Re:We need a special Anti MS open source license?
on
Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 1
That would be worthless because it would be totally unenforceable legally. Evaluations of which companies are 'OK' and which aren't would be so subjective as to not mean anything. If you specifically named MS as not licensable, that may have legal problems anyway. The most reasonable thing to do is basically the GPL-style license anyway, where no one is allowed to close-source and distribute it.
The Linux to exercise simile is a good one, and I stopped trying both for about the same reason--my schedule was getting so busy that I couldn't keep devoting so much time to it.
Not to mention the number of OSX machines that are purchased for the HW;
Hee hee, oh my. That was a good one. I wish I had my mod points today; that one deserves a funny. If Apple would port OSX for x86, I'd be interested, but the other way would be like buying a Geo Metro that only gets 5mpg.
There are just different ways of using the computer. I think it's odd when people laugh at using WinXP with 256 or 128MB of memory. That perception comes from their type of usage. They don't like having to open and close programs. There are always at least 5 apps open all the time, so of course that small amount of memory would make the machine run slowly. For many people who don't spend all their time on the computer, one or two programs at a time is the norm, so there's not much need for a lot of memory. Thanks for standing up for the common man! *Disclaimer* I work for a DRAM maker, so I do always have a pretty decent amount of memory in my systems. I hardly ever need that much, though--just making sure the machine keeps running fast.
I swear I think you're just trolling with all your false Windows bashing, but your Karma's not bad so I'll respond.
Sometimes Linux comes with a nice mp3 player in
the menus. Windows doesn't have this.
Actually, that's still an issue with most Linux distros that they can't include an mp3 decoder because of the patent issue, whereas WMP plays mp3s by default.
Windows can't rip a CD-ROM. In trying to install
something for this, the Windows user will usually end up installing spyware, adware and a spamming engine.
I'm wondering what they mean by "ripping" a CD-ROM anyway. Ripping tracks off a music CD is easy in Windows, again using WMP. If they mean ripping a data CD-ROM to an image file, the software that comes with the CDRW drive does that without being spyware, adware, etc.
You'll have to pay extra to burn a CD from Windows. Also, see above: spyware, adware...
Same as above. If you're just talking about burning files, that's built into the file explorer anyway.
Linux typically comes up in high-resolution by
default,[I know, and I hate that.] while Windows is in 640x480. Why change?
Bunch of BS. Windows does not usually start in 640x480 unless it has no idea what your video card is and has to revert to VGA. (When I was trying out Linux distros, most of them that didn't recognize my video card would just take a dump and halt the installation instead of trying out a VGA default.) It will usually start in at least 800x600, but not the maximum resolution your card supports like Linux annoyingly does, where I have to bring it down to make it readable. ("Are those letters on the screen? They look like specs of dust.")
I have still not figured out why MS hasn't closed up this loophole. I wasn't in the market for a new computer yet, so I searched the web and found that there were lots of places that would sell the OEM version of WinXP with a piece of "computer hardware". I bought an $8 mouse and then got XP for $79. Also, I wanted to have it for our second computer too, so you can order an extra license without the CD for $50.
Re:This is going to be a busy topic...
on
Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 1
>And then some more advanced tasks
>Setup a website (IIS or apache preinstalled)
hmm, never used IIS. Does apache have any GUI front ends?
This task strikes me as crazy to even bring up. I've never set up a web page, and most people I know have never set up a web page or had any need to (except for the couple of web app developers I know).
>Change your screen resolution
Right click->Configure desktop ->Size and orientation
Ah, but you have just unknowingly proved his point. You're using SuSE 9.1. I tried out several distos and found this to be a glaring error in all of them but SuSE. YaST has a utility for changing your resolution, but Mandrake, Debian, Knoppix, and MEPIS didn't because KDE doesn't normally have that capability to change the configuration of the X server. It was a complicated process of having to search the web first to find out what the X server configuration utility was named, running that from a command prompt, and then having to enter every parameter, including refresh rate and how many bits of color to make any change. Thus, the point of this is that you got lucky because you have the "right" distro who programmed a convenient GUI for accomplishing this task. For people who are introduced to something else, this can be nearly impossible or at least very frustrating.
This seems like only one example of the type of issues Linux systems are faced with. It generally stems from design decisions based on security or flexibility. They introduce quirks that make things inconvenient, but SuSE came up with a workaround to make it convenient again. In this case, it was the flexibility of being able to choose your own window manager. That means that your X display (xfree86 or whatever) is a separate application from your desktop environment (KDE Gnome, etc.). A little effort can make easier front-ends to make this work for most people, but ease of configuration doesn't always seem to be a high priority for OSS projects. The attraction of adding FEATURES frequently pushes convenience onto the back burner.
