I agree that the brain is not wired in a way that causes a belief in any form of deity.
If a child was born of deeply religious US parents (for example), from a family of several generations of religious belief and that child was adopted, taken into a family and raised in an environment with absolutely no religious influences we can pretty much guarantee that they will not believe in any god. As beings we are born as a blank slate.
Religion is taught along with pretty much everything else that makes modern humans who we are.
As a result, the US software industry loses $US13 billion ($A16.52 billion) a year for counterfeiting and other forms of software piracy.
It amazes me just how much emphasis is placed on financial losses due to piracy. Just because people are using pirated versions of software does not mean they would have bought it anyway! The figure qouted is a "best case scenario" projection of what could have been new sales, but the companies are not actually losing that amount from money they have already earned.
Even now, if you buy a DVD or VHS version of a film, there are restrictions within the "license" that restricts playing your copy in public places, specifically, pubs, clubs, oil rigs etc.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that most everyone builds their kernel with unique options, so you'd have to have a ton of binaries for each distribution. And if you're going to have to choose your options for the kernel somewhere, it might as well be in the kernel configurator, where's there's some help available, rather than in a ftp server listing.
Actually, I disagree on that point. Most noob or non techie users never change from the config that was distributed with their distribution as they are mostly all-module builds anyway (to make the hardware detection usefull, you need to build modules for all known hardware just in case some particular installation needs it).
I'm suggesting these non-processor specific kernel packages that most of the distros make as most of the people I'm talking about would not care if an extra.004% can be squeezed out of the hardware by compiling with mcpu=i686 instead of i586.
I think this will turn out to be a great series of white papers helping people get to grips with the process of configuring and compiling their own kernels, but I have to say that I think there would be faster progress on new kernels if the was some central repository of precompiled binary packages for the major distros throughout the development cycle.
The truth of the matter is that now linux is gaining wider acceptance, the community is filling up with more and more noobs and we should be doing more to help them understand the "new" (to them) technology. We also need to remember that not everyone who wants to use the software needs to be some sort of guru.
This article is a great start to moving more people to the new code quicker, but regular up to date debs/rpms for all the current distributions will push that long even faster. I know someone will probably post saying "but there are packed versions for xxxx at somewhere.org", but they are often difficult to find for the noobs who just don't know where to look.
This will not work for Microsoft Enterprise Licence customers because the "site" licences are in fact upgrades for an OEM pre-installed version of Windows. In other words, if a business were to buy a machine with just FreeDOS on it, they would not be elligible to just install Windows.
According to Microsoft, you are not paying for Windows twice.
I am in the UK and have a Myth box with sky TV. It took a LONG time to build the software so it would work correctly AND pass the wife test. Now, neither myself or my wife would be without it.
I built a homebrew IR transmitter and managed to track down a very elusive lircd.conf for sky digital remote codes, and it works flawlessly about 99% of the time changing channels on the Sky Digibox, the 1% error rate is probably more due to the digibox than the homebrew transmitter. I also have a PVR250 doing the encoding, which provides a remote control for using myth etc and superb picture quality at low CPU overheads.
The only issue really is with the lack of complete listings data for all the channels available on sky, especially the +1 channels. This was also made worse this week by the closure of the most reliable listings source (ananova's TV feed). Work is progress by someone to sort this out though, and until it is complete, the tv_grab_uk_rt alternative works "not too bad".
I'm looking to put together a mini-HOWTO for UK sky subscribers interested in doing this (if I can find the time).
If you are thinking you can get a cheap Sky+ system, forget it as for 199 the Sky+ deal can't really be beaten, but if you want the satisfaction of building something yourself, which has infinately more expandability than an off the shelf product, and perhaps some spare PC bits lying around, then you will probably never want to part with an all singing, all dancing, mythtv system and sky.
.. on SCO before now. From my reading of the asset purchase agreement(s), Novell retained certain rights over SCO, including the right to "undo" certain things that SCO might do to their licensees, e.g. SCO revokes IBM's license, Novell un-revokes it.
I find it surprising that they have not been able to just pull the plug on SCO for all of their recent behaviour.
It's a shame, but I'm sure that if they could have done, they would have.
Something that just came to mind re: the NDAs for examining the UNIX codebase.
Everyone is saying that there is no point in trying to protect code that is already out there, while this is certainly true, in order for the analysts to ascertain if the code is indeed copied, it may need to be viewed in context with the surrounding code. They are trying to protect further aspects of the UNIX code from being disclosed to the public.
