3. Use a stable, mature browser in a rock solid OS -- Konqueror!...Who am I kidding? Konq is usually pretty solid, but likes to crash (very occasionally) when editing textareas. Unlike Firefox, the contents of that textarea will be completely gone... which leads to a lot of re-typed Slashdot comments.
From what I heard (admittedly anecdotal evidence) the Microsoft support that is included with the purchase of the license is rather crappy. As in, some guy in a call center who looks for the solution in a database (MSDN??). For that alone, I doubt many customers would pay them.
No, I suspect what they'd pay for is the fact that they can then say to their boss that they have support, and that the support didn't help. Why do you think people buy RedHat Enterprise Linux, when CentOS is available for free?
Over the years I expect that I have purchased 3 or 4 boxed.... I would hate to think that I am not the rule for a citizen of the U.S.
I have had one purchased for me, for work.
For personal use, I very much doubt you're the rule. Even ignoring piracy, I have one legitimate copy of Vista (came preloaded on the laptop), one legitimate copy of XP Home (came preloaded on an older laptop), and one of XP Pro (college site-wide license/subscription/deal -- all CS students can burn their own copy, legally) -- and a copy of 3.1 (came on a Pentium-1-era machine), and a copy of 98 SE (came on a desktop).
None of these came in boxes. I only purchased one of them directly, even -- that was the one preloaded on that laptop.
I think the only people I know of who have bought Microsoft software in a box did it on behalf of a small business.
Let me put it another way -- the average US citizen only has a dim concept of what an OS is. They buy computers, not operating systems. They buy Macs or PCs, not OS X or Windows. They have never heard of Linux.
Well, they'd need to move to an OSS compatible business model for starters but right now they're still mostly about selling boxes of software.
Seems to me they get much of their money from hardware vendors (like Dell) and from large corporations (volume licenses). How many people do you know who've actually bought a boxed copy of Windows?
And because of that, it seems like neither of those customers would stop buying from them if their product could be had for free. After all, Dell pays Canonical for support...
Just guessing... maybe the secret is that Microsoft doesn't actually offer any support?
I've had plenty. If I had to install it on a dozen identical PCs, I'm sure that after the first nightmare, the rest would seem easy...
What you have to do is put them on a fair playing field. I have a laptop that's designed for Vista, and XP was at least as difficult to get working as Ubuntu.
I'd think they'd be more likely to be I/O or socket bound, especially if they're dealing with file uploads or calls to S3 or Salesforce or any other long-lasting requests.
In cases like these, it seems like you'd more often be looking to background the task.
Right, and modrails handles that, so I don't need to see anything else up as a watchdog.
At the top of deploy.rb:
require 'mongrel_cluster/recipes'
And, once:
gem install mongrel_cluster
Done. Considerably easier than configuring Apache, I'll bet.
Ah, ok, so nginx is the load balancer.
Yes. Incidentally, it's also the webserver for static files, for things we don't have on S3.
The nice thing is that I wouldn't need to have nginx know how many mongrel instances were on each host; instead, I just point it to port 80 on each app server and let modrails handle the cluster size based on the current load.
Interesting. Out of curiosity, what would scaling the cluster size down accomplish? We're pretty much putting apps on dedicated app servers on EC2. We might put memcached on them, but that can't really be resized on the fly.
Quite right, yup, then it's just like a PHP app - set up Apache, set up the DB, and away you go.
If I wanted something like a PHP app, I'd grab Sinatra, or maybe Camping.
Um, except if you you have exactly 1 physics thread you have to juggle complex scheduling considerations about who needs how much CPU, handle the prioritization against the render and AI threads, handle intermixing them, etc.
Which people do.
Or simpler: Give the render thread priority, and set it to vsync. Anything above 60 fps is a waste.
If you have 10000 physics objects and 15 AIs, keeping both threads CPU-hungry, then the OS will give 1/3 CPU to the physics engine; 1/3 CPU to the AI; and 1/3 CPU to the render thread.
Assuming the render thread needs that 1/3rd.
Keep in mind that ideally -- that is, if you're not lagging -- none of these are pegging the CPU, and you're just making whatever calculations you make every tick.
You obviously don't understand either game programming or operating systems.
Well, let's see -- most games I know of won't take advantage of more than one CPU. In fact, when Quake3 was ported to dual-core, it took a 30% performance hit -- and keep in mind, that's Carmack doing it.
And this is hardly the first place this argument has been made -- green threads are inherently more efficient than OS threads. Take Erlang -- it runs as many OS threads as you have cores, and distributes green threads among OS threads.
So I don't actually have to understand these. I just have to refer you to the people who do -- and obviously have a fair bit of experience making it work. Do you?
