In the early days, the GNU project were using a BSD kernel. TTBOMK, by the time the GNU project was announced, BSD was already completely free of AT&T code. Though, all the various unix-like systems seem to have a family tree more tangled than the various Royal families of Europe.
No ordinary monitor can display "millions of colours" at the same time. Even a 1280x1024 monitor can only ever be displaying 1 310 720 colours at the same time.
There has been enough fuss recently over "Vista-Certified" graphics drivers that didn't really work well with Vista
Can you point me towards some stories? Not trolling, just genuinely curious as I've not been reading about hardware I don't need (my current nVidia card is working well enough with the i-tal "nv" driver) or software I don't intend to buy.
So if I want XZY driver then I have to install the latest 'beta' kernel because the drivers aren't separate from the kernel.
Yes; or, if you're a level 5 or higher advanced wizard, you could try backporting the driver to the kernel you're already running (just grabbing the XZY module from the newest tree and compiling it against your running kernel may be enough, if your kernel is fairly modern). Note that many distros have pre-compiled kernels for you to download, if you are too lazy to compile your own.
With Linux, compatibility is guaranteed at the source level, not the binary level, and no secret has ever been made of that. If, somehow, the kernel developers managed to miss a huge, gaping hole, meaning that something really major has to be rewritten, the ABI will necessarily change -- and it may be mathematically impossible both to maintain compatibility with legitimate legacy code and fix the flaw. (Look at all the stuff which broke on XP SP2 just because it used, albeit for "legitimate" purposes, the same "features" of Windows 95/98/Me as malware used.) Therefore, the kernel developers' preferred cop-out^Wsolution is not even to bother trying -- just get everyone used to the idea that sometimes, it's necessary to recompile code to make it work.
As a beneficial side-effect, this policy impedes the development of closed-source, binary-only drivers.
I've often wondered about this myself -- could Microsoft actively prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing Linux drivers, just by refusing to certify Windows drivers for any hardware which comes with a Linux driver? And for that matter, have they been doing exactly that?
Now that Windows is moving towards a more locked-down kernel, it's certainly technically feasible. It's probably Anticompetitive Behaviour, but that doesn't seem to be illegal in the USA anymore.
4. Change the law -- so hardware manufacturers are REQUIRED to release documentation so that independent programmers can write drivers, as Theo is calling for, if they want to be allowed to sell their hardware at all.
I believe it is going to require a law, as QuantumG points out that manufacturers are often unwilling to release this information. However, that information is in no way secret -- it forms an integral part of the instructions for using the device. It may not be a chapter that many people are going to read, but that does not make it any less useful. Making it a legal requirement will ensure that all competitors are forced to release their specs together.
(I suppose I also ought to elaborate on this, since "change the law" is a pretty big undertaking. I believe the best chance of this becoming law is in the Mainland EU, where there is a history of pro-competition, pro-consumer and pro-environment lawmaking. A law like this would give consumers more choice {since they can now choose from a greater range of hardware and software combinations} and reduce pollution {from otherwise-serviceable electronics rendered useless by lack of software support}. Additionally, it would prevent dishonest manufacturers from hiding mendacious claims concerning their hardware behind closed-source software {I'm thinking of cases such as where a digital camera labelled as "6 megapixels" actually has only a 2 megapixel image sensor, whose output is interpolated by firmware to a 6 megapixel JPEG image; the RAW file format would reveal this deception, but because it is closed and proprietary, the consumer is hoodwinked into buying an inferior product. Manufacturers of genuine 6 megapixel cameras are forced to choose between playing the same game or selling fewer units at higher prices}. I say "Mainland EU" because once-proud Britain has already sold out to the USA and may well get "black-balled" at some point in future.)
Yes, but that wasn't what they wanted to do -- they wanted a microkernel. The thing that Linus grasped and the Hurd developers didn't is: you have to position fences according to what might conceivably need to cross them, not just where they look pretty. Microkernels (with drivers running mainly in user space) may be "purer", but monolithic kernels (with drivers integrated into the kernel) just work better in practice.
If the GNU people wanted a monolithic kernel, they could just have used the one out of what was then just BSD. Except that already came with a reasonable set of userland utilities..... It's only very serious enthusiasts who buy a drivable car just to hoik out the engine and use it in a different chassis.
