For these hardware devices, much of the development work is in the firmware running on the processors.
The kernel seems to allow binary firmware. It pisses off GNU, but it works.
The problem is when all the rest of your software -- which is running right there in ring 0, in that monolithic kernel with everything else -- is closed.
Next time, make sure you own your own stuff. Your competitors are doing it. I own a couple of network cards which have completely, 100% open source drivers, which do occasionally get folded into the Linux kernel.
Keep in mind, if you make it open source, you'll very likely have the community maintaining it for you. Which means you won't have to worry about ABI or API changes, it'll Just Work.
Behind the scenes, our text editor turns it into postscript, which our printer driver probably turns back into ASCII. But that's all implementation detail.
Because this way, we can provide Linux as an upgrade path for those users. It runs reasonably well on antiquated hardware, and there's that much more likelihood that everything they need either has an open source equivalent, or runs well under Wine.
Do you think he'll get the Dems to undo the Patriot Act?
No idea.
Do you think he'll get to the bottom of and stop the Wiretaps on US Citizens?
No idea.
Given the choice, I would say it's far more important to ensure the wiretapping stops, and doesn't start again, than to point fingers. But I was pissed off at the wiretapping immunity bill, too.
Do you think he'll have us 100% out of Iraq in the next week? Month? Year? Decade?
Decade, yes. Year, probably not.
I would guess something dramatic will happen in the next term, at least, otherwise he's going to have a bitch of a time come re-election.
Will he magically fix the economy? If so, how long? What exactly is he going to do?
That's all pretty much been spelled out. Watch the debates.
The only part that confuses me is how he intends to ensure that these new jobs from alternative energy "can never be outsourced."
Will he walk on water?
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Ok... the last one was a joke, but, seriously, I didn't vote for him because I think he's The Savior. I didn't vote for him because of empty words like "Hope" and "Change".
I voted for him because he actually seems to understand technology, and has been promising a more open government -- and he's in favor of net neutrality. I voted for him because he surrounds himself with people who are competent -- his tech adviser was an MIT professor; McCain's tech adviser was an MPAA exec. In the same vein, I voted for him because there is no fucking way I want Sarah Palin to be President, ever.
And for many other reasons, which basically add up to: I actually agree with almost everything he had to say. Can't say I even trust McCain.
Anyone who reads all the fine print they are given has more time than I do.
I always wonder if there's a way to prevent that, legislatively.
I keep trying to word a law that basically says "Contracts must be simple and to the point, with no BS, and should be understandable in a reasonable amount of time by an ordinary person." I'm not a lawyer, but beyond that, I can't figure out how to define unambiguously how you'd outlaw legalese.
Work around it by plugging a computer directly into the Internet to download the firmware, then switching everything back and upgrading the firmware the normal way...
Or, my personal preference, you call D-Link, say FUCK NO, demand your money back, use said money to buy something decent (generic Linksys, maybe?), and never buy D-Link again.
Not a lot more an open source project can do than, well, be open source.
Recognition.
Ok, true, this could help. But I doubt FLAC has Firefox's budget.
Efficiency.
So what you're saying is that we should make FLAC lossy?
Wouldn't that kind of defeat the fucking point?
If you want the industry to use a "100% compatible FLAC" logo
No, I don't. I want a "100% Compatible" logo, maybe with "No DRM". It doesn't need to cite specific formats -- if it's the wrong one, it's easily converted, unlike a DRM'd version.
I can afford to run my own servers, even just for a hobby. I want to reserve the right to do whatever I want with it, including throw ads on it, maybe make some money.
So the hosting part of App Engine doesn't buy me much -- I might as well use AppDrop. And I might move it to AppDrop eventually.
And if I'm doing that, I may as well use something Ruby- or Erlang-based.
My comment was probably badly worded -- I don't mean that I tried and Google rejected me. I mean that I don't have any ideas for a project that AppEngine would help.
There's some pretty strong evidence. Diebold execs were Republican. The thing was insecure enough that a 12-year-old could crack it -- so what makes you think that no one with the appropriate access would've done this? And the discrepancy between exit polls and actual results is another indicator...
Then there's the things which actually happened, like the actual 'swiftboating'.
Point is: You didn't have to be bitter to suspect something in 2000 and 2004. But this one, bitter or not, Obama won.
So STFU about being an asshole because you and your crowd have made that into a science.
You know nothing about "my crowd".