...WTF? Either it's FOSS or it's not. "Only in name" would imply that it claims to be FOSS and isn't.
Intel writes the drivers
So what? The community at least has a chance of maintaining them.
ATI/AMD has been working very hard to open up their cards and as of right now they are the leaders in FOSS support for good GPUs.
Great -- can I actually download a FOSS ATI driver that works better than the Intel driver on an Intel card? Because as of a few months ago, this was not the case.
WinAmp - Windows Amplifier So it provides more power to be used by Windows?
Even if you assume it's music... So it lets me turn my PC into an amplifier? I still have to buy a CD player and some speakers to connect to it?
Outlook Express - An express version of Outlook that users were already familiar with because it came with Office, which is an office suite. First: WTF does "express" mean?
Second: You're wrong. Most often, Outlook Express seems to be used by people for whom it never occurred that there was an Outlook, or that they could buy Office. To such a person, even if Outlook makes sense (hint: IT DOESN'T), it would seem like Outlook Express is a faster, better, new and improved version of Outlook, right?
AutoCAD - It has C.A.D. right in it. Which stands for what?
Yes, I know what it stands for. But given that all of these are assuming a certain amount of ignorance with computer-specific names, I think ignorance of computer-specific acronyms is fair.
Sure it works fine in Kopete, but it wouldn't let me grab a snapshot in it. While it's probably not as convenient, there's printscreen -- brings up ksnapshot by default on KDE.
And there's also the possibility of simply investigating how Kopete does it.
Here's the problem from a usability standpoint: I want to install a media player. I don't know that I need to install mplayer, xine or totem. That is a real problem, and one we should fix, but it's not unique to Linux.
Say I'm on Windows and I want to install something to watch movies. If I'm lucky, I know I'm looking for Windows Media player -- but where to go get it? If I didn't already know, I'm sure "Windows Update" wouldn't have been my first place. (Why isn't it called "Windows Install", then?)
What is a totem and WTF does it have to do with playing media? WTF does my outlook on life have to do with reading email? WTF does excelling have to do with a spreadsheet?
try installing an app that plays podcasts WITHOUT KNOWING that democracyplayer and VLC play podcasts. Well, when I went to grab the Skepticality podcast for Amarok (because I already know and love Amarok), I found two recommendations beyond "just use iTunes" -- one of which works on Linux (and they explicitly said so).
And while it's just a bit of a stretch, Googling for "podcatcher" told me about gpodder. And Amarok was preinstalled (Kubuntu).
Again, I think this could be improved, but I don't think it's any worse than on any platform. The only advantage of Windows is that there's a fair chance that the website on which you first learn that podcasts exist will very likely take you to an EXE download eventually -- but there's nothing we can do about that, other than improve Wine.
WineHQ further lists "Wine will never run on Win64" in their "Wine Myths" section, seeming to imply that there will eventually be Win64 support.
It's hard to say how much of a priority it should be. I want my 64-bit stuff working, and ideally, I'd love for Wine to be as good or better than Windows for certain tasks. (Benchmarks showed Quake3 was faster on Linux, even under Wine.)
But it seems more like Wine is a killer app for random, old, small-user-base apps, often that one last thing that you can't do on Windows. Gamers will outgrow Quake3 and start playing QuakeWars (which has native Linux support), and you can always choose to play a different game (unless you're playing WoW, which runs well under Wine.) But if you need QuickBooks, you need QuickBooks, and Gnucash isn't likely to be a valid replacement.
And they are using my code in a way I didn't intend.
Are they?
Well, let's see. Um... duh... YES. Pretty much because I say so.
Did you out those stipulations in the contract?
Does it matter?
Now, they may well be using it in a way they are legally allowed to. We've established it. Stop bringing that up -- it's a strawman.
But certainly, if I released code under the GPL, it was code that I intended people to be able to tinker with. Whether or not that is what is actually stated in the license is irrelevant.
And who says the code is intended to thwart Linux?
LOL... It isn't intended to thwart linux
Thanks, that proves my point. Unless their intent was to thwart Linux, this was an incidental restriction, not a deliberate one.
it is intended to maintain it's operation as they intended it to be.
So, is your point (roughly) that it wasn't intended to thwart Linux specifically, but it was intended to prevent configurations other than the one they approve?
I really don't see it, given that this doesn't make it any harder to use an alternative OS -- it only makes it easier to use the provided one.
In reality, they pretty much ignore Linux, and attempt to help Windows. I see this as very different than if they deliberately tried to stop custom software (Trusted Computing, say). In one case, effort was expended to help Windows. In the other case, effort was expended to prevent certain kinds of use.
