But IE binaries are given away free, so you can't really "pirate" it -- unless you are installing it on some non-Windows system by means of API emulation (e.g. WINE) which probably is not permitted by the licence.
Why would you switch away from Gentoo? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious. As a long term Debian user {formerly a Mandrake user}, I tried a brief fling with Gentoo a year or so back. It did everything Debian did, but it didn't really seem to do it any better than Debian. The biggest difference seemed to be that "apt-get install foo" was replaced by "emerge foo". I put up with it till the HDD in the box died the death, then went back to Debian for its replacement.
Had I discovered Gentoo before Debian, I'm quite sure that's what I would have eventually stuck with; I had reached the limitations of Mandrake {as it was then known} and needed a more powerful system with a bigger package repository. There's little to choose between Gentoo and Debian, IMHO. And Ubuntu is really just Debian, but pre-configured a certain way.
That is no excuse. You can load up a computer with all the software you're likely to need without ever paying a single penny for it, and without going against the wishes of the copyright holders.
As an aside, using serious alternatives to Microsoft products will most certainly annoy Microsoft far more than using pirated copies of Microsoft products ever could.
I read (a long time ago!) that if you ever go on a calorie-controlled diet, you should try eating from a smaller plate. The reason given was that it will look as though you have eaten more than you really have.
I went to a restaurant once that quite assuredly did not work on this principle! The plates were enormous, but the portions were minuscule -- and a bit undercooked. The toilets were clean, though.
The only thing you need is some shielding to protect cable from RFI (it's real and measurable - try to put your cell phone next to speakers)
Close, but no cigar. It'll only work if there's an amplifier connected to the speaker. Place a mobile phone next to a speaker which is not connected to an amplifier, and you won't hear a blind thing. Connect a cable and short out the far end. Again, rien.
And now: The Physics! Most modern hi-fi systems are designed for 8 ohm speakers. Loudspeakers are inductive, so at higher frequencies they have a higher impedance. At UHF, a loudspeaker is practically an open-circuit -- so the cable makes quite a good antenna. Most amplifiers employ negative feedback, so there is a connection from the output to the input. The idea is that as long as the feedback circuit behaves linearly, which it ought to do since it consists of only passive components, then the system consisting of the amplifier and its feedback circuit will behave more linearly than the amplifier -- at the expense of gain. Since we can build amplifiers with gain to spare nowadays, this isn't even a trade-off.
Unfortunately, while the feedback circuit may be linear at audio frequencies, it's not linear at UHF. Everything looks like an inductor, solder joints look like leaky diodes and P-N junctions can't change from conducting to not-conducting quickly enough to rectify. So you get some grossly-distorted and partially rectified (mostly by parasitic junctions in the soldering) version of the RF signal coupled back from the speaker cables to the amplifier input. And mobile telephony is digital, so the signals have lots of sharp edges.
For a cure, stick the biggest ceramic capacitor you can find (it'll probably be 100nF) across the amplifier's output terminals -- and add more like it on the power lines of the output amplifier ICs (or between the collector and emitter of the output transistors).
I always get a little uneasy whenever I see or hear the word "audiophile". For some reason, it conjures up images of a mob of angry News of the World readers brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.
Well, there's a thing with RAW formats. Many manufacturers keep them closely guarded secrets and with good reason. Getting images with 6 megapixels and 12/36-bit colour out of a a two-megapixel, 8/24-bit sensor requires very special techniques. Most people would want to keep very quiet indeed about how they were doing that.
Or like the Deluxe Paint became the graphics editor for the Amiga by being bundled with every Amiga sold? Only snag is, camera manufacturers are already being paid to include cut-down, ad-ridden versions of software with their cameras. Why on earth would they include a competing application without any baksheesh?
Also, a standard Windows installation doesn't include a compiler (one: so Microsoft can charge you extra, and two: so Ordinary People can't just write their own software and bypass Microsoft altogether). So you'd have to have pre-compiled versions of both GIMP and GTK2 for the various Windows versions.
