windows techs are a dime a dozen. mac or linux techs cost more
Any trained monkey can fix a Windows computer -- all they have to do is hoick out the power lead and wait 10". This is because Windows crashes for no good reason {unless you count lousy design as a good reason..... but what you can't do anything about, you needn't lose any sleep over}, and does this significantly more often than real faults occur. Macs and Linux boxes, on the other hand, only crash when they are genuinely poorly -- IMLE usually hard drive or memory failure (what is really fun is when the bit of memory holding the disk cache decides to jump out of its comfortable slot on the motherboard and fall on the floor of the case..... you know, I wouldn't have believed that either if I hadn't seen it happen for real) though I have also seen sabotage.
This isn't to say that Windows boxes don't fail for genuine reasons; but false alarms are common enough that anything that can't be fixed by depowering and repowering usually gets scrapped.
What RMS means by "Freedom of choice is deceptively attractive because people who focus on choice can easily be undermined" is that, if the local tobacconist's shop sells fifty different kinds of fags but they all give you lung cancer, then you don't really have a choice..... whichever ones you smoke, you're going to end up the same way.
No person is an island. Everything that you have, and everything that you are, comes in some greater or lesser measure at the expense of others. All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity.
If you want to live in a civilised society -- with things like clean water, sanitation, electricity, free health care, telecommunications, paved roads, free education, and so forth, all the things that we quite rightly take for granted -- then you have to expect to make some kind of contribution towards that. You also have to realise that the amount of effort it would take to calculate exactly how much every single person deserves to pay as their personally-weighted contribution towards arranging all this, would mean that the person who pays the least under the new "fair" system would actually be paying more than they are paying today. Look at the history of the penny post for a good example. In other words, a little unfairness is benefitting you right now.
Exactly. I mean, I paid good money for this machete, and god damn it, now you pinko commie jerks tell me I can't stab little kiddies with MY knife that I bought and PAID FOR with my OWN money?????
The point of the GPL is that the things it doesn't allow you to do, are the things that would cause software not to be free anymore. The GPL does not allow you to modify GPL software and release it in closed-source form -- IMHO this is the major omission from the BSD licence -- and it does not allow you to use discriminatory patent licencing to subvert the non-discriminatory nature of the GPL.
Anyway, why should the GPL permit you to use GPL software in a closed source project? Even if RMS et al did not believe that closed source software is evil, the fact remains that other people wrote that software, not you; and if you base a derivative work on it, the copyright generally stays with the original author {unless your modifications are so extensive as to constitute a new work in their own right; but that is for the courts to decide}. The people who wrote it in the first place wanted it to be shared with everyone; you don't want to share your version with everyone, but you don't mind accepting something that someone was trying to share with you. Just how hypocritical can you get?
Abstraction layers are fine and dandy, but sooner or later there comes a point where you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty dealing with actual data. So you can have this independent of that and whatever, but at the end of the day you have to move some data into or out of the database -- and no amount of pretending will change that.
If you "ride the metal", then you can run as fast as the system will allow you. The more layers of independence you try to add, the slower it will run. This is a fact. If you truly know for certain that you are never, ever going to use a different back end, then it is a complete waste of effort pretending you might. On the other hand, if you ever do need to use a different back end, then you might be in for a lot of work.....
I guess the madness will only end when we get a set of common "drag and drool" development environments that effectively create a programming language abstraction layer..... it won't really matter whether your pretty diagrammatical representation of a programme is turned into C, Perl, Python, Lisp, Visual Basic, ASP.Net or Lua.
When the US constitution was written, nobody could have foreseen that one day, the technology would exist that would enable a manufacturer to sell something which effectively kept a secret from its rightful owner. If you bought a locked box, you could always split it open. If you bought something tiny, you could always look at it through a microscope. It just wasn't anything to be bothered about. (This is the same thinking as "you could always sneak off into the woods somewhere to be sure of having a private conversation".) It was simply inconceivable that that "right" could be violated, and therefore, it wasn't viewed as worthy of protection -- it would have been about as sensible as a law today issuing speeding tickets for anybody caught travelling at more than 300 megametres per second. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers wanted to keep the laws fair and few. Banning the impossible would have been a Bad Law -- it was redundant, because there was no conceivable way to break it, and also it might encourage future lawmakers to create redundant laws.
Fast forward 200-odd years and see how things have changed. Now it is physically possible to attempt to keep details of a purchased product secret from its rightful owner, with a high barrier to discovery; though this is clearly at odds with common law property rights. And the rest of the world seems hell-bent on adopting US-style law.
What we basically need is a new law clarifying -- for it is not, by any leap of imagination, a new right, but dates back to the time before it was physically possible even to violate that right -- that the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is, by sole virtue of such ownership, automatically privy to {but may be bound to keep} any and every secret contained within that piece of hardware. For manufacturers to attempt to keep secrets from the very people who pay their wages is very broken, and should not be tolerated. There might be some predictable protest from manufacturers, upset at the though of competitors knowing their secrets -- but the chances are that your competitors have already reverse-engineered your secrets. (side note: should we try ATI for open source nVidia drivers?) Furthermore, there are such things as patents, which oblige other people to pay you money before they make any money out of your ideas (at least until such time as you ought to have made enough money out of them and now it's everyone else's turn) which actually can be used properly.
