Out of interest, why did you switch away from Konqueror? It's what I use and I love it..... I probably wouldn't want to switch to Opera, even if they opened up the Source Code.
Google are playing to win. Plus they'd so rather YouTube didn't exist than belonged to somebody else, that they are prepared to be holding the package when it blows up in their face.
If they just paid YouTube's legal costs, and YouTube won, then YouTube would have ended up being worth even more than Google already paid for them -- and someone other than Google would end up owning YouTube. Not that anyone would be suing YouTube if they weren't owned by somebody rich; prior to the Google purchase, YouTube had no assets worth suing for.
So Google bought YouTube when the risk of lawsuits was low. Now YouTube are worth something, the vultures are circling. If Google win the small victory (safe harbour protection under the US DMCA) then that's good. If they win the big victory (Fair Use) then that's even better. Meanwhile, nobody with a pound less than Google dares open a competing video-sharing site. And even if somehow Google manage to lose, there won't be another YouTube competitor -- ever.
Well, if you take the view that "christian" can be a synonym for "arsehole", or can mean "devoid of one or more of what are usually considered to be the defining qualities of the genre" (as in "christian rock music") then it is, indeed, very christian of him.
"Christian" can also mean psychotic. This may take the form either of mild delusions of an imaginary friend protecting them and/or causing things to happen, aggravated by the cognitive dissonance inherent in such delusions; or of total whackjob sociopathy wherein one actively persuades others to follow a lifestyle on the pretence that failure to do so will result in unspecified punishment.
Religion is basically just a crutch that helps people get through the day. Which wouldn't be too bad, in and of itself; we're all fucked-up in our own different ways. Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes. Some people drink, some people smoke, some people take drugs, some people pretend to be small furry animals. Others get religion. But you never hear an alcoholic saying that sober people are going to suffer eternal punishment; you never hear a pot-head saying that non-smokers are going to be damned; and nobody ever says that if you don't pretend to be a small furry animal then you'll suffer from the day you die till the end of the world. There's only one crutch that the people who use it are so weak, they have to try to ram it down everybody else's throat to make themselves look a bit less fucked-up than they really are.
The best advice I can give you is: Keep as far away from christians as you would keep from anyone else who worships a serial killer.
Or you could write to your MP and ask them to push for a new law, obliging manufacturers to provide documentation that would enable the creation of drivers if they want to be allowed to sell their hardware at all.
If you don't get any harsher a punishment for selling heroin cut with brick dust than you do for selling pure heroin, then some drug dealers are going to cut it -- which means that if they want to stay in business, all dealers end up having to adulterate their product. The consumer doesn't know what they're buying; and the end result is often either poisoning from all the adulterants, or an overdose due to a batch of gear being stronger than they were expecting.
With graphics cards, the argument that manufacturers will use is that they might give away a competitive advantage (as though they weren't all reverse-engineering the living daylights out of one another's products anyway.....) if they released their details and the competition didn't release theirs. If, however, it was a statutory requirement to provide this information, then nobody would get an unfair advantage.
It all makes perfect sense if you begin from the assumption that soldering a few connections (in order to eliminate the possibility of bad connections with the notorious 3.5mm stereo jack) is simpler than recompiling a kernel (which may introduce additional variables in its own right). How would you feel if the real cause of the noise was no more than a dodgy connection in the analogue domain; but you went ahead, recompiled your kernel, and somehow managed to muck it up in a way that actually made things worse by introducing noise in the digital domain?
There is never a good reason to keep source code hidden. The usual bad reasons include lousy code quality (e.g. Mozilla when it was Netscape, OpenOffice.org when it was StarOffice); misappropriation of other people's code; and the fact that it would expose mendacious marketing for the scam it really is.
When what you've written is a driver, then there is an obligation to open up the Source Code. Failure to do so means that people who have bought and paid for the product may be unable to make proper use of it. Which is technically a violation of Common Law Property Rights, but so far the government have turned a blind eye to the people who pay their wages.