The real killer, though, is that GIMP works with Linux and Mac OS X. Microsoft are paying hardware manufacturers not to mention that their hardware is compatible with Linux or OS X. The presence of a bundled GPL application with the camera would rather go against that, since compliance with Clause Three would make it obvious that the camera was in fact compatible with non-Windows systems.
You know, I wonder if there isn't some law that could be "creatively" interpreted as saying that all these people who write £19.99 books on how to use a £500 piece of software are guilty of aiding and abetting piracy or something similar.
I mean, if the USDMCA can be used against a manufacturer of universal remote controls (unfortunately for the plaintiff, "raw telemetry data" is outside the scope of copyright)..... a cheap book which anyone can buy anonymously with no requirement to prove you have a valid licence to use the software, sounds highly dodgy.
Most of what you think is "intuitive" is, in fact, learned behaviour. There's not a lot about a motor car that's intuitive -- for a start, there are more pedals than you have feet, and the one that's smaller than the other two is the one you use the most. In addition, the position of "reverse" varies from make to make; on a Ford, it's right and back, but on a Vauxhall, it's left and forward.
People seem to have lost the ability to deal with abstract concepts anymore.
Well, that's not surprising. The applications that run on Linux are (with a few irrelevant exceptions) Open Source. This means that they will work, possibly subject to some slight modification, on any hardware that has a compiler for the language in which they were written; and nobody is allowed to try to deny you access to them.
People who write software for Windows are only interested in making money from it, so they usually release it as closed-source "shareware" where you are expected to pay money to enable certain features. Patches partially to circumvent this extortion are available from various malware-ridden websites.
Re-partition your drive so as to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Scan your images in Windows. Reboot into Linux to edit them.
And hassle Microtek! The most likely explanation for them not releasing specs that would enable the writing of a driver for *any* OS is that they are making bullshit claims in respect of the capabilities of the hardware; you can't pretend to have 38400dpi resolution at 96 bits per pixel if the specifications reveal only 300dpi at 30 bits.
But, since Novell don't hold the copyright on OpenOffice.org, they won't easily be able to distribute it with proprietary extensions -- they'll still have to give out the source for the LGPL-covered parts and won't be allowed to use any full-GPL covered code. Their proprietary extensions should be susceptible to reverse-engineering and re-implementation; and software patents are not enforcible outside the USA, so it looks as though The Rest Of The World will get the advantage.
The LGPL obliges you to (make a promise to) hand over source code for all covered components when you distribute a covered work. Sun would be completely within their rights to distribute StarOffice + this patch on CD, with a directory containing the source code to this patch.
Point is, they don't want to. A "we own this and you can't look at it blob" is exactly what they want to provide. A "we own this and you can't look at it blob" is also what the rest of the world is slowly waking up and seeing is a Very Bad Idea.
Sun insist that you assign copyright to them, so that they can use your code in their proprietary, closed-source StarOffice application. This is almost exactly like OpenOffice.org -- except that you have to pay for it, and you're restricted how many copies you can make and how many computers you can use it on. (The LGPL ordinarily forbids a completely closed-source release; you can link a closed-source program against an LGPL program, but you have to make the Source Code for the LGPL part available -- unless, of course, you are the copyright holder.)
FSF suggest that you assign copyright to them, in order that you can benefit from their legal services. If someone tries to rip off a GPL application over which they have copyright, FSF can bitch-slap the offender on your behalf. You can write GPL code without reassigning copyright; but if someone misuses it, it's your responsibility to keelhaul the pirates.
There have already been temporary OO.o forks from Debian; first they built a Java-free OO.o, then some or other Debian developer managed to build a 64-bit-clean OO.o before the "official" Sun one.
Anyway, as long as one of the forked versions is released under the GPL (you can re-licence LGPL code to "full" GPL, but not the other way around) then there is no reason for version proliferation to happen. Even GPL v2/3 compatibility issues will sort themselves out in time. It will be legal to take LGPL code into a GPL project; but anyone still using the LGPL will have to rewrite new from scratch any new code that was released under GPL or else move to mixed-licencing.