(Of course, such a law may turn out to be unnecessary: it is entirely conceivable that a future technological change will restore the situation where keeping secrets from your customers is impossible.)
Who cares about a crap closed-source database? We have Postgres, which has features, and we have MySQL, which has speed. The trends of evolution suggest that (1) processor speeds will increase, making Postgres appear less slow; and (2) MySQL will adopt more features, gradually losing its "toy" reputation. And that's even assuming some new upstart competitor doesn't emerge onto the scene to leave them both standing. We already don't need the likes of Oracle, and we will be needing them even less in future.
Imagine a very long, stiff rod. Now when you push, pull or twist one end, the other end must also move. But it can never take less time to transmit this movement than the time it would take a photon to reach the other end, otherwise information would be travelling faster than light, which is Not Allowed. (*)
Think of it as being like a load of tennis balls in a drainpipe: you stick one in your end, the next one squashes a bit, then moves a bit and recovers its shape, squashing the next one a bit, and so on. The molecules are not bonded to each other with absolute rigidity. And there is a quantum limit to how stiff matter could ever be.
Which fits right in with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, somehow or other. At least, it did when I was conducting experiments outside of the realms of physics and more into the domains of chemistry..... and botany.....
* OK, two particles which always have opposite spin, blah blah blah, one in your lab, one in a spaceship several gigametres away, you expend an obscene amount of energy reversing the spin on yours, and the spin on the far one reverses at the exact same time. But so what? You can't use the phenomenon to impart any useful information to the other party. You already knew that the spins would always be opposite.
I don't find "viral" licences half as repulsive as I find the idea that someone could take the code I wrote with the intention of sharing it with everybody, modify it just a little bit, and refuse to share it with anyone.
If you take the view that closed source is evil -- and I mean evil in the same sort of way that slavery is evil -- then the GPL's prohibition against closed-source derivatives is admirable.
People who think the French are arrogant probably just have not tried speaking to them in their own language.
The French are a wonderfully polite race. All they ask is that you make some sort of effort to fit in with their culture and their language. It's their country, and they feel they have a right to expect it of you. Even if it is only just saying "Bonjour" [hello], "J'en veux comme celui-la, s'il vous plait" [I want one like that, please] and "Ou est la toilette?" [Where is the toilet?]
Once you have indicated that you are making at least some small token attempt, then you will be treated to the usual Continental hospitality. Speak English to a Frenchman in France, though, and you have just earned yourself an enemy for life.
It's nice to see that someone is making Open Source -- or should that be Logiciel Lisible Libre? -- "official". If this licence stands up to the scrutiny of the courts, and with official backing there really is no reason to suppose otherwise, then it's an important step in the right direction. The licence overcomes the Great Omission of BSD -- that is, it explicitly states that if you distribute modified binaries you must also make the source available -- and even provides explicit permission to use the GPL as an alternative licence.
How long before there is a full-on, EU-wide Open Source push? What with rampant piracy in the former Eastern Bloc countries, official approval for the fair alternative can only benefit ordinary people.
In the beginning it was LP versus CD. (Nobody mentioned cassette, except to ask how come a bootleg recorded from an LP on a 99p ferric cassette using a 49 quid midi system sounded better than a store-bought original.) Now that the recording companies have all but killed off LP, hi-fi bores (if I called them "audiophiles" there would most probably be a mob of News of the World readers standing outside their homes, waving placards and pouring petrol through their letter boxes) need something else over which to disagree.
So we're back to silicon vs. vacuum. Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, transistors were still just expensive enough that they were still competing with valves, and a tranny amp from that vintage -- if it's been fitted with new capacitors, which degrade over time -- will sound as good as a cheap valve amp from the same vintage. It had to, because the competition was there. Today, valves are strictly in the realm of esoterica, and modern IC / transistor kit doesn't have to try to compete with them.
But it's a highly subjective area, and "scientifically perfect" reproduction (identical waveshapes, just different amplitudes) is not necessarily right for the ear. There is little doubt that the distortion characteristic of transistors is harsher than that of valves. This is because, by trying to be "scientifically perfect", they hit the supply rails easily. (Recall that valves use supply rails between 100-500V and require transformers to match to low-impedance loudspeakers; transistors are driving the speaker directly, 20W RMS at 8 ohms is 36Vp-p or +-18V). So with valves, there is more headroom. Deliberate slew rate limitation also helps, by giving a different type of distortion (never quite making it, which gives even harmonics, rather than trying to overshoot and maxing out, which gives odd harmonics). Odd harmonics are reckoned to have a harsher sound than even ones. In fact, modern op-amps, with almost DC-RF bandwidth and consequently slew rates in volts/nanosecond, are as harsh as you'll get.
Bottom line, if somebody spent a fortune on an amplifier -- beyond the point where the Law of Diminishing Returns sets in -- they must think it's good, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. And there's unlikely to be any way of convincing them any different.