And for the record, the charge for the CDs.
For the record, in most cases, the CDs are extremely cheap ($5? $10? $2?) and it's sometimes possible to talk them down. Additionally, the restore partition can be backed up -- nothing to "defeat" in order to do that, either, you just need a blank DVD to put it on.
When your software gains control of the devices used to control access to copyrighted materials it does.
Still not very much to do with it, unless you mean the DMCA anti-circumvention clause.
I'm saying that Tivo isn't the only type of DRM out there and past situations don't mean they are the only possible scenarios.
Name a kind of DRM which provides more options to the user than no DRM at all. The best I can do is indirectly -- Napster, Rhapsody, Zune. Which means that:
I'm not saying TIVO is right in locking out users. Far from that.
Pretty much any kind of DRM will, by definition, be locking the users out of something. And certainly, the kind of DRM that causes GPL problems will, by definition, be locking the users out of more than just making a copy.
I'll grant you that it may be possible to come up with a kind of DRM which only restricts what it was intended to -- though I have never seen it. (Quick example: CD-based copy protection restricts me from installing that software on a computer with no optical drive, or from removing the drive while using the software.)
Wow.. Just Wow.. A manufacturer protecting the content distribution on their device is akin to genital mutilation and human oppression. You really, really, really, need a reality check here.
Thanks -- looks like you don't actually have an argument against my analogy.
Note: I am not drawing a parallel in magnitude, only in form. There is the way the real world is, and the way I would like it to be. My arguments which describe the way I think the world should work are not invalidated by the way it does.
Most of your last post, and a fair bit of this one, is still telling me that "this is the way it is" -- and more relevantly, you're talking about legal rights, whereas I was talking about moral ones.
I assume when Nokia says that they're "not ready to play by the rules yet", it doesn't mean that they're unable to follow the law -- if that were true, the EFF would be suing them. No, it mean
Yes, but instead of preallocating a specific port range (and a cluster size) you can set up one port and the number of workers gets expanded as necessary. Given two cores, I'm not sure where more than three mongrels would help. Also, there are several projects which do this already, in several ways.
Plus, you don't need something watching and restarting each worker. Actually, you do -- it's called Apache+modrails. The only difference is that it's marginally more visible when used as mongrel_cluster.
Also, you could conceivably remove a layer from your server architecture Not the way you're describing -- or at least, not on more than one app server. Or how does Apache distribute tasks to workers on other machines?
My cluster right now is: nginx -> mongrels (with rails) -> db
With modrails, it'd be: nginx -> apache (with modrails) -> db
Or, the way you'd probably do it: apache (with mod_proxy_balancer) -> apache (with modrails) -> db
Of course, if you're running on a single machine, it's slightly easier -- then you can drop the nginx/balancer layer.
Well, not that much, lvm snapshots are copy-on-write, so you merely need to store the delta. And you have to predict, ahead of time, how much space you need for snapshots. That's a bit like partitioning -- when was the last time you had to answer, at install time, exactly how much space you need for/var/spool?
It's nice to be able to do that, but I think most people would agree that it's much more convenient to just treat a hard drive as a big blob of space, and to use free space on that partition for the delta.
Also: copy-on-write is not uncopy-on-unwrite. If I save a 10 gig file, then delete it, there's still 10 gigs that was copied. The block layer doesn't know that it's all junk freespace now -- all it knows is that it's 10 gigs that physically differs between one copy and the other.
Similarly, if I make a massive change to a file, or a filesystem tree, and then revert it, not only is there no guarantee that the filesystem will put these blocks in the same place, but even if it did, I'm guessing dm-snapshot won't reassemble them.
I'd expect that knowing the exact size of the underlying device would not really be necessary; remaining space free would be more important. Fair enough. I don't think that changes anything here, though.
For a really ugly hack you start with 'actual size with 100% entropy', then you could resize to keep free space in front of used space as compression makes extra space available in your block device... Yeah, I thought of that. You already identified one problem with it. I've got another one: It's ugly!
After all, that's the major complaint against ZFS -- that it violates layering constraints, which offends people's sensibilities. And rightly so. But it's certainly better than what you've just described.
One more thing: If you seriously look at the above LVM-ish solutions, or anything else which involves messing around with device-mapper, it's going to cause a fair amount of disk fragmentation -- similar to creating a disk image for a VM. And when you've got a fragmented NTFS filesystem that's stored as a fragmented sparse file on ext3, well, let's just say that they don't cancel each other out -- you'll have to defrag them both (from inner to outer).
Because, when she bought her computer, she still hadn't heard of Linux?? Fair enough, but I still refuse to see it as a point against Linux.
