People will vote with their feet. The review and editing process will mold and shape the final GPL v3. Then the voting begins as people pick their licenses going forwards. Either they'll pick GPL v3 or will stick to some other license.
Voting won't change the contents of GPL v3 directly, but the fact that people will vote with their feet after it's released still means the broader community will have some impact. Either that, or FSF will demonstrate itself to be focused only on its own needs and interests, and so may alienate others. I don't think they've ever been too afraid of alienating others in the interest of maintaining ideological purity. So, it'll be interesting to see how effective the review and feedback process is, and how many people actually adopt GPL v3, and what impact that has on any follow-ons to GPL v3.
Ok, so let's all move into apartments then. And who gives two sh*ts about folks on fixed, limited incomes. There's a reason we amended the Constitution to allow for an income tax. Prior to the industrial revolution, how much you were worth was reasonably approximated by how much land you controlled. These days, most of us own a relatively tiny parcel of land if any at all, even if we're somewhat wealthy. It's just ludicrous to suggest that land and land alone makes for a reasonable tax base.
Reminds me of a humorous anecdote. Back when I was in college, the frats and sororities threw a "Greek Olympics" whoop-de-doo. Well, for whatever reason, they had two sets of posters that were identical up around campus: One w/ the five-circle Olympic symbol on it, and one w/ the four-circle Audi symbol. They were otherwise identical. I'm guessing some dolt made the Audi-symbol one first, they realized their mistake after printing some and fixed it, and money being what it is, they were stuck with both sets.
Splogcasts? Good gawd... it'll be the Internet equivalent of the breathless, low quality ads you hear if you ever venture onto the AM dial, only instead being about vitamin C and adjustable beds, it'll be about online pharmacies, penis enlargment and porn. (Would that be the three Ps of online spam?)
If they're selling binaries but attempting to charge specifically for provision of the source, it's one of those edge cases not specifically covered in the GPL's terms.
Copyright infringement is usually a civil violation, which means the injured party has a case for suing the transgressor for damages. However, the DMCA makes certain forms of copyright infringement criminal activity, meaning that the Department of Justice can come after the infringing party.
I wonder if someone could argue that the license offered by the GPL forms an advisory access control, kinda like the broadcast flag does. Circumventing the GPL therefore falls under the circumvention clauses in the DMCA and opens the infringing party to criminal liability. Hmmmm.... Even if it didn't, if the code had a section which attempted to enforce the GPL, say by linking a compressed tarball of the actual source code into each executable as a build step, and someone removed that step in an effort to sidestep the GPL, that could qualify as circumvention, couldn't it?
It's also a breach if, after buying the binary for $45, the quoted price for the source code is nonzero.
Not true. The GPL states plainly that with respect to the source, "[y]ou may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy . . .." It goes on to say later, though, just how much the fee can be:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;
So, really it's the ol' "Shipping & Handling" kind of charge. Cost of the media plus cost of the shipping plus a reasonable handling charge. The $45 for the binary package sets a reasonable maximum price range for the source distribution, so if they do put some wacky price on it (like, say, $1000), you'd have something to go to court with.
This thread is making me shudder, since I just realized I don't even have a floppy drive in my new box, let alone a mechanism for booting anything other than Linux, unless it's a bootable CD. Hrrrm.... Fortunately, Linux doesn't seem to rely on the BIOS getting much right to begin with, so I shouldn't need to upgrade the BIOS anytime soon. *fingers crossed*
If all else fails, I guess I'll need to school myself on El Torito.
That's the point that many are missing. It doesn't matter if you consider the GPL invalid. If you consider the GPL invalid, that simply means nothing gives you the right to distribute that code without explicit permission of the author. The GPL works because it gives you privileges that would not have existed otherwise. Remove the GPL and you remove all permissions to distribute derived works, except those derived under the principle of fair use.
Co-opting a short function or a couple lines of code--especially generic code--might constitute fair use. Annexing entire programs does not.
Yeah, machines that ran databases, large worksheets or CAD software tended to have such extravagant amounts of RAM back then.:-) I believe the 286-12 I was using at work around that time frame had only 1MB, but I could be wrong. My boss was such a cheapskate that when he got a AMD 386-40, he bought a paper-white monitor to go with its VGA card.:-P
Man... I still remember programming Informix SmartWare on that machine. It was a pretty neat integrated office suite, and Smart 2's programming language was pretty nice. (Smart 1's was like a glorified DOS batch language.) It was my first real glimpse into the world of databases and relational databases, and let's just say I didn't go running back to that space.