BTW, the first commercial use of transistor power amps was in juke boxes. My dad has a 1962 Seeburg with a 25+25 watt power amp (transformer coupled, has 100V line outputs, C/T to chassis so you can easily arrange mono speakers, taking 1/2 of LH signal plus 1/2 of RH signal in series) and also a power oscillator to run the motor at 45RPM (it does 33rpm on 50Hz so it needs 68Hz for 45RPM; it actually cheats by starting at 33RPM then switching to 45RPM, so it doesn't need to cope with the starting surge. A stationary motor looks like a short circuit). I don't think this was the first juke box to have a transistor amplifier, though, because I've seen one in a 1957 Wurlitzer (but this may have been a retrofit).
Back in 1989-92, when I was at Aston University, we used to have a few VAX/VMS systems: two 11/750s {may have been 780s} and a cluster of two 8650s. I remember writing a few programmes in DCL {think the power of bash, the verbosity of COBOL}, VAX Pascal {which was kind of similar to Turbo Pascal} and FORTRAN. I also wrote what eventually ended up becoming a very popular "alternative" user guide. But my real claim to fame is that I also wrote a programme on that VAX -- I'm not sure what language it was in, might even have been BASIC -- which passed a rough-and-ready Turing test, simulating what could only be described as a precursor to today's internet chat rooms. Unfortunately, the tester was someone to whom the phrase "sharpest knife in the drawer" could hardly be applied, so the test probably was not valid.
Thank you. You have made an excellent point (and earned yourself a blue dot on my postings). Microsoft and the like benefit enormously from "pirate" copies of Office, Photohop, Dreamweaver and so forth because people get used to them. And vendors of less expensive, competing products suffer because people choose the "free" copies of the "expensive" software just for the bigger apparent saving. Yet these small software vendors are the ones worst placed to do anything about the proliferation of copies -- while the major players usch as Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia can afford blithely to ignore it.
It's not "piracy" that's hurting the little guys' business -- it's the big guys not doing anything about it. If Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia et al were forced to chase up a certain proportion of copying incidents or risk losing their copyrights, then for sure we'd see more people moving towards the real alternatives that already exist. Microsoft know that they have about as much chance of selling Office Professional to John Willy as they have of selling a bra to Charlie Dimmock. On the other hand, if John Willy is using a dodgy copy of Office Pro, then he's not going to buy some Fred-in-the-Shed outfit's cheap and cheerful 49.95 office suite. That's how "piracy" "harms" businesses.
BTW, just for the record, I do not use closed-source software at home nor at work.
In the UK, television stations can show whatever they like after 21.00; I don't know when in the morning they are obliged to start being "family-friendly". In Mainland Europe, I believe the system is even simpler: everyone understands that television broadcasts are {primarily} for adults, and parents are entirely responsible for deciding what their kids should or should not watch.
If you don't like what you see, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to watch it. And if you can't stop your kids watching TV when they shouldn't be, then you are an unfit parent.
How do you suppose those 'creative-without-pay' types get food and shelter?
Possibly, as a direct consequence of the generosity of other "creative without pay" types. Yes, it's possible to survive without much money, if you know what you are doing. You still need some money for whatever you can't DIY, but it's surprising how little -- and how easy it is to earn. When there is more than one of you, then it gets even easier. And where there are people leaving behind loads of good stuff you can use, it's next to a joke.
Are you proposing we have xx% of people just be creative and poor while the remaining percent of people just take take take? Or are you proposing that *everyone* be a creative type?
Everyone should be creative: if everyone gives whatever they can, there will be enough for everyone to take what they need. {It should be noted that there are two problems with this arrangement: people who give less than they can, and people who take more than they need.}
that people simply are not using payware any more? Is there really any common task that can only be done using closed-source, commercial software? Bearing in mind that once you have (Perl|PHP|Python) and know what to do with it, you have something like the equivalent of every programme ever written.
Mozilla does more than IE ever will, apart from aid and abet malware writers. OpenOffice is going from strength to strength, while KOffice and AbiWord / Gnumeric are creeping up. There isn't an outright MS Access replacement yet, but let's face it: most people just create a database once and keep adding stuff to it, so it's feasible to deploy a "proper" LAMP-based alternative; a trained monkey can write a bit of PHP to work with a MySQL database (just don't tell my boss), and there's always PHPMyAdmin -- your best friend. KDE has K3B which is probably the most user-friendly piece of software ever written. And, of course, your typical Linux distro contains more e-mail clients and text editors than you could shake a stick at.
You can surf the web [Mozilla or Konqueror], send e-mail [Evolution or KMail], write letters [OOo Writer] and do sums [OOo Calc] and burn CDs [GCombust or K3B]. You can run your own office mail server [Exim and Qpopper], intranet [Apache] and database server [MySQL or PostgreSQL].