You shouldn't need to reboot just to make it detect the printer -- that's Windows thinking! Linux allows you to stop and restart misbehaving subsystems on an individual basis. Just
#/etc/init.d/cups restart
which will stop and restart CUPS, thereby forcing it to reread its configuration files and check for connected devices. (On Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, it's cupsys not cups). If that doesn't work, try
# modprobe printer
and restart CUPS again. If that makes it work, then
How many people are killed or maimed every year in accidents involving motor vehicles?
Is there a concerted effort to ban them? (The government certainly want to make it more expensive to drive a car, introducing new stealth taxes here and there to the point where it won't be long before some people will be forced to give up their jobs; but they aren't doing anything to give people an alternative such as making public transport cheaper or forcing the adoption of flexible working hours.)
We need more data points and proper double-blind trials before any conclusions can be drawn. Even then, the worst outcome is likely to be that some individuals experience a sort of allergic reaction. Proper understanding of the response mechanisms may well enable some sort of drug treatment, or even a surgical procedure for permanent desensitisation.
Absolutely. Every time I turn on a hot tap, I have to pay a fee to the plumber who installed my combi-boiler. Every time I switch on my computer, I have to pay a fee to the electrician who wired up my house. Every time I read a book, I have to pay a fee to the author. Every time my ex-girlfriend places something on the shelves I put up for her, she has to pay a fee to me.
Oh, wait, that's bollocks. Sorry. You do the work once, you get paid once -- iff you're lucky. That's how it works in The Real World.
That was basically why John Peel did his programme. By broadcasting music performed live by bands not yet signed to a label, the BBC neatly avoided paying any royalties on it. Until the 1970s at least, the BBC even used to press their own records for distribution to their own radio stations. This way, they would only ever have to compensate the songwriters, and not the record labels (since there are separate copyrights in a song and a recording of the song).
Also, if you have a radio in a workplace which by accident or design is audible to members of the general public, you are supposed to pay royalties; even though the radio station (BBC or local) has already paid them!
I wish you had logged in. I don't mod-up anonymous cowards, no matter how insightful their post.
While we're at it, how about Dell setting up their own digital music store, offering downloads in Ogg Vorbis format?
Re:Why not make an "Uncrippled for non-US" edition
on
Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes. At least in Britain and Europe, if the DVD is your property, then you are legally entitled to watch the film recorded upon it. Otherwise, the store that sold it to you was breaking the law -- goods sold to a consumer must be fit for their rightful purpose. The fact that you are circumventing encryption is irrelevant in this case, since you are (by sole virtue of ownership of the disc) the intended recipient of the encrypted communication and therefore have authorisation from the sender of the encrypted message (the film company) to view it.
Enforcement of the EUCD in such a way as to protect the interests of established manufacturers would violate pre-existing European laws against anti-competitive behaviour.
There's nothing to stop you exporting the SWF documentation to some country where the condition that it not be used to develop a competing player is unenforcible (Spain, maybe?) and doing the work there.
Re:And yes, you can play Theora in WMP
on
Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 1
YouTube movies are in flv, which is basically a bastardised MPEG format. You don't need Flash player. There's a GreaseMonkey script which will allow you to watch them using mplayer. FLV isn't even a proprietary codec (ffmpeg knows about it. In fact, the whole toolchain for converting your camera's AVI files into something you can host on a website is entirely Open Source. Only the player is proprietary, and the GNASH developers are working on that. I'm currently working on a site with embedded video clips, and I will make them accessible to GNU/Linux users without Flash player.)
I'll grant you, it's not obvious -- and that's not entirely unrelated to many people having vested interests in keeping alternatives to what they sell non-obvious. When was the last time you saw a site with PDFs mention that you could use anything other than Adobe Reader to view them? (Ones designed by me with on-the-fly PDF-munging technology [again, the toolchain to do this is 100% i-tal] and smart links to kpdf, xpdf, evince or foxit reader depending on your browser and OS don't count.)
The problem begins and ends with closed-source, proprietary software. Always has, always will. Short of passing a law against caged software (which I don't believe is impossible for some small country sometime in the near future) the best thing you can do is support the Free Software movement. Use Free Software, suggest improvements (don't just say "this sucks", say "this would be better if....."), donate money, time or hardware to an existing project, start a new project. If you want to put the "and other" into "non-violent and other direct action", there are quite a few things you can do which won't do any harm to life or tangible property, just bogus "intellectual property".
Re:And yes, you can play Theora in WMP
on
Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 1
Beh. What's wrong with a command line anyway? Don't fear it, embrace it.