After all, when she bought her computer, she might not have heard of Apple. Should she then expect OS X to work on her Dell?
More extreme example: When she bought her Xbox, she might not have heard of Windows. Should she then expect windows to work on it? (Keep in mind that you can actually get Windows to run on the original Xbox -- though there's a layer of Linux in between.)
The fact that Linux works on computers that weren't designed for it is actually pretty impressive -- not something to assume as an expectation, and blame Linux for when it doesn't work.
All the crazy stunts and tricks you have to pull to get some of those lighting and reflection tricks can be thrown out the window, and the extra time could be used to::crosses fingers:: make better gameplay. Not only that, but any weird new kind of gameplay which depends on interesting visuals can be done much, much easier.
Simple example: Portal. Right now, it involves all sorts of crazy tricks. As I understand it, objects (at least, cubes which fall through the portal) are duplicated at both ends of a portal (in case you can see both ends at once)... The "hall of mirrors" effect of two portals across the hallway from each other is apparently intensive (it causes lag), and there is a hard (adjustable) limit, which can't be set above, what, 7 layers?
If Portal had been done raytraced, there would still be tricky things to do with the physics, but at least the portal graphics themselves would require roughly a single line of code -- add a few more, and you could have it shimmer and distort -- and they'd perform about the same either way. And they'd look better -- the "hall of mirrors" would continue to the pixel (or sub-pixel, if antialiased) scale, with no huge lag when you turn towards those mirrors.
But if there's one thing we could use in games, it's simplifying the code. Consider that games have tight schedules as it is (even moreso with the knowledge that any problems can be patched via download), and that it's not as though you have to design for ten years worth of feature enhancements and bugfixes -- you generally won't carry much over to the next game, so if it runs, it's good enough.
Given that attitude, what kind of hiring pratices will you have? Even The Daily WTF doesn't like to talk about it.
Now add the absolute requirement for performance, and you get esoteric, incomprehensible hacks at every level. And this is considered normal -- celebrated, even. After all, John Carmack has a hack named after him.
This is an area which could really use some solid engineering. To liken it to Web development, it seems everyone's working with crusty old PHP (or even straight C), when what's needed is either Rails (for large projects) or Sinatra (for small projects).
Why not just allow ad-hoc registrations of TLDs, cheap? Yes, it's punting the.com problem up a level -- but why do we care? The original point of.com,.net,.org, etc is pretty much gone.
The only point I see to TLDs now is.gov, and really, that can still be done. The government, just like any organization, could register a TLD, and spread the word that anything not under that TLD is not officially associated with them.
People tell me that there are technological reasons for this, but I don't get it. EVERYONE has a.com address, so why would it be that much more difficult if they had the same address without the.com?
I think it would actually reduce the problem where people buy every damn thing -- no need to buy.com,.net,.org,.mobi,.info,.tv, etc, just to make sure people end up at Widgets, Inc when they go to a widgets.* website -- just buy yourself a.widgets and be done with it.
Of course, that's probably not how this is going to work.
I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things. Got it.
But I'd like my file system to stick to managing files and use the volume and block layers to provide those features under any file system. How, exactly, should the block layer provide resizing or compression?
I mean, yes, you can do snapshots -- clumsily, as you have to set aside space for it (can't just stuff it into free space on that volume) -- and that's inherent in the nature of the device-mapper. There's no way for DM to know which blocks are free -- that's the filesystem's job.
And yes, you should be able to do compression at the block level -- or at least, read-only compression, as we see on livecds these days. How would you add write support? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 10 gig device, and it's really on a 5 gig device, what happens when I write 6 gigs of high-entropy data to it? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 5 gig device, I won't be able to write 6 gigs of low-entropy data (text), because how would the block layer tell the filesystem it has more space?
Now, I get it that ZFS is too monolithic. I do. But the current volume/block layers are not sufficient to get some of the more interesting features of ZFS, without creating a filesystem that's as monolithic as ZFS. (There's no technical reason you couldn't port ZFS to Linux.)
At the very least, we need more layers. Maybe an extent layer, to start with. I'm actually going to start developing exactly that -- prototyping in Ruby (with FUSE). It'll be fast enough for my purposes, and if people really want speed, they can port it to the kernel -- I just don't feel like writing C.
I'm thinking an API something like this:
id = extents.store(some_string)
Obviously, allow for streaming, multiple devices, etc, but you get the idea. You could layer them, too -- compression would be a layer you can slip between any backend device (block layer, network store, RAM, whatever) and any filesystem, in pretty much the same way you can slip encryption between any block device and any filesystem today.