I'm not for the opposite pendulum swing, where you put convenience above all else and throw security out the Window[s](TM). I think security should be the primary concern and dictate design, but after that, some work should be put into making tools to enable the ease of use that is close to the "security-be-damned" system.
Re:That's not a software giant, THIS is a ...
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
Fine, he never said it was a good or bad thing. It's just a good idea to understand the true cause of something.
MS showing some of its battle plans
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
There was a very enlightening quote from Jason Matusow, "who directs Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, a two-year-old program under which more than a million software developers and corporate customers can view--but not copy or redistribute--the code behind Windows and 16 other programs." Quoted from the article:
He believes that the proprietary and open-source software worlds can exist in symbiosis, with
the open-source community supplying innovation that commercial software companies can later turn into marketable products.
That pretty much displays the successful MS growth model. They will encourage "Open Source" in the form of BSD-style licenses so that other people can come up with great stuff and then they can take it and include it in their own closed-source products to charge money for it. I can't believe they are stating this so openly. They can certainly fool the regular everyday user, but this strategy counts on open source programmers falling for it and releasing their own stuff under a "snatchable" type of license just to help MS make money off their work. Do they really expect the OSS community to jump on this "writing Microsoft's software for them" bandwagon?
It's "along with the secret...", not "as well as the secret..."
I'm not usually nearly this pedantic, but you were asking for it.:)
It's amazing the stupid crap that accumulates in our minds. When I read his comment, that immediately popped back in my mind. I haven't seen that show since I was a little kid, but when I read his misquote, I immediately jumped on it too and started singing the theme song in my mind.
OK, sorry if I jumped into this too much. The point I didn't want you removing about "the effect" was how the temp rises far above ambient because of the lack of air circulation to remove the excess heat. It sounded like you didn't believe that and were going to change it to glass blocking IR as the cause for the rise in temp.
I just went to that site where they have the 15 movies from the Metroid 2 Echos disc, and they total over 260MB. I hope they have some crazy bandwidth over there after this has now been mentioned on Slashdot.
Wrong. There is no physical difference between absorption and emission of radiation. They are the same process in different directions. A good absorber is a good radiator. This is made explicit in the equations, which you obviously do not know.
I have more than a trivial knowledge of what I speak...
Let's hear more on this because I have not studied radiation and heat absorbtion equations, so I'm prepared to grant that you're right if you can explain a few questions I have about why that doesn't make sense to me. It would seem to make sense that absorbtion and emission are reverse equations, but in the real world it seems to show otherwise. Maybe there are other factors you can mention that are changing things.
If dark objects emit heat faster than lighter objects, then two hot objects placed in the dark (so they're not absorbing more heat from the sun) would cool at different rates, even though made from the same material?
I've got another couple of questions on this, but have to go somewhere and don't have time now. Sorry if I was shooting off without knowledge on this issue.
I need to see about correcting that Wikipedia entry...
Don't mess up Wikipedia with your misunderstanding! Hot objects, like car seats, do not normally give off a lot of IR radiant heat, exceptions being glowing-hot type of stuff, flames, lasers, etc. If you had a room that was made of a material that blocked in all IR, but was porous to air, so heated air could escape, the temperature in that room would not go skyrocketing up from the IR.
Just because some greenhouses use air-trapping as a dominant effect doesn't mean that this applies to rooms and cars -- or all greenhouses, for that matter.
Yes, rooms, cars, greenhouses, it does apply to all of them.
Let's see if we can update your "Informative" comment with some "Correct" information:
No, you actually still want a light roof in winter. A black roof is a good absorber and a good radiator as well.
The basic principle that affects all of these is that a light-colored material will mostly reflect the light that hits it (therefore not heating up) and a dark-colored material will absorb the light (heats up). The property of how well something gives off heat from its surface (I suppose this is what you mean by "radiator") is a property of what material it is--unrelated to what color it is.
In the winter, a black roof will radiate the heat out of your house more rapidly than it can heat up from the sun (since the radiant intensity is generally much lower in winter). You still want a light-colored, insulating roof, even in winter.
Take a different example to see if this makes sense. Instead of a house, let's say you want to keep a person warm. Which color T-shirt should they wear--white or black? The black one will get warmer as it absorbs more sunlight. Maybe the idea you were going for was that dark-colored objects will give off more heat, but that is because they have absorbed more and therefore have more to give.
