Yeah I like Qt over GTK and I like the way KDE looks and operates over the way GNOME does.
KDE4 usability is top notch. We'll have this discussion again at Christmas when it's released.
Xfce is too minimal for me. I have to run it on a 400MHz board (http://www.genesippc.com/efika.php) because I'm forced to, but I loathe the way GTK acts, and when switching to a KDE environment to do some testing, I am a little more refreshed but also a little pissed off that I had to run GDM to get there, install GTK in the first place (I would be perfectly happy in a Qt-only system).
The only thing that stops me from going Qt-only is the dismal Debian/Kubuntu packaging option. The standard Qt apt GUI is awful, nowhere near as classy as Synaptic, although Synaptic serves to have me clawing at the monitor sometimes. None of them are anywhere near the usefulness of the Gentoo equivalents which while incredible are also beta and unreleased.
Kuroo (http://kuroo.org/) really lights my fire and the work one of the KDE Usability guys did to it makes me cream for KDE 4 in a way GNOME's little foot paw just doesn't rub the right way. AHEM. kio-apt is pretty damn neat too.
It's nice to see the right people being held accountable for a change.
From the article, even in Swedish, it makes it clear that the town doesn't want to cooperate with Microsoft on providing data for the bugfix. The accountable party here, then, is the town internet provider and not Microsoft.
[Town]: Our internets doesn't work with Vista [Microsoft]: Okay, do you have any data on why not? [Town]: no but it's your fault, fix it!?!? [Microsoft]: Well, what's even a short description of the problem? Side effects? Can your Linux server be changed to alleviate it in the meantime? [Town]: THE INTERNETS IS BROKEN, FIX IT THOUGH OKAY!!!!????
Yeah, all Microsoft's fault. If this was on Mozilla or Novell or Linux bugzillas it would have been closed as "irrelevant".
1) You're running an x86 PC with a VESA compliant graphics card, or any platform which has 'legacy VGA' registers mapped. What about PPC or something? It's frighteningly rare for the kernel framebuffer not to work on these platforms but there are some times where the X.org driver/autodetect or most commonly GDM doesn't quite configure your card correctly and hands you a garbage display. I never understood why X.org can't have a TRUE framebuffer console driver which simply inherits the mode the kernel gives it.
This isn't bulletproof it's just a band-aid.
2) Everyone loves GTK+ - well, I pretty much don't. Does this mean the Kubuntu guys have to install GTK now? Actually not, because there is a cute KDE app for it, but seriously.. why does everyone fawn over the GTK stuff and never show the Qt stuff?
In fact, it turns out this was a KDE app to start with. Quote;
displayconfig-gtk is a GTK/Python frontend being developed for KDE's guidance configuration system by glatzor, mvo, and others. In addition to using this in the failsafe mode, this is plugged into Ubuntu's System / Administration menu so users can also use it for configuring their system once successfully booted into X (shown below).
Which just begs the question, why wasn't this news when the KDE app got written?
3) Everyone loves GDM, well, I don't. What's up with KDM these days? Does it handle it better? None of the developers are telling the success story on any project I'm watching right now, it's all "GDM breaks this" and "we have problems with that". So it worked on KDE before, but nobody thought to say "this is a great feature, now we port it to GTK"?
There are some very strange priorities in the software world these days.. bug reports flood the net and nobody talks about anything being finished..
If dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code is used, then changes can be distributed under the GPL or BSD by the author of derivative works. However that applies to the derivative work; the COPYING file in any source code tarball dictates how you handle the entire derivative work. The original code would still be BSD licensed.
The problem here is not that BSD licensed code has no legal obligation to contribute back, or that the GPL has a legal obligation to report changes, but that GPL licensing code as a derivative work of dual licensed code is against the policy of 99% of BSD-licensed projects. No BSD licensed code will ever integrate the fixes to the Atheros driver because it causes a licensing mess - not only the evil corporations, but the FRIENDLY corporations, BSD-licensed operating systems and toolkits where relevant.
The same way the Linux developers band-aid everything to be GPL so that changes MUST be given back (a kind of heavy-handed moral imperitive enshrined in a legal document) works just fine on the BSD license where the simple, IMPLIED moral imperitive works just as well. BSD licensed code fits very nicely in GPL software distributions and as Theo remarked, a lot of FSF code contains BSD licensed works. There is no need to relicense as it kicks the BSD developers in the nuts.
Summary:
Yes, sometimes it is good to put two fingers up to Microsoft and Evil Industry, but it is not good to kick Theo in the nuts while you do it (however glorious and satisfying that may be to some).
For once I agree with Theo - but then I share his loathing of the GPL (it is too heavy-handed and forces it's morality on you like a preacher in the street won't leave you alone) and am quite a proponent of the BSD license myself.
I thought the idea of dual GPL/BSD licensing was to quash the stupid "incompatible license debate".
If you have dual GPL/BSD licensed code, you can integrate it into any BSD-licensed product (and kill off the GPL portion) as you wish. You can also integrate it into any GPL-licensed product (and kill off the BSD portion) as you wish. As long as one license is honored, it is still meeting the original intent of that license and the original author and more importantly, copyright holder. The licenses are mutually exclusive at the point you start making your derived work. Pick one and run with it or keep both.