I disagree... Given that Myspace is losing people, they're losing those ad impressions anyway. And I was going to put those tour dates in places that they wouldn't have otherwise been -- people would see them who would never have looked at MySpace in the first place.
However, the complete breaking of the calendar, as viewed from the website -- duplicate entries, missing entries, until they finally disable the feature till they're ready to fix it -- that is not a feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that must be why it's not on the iPhone -- which, as we all know, is only used by greasy GNU hippies who are broke and worthless.
3. Use a stable, mature browser in a rock solid OS -- Konqueror! ...Who am I kidding? Konq is usually pretty solid, but likes to crash (very occasionally) when editing textareas. Unlike Firefox, the contents of that textarea will be completely gone... which leads to a lot of re-typed Slashdot comments.
I guess I'm thinking of thing like a 2-3 second call to a service.
Still something that might be better backgrounded -- though I see your point. Easier to just let a thread be used.
Camping's fun stuff; another fine piece of work from _why...
If you like Camping, you'll love Sinatra. Not MVC, but still awesome.
From what I heard (admittedly anecdotal evidence) the Microsoft support that is included with the purchase of the license is rather crappy. As in, some guy in a call center who looks for the solution in a database (MSDN??). For that alone, I doubt many customers would pay them.
No, I suspect what they'd pay for is the fact that they can then say to their boss that they have support, and that the support didn't help. Why do you think people buy RedHat Enterprise Linux, when CentOS is available for free?
Over the years I expect that I have purchased 3 or 4 boxed.... I would hate to think that I am not the rule for a citizen of the U.S.
I have had one purchased for me, for work.
For personal use, I very much doubt you're the rule. Even ignoring piracy, I have one legitimate copy of Vista (came preloaded on the laptop), one legitimate copy of XP Home (came preloaded on an older laptop), and one of XP Pro (college site-wide license/subscription/deal -- all CS students can burn their own copy, legally) -- and a copy of 3.1 (came on a Pentium-1-era machine), and a copy of 98 SE (came on a desktop).
None of these came in boxes. I only purchased one of them directly, even -- that was the one preloaded on that laptop.
I think the only people I know of who have bought Microsoft software in a box did it on behalf of a small business.
Let me put it another way -- the average US citizen only has a dim concept of what an OS is. They buy computers, not operating systems. They buy Macs or PCs, not OS X or Windows. They have never heard of Linux.
It did, however, answer your point:
There's no evidence of change
It's not conclusive evidence, but it is evidence.
Also:
Well, they'd need to move to an OSS compatible business model for starters but right now they're still mostly about selling boxes of software.
Seems to me they get much of their money from hardware vendors (like Dell) and from large corporations (volume licenses). How many people do you know who've actually bought a boxed copy of Windows?
And because of that, it seems like neither of those customers would stop buying from them if their product could be had for free. After all, Dell pays Canonical for support...
Just guessing... maybe the secret is that Microsoft doesn't actually offer any support?
I haven't actually ever tried to extend an lvm snapshot, as I've never had a use for it, but it would be trivial technically.
Would it also be trivial to shrink the filesystem to make room for that snapshot? (Assume you aren't adding another disk.)
There are advantages to the approach.
Any disadvantages?
Mmm, speaking of fragmentation, have you tried running ZFS for a longer period?
Actually, I haven't run ZFS at all. Still, I suspect it would be easier to write a defragmenter for ZFS than for, say, ext3+lvm.
I've had plenty. If I had to install it on a dozen identical PCs, I'm sure that after the first nightmare, the rest would seem easy...
What you have to do is put them on a fair playing field. I have a laptop that's designed for Vista, and XP was at least as difficult to get working as Ubuntu.
I'd think they'd be more likely to be I/O or socket bound, especially if they're dealing with file uploads or calls to S3 or Salesforce or any other long-lasting requests.
In cases like these, it seems like you'd more often be looking to background the task.
Right, and modrails handles that, so I don't need to see anything else up as a watchdog.
At the top of deploy.rb:
require 'mongrel_cluster/recipes'
And, once:
gem install mongrel_cluster
Done. Considerably easier than configuring Apache, I'll bet.
Ah, ok, so nginx is the load balancer.
Yes. Incidentally, it's also the webserver for static files, for things we don't have on S3.
The nice thing is that I wouldn't need to have nginx know how many mongrel instances were on each host; instead, I just point it to port 80 on each app server and let modrails handle the cluster size based on the current load.
Interesting. Out of curiosity, what would scaling the cluster size down accomplish? We're pretty much putting apps on dedicated app servers on EC2. We might put memcached on them, but that can't really be resized on the fly.
Quite right, yup, then it's just like a PHP app - set up Apache, set up the DB, and away you go.
