most of them are storing the data on a un-backed up hard drive or CD without any thought as to the safety of that data (when they come to look at their old photos in 15 years time I expect a lot of people will be shocked to see their CDs are unrecoverable).
How 'bout paying a few more bucks for quality CDs/DVDs instead of buying the cheapest shit that has started decaying at a hellish pace before you even opened the shrink wrap?
The problem is identifying _which_ brands are durable. I've not seen any independent tests that compares the life of the different brands that are on the market. And before you start saying that clearly the more expensive discs are better, this is clearly not true - I have many TDK discs (one of the higher cost brands at the time) which are degrading. I'm also not at all convinced that the discs that claim to last 100 years really will last that long.
I wish someone would come up with some _cheap_ write-once solid state storage, preferably in an existing format like Compact Flash or something, which could be used as "electronic film" for storing important long-lived data such as photos, etc. for guaranteed long periods of time (I'm talking 100 - 200 years here). I just don't trust *any* of the current technologies to store my data for a significant amount of time... maybe an option would be to construct such devices in an internal RAID style configuration for redundency too...
what is bad about working for Microsoft?
Well, I can only speak for myself here, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that is grossly unethical and has such an anti-FOSS (and indeed anti-standards) attitude. Wouldn't you have a problem with being part of something you consider very bad?
OTOH, I assume that most of the MS employees don't see the company in this light (whether that be because they haven't seen that side of the company or whatever).
Civilization has removed the engine through which drives the evolution of the species.
Yes, at the moment we are "managing" diseases that would, in the past, be bread out of the species. For example, without my contact lenses I can't see a thing - in nature, as a hunter-gatherer species, there's no way I'd survive since I wouldn't be able to see what I am hunting/gathering, nor would I be able to see any predators. Whereas now, because of corrective lenses and supermarkets I am not in danger of starving and can pass the crap-eyesight gene on to the next generation. (And this equally applies to many, often more debilitating, diseases)
I guess that the gene pool is now widening in all directions rather than only extending in the "positive" direction. Not necessarilly a wholly bad thing - characteristics that are not immediately positive could become positive in the future so having them sticking around in the gene pool is probably good in some cases.
However, since we have now lost the evolutionary drive away from negative characteristics, I strongly believe that genetic engineering is now the way forward for our evolution. Yes, we need to be very careful of course, but without some way of removing the negative characteristics from the gene pool we're going to end up with a lot more of the population having genetic diseases.
I'm in a similar boat here in the UK as I'm one of the 1% who do not have a TV. Currently this means I don't have to pay $180 p.a. for a license, but I use the BBC web site and radio services, and might use view program content online when they make it available, so I guess I wouldn't gripe too much about paying the license if they changed the rules and decoupled it from physical TVs.
I'm also in the UK... My view on the licence fee is that it might be a good idea in theory but it's poorly targetted. As you say, the BBC website and radio stations are available to anyone, even people who don't have a TV (so don't pay the licence) and they take a sizable chunk of the BBC's funds so why should they be funded purely by TV watchers.
I think I probably do watch the beeb more than I used to - I like stuff like Rough Science and the Ray Mears programs, and I certainly see a place for them - the point of the licence fee is to let them put on minority shows that commercial stations wouldn't show (that's not to say the minority programs should be unpopular - they should be popular shows that commercial channels wouldn't touch because they can get higher ratings from other stuff. The thing that annoys me is that the BBC seem to chase ratings as much as a commercial channel, spending my licence fee on rubbish like Eastenders, Fame Acadamy, etc - i.e. exactly the same as a commercial channel would run!
That said, I haven't seen a decent single piece of comedy come out of the BBC since Red Dwarf, and that's a real shame. (Don't get me started about cringeworthy stuff like The Office - it's not funny).
The alternate evil is that the community is policed to ensure that only those who have paid get to share, but then we're back to DRM again.
I'm not at all convinced that such policing is necessary. It is my experience that most people will buy stuff for a _reasonable price_ rather than getting stuff from, what is essentially a black market. A lot of the indepentent studies show that people who infringe copyright on music by downloading from P2P networks actually spend _more_ money on legal music than people who don't download. If for one don't buy CDs these days unless I've downloaded a few tracks to see how good it is. And then because I'm not taking a chance on buying a crap CD I'm more likely to buy more of them - the only people who are losing out here are the artists that release a couple of good singles to get people interested and then fill the rest of their album with rubbish.
So the least worst option is for a tax, as long as it is small (relative to average total spent on content)
Hold on, the original idea was to fund the content _entirely_ from the tax, so the tax _is_ the total spent on content.