It's just that the Linux kernel prefers GPL, that you would license them that way. The thing the OpenBSD guys hate here, is that the author of some parts of the code has decided to make a derivative work (of his own code..) single-licensed. A license which is incompatible with OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD which consider GPL a 'contributors' license and nothing that can go into the basic kernel or userland.
I can understand why Theo is having a shit fit over it, but it's not because the BSD clauses got removed.
I was always curious about this one. Since the GPL has the 'restriction' that you must duplicate and advertise license under the GPL at every opportunity, in every source file, help text and document associated, how is putting the BSD license in the same code an 'extra restriction'?
It is at least in the SPIRIT of the GPL - be sure to tell/remind everyone how it is licensed and inform them of their rights and privileges. If you are not allowed to print the BSD license in GPL code because "it's an extra restriction", then dual-licensing code is also disgusting and bad (but, cannot be under the GPL as it gives the author the explicit right to do so) and moving to strict GPL-only is also discouraged (haha, try selling that to Stallman)
Just do what you always did, but before you sit down and spend 72 hour jolt-cola coding sessions coding it yourself, have a project meeting to discuss it, and see if you can get your team to do it for you.
Absolute bullshit. Microsoft are right here. They've admitted there's a bug in it - something is definitely wrong if the re-prioritizing of tasks is causing that much of a performance hit.
But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design. Sometimes it is built directly into hardware - you dedicate fewer, faster lines to audio and slower and buffered to the networking. When audio skips you are FUCKED. When network traffic stalls, TCP - and in fact UDP and most other protocols layered in some fashion over Ethernet or ATM - is actually designed to handle it by retransmission.
A 90% drop is ridiculously high, but it IS keeping your audio system fed with data reliably. Perhaps it just needs some extreme fine-tuning. It's certainly the case that a PCI Express audio card because of the high overhead would not be fed data fast enough (PCI Express is high bandwidth but not low-latency) if a PCI Express networking device was pushing data around. We've had this stuff before on Creative cards, where the PCI latency and bus mastering has been tweaked such that the PCI chipset holds the bus for "far too long" causing problems with the rest of the system. But in the end there are not that many TRULY elegant ways of doing it.
Every system bus is contended at some point, and if the contention shows VISIBLE or AUDIBLE artifacts, then the user will be pissed off. That means, display corruption, legobricking of MPEG data, audio skipping or looping, you cannot have this on a high quality multimedia system, however, 100mbit/s transfer rate really is just fine when it comes down to it. Not perfect considering you paid for something 10x faster, but still, not all that bad for multimedia performance.
Sounds very reasonable to me. TCP/IP is meant to deal with a couple dropped packets here and there, but audio protocols are generally very sensitive.
I wonder how it affects systems where the networking is not on PCI (maybe an integrated northbridge component which is not glued to an internal PCI bus), or the audio controller is on a completely different PCI host controller (this scenario is practically unheard of on most x86 systems though.. would be intriguing to find out nonetheless:)
I can't even understand why it's news. The SUMMARY of the patent in question shows it does not apply. All Apple's lawyer has to do is go in and tap on the screen in Maps to minimize the keypad, and underline a single sentence in the summary. It gets even worse when you go into the actual patent description.
It won't go past a first look by any decent legal system. The patent system in the USA is quite fine as it stands (I agree with Apple here..) but the amount of bullshit litigation that goes on needs to be fixed. I am certainly glad that legal precedents have been set for "patent squatting" being no grounds for collecting royalties, hopefully this will add further clarification that having a SUPERFICIALLY SIMILAR patent does not qualify you for royalties.
"The input area has no task bar and may not be minimized, maximized, or deleted. Therefore, the input area becomes an integral component and provides the user with a constant and reliable method of inputting information into the computer program."
You can easily get rid of the iPhone keyboard. It slides down when you click on the google maps and stuff and don't need text input capability. It's by no means constantly on display...
So, what are they infringing?
What they have patented here is a display whereby the keyboard is an absolutely permanent feature and soaks up space on the screen forever and ever and cannot be taken off. No device like this has ever existed because it'd be a shitty thing to do considering the cost of screen real estate to both users (usability standpoint) and manufacturers (more pixels and screen area = more $ to make).
Yeah they are too busy bitching about the difference between CFS and SD.
And then the news post here, says "Linux cannot suffer any setbacks in gaming". I think you'll find that compared to the original scheduler, CFS pretty much rocks for gaming. As much or less than SD, who the fuck cares?
It's better than the original scheduler, so where's the setback?
If it's not as good as SD, oh well, cry me a river. I don't agree with Linus' "there is no maintainer" idea, but more the concept that CFS removes more lines from the kernel than it replaces, and does a better job, whereas SD adds complexity for roughly the same effect. What could be a perfectly good technical reason in previous LKML posts got turned into politiking.
Difference between SD and CFS.. fractions of a frame per second. WOW. That really means Linus made the wrong decision! The impact on games, where 1/500th of a second really MAKES A DIFFERENCE is too high! Put the old scheduler back you fucking crazy-ass Finn!!