If I wanted something like a PHP app, I'd grab Sinatra, or maybe Camping.
Um, except if you you have exactly 1 physics thread you have to juggle complex scheduling considerations about who needs how much CPU, handle the prioritization against the render and AI threads, handle intermixing them, etc.
Which people do.
Or simpler: Give the render thread priority, and set it to vsync. Anything above 60 fps is a waste.
If you have 10000 physics objects and 15 AIs, keeping both threads CPU-hungry, then the OS will give 1/3 CPU to the physics engine; 1/3 CPU to the AI; and 1/3 CPU to the render thread.
Assuming the render thread needs that 1/3rd.
Keep in mind that ideally -- that is, if you're not lagging -- none of these are pegging the CPU, and you're just making whatever calculations you make every tick.
You obviously don't understand either game programming or operating systems.
Well, let's see -- most games I know of won't take advantage of more than one CPU. In fact, when Quake3 was ported to dual-core, it took a 30% performance hit -- and keep in mind, that's Carmack doing it.
And this is hardly the first place this argument has been made -- green threads are inherently more efficient than OS threads. Take Erlang -- it runs as many OS threads as you have cores, and distributes green threads among OS threads.
So I don't actually have to understand these. I just have to refer you to the people who do -- and obviously have a fair bit of experience making it work. Do you?
Yea it is FOSS but only in name.
...WTF? Either it's FOSS or it's not. "Only in name" would imply that it claims to be FOSS and isn't.
Intel writes the drivers
So what? The community at least has a chance of maintaining them.
ATI/AMD has been working very hard to open up their cards and as of right now they are the leaders in FOSS support for good GPUs.
Great -- can I actually download a FOSS ATI driver that works better than the Intel driver on an Intel card? Because as of a few months ago, this was not the case.
Even if you assume it's music... So it lets me turn my PC into an amplifier? I still have to buy a CD player and some speakers to connect to it?
Outlook Express - An express version of Outlook that users were already familiar with because it came with Office, which is an office suite. First: WTF does "express" mean?Second: You're wrong. Most often, Outlook Express seems to be used by people for whom it never occurred that there was an Outlook, or that they could buy Office. To such a person, even if Outlook makes sense (hint: IT DOESN'T), it would seem like Outlook Express is a faster, better, new and improved version of Outlook, right?
AutoCAD - It has C.A.D. right in it. Which stands for what?Yes, I know what it stands for. But given that all of these are assuming a certain amount of ignorance with computer-specific names, I think ignorance of computer-specific acronyms is fair.
And there's also the possibility of simply investigating how Kopete does it.
Say I'm on Windows and I want to install something to watch movies. If I'm lucky, I know I'm looking for Windows Media player -- but where to go get it? If I didn't already know, I'm sure "Windows Update" wouldn't have been my first place. (Why isn't it called "Windows Install", then?)
What is a totem and WTF does it have to do with playing media? WTF does my outlook on life have to do with reading email? WTF does excelling have to do with a spreadsheet? try installing an app that plays podcasts WITHOUT KNOWING that democracyplayer and VLC play podcasts. Well, when I went to grab the Skepticality podcast for Amarok (because I already know and love Amarok), I found two recommendations beyond "just use iTunes" -- one of which works on Linux (and they explicitly said so).And while it's just a bit of a stretch, Googling for "podcatcher" told me about gpodder. And Amarok was preinstalled (Kubuntu).
Again, I think this could be improved, but I don't think it's any worse than on any platform. The only advantage of Windows is that there's a fair chance that the website on which you first learn that podcasts exist will very likely take you to an EXE download eventually -- but there's nothing we can do about that, other than improve Wine.
WineHQ further lists "Wine will never run on Win64" in their "Wine Myths" section, seeming to imply that there will eventually be Win64 support.
It's hard to say how much of a priority it should be. I want my 64-bit stuff working, and ideally, I'd love for Wine to be as good or better than Windows for certain tasks. (Benchmarks showed Quake3 was faster on Linux, even under Wine.)
But it seems more like Wine is a killer app for random, old, small-user-base apps, often that one last thing that you can't do on Windows. Gamers will outgrow Quake3 and start playing QuakeWars (which has native Linux support), and you can always choose to play a different game (unless you're playing WoW, which runs well under Wine.) But if you need QuickBooks, you need QuickBooks, and Gnucash isn't likely to be a valid replacement.
And they are using my code in a way I didn't intend.
Are they?
Well, let's see. Um... duh... YES. Pretty much because I say so.
Did you out those stipulations in the contract?
Does it matter?
Now, they may well be using it in a way they are legally allowed to. We've established it. Stop bringing that up -- it's a strawman.