I am not a crowd. I think and speak for myself. If you have a problem with me, you have a problem with me. And I don't think you know me well enough for that.
If you have a problem with "my crowd", you are bigoted against... something, you haven't said what. If it's "Democrats", you really don't know me very well.
There were other positions to vote for yesterday, and I didn't vote blue on all of them.
You're just guessing a letter that should have been printed anyway. Equating it to cracking is silly
Oh?
Used to be, every new game I obtained, legally or not, I used a no-CD crack. I was removing protection that should not have been there anyway.
Equating it to cracking is silly, yet it's also illegal (DMCA) and obviously discouraged by the publishers (or the CD check wouldn't be there in the first place).
using it as an excuse to not pay for the game at all is wrong.
So I should pay to be inconvenienced? No thanks.
If I buy a car, you should give me the keys. I should not have to break a window and hotwire it just to drive it off the lot.
So no, I'm not buying it.
Which leaves two options: Don't play it at all, or pirate it. If I don't play it at all, the developers' work truly goes to waste, I can't recommend it to friends -- and when they ask, all I can do is that I refused to buy it because of DRM, which means more lost sales.
So, oddly enough, pirating it is better for the developers.
But usually, I can't be bothered. A game has to be damned good before I'm willing to pirate it, and I'm much more willing to simply buy a game that just works, with or without DRM.
No, if the story is true, I shouldn't buy them because of the cavalier attitude towards dealing with customers.
Alright, yes, trying 36 combinations isn't the end of the world. But I'm still basically having to crack my own game -- and this time, it's what they're telling me to do.
Any game I have to crack to play properly, I either pirate or don't play at all.
In 2000 and 2004, there was actually a question as to whether the election was stolen. Not "stolen" as in "swiftboated", but "stolen" as in "diebolded".
This time, at current count, he's got 349 electoral college votes, more than double McCain's 163. By one count, he's won the popular vote by seven million people.
Another fun statistic -- if World of Warcraft characters could vote, and they all voted for McCain, Obama would still have won the popular vote. Unless you give WoW 186 electoral college votes, Obama would still have the presidency.
And another: The District of Columbia was 92.9% for Obama.
In other words: This time, he won. It was an absolute landslide. There is no question that if you're going to be an asshole, you're the minority.
When a format is not supported by all devices on the market that's not a fault of the device but of the format.
Erm, no, that's the "fault" of the device.
Flac is royalty-free and open source. What more could they do to get into portable media players?
it can't be an MP3 replacement unless it is at least as commonly suported as MP3.
And yes, some people would rather simply buy MP3s, for it to Just Work.
But you know, iPods support AACs and Apple Lossless. PlaysForMaybe devices support WMA. Sure, all of them will also play MP3, if you want worse quality for more space -- but by also providing Flac, you let the audiophiles choose exactly how they want it encoded for that player.
If you can spend that much space, just double it and get rid of the whole encoding and conversion step.
Why would you?
On a modern Linux distro, much of the documentation, including the manpages, are gzipped. This is because even if it doesn't buy much space, modern CPUs are so fast that there's no reason not to.
Well, the same is true of Flac. CPUs have gotten fast enough to play it back in realtime on any computer made in the last 10 years, and fast enough to encode as you rip, or decode as you burn.
Given that it costs me nothing to encode to Flac vs storing WAVs, why wouldn't I? Given the choice, wouldn't you want twice as much space for no additional effort?
But here's the main point: Offer it in mp3, so people don't have to do anything to get it working. Also offer it in Flac, for anyone who dislikes the quality of mp3. That way, you don't have to support everyone's pet format -- just the one lossless one, so they can convert it themselves.
If you provide an mp3 download, everyone knows what it is, and they don't have to be bothered with learning anything.
But that doesn't stop you from providing alternatives. Throw up an AAC as "best for iPod", and FLAC, because then geeks can either keep it in full lossless glory, or transcode it to what we want.
The more important question is whether they require more work to develop the missing features than it would take you to re-implement the low-level pieces of App Engine and migrate away.
If that's the case, I say there's no lock-in.
Well before that case, a lot of people would figure it's worth considering. After all, Mono is always forkable if either Novell or Microsoft does something you disagree with.
Me, I'm not really eligible for App Engine in several ways, and I like the challenge of scaling, so I won't be using it anyway.
For example, it's always nice to know that some yahoo can't come along and press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X-Windows.