I'd consider the BBC to be a subscription service.
There's a big difference between "pay for an item and want the ability to play it without restriction" DRM and "pay for an item and the ability to play it while you pay your subscription".
DRM works - at least it has a purpose - for the subscription model. Just like I (in the UK) can't even view the Showtime website to check on some of the shows I've seen from the Showtime network, and HBO crack down on non-subscribers accessing their shows (although I get to see them on UK TV about a year behind), and I can't view the Battlestar Galactica extra scenes from the US Sci-Fi website (it tells me I am not in the USA therefore have no access to it - and no anonymous proxying works for some reason), I don't see why a bunch of Americans, French, Japanese should be able to get hold of unrestricted content that I as a UK citizen and a dutiful payer of the TV license in the UK have technically paid for.
After all, someone has to pay for the content at some point. It stands to reason if the content is subscription-based, some kind of rights management needs to be in place.
DRM may well be in place for BBC because they are protecting British citizens and license-fee payers' rights to the media. If you did not have to pay the license fee to download the content for free, the BBC would not get any money every year; that's what the license fee is piled into. So it has to be protected somehow.
Gah GPLv3 is total bullshit
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
What will happen with TiVo is that because they cannot build a business model out of Linux, they will move to another operating system; while none of the software they currently use is under the GPLv3, and they can continue to use their EXISTING software and codebase without caring about the author updating the license (this is a right given by the GPLv2 and v3), to add features and roll in new fixes from GPLv3 open source software will simply become a corporate nightmare of attempting to find a legal middle-ground
It's as if the FSF are building in license clauses which are guaranteed to be legally challenged; one of the problems with the original GPLv2 license was it was NEVER effectively taken on in court and defined in legal concepts or precedent as most other licenses tend to have been. I think this caused some serious trouble with it's reliability and suitability in business.
So, by putting in a bunch of bullshit clauses about encryption, circumvention etc. they are setting up to go to court and see if they can solve out a legal win for GPL or at least some exposure. If this is not intended but even just a side-effect I think it's dispicable that they'd do this kind of thing.
Free Software is about empowering users, however with the FSF enforcing copyright transfer and shitting on business left, right and center, really what they will do is empower users to make do with nothing because nobody wants to deal with the issues surrounding a badly-understood licensing model. If it is so easy to misinterpret the GPL that it needs to be reiterated and re-explained by Stallman and the FSF, then it really is not doing it's job, is it? How do you empower users and free up software when it is conceptually and legally ambiguous?
Pirates only came out last year in the theaters, Matrix trilogy is showing it's age.
No doubt if you have a brand new HD player you're not that interested in buying 5 year old movies for it, even if they are high definition. Last year's releases are a bit more intriguing.
What they should do is release Star Wars and a bunch of new content on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (that's both) and see which one people pick to play it on.
Well, think of it this way. If you are a budding filmmaker and want to have something on your resume, isn't this a good way of trying for it?
"Amateur advertisement for Heinz shown on national TV among 5 winners"
That's a pretty good lil advertisement for yourself to get into film school!
You'd think there'd be a couple of people out there who would have some talent and more importantly PRIDE in their work. As it turns out, most people who use the internet and participate in this stuff are soul-less, talentless ugly freaks who never see the light of day outside their mom's basements and probably DO brush their teeth with ketchup (we seem to have missed the gargling with a shot of mountain dew).
The thing to remember here though is that Heinz do not want free advertising; they want people to *contribute* (Web 2.0 style) and their reward is to be used on some TV spots - ostensibly an advertising campaign, but only insofar as it's branded. It probably costs far more to organise this kind of involvement than just having some agency come up with something quirky, and they knew it from the start.
I think they were just surprised about the amount of shite they got, and the lack of quality entries.
What organization would be the likely custodian of such data?
Is it not obvious that it may as well be the W3C? XML is their standard, operating a registry for public-use DTDs would be a rather reasonable service to provide..
Wait, Final Fantasy is better than Zelda because it introduces a new cast, theme and setting?
The only real common components in Zelda games is Link, Zelda and occasionally the return of Ganon and the presence of the Master Sword.
Otherwise I could just as easily cast FF in the same light; you control a guy with a dumb haircut and a an unsurprisingly HUGE sword, wander around an overhead-looking map, and walk over an innocuous patch of ground, the screen swirls and your people jiggle around while they enact actions based on timers, menu selection and some predetermined battle strategy. Repeat ad nauseum, eventually find an airship, fly to some other part of the world, repeat ad nauseum, summon Bahamut, repeat ad nauseum... keep levelling up and stocking on Phoenix Feathers because the final boss will always be 3 discrete 'final' bosses right after each other, and take 7 hours to beat.
Repeat ad nauseum for *THIRTY GAMES*.'
That's better than "control the same green-suited elf and save the princess"?
Because it would have delayed the transition by a year and IBM and Freescale weren't even close to successor chips (and really, still aren't) for Apple's desktop domination plans.