But certainly, if I released code under the GPL, it was code that I intended people to be able to tinker with. Whether or not that is what is actually stated in the license is irrelevant.
And who says the code is intended to thwart Linux?
LOL... It isn't intended to thwart linux
Thanks, that proves my point. Unless their intent was to thwart Linux, this was an incidental restriction, not a deliberate one.
it is intended to maintain it's operation as they intended it to be.
So, is your point (roughly) that it wasn't intended to thwart Linux specifically, but it was intended to prevent configurations other than the one they approve?
I really don't see it, given that this doesn't make it any harder to use an alternative OS -- it only makes it easier to use the provided one.
In reality, they pretty much ignore Linux, and attempt to help Windows. I see this as very different than if they deliberately tried to stop custom software (Trusted Computing, say). In one case, effort was expended to help Windows. In the other case, effort was expended to prevent certain kinds of use.
And for the record, the charge for the CDs.
For the record, in most cases, the CDs are extremely cheap ($5? $10? $2?) and it's sometimes possible to talk them down. Additionally, the restore partition can be backed up -- nothing to "defeat" in order to do that, either, you just need a blank DVD to put it on.
When your software gains control of the devices used to control access to copyrighted materials it does.
Still not very much to do with it, unless you mean the DMCA anti-circumvention clause.
I'm saying that Tivo isn't the only type of DRM out there and past situations don't mean they are the only possible scenarios.
Name a kind of DRM which provides more options to the user than no DRM at all. The best I can do is indirectly -- Napster, Rhapsody, Zune. Which means that:
I'm not saying TIVO is right in locking out users. Far from that.
Pretty much any kind of DRM will, by definition, be locking the users out of something. And certainly, the kind of DRM that causes GPL problems will, by definition, be locking the users out of more than just making a copy.
I'll grant you that it may be possible to come up with a kind of DRM which only restricts what it was intended to -- though I have never seen it. (Quick example: CD-based copy protection restricts me from installing that software on a computer with no optical drive, or from removing the drive while using the software.)
Wow.. Just Wow.. A manufacturer protecting the content distribution on their device is akin to genital mutilation and human oppression. You really, really, really, need a reality check here.
Thanks -- looks like you don't actually have an argument against my analogy.
Note: I am not drawing a parallel in magnitude, only in form. There is the way the real world is, and the way I would like it to be. My arguments which describe the way I think the world should work are not invalidated by the way it does.
Most of your last post, and a fair bit of this one, is still telling me that "this is the way it is" -- and more relevantly, you're talking about legal rights, whereas I was talking about moral ones.
I assume when Nokia says that they're "not ready to play by the rules yet", it doesn't mean that they're unable to follow the law -- if that were true, the EFF would be suing them. No, it mean
My cluster right now is: nginx -> mongrels (with rails) -> db
With modrails, it'd be: nginx -> apache (with modrails) -> db
Or, the way you'd probably do it: apache (with mod_proxy_balancer) -> apache (with modrails) -> db
Of course, if you're running on a single machine, it's slightly easier -- then you can drop the nginx/balancer layer.
It's nice to be able to do that, but I think most people would agree that it's much more convenient to just treat a hard drive as a big blob of space, and to use free space on that partition for the delta.
Also: copy-on-write is not uncopy-on-unwrite. If I save a 10 gig file, then delete it, there's still 10 gigs that was copied. The block layer doesn't know that it's all junk freespace now -- all it knows is that it's 10 gigs that physically differs between one copy and the other.
Similarly, if I make a massive change to a file, or a filesystem tree, and then revert it, not only is there no guarantee that the filesystem will put these blocks in the same place, but even if it did, I'm guessing dm-snapshot won't reassemble them.
I'd expect that knowing the exact size of the underlying device would not really be necessary; remaining space free would be more important. Fair enough. I don't think that changes anything here, though. For a really ugly hack you start with 'actual size with 100% entropy', then you could resize to keep free space in front of used space as compression makes extra space available in your block device... Yeah, I thought of that. You already identified one problem with it. I've got another one: It's ugly!After all, that's the major complaint against ZFS -- that it violates layering constraints, which offends people's sensibilities. And rightly so. But it's certainly better than what you've just described.
One more thing: If you seriously look at the above LVM-ish solutions, or anything else which involves messing around with device-mapper, it's going to cause a fair amount of disk fragmentation -- similar to creating a disk image for a VM. And when you've got a fragmented NTFS filesystem that's stored as a fragmented sparse file on ext3, well, let's just say that they don't cancel each other out -- you'll have to defrag them both (from inner to outer).
After all, when she bought her computer, she might not have heard of Apple. Should she then expect OS X to work on her Dell?