4MB was still a lot of RAM in 1991, unless you were plonking down $4000 for a PC. Then you might get a capacious 8MB or 16MB system. My approx $2000 386SX25 system came with 4MB of RAM, and that was summer of '92. It also had a 1MB video card (ET4000 based).... Ah, the bad ol' days. It even briefly had an out-of-date 68MB ESDI drive in it, but that was quickly swapped out for a 120MB IDE drive. 486s didn't really become popular outside of servers until 1992 or so, and they were still rather expensive. I bet AMD made a lot of money selling 386DX40s in that time period.
I remember a couple years later paying $475 for 16MB of RAM for that system. (By then, it was upgraded to a 486DX33.) $475 was considered dirt cheap at the time, having come down from $600. Ah, 1994.
My WinXP laptop is similarly slow. I blame all the corporate anal probes installed on there. The hard drive on that thing is always crunching away either a virus scan, a backup scan or some SMS inventory script. I quite often have a system load between 50% and 80% at "idle." And, with that *cough* speedy *cough* 4500RPM laptop HD, you can imagine how responsive it is while it boots and loads all this crap, and how long it takes before I can even so much as open the Start menu....
Actually, if you click on the link up in the original Slashdot article, you'll discover that the first 3 pages of the article have been hacked w/ the Goatse guy. At the time I posted, only the first two pages had been hacked. I imagine the whole article might get hacked eventually unless the guys running GamePC fix whatever the hole is.
The key word here is filtering. You see, the cache controllers on each CPU have to snoop the bus in order to keep the view of memory coherent and consistent among all the CPUs. The snoop protocol is a broadcast protocol, and as such it does not scale well to large numbers of CPUs unless it's implemented carefully. It sounds as though this chipset tracks what each CPU holds, so that it can short-circuit many of the snoops. Thus, it can provide a negative response to a snoop much earlier than it would if it actually queried all the attached CPUs.
In the typical case, most data shared among CPUs is read-only, and the rest of the working set is private. Only a handful of data (locks mainly) get shared and ping-pong among the caches. So, it's easy to see the benefit. I just wanted to point out in my original post that bus snooping wasn't the innovation. Bus snooping is what holds back performance in a multi-CPU environment.
On this point, it'll be interesting how the next generation of dual-core CPUs perform once they start merging the L2 controllers. Current dual-core CPUs have two separate L2s on the die. Intel, at least, has stated their next round will merge the L2s into a single, combined L2. This eliminates on-die L2-to-L2 snoop traffic at a minimum and depending on implementation should eliminate most L1 snoops as well. (Presumably the L2 controller tracks the L1 contents, so it has ample opportunity to filter the core-to-core snoops.)
I'm not sure what AMD is doing in this space. AMD's recent caches have all had an exclusive policy (meaning, a given line could be in L1D, L1I or L2, but never replicated within the 3) but that could cause real problems for shared read-only pages, whether they are code or data, if the two CPUs merge their L2s into a single, large L2. For it to work cleanly, they almost need to shrink their L2s, keep them separate and sprout a large, merged, non-exclusive L3. Either that, or come up with a semi-exclusive protocol that allows replication between the two CPUs L1s, and a mostly-exclusive L2.
Technically, I was being a semantics Nazi as opposed to a grammar Nazi above.:-)
As for my sig, thanks for the tip. I guess Art of Espresso let their domain registration lapse. That's too bad. It's a nice little coffee shop. I'll have to think up a new sig. Thanks.
Uhm, "bus sniffing," aka "bus snooping" is pretty much required on any multiprocessor setup to keep the caches coherent. Either that, or you have software-managed cache coherency across the multiple CPUs, which isn't the norm in x86-land.
"You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
How is it Intel has the slower chip and has been slacking if they have been focusing on "faster"? I think you mean "clock speed." As in, "Intel has been focusing on having the highest clock speed, regardless of whether it gives them the faster chip."
One thing working against the P4 is that in order to get to higher clock rates, they dumped their barrel rotators. Now rotates and shifts could take multiple cycles. That'll hurt you, since many crypto algorithms live on shifts and rotates.