It's trivial to configure X to not respond to ctrl+alt+backspace.
It's even easier to simply lock the cabinet to your kiosk, and expose a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. If it has to be a keyboard, well, I've seen Windows kiosks which had the ctrl, alt, and del keys removed.
It's also nice to be able to eliminate the overhead of X in a memory constrained environment where a sophisticated interface can be achieved with a lot less hardware.
True enough, but Moore's Law applies to RAM (sort of), effectively making this obsolete -- at least in the kiosk, for now.
So, your point is about the ease of developing a fork. The "gold standard" stuff is only important to you because it makes a fork easier.
Am I right so far?
Well, there are no new versions of DOS coming out. FreeDOS is, in many circles, considered the "gold standard" of DOS. Something starting out proprietary doesn't prevent it from becoming an open standard.
In the case of AppEngine, most of the original library code from Google is open under an Apache license -- so, while parts of it are closed, those are the lower-level things like BigTable, which have multiple viable replacements (Hadoop, Mnesia, CouchDB).
So, with parts of it open, and with at least one open implementation, it is effectively easy to fork -- just look at how fast AppDrop came out after AppEngines (within a month).
So, your real concern is addressed, if I understand what you're saying.
I am not saying that everything is easy to fork, or that everything with an attempted open implementation lacks vendor lock-in. You know better by now.
If you're using Gmail, you could avoid this problem with an IMAP client. Of course, that may defeat the point of Gmail...
The other cool point about web apps is: If your Internet goes down, you can go wandering. Maybe there's some nearby wifi you can leech. Maybe you go to Starbucks. Maybe you go home.
With an internal server, if you lose power, you're SOL. If your server is down, you're also SOL. If a worm runs rampant, bogging down network traffic and even making your desktop unusable, guess what? You're shit-outta-luck.
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For these hardware devices, much of the development work is in the firmware running on the processors.
The kernel seems to allow binary firmware. It pisses off GNU, but it works.
The problem is when all the rest of your software -- which is running right there in ring 0, in that monolithic kernel with everything else -- is closed.
there are legal hurdles to making that work.
Since when are your legal hurdles our problems?
Next time, make sure you own your own stuff. Your competitors are doing it. I own a couple of network cards which have completely, 100% open source drivers, which do occasionally get folded into the Linux kernel.
Keep in mind, if you make it open source, you'll very likely have the community maintaining it for you. Which means you won't have to worry about ABI or API changes, it'll Just Work.
There is one difference: Ubuntu 8.10 is out.
Erm, no, we just tell it to print our ASCII text.
Behind the scenes, our text editor turns it into postscript, which our printer driver probably turns back into ASCII. But that's all implementation detail.
Because this way, we can provide Linux as an upgrade path for those users. It runs reasonably well on antiquated hardware, and there's that much more likelihood that everything they need either has an open source equivalent, or runs well under Wine.
Do you think he'll get the Dems to undo the Patriot Act?
No idea.
Do you think he'll get to the bottom of and stop the Wiretaps on US Citizens?
No idea.
Given the choice, I would say it's far more important to ensure the wiretapping stops, and doesn't start again, than to point fingers. But I was pissed off at the wiretapping immunity bill, too.
Do you think he'll have us 100% out of Iraq in the next week? Month? Year? Decade?
Decade, yes. Year, probably not.
I would guess something dramatic will happen in the next term, at least, otherwise he's going to have a bitch of a time come re-election.
Will he magically fix the economy? If so, how long? What exactly is he going to do?
That's all pretty much been spelled out. Watch the debates.
The only part that confuses me is how he intends to ensure that these new jobs from alternative energy "can never be outsourced."
Will he walk on water?
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Ok... the last one was a joke, but, seriously, I didn't vote for him because I think he's The Savior. I didn't vote for him because of empty words like "Hope" and "Change".
I voted for him because he actually seems to understand technology, and has been promising a more open government -- and he's in favor of net neutrality. I voted for him because he surrounds himself with people who are competent -- his tech adviser was an MIT professor; McCain's tech adviser was an MPAA exec. In the same vein, I voted for him because there is no fucking way I want Sarah Palin to be President, ever.
And for many other reasons, which basically add up to: I actually agree with almost everything he had to say. Can't say I even trust McCain.
Anyone who reads all the fine print they are given has more time than I do.
I always wonder if there's a way to prevent that, legislatively.