More extreme example: When she bought her Xbox, she might not have heard of Windows. Should she then expect windows to work on it? (Keep in mind that you can actually get Windows to run on the original Xbox -- though there's a layer of Linux in between.)
The fact that Linux works on computers that weren't designed for it is actually pretty impressive -- not something to assume as an expectation, and blame Linux for when it doesn't work.
Simple example: Portal. Right now, it involves all sorts of crazy tricks. As I understand it, objects (at least, cubes which fall through the portal) are duplicated at both ends of a portal (in case you can see both ends at once)... The "hall of mirrors" effect of two portals across the hallway from each other is apparently intensive (it causes lag), and there is a hard (adjustable) limit, which can't be set above, what, 7 layers?
If Portal had been done raytraced, there would still be tricky things to do with the physics, but at least the portal graphics themselves would require roughly a single line of code -- add a few more, and you could have it shimmer and distort -- and they'd perform about the same either way. And they'd look better -- the "hall of mirrors" would continue to the pixel (or sub-pixel, if antialiased) scale, with no huge lag when you turn towards those mirrors.
But if there's one thing we could use in games, it's simplifying the code. Consider that games have tight schedules as it is (even moreso with the knowledge that any problems can be patched via download), and that it's not as though you have to design for ten years worth of feature enhancements and bugfixes -- you generally won't carry much over to the next game, so if it runs, it's good enough.
Given that attitude, what kind of hiring pratices will you have? Even The Daily WTF doesn't like to talk about it.
Now add the absolute requirement for performance, and you get esoteric, incomprehensible hacks at every level. And this is considered normal -- celebrated, even. After all, John Carmack has a hack named after him.
This is an area which could really use some solid engineering. To liken it to Web development, it seems everyone's working with crusty old PHP (or even straight C), when what's needed is either Rails (for large projects) or Sinatra (for small projects).
Question: Why didn't Mom buy her Dell with Ubuntu instead? That way, at least there'd be someone to call when you have these issues.
Why not just allow ad-hoc registrations of TLDs, cheap? Yes, it's punting the .com problem up a level -- but why do we care? The original point of .com, .net, .org, etc is pretty much gone.
The only point I see to TLDs now is .gov, and really, that can still be done. The government, just like any organization, could register a TLD, and spread the word that anything not under that TLD is not officially associated with them.
People tell me that there are technological reasons for this, but I don't get it. EVERYONE has a .com address, so why would it be that much more difficult if they had the same address without the .com?
I think it would actually reduce the problem where people buy every damn thing -- no need to buy .com, .net, .org, .mobi, .info, .tv, etc, just to make sure people end up at Widgets, Inc when they go to a widgets.* website -- just buy yourself a .widgets and be done with it.
Of course, that's probably not how this is going to work.
I mean, yes, you can do snapshots -- clumsily, as you have to set aside space for it (can't just stuff it into free space on that volume) -- and that's inherent in the nature of the device-mapper. There's no way for DM to know which blocks are free -- that's the filesystem's job.
And yes, you should be able to do compression at the block level -- or at least, read-only compression, as we see on livecds these days. How would you add write support? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 10 gig device, and it's really on a 5 gig device, what happens when I write 6 gigs of high-entropy data to it? If you tell the filesystem it's on a 5 gig device, I won't be able to write 6 gigs of low-entropy data (text), because how would the block layer tell the filesystem it has more space?
Now, I get it that ZFS is too monolithic. I do. But the current volume/block layers are not sufficient to get some of the more interesting features of ZFS, without creating a filesystem that's as monolithic as ZFS. (There's no technical reason you couldn't port ZFS to Linux.)
At the very least, we need more layers. Maybe an extent layer, to start with. I'm actually going to start developing exactly that -- prototyping in Ruby (with FUSE). It'll be fast enough for my purposes, and if people really want speed, they can port it to the kernel -- I just don't feel like writing C.
I'm thinking an API something like this:
Obviously, allow for streaming, multiple devices, etc, but you get the idea. You could layer them, too -- compression would be a layer you can slip between any backend device (block layer, network store, RAM, whatever) and any filesystem, in pretty much the same way you can slip encryption between any block device and any filesystem today.You still need to setup a reverse proxy to the other servers. The only thing you've done is replaced mongrel with apache.
I disagree... Given that Myspace is losing people, they're losing those ad impressions anyway. And I was going to put those tour dates in places that they wouldn't have otherwise been -- people would see them who would never have looked at MySpace in the first place.
However, the complete breaking of the calendar, as viewed from the website -- duplicate entries, missing entries, until they finally disable the feature till they're ready to fix it -- that is not a feature.