I think for people whose experience was never soured by MS-DOS, Bash won't actually be such a big deal. It makes a lot of sense if you communicate with people in words, rather than pointing at things and grunting. You get a record on the screen of what you've been doing, like a till roll; and the concept behind abbreviations such as ls, mv, rm and so forth will be familiar to anyone who has used a mobile phone. Ubuntu's default editor is nano, which is a bit like pico (if you remember pine).
Also, just try doing the equivalent of
echo -e "<html>\n<head>\n<title>My Holiday Snaps</title>\n<body>" > index.html && for i in *jpg; do thumb="`basename $i.jpg`_mini.jpg"; convert -resize 160x120 $i $thumb && echo "Shrunk $i to $thumb" && echo "<a href='$i'><img border='0' src='$thumb'/></a>" >> index.html; done; echo -e "</body>\n</html>" >> index.html
in a GUI, and tell me it's quicker and easier and less effort. (Time taken to learn how to put that one-liner together from first principles doesn't count. I already learnt it from first principles. Nobody else will ever have to do that again.)
Re:Piracy is marker of immature market
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 2, Funny
Ah, but that's just the point. The First Industrial Revolution made slave labour uncompetitive. Rising energy prices caused by a combination of lousy management and rampant greed have reversed the situation. Robots are expensive and complicated to build. People are just a by-product of fucking. And it's amazing what a hungry person will do to get a bowl of rice.....
I have a better one. Get Sky Plus or Sky HD installed (I chose the former; my eyesight is so poor, I can barely see 625 lines let alone 1080). Select the station you want to watch, on-time for the programme you want to watch. Allow the programme to run for, say, 10 minutes (enough for all advert breaks in the programme) while you do something else. Rewind to beginning of programme. Fast-forward through advertisements. Enjoy:)
When will companies learn that suing your customers isn't a good business model?
When it stops being a bloody good business model, is when. Companies nowadays tend to view customers in a slightly less favourable light than a dog turd on the sole of the shoe. The Policy Manual is always right. Us poor sods only exist to pay their wages -- and if we are actually satisfied, then that is an unintended bonus.
As far as the telephone companies are concerned, talking to your neighbour over your garden fence is depriving them of revenue. That is the mentality you are up against -- and that's why lawsuits against customers are here to stay.
Any company that sets out with the intention to satisfy their customers is destined ultimately for failure: you simply can't turn enough of a profit that way, and if you do manage to keep it up long enough to get a reputation you will just end up being bought up by one of the incumbent players.
Only the sets with no SCART sockets. If your set has a SCART socket (and most have two or more nowadays), you can just plug a digital decoder straight into it. The socket labelled AV1 usually accepts RGB, which will give the absolute best picture.
No it wouldn't. It would, however, level the playing field. Manufacturing industry in the West can't hope to compete with third-world countries where they get away with things like not paying workers a decent wage, having them work in dangerous or unsanitary conditions, or polluting the environment. Why is it OK to treat Chinese workers like that but not British, European or American workers?
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In the early days, the GNU project were using a BSD kernel. TTBOMK, by the time the GNU project was announced, BSD was already completely free of AT&T code. Though, all the various unix-like systems seem to have a family tree more tangled than the various Royal families of Europe.
No ordinary monitor can display "millions of colours" at the same time. Even a 1280x1024 monitor can only ever be displaying 1 310 720 colours at the same time.
No, 6 bits per pixel gives you 2**18 = 256Ki = 262 144 colours.
With Linux, compatibility is guaranteed at the source level, not the binary level, and no secret has ever been made of that. If, somehow, the kernel developers managed to miss a huge, gaping hole, meaning that something really major has to be rewritten, the ABI will necessarily change -- and it may be mathematically impossible both to maintain compatibility with legitimate legacy code and fix the flaw. (Look at all the stuff which broke on XP SP2 just because it used, albeit for "legitimate" purposes, the same "features" of Windows 95/98/Me as malware used.) Therefore, the kernel developers' preferred cop-out^Wsolution is not even to bother trying -- just get everyone used to the idea that sometimes, it's necessary to recompile code to make it work.
As a beneficial side-effect, this policy impedes the development of closed-source, binary-only drivers.
I've often wondered about this myself -- could Microsoft actively prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing Linux drivers, just by refusing to certify Windows drivers for any hardware which comes with a Linux driver? And for that matter, have they been doing exactly that?