It's plug-and-play. The hardest part was finding enough cables and adaptors! Reasonably modern distros should just find it and use it, if it was connected at boot-up. There's some rcfile you can edit that will force it to load drivers in a particular sequence, so you can switch manually between audio devices later. Of course I've forgotten what the file was, because it's Just Worked ever since then, but I'll dig it out later if you want. Once it's connected, your "mixer" controls in kmix / alsamixer will be reduced to a single "output" control. This is treated by the Alesis as the 2-track tape playback channel, so depressing the "2 track to mix" button on the console enables and disables it. There are no "input" controls except the pots on the mixer.
The mixer comes with some bundled Windows software, which you are legally (and technically -- it isn't tied to the hardware) entitled to sell on.
All inputs are balanced (6.3 stereo plugs) except the 2-track tape channel (normal audio plugs) and transformerless. If you are using unbalanced sources, a mono plug will just earth one of the input leads, costing 6dB of gain. Mic sockets are Cannon type and have phantom power -- but this is switched collectively, not individually, so can't be used if you have any unbalanced mics connected. There are no phono inputs, so if you want to connect a turntable then you'll need a preamp (or take your chances approximating the RIAA curve using the onboard EQ controls -- I've heard of this being done but never tried such a bodge myself). Also note that if you need pre-fade monitoring, you will have to connect a separate headphone amp to the AUX SEND A output -- there's no built-in way to route a signal to the "control room" (i.e. headphone jack). But that's the difference between a studio mixer and a DJ mixer:)
If they feel that they have to disguise the source code of the drivers, that invariably means their product is crap. More specifically, it means their marketing is mendacious and if anyone could see the source code to the drivers they'd know at once (cf. those digital cameras with the proprietary, secret RAW formats; the RAW format necessarily exposes the actual number of pixels in the sensor, not the up-interpolated resolution of the JPEG encoder. Or nVidia's graphics cards, where you could make a £30 one do the job of a £300 one by changing one bit in one byte..... if you only knew which bit in which byte).
Exhaust the simple explanations before suggesting complex ones. You might want to try spraying your jacks with a bit of WD40 and wiggling the plugs around. I really, really don't like stereo 3.5 connectors. Give me mono 6.3s (I'm no fan of balanced lines either) anyday. In the worst case, try soldering the wires straight to the PCB.
If you're sure that it has a digital rather than an analogue origin, are you using the latest ALSA? Did you compile the driver into the kernel or load it as a module? And have you any drivers compiled into your kernel for hardware you are not using?
Hey, I've got one of them too; there wasn't a driver for the onboard sound in the stock kernel of the distro I was installing at the time, so I went out to buy a genuine SoundBlaster and ended up with a PCI128.
Since I recently started doing some serious mucking around with ALSA (trying to get a USB audio device to work -- and, to the chagrin of Windows fanboys everywhere, succeeding first time; now I can play two different audio files at the same time, one through my monitor and the other through my Alesis Multimix), I found the 1371 apparently has two DACs. Or rather, two pairs of DACs (since they're stereo). Seems that anything I try to send to the second one still comes out of the first, though..... which is probably a good job actually, since there doesn't seem to be anywhere else for it to go (no second output socket)! Is this just a design quirk, or have I really got two sound cards in one there? And if so, where do I extract the other output?
One reason to go for an aftermarket sound card is the disappearance of the analogue line in port (about 100mV sensitivity, and stereo) from modern kit. I'd seriously recommend an external, USB solution for that. Static and power hum seem almost non-existent.
If MS is smart their next Windows installment will have a rebranded Linux kernel and a closed Direct X 12 or something plus.Net. Each as a kernel module.
Not if the Copyright Office have anything to do with it, it won't.