What's most likely to happen is that Sun will have to swallow their pride and begin accepting contributions without copyright reassignment -- meaning they can't be integrated into the proprietary StarOffice. But in reality, the sort of person who pays for StarOffice is the sort of person who'd pay for OpenOffice.org on a CD and not notice the difference. StarOffice won't be missed.
Yes, because in the absolute worst case you can always compile the necessary bits and link them yourself, on your own machine. The "derivative work" you are then creating constitutes Fair Dealing (since otherwise, one or both components would be unfit for their rightful purpose); although it would infringe copyright if you passed it on to any third party (possibly, if you even so much as showed it to any third party; while it's obvious what "showing" means in the case of a video/audio recording or book, the position w.r.t. a computer program is less clear.)
As opposed to the energy that would have been expended manufacturing and transporting brand new computers, which wouldn't have used any less energy than the old ones anyway before they, too are tossed into a different landfill because the first one is full of old computers?
That's the point: you can persuade the program inside the virtual environment that 20 seconds really have elapsed. Because the only way it can find out what its own clock speed is, is to run some sort of timing loop which lasts for a known number of clock cycles; and then check that against some internal clock on the motherboard (using a known method). And the only way it can access that internal clock, is via your virtualisation layer (so you can alter the information in transit). So when it goes off to check with an external timing source, it appears to be dead right.
If the program decides that a 300MHz processor is absurdly slow (therefore possibly indicating that it's being probed) and refuses to run, nil desperandum; from the instructions most recently executed, you know exactly what it was doing when it did the test. So when you run the program again, this time you are prepared to fiddle the result -- the compare instruction at the relevant address just has to return the favourable result.
No it's not. Remember, you can control how many clock cycles the program on the inside thinks have elapsed. So even if it does manage successfully to ask someone else the time (by some method that would slip past your "blue pencil"), it won't have any reason to doubt the answer that comes back.
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But IE binaries are given away free, so you can't really "pirate" it -- unless you are installing it on some non-Windows system by means of API emulation (e.g. WINE) which probably is not permitted by the licence.
Why would you switch away from Gentoo? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious. As a long term Debian user {formerly a Mandrake user}, I tried a brief fling with Gentoo a year or so back. It did everything Debian did, but it didn't really seem to do it any better than Debian. The biggest difference seemed to be that "apt-get install foo" was replaced by "emerge foo". I put up with it till the HDD in the box died the death, then went back to Debian for its replacement.
Had I discovered Gentoo before Debian, I'm quite sure that's what I would have eventually stuck with; I had reached the limitations of Mandrake {as it was then known} and needed a more powerful system with a bigger package repository. There's little to choose between Gentoo and Debian, IMHO. And Ubuntu is really just Debian, but pre-configured a certain way.
Why are we still getting these spam posts that go to the error page where a picture that some might consider to be offensive used to be hosted?
I could understand spam posts going to a shock picture, but not an error message.
That is no excuse. You can load up a computer with all the software you're likely to need without ever paying a single penny for it, and without going against the wishes of the copyright holders.
As an aside, using serious alternatives to Microsoft products will most certainly annoy Microsoft far more than using pirated copies of Microsoft products ever could.
I read (a long time ago!) that if you ever go on a calorie-controlled diet, you should try eating from a smaller plate. The reason given was that it will look as though you have eaten more than you really have.
I went to a restaurant once that quite assuredly did not work on this principle! The plates were enormous, but the portions were minuscule -- and a bit undercooked. The toilets were clean, though.
Humans can't distinguish well between any languages they don't speak. This was the premise for The Murders in the Rue Morgue .
Well, normally you just s/^([tT][hH][eE])\s*(\S.*)$/\2, the/ -- but then, what do you do when filing CDs by the pop group The The ?