For those not in the know, the = button WAS the reset button, if you pressed the FCTN key with it...
Re:Where I sit on Google Text Ads and ads in gener
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 1
Look. Heinlein put it best when he coined TANSTAAFL: Their Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. I accept that unless micropayments become entirely painless and pervasive, our current system of information delivery simply wouldn't exist. In fact, without some huge, coordinated government "Content Subsidy," I don't think it'll ever get there. (And shudder to think what'll happen when the content of the Web is beholden to the electorate, as opposed to the people who actually use it.) Google's ad revenue generates $$ for Google, which in turn allows them to provide a valuable service that I find extremely useful. So preexisting obnoxious banners or no, I would find their take on Classifieds more than acceptable.
Not all Google ads are created equal, but more than most are actually relevant to what I'm looking for. I consider them more a service than a disservice. And when I consider that they provide me with something actually useful in the end, I find the balance acceptable. Google clearly points out the ads from the search results, and makes it a point to try to provide only relevant ads. What else could you ask for?
Most ads waste your time. They clutter your screen, they make the page load more slowly, and they often times are entirely irrelevant to you if they aren't simply outright misleading. They cause web designers to slice and dice long works into bite-sized slow-loading chunks just to get more page views (and thus more ad revenue). And, they still slow you down if you have an ad blocker, simply because you're making that many more database queries to get the content, drip by drip. Google Ads haven't done any of that yet to any appreciable extent, and yet they've funded probably the most useful web-based entity I interact with quite regularly. How is that not beautiful? It's successful capitalism, without being excessively tacky!
--Joe
Re:Wherre I set on Google Text Ads and ads in gene
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 1
FWIW, what little is worth watching isn't on snowy renditions of CBS, NBC or ABC. I prefer CNN, C-SPAN, and the occasional CNBC. My wife prefers (for what little she watches) the Learning Channel, History Channel, etc.
I have basic cable, and I've debated getting rid of it. But, I make enough that I don't notice the cable bill.
I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I felt it worth mentioning.
Slashdot Mirror
People will vote with their feet. The review and editing process will mold and shape the final GPL v3. Then the voting begins as people pick their licenses going forwards. Either they'll pick GPL v3 or will stick to some other license.
Voting won't change the contents of GPL v3 directly, but the fact that people will vote with their feet after it's released still means the broader community will have some impact. Either that, or FSF will demonstrate itself to be focused only on its own needs and interests, and so may alienate others. I don't think they've ever been too afraid of alienating others in the interest of maintaining ideological purity. So, it'll be interesting to see how effective the review and feedback process is, and how many people actually adopt GPL v3, and what impact that has on any follow-ons to GPL v3.
--Joe
Ok, so let's all move into apartments then. And who gives two sh*ts about folks on fixed, limited incomes. There's a reason we amended the Constitution to allow for an income tax. Prior to the industrial revolution, how much you were worth was reasonably approximated by how much land you controlled. These days, most of us own a relatively tiny parcel of land if any at all, even if we're somewhat wealthy. It's just ludicrous to suggest that land and land alone makes for a reasonable tax base.
Some of them are downright crazy!
Reminds me of a humorous anecdote. Back when I was in college, the frats and sororities threw a "Greek Olympics" whoop-de-doo. Well, for whatever reason, they had two sets of posters that were identical up around campus: One w/ the five-circle Olympic symbol on it, and one w/ the four-circle Audi symbol. They were otherwise identical. I'm guessing some dolt made the Audi-symbol one first, they realized their mistake after printing some and fixed it, and money being what it is, they were stuck with both sets.
Ah yes. There's a reason I didn't join a frat.
Splogcasts? Good gawd... it'll be the Internet equivalent of the breathless, low quality ads you hear if you ever venture onto the AM dial, only instead being about vitamin C and adjustable beds, it'll be about online pharmacies, penis enlargment and porn. (Would that be the three Ps of online spam?)
Untrue. The GPL covers this directly. See my other post here.
As for the rest of your FSF/GPL screed... I'll just put that on "Wally's Pile of Perpetual Ignorage." I don't like to touch that stuff with my hands.
--JoeCopyright infringement is usually a civil violation, which means the injured party has a case for suing the transgressor for damages. However, the DMCA makes certain forms of copyright infringement criminal activity, meaning that the Department of Justice can come after the infringing party.