It's fair dealing / fair use / a necessary step (the actual wording depends on your jurisdiction) if you link a GPL work (e.g. the Linux kernel) with a differently-licenced work (e.g. the nVidia drivers) for your own personal use and in order to use something you own (e.g. a graphics card) for its rightful purpose (e.g. displaying pictures on your monitor). The GPL doesn't give you permission to distribute the created derived work, though. In fact, it doesn't even give you permission to make it in the first place; but the Law of the Land does.
Distribution of a derived work requires the consent of the copyright holders of all original works used. So if the Linux kernel developers did not want Microsoft to distribute a borged-up version of Linux, they would have the legal right to block it.
"Collaboration without borders"..... now that's an interesting idea.
Just imagine there was a program which would take as its input a compiled binary; and emit as its output a file of source code which, when compiled, would produce a bitwise-identical binary. Mathematically, the problems being solved are similar or identical to those involved in shape-recognition..... high-level abstractions such as loops, functions &c. are analogous to complex shapes, and machine-code instructions are like the vertices which comprise those shapes. (Depending upon the compile-time options, variable and function names may get lost, but there is usually an option to retain these for debugging purposes. In the worst case, names will have to be inferred from behaviour and messages in the program; they can be left in forever after.)
Now imagine interchangeable output plugins for different languages.
The end result is that you can write code in C; while your co-developers halfway around the world, who wouldn't know C from line noise, can work on the same code in BASIC.
Bill Gates got to where he is because the members of the Homebrew Computer Club were so stunned at his Open Letter, they forgot to drag him into the Gents for a Bloody Good Kicking and a couple of head-flushings, then report him to the owners of the computer he had been misappropriating ("The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000" -- except they never paid it).
Had a young RMS been there, I firmly believe that a free and fully-backward-compatible BASIC would have been whipped together in a couple of days and would have quickly taken over from Microsoft BASIC. Alternatively, had the decision been made that computer software was not subject to copyright, I think the course of history might have run differently again.
Well, that's how it already is for Linux and the BSDs. Everything chugs along merrily until either (1) a new product is launched that totally changes things, or (2) a serious vulnerability is discovered. Then there's a flurry of activity as developers rush to support the new hardware / fix the flaw, and it settles down again to Business As Usual.
Windows, on the other hand, has a pre-ordained release chedule to conform to. Sometimes Microsoft even have to invent their own new thing themselves, just to make it apparently worthwhile releasing a new Windows version! And they always have to keep something back for the next version, just in case nothing major changes during the lifetime of the current one.
As for what it would take to convince me personally to switch to Windows..... the answer is, nothing short of a frontal lobotomy!
And the moral of the story is, enjoy it while you've got it -- but never forget you may not have it tomorrow.
If you've got a profitable sideline, that's great. But don't forget how you got there. Fashions change. People change. If you forget that, if you take your eye off the ball for a moment, you lose. Hookers and charlie are great fun, and it's almost rude to all the people who want to be you if you don't; but for the sake of all that's decent, pay a bit off your freakin' mortgage already!
Sounds like he just got too carried away with it all, spent it on the wrong things, and now the fickle public have left him skint. But it's not easy to muster up any sympathy for someone who had it all and blew it. And when your whole business opportunity only ever opened up in the first place precisely because someone else wasn't keeping up with the times, then you've no excuse for not doing that yourself.
It's always a tricky one, that..... have abstract mathematical concepts always been there just waiting to be discovered, or do they spring into existence the first time they are thought about?
Of course, in some countries, abstract mathematical concepts are beyond the scope of patentability.
Yes; in the case of a surveillance system, it's probably better that it stays up and exposes data to the outside world, than falls down and locks up that data. That's a choice you have to weigh up. If the machine is carrying sensitive personal information, though, it might very well be better dead than read. You need to consider different failure modes.
And I can think of a few situations where someone would consider it more expedient to kill a few people than risk letting certain secrets be revealed.