And now: The Physics! Most modern hi-fi systems are designed for 8 ohm speakers. Loudspeakers are inductive, so at higher frequencies they have a higher impedance. At UHF, a loudspeaker is practically an open-circuit -- so the cable makes quite a good antenna. Most amplifiers employ negative feedback, so there is a connection from the output to the input. The idea is that as long as the feedback circuit behaves linearly, which it ought to do since it consists of only passive components, then the system consisting of the amplifier and its feedback circuit will behave more linearly than the amplifier -- at the expense of gain. Since we can build amplifiers with gain to spare nowadays, this isn't even a trade-off.
Unfortunately, while the feedback circuit may be linear at audio frequencies, it's not linear at UHF. Everything looks like an inductor, solder joints look like leaky diodes and P-N junctions can't change from conducting to not-conducting quickly enough to rectify. So you get some grossly-distorted and partially rectified (mostly by parasitic junctions in the soldering) version of the RF signal coupled back from the speaker cables to the amplifier input. And mobile telephony is digital, so the signals have lots of sharp edges.
For a cure, stick the biggest ceramic capacitor you can find (it'll probably be 100nF) across the amplifier's output terminals -- and add more like it on the power lines of the output amplifier ICs (or between the collector and emitter of the output transistors).
I always get a little uneasy whenever I see or hear the word "audiophile". For some reason, it conjures up images of a mob of angry News of the World readers brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.
Well, there's a thing with RAW formats. Many manufacturers keep them closely guarded secrets and with good reason. Getting images with 6 megapixels and 12/36-bit colour out of a a two-megapixel, 8/24-bit sensor requires very special techniques. Most people would want to keep very quiet indeed about how they were doing that.
Or like the Deluxe Paint became the graphics editor for the Amiga by being bundled with every Amiga sold? Only snag is, camera manufacturers are already being paid to include cut-down, ad-ridden versions of software with their cameras. Why on earth would they include a competing application without any baksheesh?
Also, a standard Windows installation doesn't include a compiler (one: so Microsoft can charge you extra, and two: so Ordinary People can't just write their own software and bypass Microsoft altogether). So you'd have to have pre-compiled versions of both GIMP and GTK2 for the various Windows versions.
The real killer, though, is that GIMP works with Linux and Mac OS X. Microsoft are paying hardware manufacturers not to mention that their hardware is compatible with Linux or OS X. The presence of a bundled GPL application with the camera would rather go against that, since compliance with Clause Three would make it obvious that the camera was in fact compatible with non-Windows systems.
You know, I wonder if there isn't some law that could be "creatively" interpreted as saying that all these people who write £19.99 books on how to use a £500 piece of software are guilty of aiding and abetting piracy or something similar.
..... a cheap book which anyone can buy anonymously with no requirement to prove you have a valid licence to use the software, sounds highly dodgy.
I mean, if the USDMCA can be used against a manufacturer of universal remote controls (unfortunately for the plaintiff, "raw telemetry data" is outside the scope of copyright)
Most of what you think is "intuitive" is, in fact, learned behaviour. There's not a lot about a motor car that's intuitive -- for a start, there are more pedals than you have feet, and the one that's smaller than the other two is the one you use the most. In addition, the position of "reverse" varies from make to make; on a Ford, it's right and back, but on a Vauxhall, it's left and forward.
People seem to have lost the ability to deal with abstract concepts anymore.
Well, that's not surprising. The applications that run on Linux are (with a few irrelevant exceptions) Open Source. This means that they will work, possibly subject to some slight modification, on any hardware that has a compiler for the language in which they were written; and nobody is allowed to try to deny you access to them.
People who write software for Windows are only interested in making money from it, so they usually release it as closed-source "shareware" where you are expected to pay money to enable certain features. Patches partially to circumvent this extortion are available from various malware-ridden websites.
I run every application on a separate virtual desktop. Isn't that the proper way anyway?
Re-partition your drive so as to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Scan your images in Windows. Reboot into Linux to edit them.
And hassle Microtek! The most likely explanation for them not releasing specs that would enable the writing of a driver for *any* OS is that they are making bullshit claims in respect of the capabilities of the hardware; you can't pretend to have 38400dpi resolution at 96 bits per pixel if the specifications reveal only 300dpi at 30 bits.