The GPL pretty much does say you'll be wasting your time; summarised over a few paragraphs and legal points of course, but "you can charge for your software" and "your customers are free to put it on a website and give it away" is exactly wasting your time trying to make a profit on it.
RedHat do sell their software, and a vast majority of it is under the GPL; however the tools they provide to keep your system up to date, the service contract they enforce on the thing, are NOT GPL. It is not the GPL software they are selling, but a raft of 'mandatory' services. You can't put the RHEL CD online for free, because contained on that CD is in fact some proprietary software. Be that Java or a Flash plugin or RedHat Command Center, Directory Server, Certificate System, Cluster Suite even something bigger, this is stuff Red Hat have licensed and are making you pay for, or it's proprietary RedHat software and support wrapped around Open Source software you can just compile yourself - if you're willing to fight and play and perform validation, performance testing, stability testing on your own systems through insane text file configuration systems and not a point-and-click UI. This is stuff only RedHat (not RedHat's customers) are allowed to distribute, or it's not economical for anyone else to distribute.
In effect they do not make a profit on the GPL software. They probably do not make a great deal of money on selling individual (even at $80) copies of RHEL. They are a services company, and a value-added company. You still can't sell GPL software for a profit, and RedHat are not anything close to an example anymore of "selling GPL software and making a profit" because the vast majority of their profits come from selling other things.
I don't think there is any company in the world that truly makes a profit - or any individual developer for that matter who has attempted it and not been shot down by rabid FSF fanboys - by solely selling GPL software for a profit and curtailing the rights of customers to redistribute so-called Free Software independantly of the author and/or copyright holder.
Actually a fairly enjoyable little movie. I really don't think anyone wants this kind of "google search for life" stuff if this is where it would (and it would..) go. While it would be useful DURING your life (albeit with the conscious knowledge that everything you do is recorded), what do you think people would do with it after your death?
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
People who claim that the GPL explicitly forbids making a profit from selling software or that Stallman himself is against the sale of software are either deeply confused or dishonest. In fact, in the early years of the FSF, the foundation was primarily supported by the sale of its own, GPL-licensed software. In those days, the internet was still slow, unstable, and inaccessible to commercial interests, many of whom nonetheless ran UNIX systems and desired GNU tools. These were sold, on floppy disks by snail mail, to people who were interested. Yes, for a fee.
There is a flaw in this argument.
The GPL doesn't truly forbid profit, that's right, since this would be a restriction of rights. It does only mention that the software may only be shipped at reasonable cost; be that postage, media cost, or the 6 months work on your part which requires a salary, it makes no real differentiation.
It however then goes on to make true profit totally impossible merely on the basis of distributing software. That fatal flaw being that you can sell your code for a profit ONCE, and then that customer can distribute your software for free, thereby completely and totally undercutting you, and depriving you of any further remuneration for your software.
However if a developer's goal is to simply write great software and get his money back for the 6 months of work he put into it, that's easy; sell it to a company who wants to open source it. Well, it's not easy, but it has been done. There's also the opportunity as the copyright holder to re-sell the software and re-license the software for profit, however the FSF has a bee in it's bonnet about transferring copyright to the FSF meaning only THEY can re-sell and re-license the software effectively (i.e. you give up all your rights under the GPL too, willingly, for the privilege of having your name stripped from the code, and an FSF banner on top)
The GPL, and the organisation that developed and standardised the GPL, basically makes very clear that you can try and make money from GPL software, but you'll be wasting your time.
Why, I thought it would be obvious to anyone who's used Unix-like systems for a year, let alone 15. If I install ANY FLAVOUR of Linux in a 4GB partition, and I copy that entire partition to a spare partition using the simple 'tar' command... I can rest assured that if the OS crashed, it's a simple matter of running a 'tar' command to get it back working - WITH ALL APPLICATIONS, SETTINGS etc. INTACT. Try doing that with Windows.... ANY version.
Wow, that's not even slightly close to a good example of what you said.
How is Windows thinking it's "wiser and smarter" than the user by not allowing you to tarball your OS and restore it that way?
You do realise, too, that tarballing your OS isn't going to give you a true backup if you are using ANY filesystem that uses ACLs, custom metadata or whatever.
I dare say there is no archiver on the planet that will properly take and restore an XFS or UFS2 partition in Linux, BSD or so on, and take all the data with it, and whatever that tool is if it does actually exist, it's certainly NOT fucking 'tar'.
As a sidenote, with the right options and a bit of ingenunity and a small script, you can use something like WinRAR to perform a tarball backup of your system - it will gladly pull in all the NTFS extra data like security descriptors and multiple data streams from the filesystem and store it in the archive. You simply then need to set the permissions correctly when you restore, for files which are ostensibly completely hidden from the user and WinRAR's file dialog - important, nasty files which if they were present for the rest of the system to touch, would explode your system in an instant (or at least the next boot)
Windows Vista comes with some tools in the admin kit, which will make something akin to a squashfs filesystem image of a system and keep all permissions on it. As part of the installer process of Vista, you can actually take files from this compressed filesystem 'image' one-by-one, you can add files in, and you can restore a system to your exact specifications - even to the point that you can set up a system from scratch, install all your apps, make an archive of the 'differences' and restore it from a clean Vista DVD you burn yourself. It's a far better method than slipstreaming and is quite close to what you want.