Even if you don't move over to Open Source, any Closed Source software you have already paid for can still be used on your new machines. If you ever had a licence for Office 97, you can still run one copy of Office 97 on that licence -- that's covered by your statutory (and therefore inalienable) right of fair use. And if Office 97 was good enough for you seven years ago, why isn't it good enough today?
Perhaps the reason why people aren't spending money on software anymore is because they really don't have to?
You did the right thing. If it's valid XHTML 1.1 with CSS, then it conforms to the standard. If MSIE can't render things that conform to the standard then it's broken. It may be popular -- in fact it may be all but a monopoly -- but that does not make it right. When 95% of people believed the Sun revolved around the Earth, did it? If you continue to support IE rather than to support standards-compliant browsers, then you are caving in to the tyranny of mob rule. I suggest something like this;
<? if (preg_match("/msie/i", $HTTP_USER_AGENT)) { echo "Download a proper browser now at <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/">www.mozilla.org</a> \n"; die(); }; ?>
And that's tame compared to some of what I've been cooking up for visitors to my site.
Seriously, all this fuss is being made because people aren't paying record companies money anymore. You know what? I couldn't give a fuck. Record companies made every penny they ever earned because the ability to manufacture recorded media was scarce. Now it isn't -- thanks to the Internet, ready availability of CD burners, compressed audio formats, portable devices, and so forth, just about anyone can make records. I'm almost surprised the RIAA aren't trying to demand that you buy a licence to own an instrument (after all, performing a song might be construed as copying it, in some warped, twisted way).
Of course, before you can make a record, you first need a song. Musical talent is a scarce commodity -- and the person whose voice is on the record is the only one whose job can't be done by someone else, and probably for less money. Everyone else is just a middleman, and is totally replaceable. That, the record companies need to realise, is how the real world works.
My proposed new business model for the recording industry works like this. A singer or band borrows some money to cover the overheads of hiring a studio, session musicians, producers, making a glass master, stamping CDs, designing and printing booklets, and so on (of course they may well already have some equipment of their own, so they won't need to borrow as much); and then sells the CDs at such a price as to recoup that loan and make a profit for themself. Like any other business venture, the money is lent on the understanding that the recorded performance will be of a sufficient standard that the resulting product will be saleable. Until the moment when the loan has been paid off, the lender has lien over the CDs and the content in them, and can prevent anyone else from distributing independent copies; but as soon as the loan is paid off, then control reverts to the original performer (until the work goes PD, anyway; and if the work goes PD during the lender's lien, that just serves them right for picking the wrong person to lend money to). Some fancy wording will almost certainly be required to prevent any shenanigans, e.g. where the artist holds out on the last pound and so the music still belongs to the lender.
I would also make it law that, once any debt incurred in making a recording is paid in full, then an artist must allow anyone to distribute copies of their work, for a fixed fee -- which would be the same amount irrespective of who does the distributing, and irrespective of the format in which the recording is made or the medium on which it is stored. This fee would be applied whenever a permanent recording of a copyrighted work changes hands, unless in the course of transfer the supplier loses the ability to make further copies. The onus would be on the supplier if any payment is made to the supplier, or on the recipient otherwise. (So I can make a free copy of an album I own for my MP3 player, but I have to pay to make a copy of my friend's album; and I would not have to pay anything if I sold a CD outright, unless I retained any copies of the songs on it. If my friend made a copy of one of my albums, it would be my friend's responsibility to pay the artist -- unless my friend bought me a pint, in which case I would owe the artist.)
It's also quite feasible that a few local bands could get together, pool their resources, and produce an album each without having to borrow any money against their "audible collateral" (for want of a better phrase to describe it).
You can support as many USB memory devices as uou have sd_ entries in/dev. If you configure your/etc/fstab properly, you can allow non-root users to mount them; the device then belongs to the user who mounted it, and can have a default umask which keeps other users from accessing it.
Mandrake has something called "supermount" which takes care of mounting and unmounting removable devices {USB devices, floppies, CDs &c.} thereby avoiding the need to open an Xterm and enter "mount -tvfat/dev/sda1/mnt/usbmem". It's just within the bounds of conceivability that this might have been hacked in such a way as to determine the electrical path to a USB storage device, see if there is a keyboard attached to the same hub, and assign ownership of the device to the user logged in at that keyboard.
Go ahead and call the old Bill. Simple trespass is a civil offence, not a criminal offence -- there is nothing the police can do about it, because it's out of their remit. Of course, if they start using more than reasonable force to try to get rid of you, the cops can arrest them!
Exactly..... they're a gamble. Next time you're in a bookie's shop -- preferably around the time of some important sporting fixture, so it's nice and packed -- add up the estimated total wealth of all the punters, and compare it to the estimated total wealth of the owner.
On which side of the glass is there more money?
That's not to say you can't make money out of gambling, far from it. If you can estimate the odds better than the bookie, then you're on a winning ticket. But electronic component failure is fairly random -- more like the lottery or the roulette table -- whereas performances in sports are somewhat predictable (and, crucially for a gambler, can be influenced by events occurring after the odds have been fixed, but before the game is played).
Yeah..... tell you what, why don't I return the favour, and suggest you check out Simpson's Paradox?