But, since Novell don't hold the copyright on OpenOffice.org, they won't easily be able to distribute it with proprietary extensions -- they'll still have to give out the source for the LGPL-covered parts and won't be allowed to use any full-GPL covered code. Their proprietary extensions should be susceptible to reverse-engineering and re-implementation; and software patents are not enforcible outside the USA, so it looks as though The Rest Of The World will get the advantage.
You're right, because I oversimplified.
The LGPL obliges you to (make a promise to) hand over source code for all covered components when you distribute a covered work. Sun would be completely within their rights to distribute StarOffice + this patch on CD, with a directory containing the source code to this patch.
Point is, they don't want to. A "we own this and you can't look at it blob" is exactly what they want to provide. A "we own this and you can't look at it blob" is also what the rest of the world is slowly waking up and seeing is a Very Bad Idea.
The problem is that they wouldn't be allowed to incorporate it into StarOffice, or any proprietary software they may wish to develop in future.
Sun insist that you assign copyright to them, so that they can use your code in their proprietary, closed-source StarOffice application. This is almost exactly like OpenOffice.org -- except that you have to pay for it, and you're restricted how many copies you can make and how many computers you can use it on. (The LGPL ordinarily forbids a completely closed-source release; you can link a closed-source program against an LGPL program, but you have to make the Source Code for the LGPL part available -- unless, of course, you are the copyright holder.)
FSF suggest that you assign copyright to them, in order that you can benefit from their legal services. If someone tries to rip off a GPL application over which they have copyright, FSF can bitch-slap the offender on your behalf. You can write GPL code without reassigning copyright; but if someone misuses it, it's your responsibility to keelhaul the pirates.
There have already been temporary OO.o forks from Debian; first they built a Java-free OO.o, then some or other Debian developer managed to build a 64-bit-clean OO.o before the "official" Sun one.
Anyway, as long as one of the forked versions is released under the GPL (you can re-licence LGPL code to "full" GPL, but not the other way around) then there is no reason for version proliferation to happen. Even GPL v2/3 compatibility issues will sort themselves out in time. It will be legal to take LGPL code into a GPL project; but anyone still using the LGPL will have to rewrite new from scratch any new code that was released under GPL or else move to mixed-licencing.
What's most likely to happen is that Sun will have to swallow their pride and begin accepting contributions without copyright reassignment -- meaning they can't be integrated into the proprietary StarOffice. But in reality, the sort of person who pays for StarOffice is the sort of person who'd pay for OpenOffice.org on a CD and not notice the difference. StarOffice won't be missed.
Yes, because in the absolute worst case you can always compile the necessary bits and link them yourself, on your own machine. The "derivative work" you are then creating constitutes Fair Dealing (since otherwise, one or both components would be unfit for their rightful purpose); although it would infringe copyright if you passed it on to any third party (possibly, if you even so much as showed it to any third party; while it's obvious what "showing" means in the case of a video/audio recording or book, the position w.r.t. a computer program is less clear.)
As opposed to the energy that would have been expended manufacturing and transporting brand new computers, which wouldn't have used any less energy than the old ones anyway before they, too are tossed into a different landfill because the first one is full of old computers?
That's the point: you can persuade the program inside the virtual environment that 20 seconds really have elapsed. Because the only way it can find out what its own clock speed is, is to run some sort of timing loop which lasts for a known number of clock cycles; and then check that against some internal clock on the motherboard (using a known method). And the only way it can access that internal clock, is via your virtualisation layer (so you can alter the information in transit). So when it goes off to check with an external timing source, it appears to be dead right.
If the program decides that a 300MHz processor is absurdly slow (therefore possibly indicating that it's being probed) and refuses to run, nil desperandum; from the instructions most recently executed, you know exactly what it was doing when it did the test. So when you run the program again, this time you are prepared to fiddle the result -- the compare instruction at the relevant address just has to return the favourable result.
No it's not. Remember, you can control how many clock cycles the program on the inside thinks have elapsed. So even if it does manage successfully to ask someone else the time (by some method that would slip past your "blue pencil"), it won't have any reason to doubt the answer that comes back.