Either way, Linux is not special or better because you can tarball your system and copy it back, ostensibly because if you are using anything more than ext2 and a mainline kernel with absolutely no configuration whatsoever, only shadow passwords and basic PAM, your little tarball trick doesn't work.
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Yeah I like Qt over GTK and I like the way KDE looks and operates over the way GNOME does.
KDE4 usability is top notch. We'll have this discussion again at Christmas when it's released.
Xfce is too minimal for me. I have to run it on a 400MHz board (http://www.genesippc.com/efika.php) because I'm forced to, but I loathe the way GTK acts, and when switching to a KDE environment to do some testing, I am a little more refreshed but also a little pissed off that I had to run GDM to get there, install GTK in the first place (I would be perfectly happy in a Qt-only system).
The only thing that stops me from going Qt-only is the dismal Debian/Kubuntu packaging option. The standard Qt apt GUI is awful, nowhere near as classy as Synaptic, although Synaptic serves to have me clawing at the monitor sometimes. None of them are anywhere near the usefulness of the Gentoo equivalents which while incredible are also beta and unreleased.
Kuroo (http://kuroo.org/) really lights my fire and the work one of the KDE Usability guys did to it makes me cream for KDE 4 in a way GNOME's little foot paw just doesn't rub the right way. AHEM. kio-apt is pretty damn neat too.
From the article, even in Swedish, it makes it clear that the town doesn't want to cooperate with Microsoft on providing data for the bugfix. The accountable party here, then, is the town internet provider and not Microsoft.
[Town]: Our internets doesn't work with Vista
[Microsoft]: Okay, do you have any data on why not?
[Town]: no but it's your fault, fix it!?!?
[Microsoft]: Well, what's even a short description of the problem? Side effects? Can your Linux server be changed to alleviate it in the meantime?
[Town]: THE INTERNETS IS BROKEN, FIX IT THOUGH OKAY!!!!????
Yeah, all Microsoft's fault. If this was on Mozilla or Novell or Linux bugzillas it would have been closed as "irrelevant".
Or it could be that most geeks are incredibly self-centered, self-aggrandising jerks?
1) You're running an x86 PC with a VESA compliant graphics card, or any platform which has 'legacy VGA' registers mapped. What about PPC or something? It's frighteningly rare for the kernel framebuffer not to work on these platforms but there are some times where the X.org driver/autodetect or most commonly GDM doesn't quite configure your card correctly and hands you a garbage display. I never understood why X.org can't have a TRUE framebuffer console driver which simply inherits the mode the kernel gives it.
This isn't bulletproof it's just a band-aid.
2) Everyone loves GTK+ - well, I pretty much don't. Does this mean the Kubuntu guys have to install GTK now? Actually not, because there is a cute KDE app for it, but seriously.. why does everyone fawn over the GTK stuff and never show the Qt stuff?
In fact, it turns out this was a KDE app to start with. Quote;
Which just begs the question, why wasn't this news when the KDE app got written?
3) Everyone loves GDM, well, I don't. What's up with KDM these days? Does it handle it better? None of the developers are telling the success story on any project I'm watching right now, it's all "GDM breaks this" and "we have problems with that". So it worked on KDE before, but nobody thought to say "this is a great feature, now we port it to GTK"?
There are some very strange priorities in the software world these days.. bug reports flood the net and nobody talks about anything being finished..
I'd disagree with that assessment.
If dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code is used, then changes can be distributed under the GPL or BSD by the author of derivative works. However that applies to the derivative work; the COPYING file in any source code tarball dictates how you handle the entire derivative work. The original code would still be BSD licensed.
The problem here is not that BSD licensed code has no legal obligation to contribute back, or that the GPL has a legal obligation to report changes, but that GPL licensing code as a derivative work of dual licensed code is against the policy of 99% of BSD-licensed projects. No BSD licensed code will ever integrate the fixes to the Atheros driver because it causes a licensing mess - not only the evil corporations, but the FRIENDLY corporations, BSD-licensed operating systems and toolkits where relevant.
The same way the Linux developers band-aid everything to be GPL so that changes MUST be given back (a kind of heavy-handed moral imperitive enshrined in a legal document) works just fine on the BSD license where the simple, IMPLIED moral imperitive works just as well. BSD licensed code fits very nicely in GPL software distributions and as Theo remarked, a lot of FSF code contains BSD licensed works. There is no need to relicense as it kicks the BSD developers in the nuts.
Summary:
Yes, sometimes it is good to put two fingers up to Microsoft and Evil Industry, but it is not good to kick Theo in the nuts while you do it (however glorious and satisfying that may be to some).
For once I agree with Theo - but then I share his loathing of the GPL (it is too heavy-handed and forces it's morality on you like a preacher in the street won't leave you alone) and am quite a proponent of the BSD license myself.
Wait until it comes out on DVD, of course.
I thought the idea of dual GPL/BSD licensing was to quash the stupid "incompatible license debate".