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Out of interest, why did you switch away from Konqueror? It's what I use and I love it ..... I probably wouldn't want to switch to Opera, even if they opened up the Source Code.
Google are playing to win. Plus they'd so rather YouTube didn't exist than belonged to somebody else, that they are prepared to be holding the package when it blows up in their face.
If they just paid YouTube's legal costs, and YouTube won, then YouTube would have ended up being worth even more than Google already paid for them -- and someone other than Google would end up owning YouTube. Not that anyone would be suing YouTube if they weren't owned by somebody rich; prior to the Google purchase, YouTube had no assets worth suing for.
So Google bought YouTube when the risk of lawsuits was low. Now YouTube are worth something, the vultures are circling. If Google win the small victory (safe harbour protection under the US DMCA) then that's good. If they win the big victory (Fair Use) then that's even better. Meanwhile, nobody with a pound less than Google dares open a competing video-sharing site. And even if somehow Google manage to lose, there won't be another YouTube competitor -- ever.
Well, if you take the view that "christian" can be a synonym for "arsehole", or can mean "devoid of one or more of what are usually considered to be the defining qualities of the genre" (as in "christian rock music") then it is, indeed, very christian of him.
"Christian" can also mean psychotic. This may take the form either of mild delusions of an imaginary friend protecting them and/or causing things to happen, aggravated by the cognitive dissonance inherent in such delusions; or of total whackjob sociopathy wherein one actively persuades others to follow a lifestyle on the pretence that failure to do so will result in unspecified punishment.
Religion is basically just a crutch that helps people get through the day. Which wouldn't be too bad, in and of itself; we're all fucked-up in our own different ways. Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes. Some people drink, some people smoke, some people take drugs, some people pretend to be small furry animals. Others get religion. But you never hear an alcoholic saying that sober people are going to suffer eternal punishment; you never hear a pot-head saying that non-smokers are going to be damned; and nobody ever says that if you don't pretend to be a small furry animal then you'll suffer from the day you die till the end of the world. There's only one crutch that the people who use it are so weak, they have to try to ram it down everybody else's throat to make themselves look a bit less fucked-up than they really are.
The best advice I can give you is: Keep as far away from christians as you would keep from anyone else who worships a serial killer.
Given that she was a defendant in an ongoing court case, it would almost certainly be treated as Death in Suspicious Circumstances.
Or you could write to your MP and ask them to push for a new law, obliging manufacturers to provide documentation that would enable the creation of drivers if they want to be allowed to sell their hardware at all.
.....) if they released their details and the competition didn't release theirs. If, however, it was a statutory requirement to provide this information, then nobody would get an unfair advantage.
If you don't get any harsher a punishment for selling heroin cut with brick dust than you do for selling pure heroin, then some drug dealers are going to cut it -- which means that if they want to stay in business, all dealers end up having to adulterate their product. The consumer doesn't know what they're buying; and the end result is often either poisoning from all the adulterants, or an overdose due to a batch of gear being stronger than they were expecting.
With graphics cards, the argument that manufacturers will use is that they might give away a competitive advantage (as though they weren't all reverse-engineering the living daylights out of one another's products anyway
It all makes perfect sense if you begin from the assumption that soldering a few connections (in order to eliminate the possibility of bad connections with the notorious 3.5mm stereo jack) is simpler than recompiling a kernel (which may introduce additional variables in its own right). How would you feel if the real cause of the noise was no more than a dodgy connection in the analogue domain; but you went ahead, recompiled your kernel, and somehow managed to muck it up in a way that actually made things worse by introducing noise in the digital domain?
There is never a good reason to keep source code hidden. The usual bad reasons include lousy code quality (e.g. Mozilla when it was Netscape, OpenOffice.org when it was StarOffice); misappropriation of other people's code; and the fact that it would expose mendacious marketing for the scam it really is.