Now that Windows is moving towards a more locked-down kernel, it's certainly technically feasible. It's probably Anticompetitive Behaviour, but that doesn't seem to be illegal in the USA anymore.
You missed one out.
4. Change the law -- so hardware manufacturers are REQUIRED to release documentation so that independent programmers can write drivers, as Theo is calling for, if they want to be allowed to sell their hardware at all.
I believe it is going to require a law, as QuantumG points out that manufacturers are often unwilling to release this information. However, that information is in no way secret -- it forms an integral part of the instructions for using the device. It may not be a chapter that many people are going to read, but that does not make it any less useful. Making it a legal requirement will ensure that all competitors are forced to release their specs together.
(I suppose I also ought to elaborate on this, since "change the law" is a pretty big undertaking. I believe the best chance of this becoming law is in the Mainland EU, where there is a history of pro-competition, pro-consumer and pro-environment lawmaking. A law like this would give consumers more choice {since they can now choose from a greater range of hardware and software combinations} and reduce pollution {from otherwise-serviceable electronics rendered useless by lack of software support}. Additionally, it would prevent dishonest manufacturers from hiding mendacious claims concerning their hardware behind closed-source software {I'm thinking of cases such as where a digital camera labelled as "6 megapixels" actually has only a 2 megapixel image sensor, whose output is interpolated by firmware to a 6 megapixel JPEG image; the RAW file format would reveal this deception, but because it is closed and proprietary, the consumer is hoodwinked into buying an inferior product. Manufacturers of genuine 6 megapixel cameras are forced to choose between playing the same game or selling fewer units at higher prices}. I say "Mainland EU" because once-proud Britain has already sold out to the USA and may well get "black-balled" at some point in future.)
Yes, but that wasn't what they wanted to do -- they wanted a microkernel. The thing that Linus grasped and the Hurd developers didn't is: you have to position fences according to what might conceivably need to cross them, not just where they look pretty. Microkernels (with drivers running mainly in user space) may be "purer", but monolithic kernels (with drivers integrated into the kernel) just work better in practice.
..... It's only very serious enthusiasts who buy a drivable car just to hoik out the engine and use it in a different chassis.
If the GNU people wanted a monolithic kernel, they could just have used the one out of what was then just BSD. Except that already came with a reasonable set of userland utilities
And next time you buy a printer, choose a proper one with PostScript Level 3 in hardware and a built-in Ethernet interface, you cheapskate
How many people are killed or maimed every year in accidents involving motor vehicles?
Is there a concerted effort to ban them? (The government certainly want to make it more expensive to drive a car, introducing new stealth taxes here and there to the point where it won't be long before some people will be forced to give up their jobs; but they aren't doing anything to give people an alternative such as making public transport cheaper or forcing the adoption of flexible working hours.)
We need more data points and proper double-blind trials before any conclusions can be drawn. Even then, the worst outcome is likely to be that some individuals experience a sort of allergic reaction. Proper understanding of the response mechanisms may well enable some sort of drug treatment, or even a surgical procedure for permanent desensitisation.
Absolutely. Every time I turn on a hot tap, I have to pay a fee to the plumber who installed my combi-boiler. Every time I switch on my computer, I have to pay a fee to the electrician who wired up my house. Every time I read a book, I have to pay a fee to the author. Every time my ex-girlfriend places something on the shelves I put up for her, she has to pay a fee to me.
Oh, wait, that's bollocks. Sorry. You do the work once, you get paid once -- iff you're lucky. That's how it works in The Real World.
That was basically why John Peel did his programme. By broadcasting music performed live by bands not yet signed to a label, the BBC neatly avoided paying any royalties on it. Until the 1970s at least, the BBC even used to press their own records for distribution to their own radio stations. This way, they would only ever have to compensate the songwriters, and not the record labels (since there are separate copyrights in a song and a recording of the song).
Also, if you have a radio in a workplace which by accident or design is audible to members of the general public, you are supposed to pay royalties; even though the radio station (BBC or local) has already paid them!
I wish you had logged in. I don't mod-up anonymous cowards, no matter how insightful their post.
While we're at it, how about Dell setting up their own digital music store, offering downloads in Ogg Vorbis format?