I wonder if someone could argue that the license offered by the GPL forms an advisory access control, kinda like the broadcast flag does. Circumventing the GPL therefore falls under the circumvention clauses in the DMCA and opens the infringing party to criminal liability. Hmmmm.... Even if it didn't, if the code had a section which attempted to enforce the GPL, say by linking a compressed tarball of the actual source code into each executable as a build step, and someone removed that step in an effort to sidestep the GPL, that could qualify as circumvention, couldn't it?
--Joe^C is "Break." It should end up saying 0 file(s) copied.
Not true. The GPL states plainly that with respect to the source, "[y]ou may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy . . . ." It goes on to say later, though, just how much the fee can be:
So, really it's the ol' "Shipping & Handling" kind of charge. Cost of the media plus cost of the shipping plus a reasonable handling charge. The $45 for the binary package sets a reasonable maximum price range for the source distribution, so if they do put some wacky price on it (like, say, $1000), you'd have something to go to court with.
--JoeThis thread is making me shudder, since I just realized I don't even have a floppy drive in my new box, let alone a mechanism for booting anything other than Linux, unless it's a bootable CD. Hrrrm.... Fortunately, Linux doesn't seem to rely on the BIOS getting much right to begin with, so I shouldn't need to upgrade the BIOS anytime soon. *fingers crossed*
If all else fails, I guess I'll need to school myself on El Torito.
--JoeThat's the point that many are missing. It doesn't matter if you consider the GPL invalid. If you consider the GPL invalid, that simply means nothing gives you the right to distribute that code without explicit permission of the author. The GPL works because it gives you privileges that would not have existed otherwise. Remove the GPL and you remove all permissions to distribute derived works, except those derived under the principle of fair use.
Co-opting a short function or a couple lines of code--especially generic code--might constitute fair use. Annexing entire programs does not.
--JoeYeah, machines that ran databases, large worksheets or CAD software tended to have such extravagant amounts of RAM back then. :-) I believe the 286-12 I was using at work around that time frame had only 1MB, but I could be wrong. My boss was such a cheapskate that when he got a AMD 386-40, he bought a paper-white monitor to go with its VGA card. :-P
Man... I still remember programming Informix SmartWare on that machine. It was a pretty neat integrated office suite, and Smart 2's programming language was pretty nice. (Smart 1's was like a glorified DOS batch language.) It was my first real glimpse into the world of databases and relational databases, and let's just say I didn't go running back to that space.
--Joe
4MB was still a lot of RAM in 1991, unless you were plonking down $4000 for a PC. Then you might get a capacious 8MB or 16MB system. My approx $2000 386SX25 system came with 4MB of RAM, and that was summer of '92. It also had a 1MB video card (ET4000 based).... Ah, the bad ol' days. It even briefly had an out-of-date 68MB ESDI drive in it, but that was quickly swapped out for a 120MB IDE drive. 486s didn't really become popular outside of servers until 1992 or so, and they were still rather expensive. I bet AMD made a lot of money selling 386DX40s in that time period.
I remember a couple years later paying $475 for 16MB of RAM for that system. (By then, it was upgraded to a 486DX33.) $475 was considered dirt cheap at the time, having come down from $600. Ah, 1994.
--Joe
My WinXP laptop is similarly slow. I blame all the corporate anal probes installed on there. The hard drive on that thing is always crunching away either a virus scan, a backup scan or some SMS inventory script. I quite often have a system load between 50% and 80% at "idle." And, with that *cough* speedy *cough* 4500RPM laptop HD, you can imagine how responsive it is while it boots and loads all this crap, and how long it takes before I can even so much as open the Start menu....
Actually, if you click on the link up in the original Slashdot article, you'll discover that the first 3 pages of the article have been hacked w/ the Goatse guy. At the time I posted, only the first two pages had been hacked. I imagine the whole article might get hacked eventually unless the guys running GamePC fix whatever the hole is.
Page #2 is hacked as well... move on to page 3. Of course that might get hacked too...
The key word here is filtering. You see, the cache controllers on each CPU have to snoop the bus in order to keep the view of memory coherent and consistent among all the CPUs. The snoop protocol is a broadcast protocol, and as such it does not scale well to large numbers of CPUs unless it's implemented carefully. It sounds as though this chipset tracks what each CPU holds, so that it can short-circuit many of the snoops. Thus, it can provide a negative response to a snoop much earlier than it would if it actually queried all the attached CPUs.