I keep trying to word a law that basically says "Contracts must be simple and to the point, with no BS, and should be understandable in a reasonable amount of time by an ordinary person." I'm not a lawyer, but beyond that, I can't figure out how to define unambiguously how you'd outlaw legalese.
That would tend to support the "I Am Rich" theory of capitalism:
Step 1: Build something. Anything.
Step 2: Sell it for as much as you possibly can.
Step 3: Profit.
Then, you have two options:
Work around it by plugging a computer directly into the Internet to download the firmware, then switching everything back and upgrading the firmware the normal way...
Or, my personal preference, you call D-Link, say FUCK NO, demand your money back, use said money to buy something decent (generic Linksys, maybe?), and never buy D-Link again.
Penetration.
Not a lot more an open source project can do than, well, be open source.
Recognition.
Ok, true, this could help. But I doubt FLAC has Firefox's budget.
Efficiency.
So what you're saying is that we should make FLAC lossy?
Wouldn't that kind of defeat the fucking point?
If you want the industry to use a "100% compatible FLAC" logo
No, I don't. I want a "100% Compatible" logo, maybe with "No DRM". It doesn't need to cite specific formats -- if it's the wrong one, it's easily converted, unlike a DRM'd version.
I don't particularly like Python (I prefer Ruby).
I can afford to run my own servers, even just for a hobby. I want to reserve the right to do whatever I want with it, including throw ads on it, maybe make some money.
So the hosting part of App Engine doesn't buy me much -- I might as well use AppDrop. And I might move it to AppDrop eventually.
And if I'm doing that, I may as well use something Ruby- or Erlang-based.
My comment was probably badly worded -- I don't mean that I tried and Google rejected me. I mean that I don't have any ideas for a project that AppEngine would help.
Nobody ever came up with any proof.
There's some pretty strong evidence. Diebold execs were Republican. The thing was insecure enough that a 12-year-old could crack it -- so what makes you think that no one with the appropriate access would've done this? And the discrepancy between exit polls and actual results is another indicator...
Then there's the things which actually happened, like the actual 'swiftboating'.
Point is: You didn't have to be bitter to suspect something in 2000 and 2004. But this one, bitter or not, Obama won.
So STFU about being an asshole because you and your crowd have made that into a science.
You know nothing about "my crowd".
I am not a crowd. I think and speak for myself. If you have a problem with me, you have a problem with me. And I don't think you know me well enough for that.
If you have a problem with "my crowd", you are bigoted against... something, you haven't said what. If it's "Democrats", you really don't know me very well.
There were other positions to vote for yesterday, and I didn't vote blue on all of them.
You're just guessing a letter that should have been printed anyway. Equating it to cracking is silly
Oh?
Used to be, every new game I obtained, legally or not, I used a no-CD crack. I was removing protection that should not have been there anyway.
Equating it to cracking is silly, yet it's also illegal (DMCA) and obviously discouraged by the publishers (or the CD check wouldn't be there in the first place).
using it as an excuse to not pay for the game at all is wrong.
So I should pay to be inconvenienced? No thanks.
If I buy a car, you should give me the keys. I should not have to break a window and hotwire it just to drive it off the lot.
So no, I'm not buying it.
Which leaves two options: Don't play it at all, or pirate it. If I don't play it at all, the developers' work truly goes to waste, I can't recommend it to friends -- and when they ask, all I can do is that I refused to buy it because of DRM, which means more lost sales.
So, oddly enough, pirating it is better for the developers.
But usually, I can't be bothered. A game has to be damned good before I'm willing to pirate it, and I'm much more willing to simply buy a game that just works, with or without DRM.
make FLAC as important as MP3.
Details, please.
why did they give MP3 and not FLAC their logo
No, the question is, why did they give a specific format their logo?
No, if the story is true, I shouldn't buy them because of the cavalier attitude towards dealing with customers.
Alright, yes, trying 36 combinations isn't the end of the world. But I'm still basically having to crack my own game -- and this time, it's what they're telling me to do.
Any game I have to crack to play properly, I either pirate or don't play at all.
In 2000 and 2004, there was actually a question as to whether the election was stolen. Not "stolen" as in "swiftboated", but "stolen" as in "diebolded".
This time, at current count, he's got 349 electoral college votes, more than double McCain's 163. By one count, he's won the popular vote by seven million people.