When what you've written is a driver, then there is an obligation to open up the Source Code. Failure to do so means that people who have bought and paid for the product may be unable to make proper use of it. Which is technically a violation of Common Law Property Rights, but so far the government have turned a blind eye to the people who pay their wages.
It's plug-and-play. The hardest part was finding enough cables and adaptors! Reasonably modern distros should just find it and use it, if it was connected at boot-up. There's some rcfile you can edit that will force it to load drivers in a particular sequence, so you can switch manually between audio devices later. Of course I've forgotten what the file was, because it's Just Worked ever since then, but I'll dig it out later if you want. Once it's connected, your "mixer" controls in kmix / alsamixer will be reduced to a single "output" control. This is treated by the Alesis as the 2-track tape playback channel, so depressing the "2 track to mix" button on the console enables and disables it. There are no "input" controls except the pots on the mixer.
:)
The mixer comes with some bundled Windows software, which you are legally (and technically -- it isn't tied to the hardware) entitled to sell on.
All inputs are balanced (6.3 stereo plugs) except the 2-track tape channel (normal audio plugs) and transformerless. If you are using unbalanced sources, a mono plug will just earth one of the input leads, costing 6dB of gain. Mic sockets are Cannon type and have phantom power -- but this is switched collectively, not individually, so can't be used if you have any unbalanced mics connected. There are no phono inputs, so if you want to connect a turntable then you'll need a preamp (or take your chances approximating the RIAA curve using the onboard EQ controls -- I've heard of this being done but never tried such a bodge myself). Also note that if you need pre-fade monitoring, you will have to connect a separate headphone amp to the AUX SEND A output -- there's no built-in way to route a signal to the "control room" (i.e. headphone jack). But that's the difference between a studio mixer and a DJ mixer
No, it's Creative's problem.
..... if you only knew which bit in which byte).
If they feel that they have to disguise the source code of the drivers, that invariably means their product is crap. More specifically, it means their marketing is mendacious and if anyone could see the source code to the drivers they'd know at once (cf. those digital cameras with the proprietary, secret RAW formats; the RAW format necessarily exposes the actual number of pixels in the sensor, not the up-interpolated resolution of the JPEG encoder. Or nVidia's graphics cards, where you could make a £30 one do the job of a £300 one by changing one bit in one byte
Exhaust the simple explanations before suggesting complex ones. You might want to try spraying your jacks with a bit of WD40 and wiggling the plugs around. I really, really don't like stereo 3.5 connectors. Give me mono 6.3s (I'm no fan of balanced lines either) anyday. In the worst case, try soldering the wires straight to the PCB.
If you're sure that it has a digital rather than an analogue origin, are you using the latest ALSA? Did you compile the driver into the kernel or load it as a module? And have you any drivers compiled into your kernel for hardware you are not using?
Hey, I've got one of them too; there wasn't a driver for the onboard sound in the stock kernel of the distro I was installing at the time, so I went out to buy a genuine SoundBlaster and ended up with a PCI128.
..... which is probably a good job actually, since there doesn't seem to be anywhere else for it to go (no second output socket)! Is this just a design quirk, or have I really got two sound cards in one there? And if so, where do I extract the other output?
Since I recently started doing some serious mucking around with ALSA (trying to get a USB audio device to work -- and, to the chagrin of Windows fanboys everywhere, succeeding first time; now I can play two different audio files at the same time, one through my monitor and the other through my Alesis Multimix), I found the 1371 apparently has two DACs. Or rather, two pairs of DACs (since they're stereo). Seems that anything I try to send to the second one still comes out of the first, though
One reason to go for an aftermarket sound card is the disappearance of the analogue line in port (about 100mV sensitivity, and stereo) from modern kit. I'd seriously recommend an external, USB solution for that. Static and power hum seem almost non-existent.