If you have dual GPL/BSD licensed code, you can integrate it into any BSD-licensed product (and kill off the GPL portion) as you wish. You can also integrate it into any GPL-licensed product (and kill off the BSD portion) as you wish. As long as one license is honored, it is still meeting the original intent of that license and the original author and more importantly, copyright holder. The licenses are mutually exclusive at the point you start making your derived work. Pick one and run with it or keep both.
It's just that the Linux kernel prefers GPL, that you would license them that way. The thing the OpenBSD guys hate here, is that the author of some parts of the code has decided to make a derivative work (of his own code..) single-licensed. A license which is incompatible with OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD which consider GPL a 'contributors' license and nothing that can go into the basic kernel or userland.
I can understand why Theo is having a shit fit over it, but it's not because the BSD clauses got removed.
I was always curious about this one. Since the GPL has the 'restriction' that you must duplicate and advertise license under the GPL at every opportunity, in every source file, help text and document associated, how is putting the BSD license in the same code an 'extra restriction'?
It is at least in the SPIRIT of the GPL - be sure to tell/remind everyone how it is licensed and inform them of their rights and privileges. If you are not allowed to print the BSD license in GPL code because "it's an extra restriction", then dual-licensing code is also disgusting and bad (but, cannot be under the GPL as it gives the author the explicit right to do so) and moving to strict GPL-only is also discouraged (haha, try selling that to Stallman)
Just do what you always did, but before you sit down and spend 72 hour jolt-cola coding sessions coding it yourself, have a project meeting to discuss it, and see if you can get your team to do it for you.
Absolute bullshit. Microsoft are right here. They've admitted there's a bug in it - something is definitely wrong if the re-prioritizing of tasks is causing that much of a performance hit.
But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design. Sometimes it is built directly into hardware - you dedicate fewer, faster lines to audio and slower and buffered to the networking. When audio skips you are FUCKED. When network traffic stalls, TCP - and in fact UDP and most other protocols layered in some fashion over Ethernet or ATM - is actually designed to handle it by retransmission.
A 90% drop is ridiculously high, but it IS keeping your audio system fed with data reliably. Perhaps it just needs some extreme fine-tuning. It's certainly the case that a PCI Express audio card because of the high overhead would not be fed data fast enough (PCI Express is high bandwidth but not low-latency) if a PCI Express networking device was pushing data around. We've had this stuff before on Creative cards, where the PCI latency and bus mastering has been tweaked such that the PCI chipset holds the bus for "far too long" causing problems with the rest of the system. But in the end there are not that many TRULY elegant ways of doing it.
Every system bus is contended at some point, and if the contention shows VISIBLE or AUDIBLE artifacts, then the user will be pissed off. That means, display corruption, legobricking of MPEG data, audio skipping or looping, you cannot have this on a high quality multimedia system, however, 100mbit/s transfer rate really is just fine when it comes down to it. Not perfect considering you paid for something 10x faster, but still, not all that bad for multimedia performance.
Sounds very reasonable to me. TCP/IP is meant to deal with a couple dropped packets here and there, but audio protocols are generally very sensitive.
:)
l eashes-pci-express-xfi.html
I wonder how it affects systems where the networking is not on PCI (maybe an integrated northbridge component which is not glued to an internal PCI bus), or the audio controller is on a completely different PCI host controller (this scenario is practically unheard of on most x86 systems though.. would be intriguing to find out nonetheless
Ooh. Could it be that these systems are PCI Express and Vista UAA has been coddled to make PCI Express audio not such a bitch? http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=3005 although as of last month or so, they seem to have decided they CAN do it without a bunch of the features; http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/115666/creative-un
I can't even understand why it's news. The SUMMARY of the patent in question shows it does not apply. All Apple's lawyer has to do is go in and tap on the screen in Maps to minimize the keypad, and underline a single sentence in the summary. It gets even worse when you go into the actual patent description.
It won't go past a first look by any decent legal system. The patent system in the USA is quite fine as it stands (I agree with Apple here..) but the amount of bullshit litigation that goes on needs to be fixed. I am certainly glad that legal precedents have been set for "patent squatting" being no grounds for collecting royalties, hopefully this will add further clarification that having a SUPERFICIALLY SIMILAR patent does not qualify you for royalties.
"The input area has no task bar and may not be minimized, maximized, or deleted. Therefore, the input area becomes an integral component and provides the user with a constant and reliable method of inputting information into the computer program."
You can easily get rid of the iPhone keyboard. It slides down when you click on the google maps and stuff and don't need text input capability. It's by no means constantly on display...
So, what are they infringing?
What they have patented here is a display whereby the keyboard is an absolutely permanent feature and soaks up space on the screen forever and ever and cannot be taken off. No device like this has ever existed because it'd be a shitty thing to do considering the cost of screen real estate to both users (usability standpoint) and manufacturers (more pixels and screen area = more $ to make).
Yeah they are too busy bitching about the difference between CFS and SD.
And then the news post here, says "Linux cannot suffer any setbacks in gaming". I think you'll find that compared to the original scheduler, CFS pretty much rocks for gaming. As much or less than SD, who the fuck cares?