I am not siding with them, I just wanted to point out that it may not be as clear cut as we might imagine.
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I agree that the brain is not wired in a way that causes a belief in any form of deity.
If a child was born of deeply religious US parents (for example), from a family of several generations of religious belief and that child was adopted, taken into a family and raised in an environment with absolutely no religious influences we can pretty much guarantee that they will not believe in any god. As beings we are born as a blank slate.
Religion is taught along with pretty much everything else that makes modern humans who we are.
Except that the quick start functionality that you are speaking of is based on a windows PE type environment and is therefore still bundling windows!
It amazes me just how much emphasis is placed on financial losses due to piracy. Just because people are using pirated versions of software does not mean they would have bought it anyway! The figure qouted is a "best case scenario" projection of what could have been new sales, but the companies are not actually losing that amount from money they have already earned.
Even now, if you buy a DVD or VHS version of a film, there are restrictions within the "license" that restricts playing your copy in public places, specifically, pubs, clubs, oil rigs etc.
Actually, I disagree on that point. Most noob or non techie users never change from the config that was distributed with their distribution as they are mostly all-module builds anyway (to make the hardware detection usefull, you need to build modules for all known hardware just in case some particular installation needs it).
I'm suggesting these non-processor specific kernel packages that most of the distros make as most of the people I'm talking about would not care if an extra .004% can be squeezed out of the hardware by compiling with mcpu=i686 instead of i586.
I think this will turn out to be a great series of white papers helping people get to grips with the process of configuring and compiling their own kernels, but I have to say that I think there would be faster progress on new kernels if the was some central repository of precompiled binary packages for the major distros throughout the development cycle.
The truth of the matter is that now linux is gaining wider acceptance, the community is filling up with more and more noobs and we should be doing more to help them understand the "new" (to them) technology. We also need to remember that not everyone who wants to use the software needs to be some sort of guru.This article is a great start to moving more people to the new code quicker, but regular up to date debs/rpms for all the current distributions will push that long even faster. I know someone will probably post saying "but there are packed versions for xxxx at somewhere.org", but they are often difficult to find for the noobs who just don't know where to look.
Wow man, REAL swirly colours on them doobies...
This will not work for Microsoft Enterprise Licence customers because the "site" licences are in fact upgrades for an OEM pre-installed version of Windows. In other words, if a business were to buy a machine with just FreeDOS on it, they would not be elligible to just install Windows.
According to Microsoft, you are not paying for Windows twice.
I am in the UK and have a Myth box with sky TV. It took a LONG time to build the software so it would work correctly AND pass the wife test. Now, neither myself or my wife would be without it.
I built a homebrew IR transmitter and managed to track down a very elusive lircd.conf for sky digital remote codes, and it works flawlessly about 99% of the time changing channels on the Sky Digibox, the 1% error rate is probably more due to the digibox than the homebrew transmitter. I also have a PVR250 doing the encoding, which provides a remote control for using myth etc and superb picture quality at low CPU overheads.
The only issue really is with the lack of complete listings data for all the channels available on sky, especially the +1 channels. This was also made worse this week by the closure of the most reliable listings source (ananova's TV feed). Work is progress by someone to sort this out though, and until it is complete, the tv_grab_uk_rt alternative works "not too bad".
I'm looking to put together a mini-HOWTO for UK sky subscribers interested in doing this (if I can find the time).
If you are thinking you can get a cheap Sky+ system, forget it as for 199 the Sky+ deal can't really be beaten, but if you want the satisfaction of building something yourself, which has infinately more expandability than an off the shelf product, and perhaps some spare PC bits lying around, then you will probably never want to part with an all singing, all dancing, mythtv system and sky.
.. on SCO before now. From my reading of the asset purchase agreement(s), Novell retained certain rights over SCO, including the right to "undo" certain things that SCO might do to their licensees, e.g. SCO revokes IBM's license, Novell un-revokes it. I find it surprising that they have not been able to just pull the plug on SCO for all of their recent behaviour. It's a shame, but I'm sure that if they could have done, they would have.
Everyone is saying that there is no point in trying to protect code that is already out there, while this is certainly true, in order for the analysts to ascertain if the code is indeed copied, it may need to be viewed in context with the surrounding code. They are trying to protect further aspects of the UNIX code from being disclosed to the public.
I am not siding with them, I just wanted to point out that it may not be as clear cut as we might imagine.