It's fair dealing / fair use / a necessary step (the actual wording depends on your jurisdiction) if you link a GPL work (e.g. the Linux kernel) with a differently-licenced work (e.g. the nVidia drivers) for your own personal use and in order to use something you own (e.g. a graphics card) for its rightful purpose (e.g. displaying pictures on your monitor). The GPL doesn't give you permission to distribute the created derived work, though. In fact, it doesn't even give you permission to make it in the first place; but the Law of the Land does.
Distribution of a derived work requires the consent of the copyright holders of all original works used. So if the Linux kernel developers did not want Microsoft to distribute a borged-up version of Linux, they would have the legal right to block it.
"Collaboration without borders" ..... now that's an interesting idea.
..... high-level abstractions such as loops, functions &c. are analogous to complex shapes, and machine-code instructions are like the vertices which comprise those shapes. (Depending upon the compile-time options, variable and function names may get lost, but there is usually an option to retain these for debugging purposes. In the worst case, names will have to be inferred from behaviour and messages in the program; they can be left in forever after.)
Just imagine there was a program which would take as its input a compiled binary; and emit as its output a file of source code which, when compiled, would produce a bitwise-identical binary. Mathematically, the problems being solved are similar or identical to those involved in shape-recognition
Now imagine interchangeable output plugins for different languages.
The end result is that you can write code in C; while your co-developers halfway around the world, who wouldn't know C from line noise, can work on the same code in BASIC.
That's collaboration without borders.
No, abaci. One i. It's an abacus, not an abacius.
Yes, but the main difference between a kernel panic and a BSOD is that you don't need a faulty motherboard to get a BSOD.
Bill Gates got to where he is because the members of the Homebrew Computer Club were so stunned at his Open Letter, they forgot to drag him into the Gents for a Bloody Good Kicking and a couple of head-flushings, then report him to the owners of the computer he had been misappropriating ("The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000" -- except they never paid it).
Had a young RMS been there, I firmly believe that a free and fully-backward-compatible BASIC would have been whipped together in a couple of days and would have quickly taken over from Microsoft BASIC. Alternatively, had the decision been made that computer software was not subject to copyright, I think the course of history might have run differently again.
You know, if you had the source code, you could have fixed it by now.
No, you're thinking of the British legal system there.
Windows, on the other hand, has a pre-ordained release chedule to conform to. Sometimes Microsoft even have to invent their own new thing themselves, just to make it apparently worthwhile releasing a new Windows version! And they always have to keep something back for the next version, just in case nothing major changes during the lifetime of the current one.
As for what it would take to convince me personally to switch to Windows
And the moral of the story is, enjoy it while you've got it -- but never forget you may not have it tomorrow.
If you've got a profitable sideline, that's great. But don't forget how you got there. Fashions change. People change. If you forget that, if you take your eye off the ball for a moment, you lose. Hookers and charlie are great fun, and it's almost rude to all the people who want to be you if you don't; but for the sake of all that's decent, pay a bit off your freakin' mortgage already!
Sounds like he just got too carried away with it all, spent it on the wrong things, and now the fickle public have left him skint. But it's not easy to muster up any sympathy for someone who had it all and blew it. And when your whole business opportunity only ever opened up in the first place precisely because someone else wasn't keeping up with the times, then you've no excuse for not doing that yourself.
It's always a tricky one, that ..... have abstract mathematical concepts always been there just waiting to be discovered, or do they spring into existence the first time they are thought about?
Of course, in some countries, abstract mathematical concepts are beyond the scope of patentability.
Which would be fine. But most people's definition of "stealing" does not include "paying for it, then mislaying the receipts".
Yes; in the case of a surveillance system, it's probably better that it stays up and exposes data to the outside world, than falls down and locks up that data. That's a choice you have to weigh up. If the machine is carrying sensitive personal information, though, it might very well be better dead than read. You need to consider different failure modes.
And I can think of a few situations where someone would consider it more expedient to kill a few people than risk letting certain secrets be revealed.
Yes, and that's why neither OpenBSD nor Linux will ever have a stable kernel ABI.