In areas of the world that receive snowfall in winter, the snow on the roof is actually helping, by reflecting heat back into the building.
The snow does help, but there's no reflecting; it is insulating. It's like having a blanket covering the roof, so that the heat from your furnace doesn't escape the house as fast. One of the neat ways to see which houses are well insulated inside if you are looking to buy a house is to see which houses melt the snow off the roof fastest. Given houses with the same sun exposure, the ones that keep snow on the roof longer are the ones that are insulated better, keeping the heat in the house, rather than escaping up to warm up the roof.
One of the reasons rooms get so hot is that ordinary glass is already blocking a lot of infrared--from getting out. Non-infrared (ordinary visible) light comes through easily and strikes whatever is inside. In doing so, it heats it, so a portion of the visible light is converted to infrared. But, since the glass isn't very permeable to infrared, it can't get out, so the inside space heats up.
Actually your explanation of why rooms heat up is not correct, which is why this doesn't make sense to you. Read this article about the greenhouse effect from wikipedia. Before you say "Aha, see?" read the section titled "Real greenhouses", where they explain that actual greenhouses work differently. Rather than trapping infrared radiation inside, the light coming in heats up the air, and the hot air is trapped inside. Rooms/cars get hot because they can't let the air out. Blocking the IR from coming in these new windows will help by not letting the air get heated inside in the first place.
I had my little learning experience with DirectCD. I used it to burn a bunch of mp3's onto a disc. Then I took it to work and tried to play it on my mp3-playing discman. It would play for about 10 seconds, pause for about a second and then play another 10, pause, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I was trying to figure out what was going on, so I looked online and found out what packet writing was. The CD player can decode mp3 format, but it still does a sequential read with the laser, rather than reading the file into memory to play, like a computer does.
Remember that because of the license Linux distros are released under, They will never completely stagnate or regress. Let's say Microsoft completely buys Novell. SuSE is still (mostly) out in the open. MS does not get to close the source because it's already been released as GPL. If MS tries to shut it down, people will just take the source they already have from SuSE 9.2, or whatever, and form a group to keep going with it, releasing new stuff on it under the GPL again. That is one of the potentially beneficial aspects of forking. Especially if they are "forking" up Microsoft.
"and after I installed SP2, the first thing it did was offer to block a vendor-provided 'call-home' application."
OK, maybe I was thinking of the little firewall that was already in XP. I thought I had heard that the new one still just blocked inbound. If it is as you say, then I retract my criticism.
If your concered about the about someone planting an trojan disguesed as sp2, the checksum is 59a98f181fe383907e520a391d75b5a7 *WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
Really? Then maybe I got a bad file. My checksum says 599go6t2ch0a56s4u1ck76e82r5!1337
OK, not exactly related to laptops, but it fits with your stories of stuff getting stolen. When my wife and I were in college, she had a friend who was getting a biology degree I think. She had this class where they were studying the different classes of animals--insects birds, etc. They had a project where they were supposed to bring in one of each(dead) to study. She had no problem with most of them, but couldn't figure out a good way to get a mammal. She was getting a little desperate and had been throwing rocks at squirrels, trying to kill one to bring for this project.
She had told my wife about this, so one day while we were walking on campus, we saw a dead squirrel by one of the sidewalks. It wasn't run over or rotting or anything yet--maybe it had just fallen out of a tree. So my wife said that would be cool to give to her friend to save her from trying to kill one. I went back to my room and got a shoebox from a pair of Nikes I had just gotten and came back and scooped him in. My wife worked at the same place as this friend, so she brought the box and gave it to her friend who was really glad to get it. She left it tucked under the edge of her car so it wouldn't get warm inside and stink up the car. When she came out of work, someone had stolen the box. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of the thief who thought he had just made off with an $80 pair of Nikes and then opened the box to try them on.
It depends on how you arrange things so you can tell the truth in the police report. You can cut it first. Then go out somewhere and come home. You can file in the police report that, "When I came home I saw that the laptop was gone and the cable was sitting there and had been cut through." Entirely truthful.
Okay, everyone concentrate until I get superpowers. And I don't want to be the next "Arm Fall Off Boy" or "Matter Eating Lad" (dang Legion of Super Heroes), I want something neat. Some sort of Tad Ghostal powers.