Another fun statistic -- if World of Warcraft characters could vote, and they all voted for McCain, Obama would still have won the popular vote. Unless you give WoW 186 electoral college votes, Obama would still have the presidency.
And another: The District of Columbia was 92.9% for Obama.
In other words: This time, he won. It was an absolute landslide. There is no question that if you're going to be an asshole, you're the minority.
McCain isn't. Watch his concession speech.
When a format is not supported by all devices on the market that's not a fault of the device but of the format.
Erm, no, that's the "fault" of the device.
Flac is royalty-free and open source. What more could they do to get into portable media players?
it can't be an MP3 replacement unless it is at least as commonly suported as MP3.
And yes, some people would rather simply buy MP3s, for it to Just Work.
But you know, iPods support AACs and Apple Lossless. PlaysForMaybe devices support WMA. Sure, all of them will also play MP3, if you want worse quality for more space -- but by also providing Flac, you let the audiophiles choose exactly how they want it encoded for that player.
If by "tedious" you mean "automatic", you're absolutely right.
If you can spend that much space, just double it and get rid of the whole encoding and conversion step.
Why would you?
On a modern Linux distro, much of the documentation, including the manpages, are gzipped. This is because even if it doesn't buy much space, modern CPUs are so fast that there's no reason not to.
Well, the same is true of Flac. CPUs have gotten fast enough to play it back in realtime on any computer made in the last 10 years, and fast enough to encode as you rip, or decode as you burn.
Given that it costs me nothing to encode to Flac vs storing WAVs, why wouldn't I? Given the choice, wouldn't you want twice as much space for no additional effort?
But here's the main point: Offer it in mp3, so people don't have to do anything to get it working. Also offer it in Flac, for anyone who dislikes the quality of mp3. That way, you don't have to support everyone's pet format -- just the one lossless one, so they can convert it themselves.
Here's the difference:
If you provide an mp3 download, everyone knows what it is, and they don't have to be bothered with learning anything.
But that doesn't stop you from providing alternatives. Throw up an AAC as "best for iPod", and FLAC, because then geeks can either keep it in full lossless glory, or transcode it to what we want.
Flac, then. Turns into mp3 or ogg easily enough, and is open and unpatented.
The more important question is whether they require more work to develop the missing features than it would take you to re-implement the low-level pieces of App Engine and migrate away.
If that's the case, I say there's no lock-in.
Well before that case, a lot of people would figure it's worth considering. After all, Mono is always forkable if either Novell or Microsoft does something you disagree with.
Me, I'm not really eligible for App Engine in several ways, and I like the challenge of scaling, so I won't be using it anyway.
For example, it's always nice to know that some yahoo can't come along and press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X-Windows.
It's trivial to configure X to not respond to ctrl+alt+backspace.
It's even easier to simply lock the cabinet to your kiosk, and expose a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. If it has to be a keyboard, well, I've seen Windows kiosks which had the ctrl, alt, and del keys removed.
It's also nice to be able to eliminate the overhead of X in a memory constrained environment where a sophisticated interface can be achieved with a lot less hardware.
True enough, but Moore's Law applies to RAM (sort of), effectively making this obsolete -- at least in the kiosk, for now.
So, your point is about the ease of developing a fork. The "gold standard" stuff is only important to you because it makes a fork easier.
Am I right so far?
Well, there are no new versions of DOS coming out. FreeDOS is, in many circles, considered the "gold standard" of DOS. Something starting out proprietary doesn't prevent it from becoming an open standard.
In the case of AppEngine, most of the original library code from Google is open under an Apache license -- so, while parts of it are closed, those are the lower-level things like BigTable, which have multiple viable replacements (Hadoop, Mnesia, CouchDB).
So, with parts of it open, and with at least one open implementation, it is effectively easy to fork -- just look at how fast AppDrop came out after AppEngines (within a month).
So, your real concern is addressed, if I understand what you're saying.
I am not saying that everything is easy to fork, or that everything with an attempted open implementation lacks vendor lock-in. You know better by now.
If you're using Gmail, you could avoid this problem with an IMAP client. Of course, that may defeat the point of Gmail...
The other cool point about web apps is: If your Internet goes down, you can go wandering. Maybe there's some nearby wifi you can leech. Maybe you go to Starbucks. Maybe you go home.
With an internal server, if you lose power, you're SOL. If your server is down, you're also SOL. If a worm runs rampant, bogging down network traffic and even making your desktop unusable, guess what? You're shit-outta-luck.