In the typical case, most data shared among CPUs is read-only, and the rest of the working set is private. Only a handful of data (locks mainly) get shared and ping-pong among the caches. So, it's easy to see the benefit. I just wanted to point out in my original post that bus snooping wasn't the innovation. Bus snooping is what holds back performance in a multi-CPU environment.
On this point, it'll be interesting how the next generation of dual-core CPUs perform once they start merging the L2 controllers. Current dual-core CPUs have two separate L2s on the die. Intel, at least, has stated their next round will merge the L2s into a single, combined L2. This eliminates on-die L2-to-L2 snoop traffic at a minimum and depending on implementation should eliminate most L1 snoops as well. (Presumably the L2 controller tracks the L1 contents, so it has ample opportunity to filter the core-to-core snoops.)
I'm not sure what AMD is doing in this space. AMD's recent caches have all had an exclusive policy (meaning, a given line could be in L1D, L1I or L2, but never replicated within the 3) but that could cause real problems for shared read-only pages, whether they are code or data, if the two CPUs merge their L2s into a single, large L2. For it to work cleanly, they almost need to shrink their L2s, keep them separate and sprout a large, merged, non-exclusive L3. Either that, or come up with a semi-exclusive protocol that allows replication between the two CPUs L1s, and a mostly-exclusive L2.
--Joe
Technically, I was being a semantics Nazi as opposed to a grammar Nazi above. :-)
As for my sig, thanks for the tip. I guess Art of Espresso let their domain registration lapse. That's too bad. It's a nice little coffee shop. I'll have to think up a new sig. Thanks.
--Joe
Uhm, "bus sniffing," aka "bus snooping" is pretty much required on any multiprocessor setup to keep the caches coherent. Either that, or you have software-managed cache coherency across the multiple CPUs, which isn't the norm in x86-land.
"You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
How is it Intel has the slower chip and has been slacking if they have been focusing on "faster"? I think you mean "clock speed." As in, "Intel has been focusing on having the highest clock speed, regardless of whether it gives them the faster chip."
One thing working against the P4 is that in order to get to higher clock rates, they dumped their barrel rotators. Now rotates and shifts could take multiple cycles. That'll hurt you, since many crypto algorithms live on shifts and rotates.
They're paying by socket, not by core.
For those not in the know, the = button WAS the reset button, if you pressed the FCTN key with it...
Look. Heinlein put it best when he coined TANSTAAFL: Their Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. I accept that unless micropayments become entirely painless and pervasive, our current system of information delivery simply wouldn't exist. In fact, without some huge, coordinated government "Content Subsidy," I don't think it'll ever get there. (And shudder to think what'll happen when the content of the Web is beholden to the electorate, as opposed to the people who actually use it.) Google's ad revenue generates $$ for Google, which in turn allows them to provide a valuable service that I find extremely useful. So preexisting obnoxious banners or no, I would find their take on Classifieds more than acceptable.
Not all Google ads are created equal, but more than most are actually relevant to what I'm looking for. I consider them more a service than a disservice. And when I consider that they provide me with something actually useful in the end, I find the balance acceptable. Google clearly points out the ads from the search results, and makes it a point to try to provide only relevant ads. What else could you ask for?
Most ads waste your time. They clutter your screen, they make the page load more slowly, and they often times are entirely irrelevant to you if they aren't simply outright misleading. They cause web designers to slice and dice long works into bite-sized slow-loading chunks just to get more page views (and thus more ad revenue). And, they still slow you down if you have an ad blocker, simply because you're making that many more database queries to get the content, drip by drip. Google Ads haven't done any of that yet to any appreciable extent, and yet they've funded probably the most useful web-based entity I interact with quite regularly. How is that not beautiful? It's successful capitalism, without being excessively tacky!
--Joe
FWIW, what little is worth watching isn't on snowy renditions of CBS, NBC or ABC. I prefer CNN, C-SPAN, and the occasional CNBC. My wife prefers (for what little she watches) the Learning Channel, History Channel, etc. I have basic cable, and I've debated getting rid of it. But, I make enough that I don't notice the cable bill. I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I felt it worth mentioning.