First off, you get the mad props for using Space Ghost's real name. Extra super bonus if you also know his middle name.
all the article says is that it's discovery, and discovery doesn't mean that it came from the records department of IBM. It "could" have turned up durings some investigators interview with a disgrunted ex-SCOer, or some other questionable source.
You say "the article says...", but that's not what it says at all. Please read it. Here's the relevent part:
SCO says it discovered the e-mails in a mountain of documents IBM produced in discovery related to SCO's lawsuit against IBM over the Linux operating system.
Now as always, SCO may be making **** up, but they say it was in the documentation IBM gave to them. Thank you. Now please don't "correct" people with inaccurate information any more.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be worthless because it would be totally unenforceable legally. Evaluations of which companies are 'OK' and which aren't would be so subjective as to not mean anything. If you specifically named MS as not licensable, that may have legal problems anyway. The most reasonable thing to do is basically the GPL-style license anyway, where no one is allowed to close-source and distribute it.
The Linux to exercise simile is a good one, and I stopped trying both for about the same reason--my schedule was getting so busy that I couldn't keep devoting so much time to it.
There are just different ways of using the computer. I think it's odd when people laugh at using WinXP with 256 or 128MB of memory. That perception comes from their type of usage. They don't like having to open and close programs. There are always at least 5 apps open all the time, so of course that small amount of memory would make the machine run slowly. For many people who don't spend all their time on the computer, one or two programs at a time is the norm, so there's not much need for a lot of memory. Thanks for standing up for the common man!
*Disclaimer* I work for a DRAM maker, so I do always have a pretty decent amount of memory in my systems. I hardly ever need that much, though--just making sure the machine keeps running fast.
Actually, that's still an issue with most Linux distros that they can't include an mp3 decoder because of the patent issue, whereas WMP plays mp3s by default.
I'm wondering what they mean by "ripping" a CD-ROM anyway. Ripping tracks off a music CD is easy in Windows, again using WMP. If they mean ripping a data CD-ROM to an image file, the software that comes with the CDRW drive does that without being spyware, adware, etc.
Same as above. If you're just talking about burning files, that's built into the file explorer anyway.
Bunch of BS. Windows does not usually start in 640x480 unless it has no idea what your video card is and has to revert to VGA. (When I was trying out Linux distros, most of them that didn't recognize my video card would just take a dump and halt the installation instead of trying out a VGA default.) It will usually start in at least 800x600, but not the maximum resolution your card supports like Linux annoyingly does, where I have to bring it down to make it readable. ("Are those letters on the screen? They look like specs of dust.")
I have still not figured out why MS hasn't closed up this loophole. I wasn't in the market for a new computer yet, so I searched the web and found that there were lots of places that would sell the OEM version of WinXP with a piece of "computer hardware". I bought an $8 mouse and then got XP for $79. Also, I wanted to have it for our second computer too, so you can order an extra license without the CD for $50.
Ah, but you have just unknowingly proved his point. You're using SuSE 9.1. I tried out several distos and found this to be a glaring error in all of them but SuSE. YaST has a utility for changing your resolution, but Mandrake, Debian, Knoppix, and MEPIS didn't because KDE doesn't normally have that capability to change the configuration of the X server. It was a complicated process of having to search the web first to find out what the X server configuration utility was named, running that from a command prompt, and then having to enter every parameter, including refresh rate and how many bits of color to make any change.
Thus, the point of this is that you got lucky because you have the "right" distro who programmed a convenient GUI for accomplishing this task. For people who are introduced to something else, this can be nearly impossible or at least very frustrating.
This seems like only one example of the type of issues Linux systems are faced with. It generally stems from design decisions based on security or flexibility. They introduce quirks that make things inconvenient, but SuSE came up with a workaround to make it convenient again. In this case, it was the flexibility of being able to choose your own window manager. That means that your X display (xfree86 or whatever) is a separate application from your desktop environment (KDE Gnome, etc.). A little effort can make easier front-ends to make this work for most people, but ease of configuration doesn't always seem to be a high priority for OSS projects. The attraction of adding FEATURES frequently pushes convenience onto the back burner.
I'm not for the opposite pendulum swing, where you put convenience above all else and throw security out the Window[s](TM). I think security should be the primary concern and dictate design, but after that, some work should be put into making tools to enable the ease of use that is close to the "security-be-damned" system.
Fine, he never said it was a good or bad thing. It's just a good idea to understand the true cause of something.
OK, sorry if I jumped into this too much. The point I didn't want you removing about "the effect" was how the temp rises far above ambient because of the lack of air circulation to remove the excess heat. It sounded like you didn't believe that and were going to change it to glass blocking IR as the cause for the rise in temp.