I'm afraid I believe in freedom of choice - at the moment if I can't afford to buy a CD I won't buy a CD. With taxation I'm essentially forced to regularly buy that CD. Nolonger do I have the option of choosing to go without some fun stuff for a while so that I can afford a holiday, new car, whatever.
Nothing wrong with that, but this discussion is about funding content that is not commoditized.
My point was that, given that I want to buy a CD with music on it and I do _not_ want to buy downloadable music from the internet, why should I by forced to pay a tax for this material I don't want?
If the only use for the internet were to download music then a tax _may_ be fair, but forcing people who use the internet to pay for music they may not be downloading is akin to forcing people who drink water to pay a fruit juice manufacturer, just incase they happen to be adding fruit juice to the water.
Put in a context that's more familiar to Slashdot, what if you were forced to pay Microsoft money when you bought a blank PC, just incase you were going to put Windows on it?
I can take the code as it exists today, not change a single line other than the comments which state the license, and re-release it as non-GPL code. How is that not retrospectively changing the license on that code? I can even dig up previous versions and re-release them under a different license.
The licence forms part of a package - you are releasing a new package with a different licence - you are not retrospectively changing the licence on an existing package. The old package is still available under the old licence, people who are using the old package are still using it under the old licence - you haven't retrospectively changed the licence theya re using that code under.
The licence is a contract between the author and a second party - both parties have agreed to that licence and neither can change it without the conscent of the other.
Infact, I think under GPL you are required to put a licence header in each source code file.
If license A lets you do "X but not Y" and license B lets you to "Y but not X", code offered under a dual license allows you to do "X or Y, but not both, depending on which license you accept." (When code gets offered under a dual license, the end users essentially get to pick which one they accept.
However, I think in many cases it would be difficult to enforce this - with free (beer) licences there is usually nothing stopping someone from "purchasing" more than one licence at the selling price (£0) and using both at the same time.
The fact is that he hates to see good people win.
Much of the time it's actually the bad people who win. Does your large corporation need to break the law? A few big payoffs in the right places should get people looking the other way - you're not telling me those are _good_ people winning there?
You can't retrospectively change licences. ...
If I want to take my GPL'd stuff private and proprietary, I can. Any GPL'd copies floating about are fully legit. But, if you want any features from newer versions, you're ponying up for the proprietary version.
You need to look up what "retrospective" means - you're talking about changing the licence on _future_ versions, hence you're not retrospectively changing the licence.
I guess I worded it badly though - you can retrospectively loosen the licence but you can't restrict it. (I.e. code that's been released GPLed is going to stay GPLed but you can add an additional licencing condition which allows stuff that GPL excludes).
This means that people who were using older GPL'd software are free from obligations of the upcoming license.
You can't retrospectively change licences. And indeed, software authors can happilly still release software under the old GPL if they want.
The whole idea of free software is that it gives people the freedom to do what they want with it.
No, really it doesn't (in the case of the GPL). GPL'd software gives people the freedom to do what they want with it within limits. If I was allowed to do what I want with it with no limits then it would be fine for me to include "free" code in a closed product and sell it, which clearly the GPL forbids.
I do worry though that this new licence may make the FSF look like raving loonies to a lot of the world (more than they do already). They will need to word it very carefully. The current GPL is there to protect the authors of the software from companies ripping it off - it sounds like the new licence will be designed to protect parties who are completely unrelated to the project that is being licenced and that doesn't sound like a particularly sane idea to me.
"We're fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think it's a dead end for society," Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the kind of freedom being espoused here necessitate doing away with WiFi? I mean, how can you tax the connection if it's available to anyone, anonymously, at any time?
This is the bit that's got me worried too - seems to go against the ideals of the FSF. Why should I be forced to pay an artist through taxation if I think their work truely sucks? Especially since I prefer my music on physical media so I buy the CDs anyway (after downloading the tracks to see if they're any good). Doesn't sound like freedom to me. Infact it sounds like the varous parts of the world who charge a "copyright tax" on blank media just incase you're going to use it to infringe copyright (even though in my case pretty much all the blank CDs I buy are used for backups of my own data).
Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.
For extra bandwidth savings they should also think about using client-side XSLT. Send all the styling XHTML data to the clients as an XSLT stylesheet along with the CSS stylesheet, both the XSLT and CSS get cached by the browser and from then on you're just shifting the actual _content_ over the network. Definately a Good Thing.
I'm hoping that we're going to see XHTML1.1 strict compliance on slashdot one day...