It's better than the original scheduler, so where's the setback?
If it's not as good as SD, oh well, cry me a river. I don't agree with Linus' "there is no maintainer" idea, but more the concept that CFS removes more lines from the kernel than it replaces, and does a better job, whereas SD adds complexity for roughly the same effect. What could be a perfectly good technical reason in previous LKML posts got turned into politiking.
Difference between SD and CFS.. fractions of a frame per second. WOW. That really means Linus made the wrong decision! The impact on games, where 1/500th of a second really MAKES A DIFFERENCE is too high! Put the old scheduler back you fucking crazy-ass Finn!!
I'd consider the BBC to be a subscription service.
There's a big difference between "pay for an item and want the ability to play it without restriction" DRM and "pay for an item and the ability to play it while you pay your subscription".
DRM works - at least it has a purpose - for the subscription model. Just like I (in the UK) can't even view the Showtime website to check on some of the shows I've seen from the Showtime network, and HBO crack down on non-subscribers accessing their shows (although I get to see them on UK TV about a year behind), and I can't view the Battlestar Galactica extra scenes from the US Sci-Fi website (it tells me I am not in the USA therefore have no access to it - and no anonymous proxying works for some reason), I don't see why a bunch of Americans, French, Japanese should be able to get hold of unrestricted content that I as a UK citizen and a dutiful payer of the TV license in the UK have technically paid for.
After all, someone has to pay for the content at some point. It stands to reason if the content is subscription-based, some kind of rights management needs to be in place.
DRM may well be in place for BBC because they are protecting British citizens and license-fee payers' rights to the media. If you did not have to pay the license fee to download the content for free, the BBC would not get any money every year; that's what the license fee is piled into. So it has to be protected somehow.
What will happen with TiVo is that because they cannot build a business model out of Linux, they will move to another operating system; while none of the software they currently use is under the GPLv3, and they can continue to use their EXISTING software and codebase without caring about the author updating the license (this is a right given by the GPLv2 and v3), to add features and roll in new fixes from GPLv3 open source software will simply become a corporate nightmare of attempting to find a legal middle-ground
It's as if the FSF are building in license clauses which are guaranteed to be legally challenged; one of the problems with the original GPLv2 license was it was NEVER effectively taken on in court and defined in legal concepts or precedent as most other licenses tend to have been. I think this caused some serious trouble with it's reliability and suitability in business.
So, by putting in a bunch of bullshit clauses about encryption, circumvention etc. they are setting up to go to court and see if they can solve out a legal win for GPL or at least some exposure. If this is not intended but even just a side-effect I think it's dispicable that they'd do this kind of thing.
Free Software is about empowering users, however with the FSF enforcing copyright transfer and shitting on business left, right and center, really what they will do is empower users to make do with nothing because nobody wants to deal with the issues surrounding a badly-understood licensing model. If it is so easy to misinterpret the GPL that it needs to be reiterated and re-explained by Stallman and the FSF, then it really is not doing it's job, is it? How do you empower users and free up software when it is conceptually and legally ambiguous?
Pirates only came out last year in the theaters, Matrix trilogy is showing it's age.
No doubt if you have a brand new HD player you're not that interested in buying 5 year old movies for it, even if they are high definition. Last year's releases are a bit more intriguing.
What they should do is release Star Wars and a bunch of new content on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (that's both) and see which one people pick to play it on.
Well, think of it this way. If you are a budding filmmaker and want to have something on your resume, isn't this a good way of trying for it?
"Amateur advertisement for Heinz shown on national TV among 5 winners"
That's a pretty good lil advertisement for yourself to get into film school!
You'd think there'd be a couple of people out there who would have some talent and more importantly PRIDE in their work. As it turns out, most people who use the internet and participate in this stuff are soul-less, talentless ugly freaks who never see the light of day outside their mom's basements and probably DO brush their teeth with ketchup (we seem to have missed the gargling with a shot of mountain dew).
The thing to remember here though is that Heinz do not want free advertising; they want people to *contribute* (Web 2.0 style) and their reward is to be used on some TV spots - ostensibly an advertising campaign, but only insofar as it's branded. It probably costs far more to organise this kind of involvement than just having some agency come up with something quirky, and they knew it from the start.
I think they were just surprised about the amount of shite they got, and the lack of quality entries.
Is it not obvious that it may as well be the W3C? XML is their standard, operating a registry for public-use DTDs would be a rather reasonable service to provide..
Wait, Final Fantasy is better than Zelda because it introduces a new cast, theme and setting?
The only real common components in Zelda games is Link, Zelda and occasionally the return of Ganon and the presence of the Master Sword.
Otherwise I could just as easily cast FF in the same light; you control a guy with a dumb haircut and a an unsurprisingly HUGE sword, wander around an overhead-looking map, and walk over an innocuous patch of ground, the screen swirls and your people jiggle around while they enact actions based on timers, menu selection and some predetermined battle strategy. Repeat ad nauseum, eventually find an airship, fly to some other part of the world, repeat ad nauseum, summon Bahamut, repeat ad nauseum... keep levelling up and stocking on Phoenix Feathers because the final boss will always be 3 discrete 'final' bosses right after each other, and take 7 hours to beat.