It's not unreasonable to suppose that the market share of Windows could be skewing the figures in a way that makes Windows look more secure than it really is, because one isolated incident on a rare kind of machine is going to look like a bigger deal than it really is. When there are more Macs and more Linux desktops out there, we will have a fairer comparison.
All it means is that there are still clueless people using computers. I already know that. Sometimes I think it's a damn shame viruses can't do the kind of real, permanent damage that shocks a clue into people -- if there is such a thing. For once I'm actually wishing for a SCO story.
Please, please, please, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but please, for crying out loud, please if anyone ever asks you about buying a new computer, just point them towards the nearest Apple authorised reseller. If they complain about the price, point out that the inherent usability and security designed into Mac OS X from the ground up will more than pay for itself in terms of not cursing and screaming at the damn thing every time you boot it up. If that doesn't work, mention that Macs are prettier. If that still doesn't work, give them six months tops before you're saying "I told you so".
Windows may be popular but that doesn't make it any good.
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This isn't to say that Windows boxes don't fail for genuine reasons; but false alarms are common enough that anything that can't be fixed by depowering and repowering usually gets scrapped.
What RMS means by "Freedom of choice is deceptively attractive because people who focus on choice can easily be undermined" is that, if the local tobacconist's shop sells fifty different kinds of fags but they all give you lung cancer, then you don't really have a choice ..... whichever ones you smoke, you're going to end up the same way.
No person is an island. Everything that you have, and everything that you are, comes in some greater or lesser measure at the expense of others. All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity.
If you want to live in a civilised society -- with things like clean water, sanitation, electricity, free health care, telecommunications, paved roads, free education, and so forth, all the things that we quite rightly take for granted -- then you have to expect to make some kind of contribution towards that. You also have to realise that the amount of effort it would take to calculate exactly how much every single person deserves to pay as their personally-weighted contribution towards arranging all this, would mean that the person who pays the least under the new "fair" system would actually be paying more than they are paying today. Look at the history of the penny post for a good example. In other words, a little unfairness is benefitting you right now.
Exactly. I mean, I paid good money for this machete, and god damn it, now you pinko commie jerks tell me I can't stab little kiddies with MY knife that I bought and PAID FOR with my OWN money?????
The point of the GPL is that the things it doesn't allow you to do, are the things that would cause software not to be free anymore. The GPL does not allow you to modify GPL software and release it in closed-source form -- IMHO this is the major omission from the BSD licence -- and it does not allow you to use discriminatory patent licencing to subvert the non-discriminatory nature of the GPL.
Anyway, why should the GPL permit you to use GPL software in a closed source project? Even if RMS et al did not believe that closed source software is evil, the fact remains that other people wrote that software, not you; and if you base a derivative work on it, the copyright generally stays with the original author {unless your modifications are so extensive as to constitute a new work in their own right; but that is for the courts to decide}. The people who wrote it in the first place wanted it to be shared with everyone; you don't want to share your version with everyone, but you don't mind accepting something that someone was trying to share with you. Just how hypocritical can you get?
Abstraction layers are fine and dandy, but sooner or later there comes a point where you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty dealing with actual data. So you can have this independent of that and whatever, but at the end of the day you have to move some data into or out of the database -- and no amount of pretending will change that.
.....
..... it won't really matter whether your pretty diagrammatical representation of a programme is turned into C, Perl, Python, Lisp, Visual Basic, ASP.Net or Lua.
If you "ride the metal", then you can run as fast as the system will allow you. The more layers of independence you try to add, the slower it will run. This is a fact. If you truly know for certain that you are never, ever going to use a different back end, then it is a complete waste of effort pretending you might. On the other hand, if you ever do need to use a different back end, then you might be in for a lot of work
I guess the madness will only end when we get a set of common "drag and drool" development environments that effectively create a programming language abstraction layer
..... so we have no ASPs, but plenty of Pythons!
And therein lies the problem.
When the US constitution was written, nobody could have foreseen that one day, the technology would exist that would enable a manufacturer to sell something which effectively kept a secret from its rightful owner. If you bought a locked box, you could always split it open. If you bought something tiny, you could always look at it through a microscope. It just wasn't anything to be bothered about. (This is the same thinking as "you could always sneak off into the woods somewhere to be sure of having a private conversation".) It was simply inconceivable that that "right" could be violated, and therefore, it wasn't viewed as worthy of protection -- it would have been about as sensible as a law today issuing speeding tickets for anybody caught travelling at more than 300 megametres per second. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers wanted to keep the laws fair and few. Banning the impossible would have been a Bad Law -- it was redundant, because there was no conceivable way to break it, and also it might encourage future lawmakers to create redundant laws.
Fast forward 200-odd years and see how things have changed. Now it is physically possible to attempt to keep details of a purchased product secret from its rightful owner, with a high barrier to discovery; though this is clearly at odds with common law property rights. And the rest of the world seems hell-bent on adopting US-style law.