I just went to that site where they have the 15 movies from the Metroid 2 Echos disc, and they total over 260MB. I hope they have some crazy bandwidth over there after this has now been mentioned on Slashdot.
If dark objects emit heat faster than lighter objects, then two hot objects placed in the dark (so they're not absorbing more heat from the sun) would cool at different rates, even though made from the same material?
I've got another couple of questions on this, but have to go somewhere and don't have time now. Sorry if I was shooting off without knowledge on this issue.
Hot objects, like car seats, do not normally give off a lot of IR radiant heat, exceptions being glowing-hot type of stuff, flames, lasers, etc. If you had a room that was made of a material that blocked in all IR, but was porous to air, so heated air could escape, the temperature in that room would not go skyrocketing up from the IR.
Yes, rooms, cars, greenhouses, it does apply to all of them.
The basic principle that affects all of these is that a light-colored material will mostly reflect the light that hits it (therefore not heating up) and a dark-colored material will absorb the light (heats up). The property of how well something gives off heat from its surface (I suppose this is what you mean by "radiator") is a property of what material it is--unrelated to what color it is.
Take a different example to see if this makes sense. Instead of a house, let's say you want to keep a person warm. Which color T-shirt should they wear--white or black? The black one will get warmer as it absorbs more sunlight. Maybe the idea you were going for was that dark-colored objects will give off more heat, but that is because they have absorbed more and therefore have more to give.
The snow does help, but there's no reflecting; it is insulating. It's like having a blanket covering the roof, so that the heat from your furnace doesn't escape the house as fast. One of the neat ways to see which houses are well insulated inside if you are looking to buy a house is to see which houses melt the snow off the roof fastest. Given houses with the same sun exposure, the ones that keep snow on the roof longer are the ones that are insulated better, keeping the heat in the house, rather than escaping up to warm up the roof.
I had my little learning experience with DirectCD. I used it to burn a bunch of mp3's onto a disc. Then I took it to work and tried to play it on my mp3-playing discman. It would play for about 10 seconds, pause for about a second and then play another 10, pause, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I was trying to figure out what was going on, so I looked online and found out what packet writing was. The CD player can decode mp3 format, but it still does a sequential read with the laser, rather than reading the file into memory to play, like a computer does.
Remember that because of the license Linux distros are released under, They will never completely stagnate or regress. Let's say Microsoft completely buys Novell. SuSE is still (mostly) out in the open. MS does not get to close the source because it's already been released as GPL. If MS tries to shut it down, people will just take the source they already have from SuSE 9.2, or whatever, and form a group to keep going with it, releasing new stuff on it under the GPL again. That is one of the potentially beneficial aspects of forking. Especially if they are "forking" up Microsoft.
"and after I installed SP2, the first thing it did was offer to block a vendor-provided 'call-home' application."
OK, maybe I was thinking of the little firewall that was already in XP. I thought I had heard that the new one still just blocked inbound. If it is as you say, then I retract my criticism.
I have apps that make Windows work decently and fairly safe. You can have them when you pry them from my cold dead hard drive.
599go6t2ch0a56s4u1ck76e82r5!1337
OK, not exactly related to laptops, but it fits with your stories of stuff getting stolen. When my wife and I were in college, she had a friend who was getting a biology degree I think. She had this class where they were studying the different classes of animals--insects birds, etc. They had a project where they were supposed to bring in one of each(dead) to study. She had no problem with most of them, but couldn't figure out a good way to get a mammal. She was getting a little desperate and had been throwing rocks at squirrels, trying to kill one to bring for this project.
She had told my wife about this, so one day while we were walking on campus, we saw a dead squirrel by one of the sidewalks. It wasn't run over or rotting or anything yet--maybe it had just fallen out of a tree. So my wife said that would be cool to give to her friend to save her from trying to kill one. I went back to my room and got a shoebox from a pair of Nikes I had just gotten and came back and scooped him in. My wife worked at the same place as this friend, so she brought the box and gave it to her friend who was really glad to get it. She left it tucked under the edge of her car so it wouldn't get warm inside and stink up the car. When she came out of work, someone had stolen the box. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of the thief who thought he had just made off with an $80 pair of Nikes and then opened the box to try them on.
It depends on how you arrange things so you can tell the truth in the police report. You can cut it first. Then go out somewhere and come home. You can file in the police report that, "When I came home I saw that the laptop was gone and the cable was sitting there and had been cut through." Entirely truthful.