Repeat ad nauseum for *THIRTY GAMES*.'
That's better than "control the same green-suited elf and save the princess"?
Because it would have delayed the transition by a year and IBM and Freescale weren't even close to successor chips (and really, still aren't) for Apple's desktop domination plans.
The GPL pretty much does say you'll be wasting your time; summarised over a few paragraphs and legal points of course, but "you can charge for your software" and "your customers are free to put it on a website and give it away" is exactly wasting your time trying to make a profit on it.
RedHat do sell their software, and a vast majority of it is under the GPL; however the tools they provide to keep your system up to date, the service contract they enforce on the thing, are NOT GPL. It is not the GPL software they are selling, but a raft of 'mandatory' services. You can't put the RHEL CD online for free, because contained on that CD is in fact some proprietary software. Be that Java or a Flash plugin or RedHat Command Center, Directory Server, Certificate System, Cluster Suite even something bigger, this is stuff Red Hat have licensed and are making you pay for, or it's proprietary RedHat software and support wrapped around Open Source software you can just compile yourself - if you're willing to fight and play and perform validation, performance testing, stability testing on your own systems through insane text file configuration systems and not a point-and-click UI. This is stuff only RedHat (not RedHat's customers) are allowed to distribute, or it's not economical for anyone else to distribute.
In effect they do not make a profit on the GPL software. They probably do not make a great deal of money on selling individual (even at $80) copies of RHEL. They are a services company, and a value-added company. You still can't sell GPL software for a profit, and RedHat are not anything close to an example anymore of "selling GPL software and making a profit" because the vast majority of their profits come from selling other things.
I don't think there is any company in the world that truly makes a profit - or any individual developer for that matter who has attempted it and not been shot down by rabid FSF fanboys - by solely selling GPL software for a profit and curtailing the rights of customers to redistribute so-called Free Software independantly of the author and/or copyright holder.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/
Actually a fairly enjoyable little movie. I really don't think anyone wants this kind of "google search for life" stuff if this is where it would (and it would..) go. While it would be useful DURING your life (albeit with the conscious knowledge that everything you do is recorded), what do you think people would do with it after your death?
There is a flaw in this argument.
The GPL doesn't truly forbid profit, that's right, since this would be a restriction of rights. It does only mention that the software may only be shipped at reasonable cost; be that postage, media cost, or the 6 months work on your part which requires a salary, it makes no real differentiation.
It however then goes on to make true profit totally impossible merely on the basis of distributing software. That fatal flaw being that you can sell your code for a profit ONCE, and then that customer can distribute your software for free, thereby completely and totally undercutting you, and depriving you of any further remuneration for your software.
However if a developer's goal is to simply write great software and get his money back for the 6 months of work he put into it, that's easy; sell it to a company who wants to open source it. Well, it's not easy, but it has been done. There's also the opportunity as the copyright holder to re-sell the software and re-license the software for profit, however the FSF has a bee in it's bonnet about transferring copyright to the FSF meaning only THEY can re-sell and re-license the software effectively (i.e. you give up all your rights under the GPL too, willingly, for the privilege of having your name stripped from the code, and an FSF banner on top)
The GPL, and the organisation that developed and standardised the GPL, basically makes very clear that you can try and make money from GPL software, but you'll be wasting your time.
Wow, that's not even slightly close to a good example of what you said.
How is Windows thinking it's "wiser and smarter" than the user by not allowing you to tarball your OS and restore it that way?
You do realise, too, that tarballing your OS isn't going to give you a true backup if you are using ANY filesystem that uses ACLs, custom metadata or whatever.
I dare say there is no archiver on the planet that will properly take and restore an XFS or UFS2 partition in Linux, BSD or so on, and take all the data with it, and whatever that tool is if it does actually exist, it's certainly NOT fucking 'tar'.
As a sidenote, with the right options and a bit of ingenunity and a small script, you can use something like WinRAR to perform a tarball backup of your system - it will gladly pull in all the NTFS extra data like security descriptors and multiple data streams from the filesystem and store it in the archive. You simply then need to set the permissions correctly when you restore, for files which are ostensibly completely hidden from the user and WinRAR's file dialog - important, nasty files which if they were present for the rest of the system to touch, would explode your system in an instant (or at least the next boot)
Windows Vista comes with some tools in the admin kit, which will make something akin to a squashfs filesystem image of a system and keep all permissions on it. As part of the installer process of Vista, you can actually take files from this compressed filesystem 'image' one-by-one, you can add files in, and you can restore a system to your exact specifications - even to the point that you can set up a system from scratch, install all your apps, make an archive of the 'differences' and restore it from a clean Vista DVD you burn yourself. It's a far better method than slipstreaming and is quite close to what you want.
Either way, Linux is not special or better because you can tarball your system and copy it back, ostensibly because if you are using anything more than ext2 and a mainline kernel with absolutely no configuration whatsoever, only shadow passwords and basic PAM, your little tarball trick doesn't work.