What we basically need is a new law clarifying -- for it is not, by any leap of imagination, a new right, but dates back to the time before it was physically possible even to violate that right -- that the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is, by sole virtue of such ownership, automatically privy to {but may be bound to keep} any and every secret contained within that piece of hardware. For manufacturers to attempt to keep secrets from the very people who pay their wages is very broken, and should not be tolerated. There might be some predictable protest from manufacturers, upset at the though of competitors knowing their secrets -- but the chances are that your competitors have already reverse-engineered your secrets. (side note: should we try ATI for open source nVidia drivers?) Furthermore, there are such things as patents, which oblige other people to pay you money before they make any money out of your ideas (at least until such time as you ought to have made enough money out of them and now it's everyone else's turn) which actually can be used properly.
(Of course, such a law may turn out to be unnecessary: it is entirely conceivable that a future technological change will restore the situation where keeping secrets from your customers is impossible.)
Who cares about a crap closed-source database? We have Postgres, which has features, and we have MySQL, which has speed. The trends of evolution suggest that (1) processor speeds will increase, making Postgres appear less slow; and (2) MySQL will adopt more features, gradually losing its "toy" reputation. And that's even assuming some new upstart competitor doesn't emerge onto the scene to leave them both standing. We already don't need the likes of Oracle, and we will be needing them even less in future.
Imagine a very long, stiff rod. Now when you push, pull or twist one end, the other end must also move. But it can never take less time to transmit this movement than the time it would take a photon to reach the other end, otherwise information would be travelling faster than light, which is Not Allowed. (*)
..... and botany .....
Think of it as being like a load of tennis balls in a drainpipe: you stick one in your end, the next one squashes a bit, then moves a bit and recovers its shape, squashing the next one a bit, and so on. The molecules are not bonded to each other with absolute rigidity. And there is a quantum limit to how stiff matter could ever be.
Which fits right in with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, somehow or other. At least, it did when I was conducting experiments outside of the realms of physics and more into the domains of chemistry
* OK, two particles which always have opposite spin, blah blah blah, one in your lab, one in a spaceship several gigametres away, you expend an obscene amount of energy reversing the spin on yours, and the spin on the far one reverses at the exact same time. But so what? You can't use the phenomenon to impart any useful information to the other party. You already knew that the spins would always be opposite.
I don't find "viral" licences half as repulsive as I find the idea that someone could take the code I wrote with the intention of sharing it with everybody, modify it just a little bit, and refuse to share it with anyone.
If you take the view that closed source is evil -- and I mean evil in the same sort of way that slavery is evil -- then the GPL's prohibition against closed-source derivatives is admirable.
People who think the French are arrogant probably just have not tried speaking to them in their own language.
The French are a wonderfully polite race. All they ask is that you make some sort of effort to fit in with their culture and their language. It's their country, and they feel they have a right to expect it of you. Even if it is only just saying "Bonjour" [hello], "J'en veux comme celui-la, s'il vous plait" [I want one like that, please] and "Ou est la toilette?" [Where is the toilet?]
Once you have indicated that you are making at least some small token attempt, then you will be treated to the usual Continental hospitality. Speak English to a Frenchman in France, though, and you have just earned yourself an enemy for life.
It's nice to see that someone is making Open Source -- or should that be Logiciel Lisible Libre? -- "official". If this licence stands up to the scrutiny of the courts, and with official backing there really is no reason to suppose otherwise, then it's an important step in the right direction. The licence overcomes the Great Omission of BSD -- that is, it explicitly states that if you distribute modified binaries you must also make the source available -- and even provides explicit permission to use the GPL as an alternative licence.
How long before there is a full-on, EU-wide Open Source push? What with rampant piracy in the former Eastern Bloc countries, official approval for the fair alternative can only benefit ordinary people.
In the beginning it was LP versus CD. (Nobody mentioned cassette, except to ask how come a bootleg recorded from an LP on a 99p ferric cassette using a 49 quid midi system sounded better than a store-bought original.) Now that the recording companies have all but killed off LP, hi-fi bores (if I called them "audiophiles" there would most probably be a mob of News of the World readers standing outside their homes, waving placards and pouring petrol through their letter boxes) need something else over which to disagree.
So we're back to silicon vs. vacuum. Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, transistors were still just expensive enough that they were still competing with valves, and a tranny amp from that vintage -- if it's been fitted with new capacitors, which degrade over time -- will sound as good as a cheap valve amp from the same vintage. It had to, because the competition was there. Today, valves are strictly in the realm of esoterica, and modern IC / transistor kit doesn't have to try to compete with them.
But it's a highly subjective area, and "scientifically perfect" reproduction (identical waveshapes, just different amplitudes) is not necessarily right for the ear. There is little doubt that the distortion characteristic of transistors is harsher than that of valves. This is because, by trying to be "scientifically perfect", they hit the supply rails easily. (Recall that valves use supply rails between 100-500V and require transformers to match to low-impedance loudspeakers; transistors are driving the speaker directly, 20W RMS at 8 ohms is 36Vp-p or +-18V). So with valves, there is more headroom. Deliberate slew rate limitation also helps, by giving a different type of distortion (never quite making it, which gives even harmonics, rather than trying to overshoot and maxing out, which gives odd harmonics). Odd harmonics are reckoned to have a harsher sound than even ones. In fact, modern op-amps, with almost DC-RF bandwidth and consequently slew rates in volts/nanosecond, are as harsh as you'll get.