Yes. At least in Britain and Europe, if the DVD is your property, then you are legally entitled to watch the film recorded upon it. Otherwise, the store that sold it to you was breaking the law -- goods sold to a consumer must be fit for their rightful purpose. The fact that you are circumventing encryption is irrelevant in this case, since you are (by sole virtue of ownership of the disc) the intended recipient of the encrypted communication and therefore have authorisation from the sender of the encrypted message (the film company) to view it.
Enforcement of the EUCD in such a way as to protect the interests of established manufacturers would violate pre-existing European laws against anti-competitive behaviour.
There's nothing to stop you exporting the SWF documentation to some country where the condition that it not be used to develop a competing player is unenforcible (Spain, maybe?) and doing the work there.
Alright, smartarse. One-all. I'll be back :)
YouTube movies are in flv, which is basically a bastardised MPEG format. You don't need Flash player. There's a GreaseMonkey script which will allow you to watch them using mplayer. FLV isn't even a proprietary codec (ffmpeg knows about it. In fact, the whole toolchain for converting your camera's AVI files into something you can host on a website is entirely Open Source. Only the player is proprietary, and the GNASH developers are working on that. I'm currently working on a site with embedded video clips, and I will make them accessible to GNU/Linux users without Flash player.)
....."), donate money, time or hardware to an existing project, start a new project. If you want to put the "and other" into "non-violent and other direct action", there are quite a few things you can do which won't do any harm to life or tangible property, just bogus "intellectual property".
I'll grant you, it's not obvious -- and that's not entirely unrelated to many people having vested interests in keeping alternatives to what they sell non-obvious. When was the last time you saw a site with PDFs mention that you could use anything other than Adobe Reader to view them? (Ones designed by me with on-the-fly PDF-munging technology [again, the toolchain to do this is 100% i-tal] and smart links to kpdf, xpdf, evince or foxit reader depending on your browser and OS don't count.)
The problem begins and ends with closed-source, proprietary software. Always has, always will. Short of passing a law against caged software (which I don't believe is impossible for some small country sometime in the near future) the best thing you can do is support the Free Software movement. Use Free Software, suggest improvements (don't just say "this sucks", say "this would be better if
I think for people whose experience was never soured by MS-DOS, Bash won't actually be such a big deal. It makes a lot of sense if you communicate with people in words, rather than pointing at things and grunting. You get a record on the screen of what you've been doing, like a till roll; and the concept behind abbreviations such as ls, mv, rm and so forth will be familiar to anyone who has used a mobile phone. Ubuntu's default editor is nano, which is a bit like pico (if you remember pine).
Also, just try doing the equivalent of in a GUI, and tell me it's quicker and easier and less effort. (Time taken to learn how to put that one-liner together from first principles doesn't count. I already learnt it from first principles. Nobody else will ever have to do that again.)
How about calling it "normal behaviour" ?
Ah, but that's just the point. The First Industrial Revolution made slave labour uncompetitive. Rising energy prices caused by a combination of lousy management and rampant greed have reversed the situation. Robots are expensive and complicated to build. People are just a by-product of fucking. And it's amazing what a hungry person will do to get a bowl of rice .....
You can have both. I used to work in an office which was underground (a former railway bonded warehouse) and running close to 100% Open Source.
I have a better one. Get Sky Plus or Sky HD installed (I chose the former; my eyesight is so poor, I can barely see 625 lines let alone 1080). Select the station you want to watch, on-time for the programme you want to watch. Allow the programme to run for, say, 10 minutes (enough for all advert breaks in the programme) while you do something else. Rewind to beginning of programme. Fast-forward through advertisements. Enjoy :)
As far as the telephone companies are concerned, talking to your neighbour over your garden fence is depriving them of revenue. That is the mentality you are up against -- and that's why lawsuits against customers are here to stay.
Any company that sets out with the intention to satisfy their customers is destined ultimately for failure: you simply can't turn enough of a profit that way, and if you do manage to keep it up long enough to get a reputation you will just end up being bought up by one of the incumbent players.
Only the sets with no SCART sockets. If your set has a SCART socket (and most have two or more nowadays), you can just plug a digital decoder straight into it. The socket labelled AV1 usually accepts RGB, which will give the absolute best picture.
No it wouldn't. It would, however, level the playing field. Manufacturing industry in the West can't hope to compete with third-world countries where they get away with things like not paying workers a decent wage, having them work in dangerous or unsanitary conditions, or polluting the environment. Why is it OK to treat Chinese workers like that but not British, European or American workers?