Bottom line, if somebody spent a fortune on an amplifier -- beyond the point where the Law of Diminishing Returns sets in -- they must think it's good, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. And there's unlikely to be any way of convincing them any different.
BTW, the first commercial use of transistor power amps was in juke boxes. My dad has a 1962 Seeburg with a 25+25 watt power amp (transformer coupled, has 100V line outputs, C/T to chassis so you can easily arrange mono speakers, taking 1/2 of LH signal plus 1/2 of RH signal in series) and also a power oscillator to run the motor at 45RPM (it does 33rpm on 50Hz so it needs 68Hz for 45RPM; it actually cheats by starting at 33RPM then switching to 45RPM, so it doesn't need to cope with the starting surge. A stationary motor looks like a short circuit). I don't think this was the first juke box to have a transistor amplifier, though, because I've seen one in a 1957 Wurlitzer (but this may have been a retrofit).
Back in 1989-92, when I was at Aston University, we used to have a few VAX/VMS systems: two 11/750s {may have been 780s} and a cluster of two 8650s. I remember writing a few programmes in DCL {think the power of bash, the verbosity of COBOL}, VAX Pascal {which was kind of similar to Turbo Pascal} and FORTRAN. I also wrote what eventually ended up becoming a very popular "alternative" user guide. But my real claim to fame is that I also wrote a programme on that VAX -- I'm not sure what language it was in, might even have been BASIC -- which passed a rough-and-ready Turing test, simulating what could only be described as a precursor to today's internet chat rooms. Unfortunately, the tester was someone to whom the phrase "sharpest knife in the drawer" could hardly be applied, so the test probably was not valid.
R.I.P., VAX.
Thank you. You have made an excellent point (and earned yourself a blue dot on my postings). Microsoft and the like benefit enormously from "pirate" copies of Office, Photohop, Dreamweaver and so forth because people get used to them. And vendors of less expensive, competing products suffer because people choose the "free" copies of the "expensive" software just for the bigger apparent saving. Yet these small software vendors are the ones worst placed to do anything about the proliferation of copies -- while the major players usch as Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia can afford blithely to ignore it.
It's not "piracy" that's hurting the little guys' business -- it's the big guys not doing anything about it. If Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia et al were forced to chase up a certain proportion of copying incidents or risk losing their copyrights, then for sure we'd see more people moving towards the real alternatives that already exist. Microsoft know that they have about as much chance of selling Office Professional to John Willy as they have of selling a bra to Charlie Dimmock. On the other hand, if John Willy is using a dodgy copy of Office Pro, then he's not going to buy some Fred-in-the-Shed outfit's cheap and cheerful 49.95 office suite. That's how "piracy" "harms" businesses.
BTW, just for the record, I do not use closed-source software at home nor at work.
In the UK, television stations can show whatever they like after 21.00; I don't know when in the morning they are obliged to start being "family-friendly". In Mainland Europe, I believe the system is even simpler: everyone understands that television broadcasts are {primarily} for adults, and parents are entirely responsible for deciding what their kids should or should not watch.
If you don't like what you see, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to watch it. And if you can't stop your kids watching TV when they shouldn't be, then you are an unfit parent.
that people simply are not using payware any more? Is there really any common task that can only be done using closed-source, commercial software? Bearing in mind that once you have (Perl|PHP|Python) and know what to do with it, you have something like the equivalent of every programme ever written.
Mozilla does more than IE ever will, apart from aid and abet malware writers. OpenOffice is going from strength to strength, while KOffice and AbiWord / Gnumeric are creeping up. There isn't an outright MS Access replacement yet, but let's face it: most people just create a database once and keep adding stuff to it, so it's feasible to deploy a "proper" LAMP-based alternative; a trained monkey can write a bit of PHP to work with a MySQL database (just don't tell my boss), and there's always PHPMyAdmin -- your best friend. KDE has K3B which is probably the most user-friendly piece of software ever written. And, of course, your typical Linux distro contains more e-mail clients and text editors than you could shake a stick at.
You can surf the web [Mozilla or Konqueror], send e-mail [Evolution or KMail], write letters [OOo Writer] and do sums [OOo Calc] and burn CDs [GCombust or K3B]. You can run your own office mail server [Exim and Qpopper], intranet [Apache] and database server [MySQL or PostgreSQL].
Even if you don't move over to Open Source, any Closed Source software you have already paid for can still be used on your new machines. If you ever had a licence for Office 97, you can still run one copy of Office 97 on that licence -- that's covered by your statutory (and therefore inalienable) right of fair use. And if Office 97 was good enough for you seven years ago, why isn't it good enough today?
Perhaps the reason why people aren't spending money on software anymore is because they really don't have to?
..... when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Seriously, all this fuss is being made because people aren't paying record companies money anymore. You know what? I couldn't give a fuck. Record companies made every penny they ever earned because the ability to manufacture recorded media was scarce. Now it isn't -- thanks to the Internet, ready availability of CD burners, compressed audio formats, portable devices, and so forth, just about anyone can make records. I'm almost surprised the RIAA aren't trying to demand that you buy a licence to own an instrument (after all, performing a song might be construed as copying it, in some warped, twisted way).
Of course, before you can make a record, you first need a song. Musical talent is a scarce commodity -- and the person whose voice is on the record is the only one whose job can't be done by someone else, and probably for less money. Everyone else is just a middleman, and is totally replaceable. That, the record companies need to realise, is how the real world works.
My proposed new business model for the recording industry works like this. A singer or band borrows some money to cover the overheads of hiring a studio, session musicians, producers, making a glass master, stamping CDs, designing and printing booklets, and so on (of course they may well already have some equipment of their own, so they won't need to borrow as much); and then sells the CDs at such a price as to recoup that loan and make a profit for themself. Like any other business venture, the money is lent on the understanding that the recorded performance will be of a sufficient standard that the resulting product will be saleable. Until the moment when the loan has been paid off, the lender has lien over the CDs and the content in them, and can prevent anyone else from distributing independent copies; but as soon as the loan is paid off, then control reverts to the original performer (until the work goes PD, anyway; and if the work goes PD during the lender's lien, that just serves them right for picking the wrong person to lend money to). Some fancy wording will almost certainly be required to prevent any shenanigans, e.g. where the artist holds out on the last pound and so the music still belongs to the lender.
I would also make it law that, once any debt incurred in making a recording is paid in full, then an artist must allow anyone to distribute copies of their work, for a fixed fee -- which would be the same amount irrespective of who does the distributing, and irrespective of the format in which the recording is made or the medium on which it is stored. This fee would be applied whenever a permanent recording of a copyrighted work changes hands, unless in the course of transfer the supplier loses the ability to make further copies. The onus would be on the supplier if any payment is made to the supplier, or on the recipient otherwise. (So I can make a free copy of an album I own for my MP3 player, but I have to pay to make a copy of my friend's album; and I would not have to pay anything if I sold a CD outright, unless I retained any copies of the songs on it. If my friend made a copy of one of my albums, it would be my friend's responsibility to pay the artist -- unless my friend bought me a pint, in which case I would owe the artist.)
It's also quite feasible that a few local bands could get together, pool their resources, and produce an album each without having to borrow any money against their "audible collateral" (for want of a better phrase to describe it).
You can support as many USB memory devices as uou have sd_ entries in /dev. If you configure your /etc/fstab properly, you can allow non-root users to mount them; the device then belongs to the user who mounted it, and can have a default umask which keeps other users from accessing it.
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbmem". It's just within the bounds of conceivability that this might have been hacked in such a way as to determine the electrical path to a USB storage device, see if there is a keyboard attached to the same hub, and assign ownership of the device to the user logged in at that keyboard.
Mandrake has something called "supermount" which takes care of mounting and unmounting removable devices {USB devices, floppies, CDs &c.} thereby avoiding the need to open an Xterm and enter "mount -tvfat
Go ahead and call the old Bill. Simple trespass is a civil offence, not a criminal offence -- there is nothing the police can do about it, because it's out of their remit. Of course, if they start using more than reasonable force to try to get rid of you, the cops can arrest them!
Exactly ..... they're a gamble. Next time you're in a bookie's shop -- preferably around the time of some important sporting fixture, so it's nice and packed -- add up the estimated total wealth of all the punters, and compare it to the estimated total wealth of the owner.
On which side of the glass is there more money?
That's not to say you can't make money out of gambling, far from it. If you can estimate the odds better than the bookie, then you're on a winning ticket. But electronic component failure is fairly random -- more like the lottery or the roulette table -- whereas performances in sports are somewhat predictable (and, crucially for a gambler, can be influenced by events occurring after the odds have been fixed, but before the game is played).
Yeah ..... tell you what, why don't I return the favour, and suggest you check out Simpson's Paradox?
It's not unreasonable to suppose that the market share of Windows could be skewing the figures in a way that makes Windows look more secure than it really is, because one isolated incident on a rare kind of machine is going to look like a bigger deal than it really is. When there are more Macs and more Linux desktops out there, we will have a fairer comparison.
All it means is that there are still clueless people using computers. I already know that. Sometimes I think it's a damn shame viruses can't do the kind of real, permanent damage that shocks a clue into people -- if there is such a thing. For once I'm actually wishing for a SCO story.
Please, please, please, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but please, for crying out loud, please if anyone ever asks you about buying a new computer, just point them towards the nearest Apple authorised reseller. If they complain about the price, point out that the inherent usability and security designed into Mac OS X from the ground up will more than pay for itself in terms of not cursing and screaming at the damn thing every time you boot it up. If that doesn't work, mention that Macs are prettier. If that still doesn't work, give them six months tops before you're saying "I told you so".
Windows may be popular but that doesn't make it any good.