I would have thought with the collective power of everyone with SETI on their PC all these years, they should have found _something_ by now - yet I've not heard of anything?
Maybe the aliens are hiding?
Oh wait, I'm an Alien - at least that's what they tell me every time I pass through US immigration.
I know it's easy to add codecs to get it to work - but the codecs are still not freely available. What you need is the source code to the libraries you are talking about. Then they will be available for anyone to take, improve on or integrate into their own player. Of course, Real don't want you to do this, they want you simply to take their player - with any of its add-ons - because it's just easier and that way you are locked into 'their' codecs. It's clear to me that they want to become _the_ standard media player for Linux. Good luck to them, but I hope people who publish material choose Ogg Theora now that the format has been frozen.
Some of you seem to have missed this, they are only GPLing the Helix player. Realplayer10 is not being GPL'd, so they are not making any of their codecs available. It is therefore of very little extra value, as it is the codecs that we need to have. There are already a number of perfectly good free frameworks for multimedia.
Nothing to see here folks, move on........
You miss the point. Big companies don't generally have patents in order to sue other companies (although there are exceptions, Microsoft being an obvious example). This costs lots of money, so if best avoided. They have them as armour to prevent other companies from suing them, in order to arrange cross-licensing. This is vastly cheaper than paying lawyers.
A good example of this is IBM's counter-suit against SCO. SCO like probably most companies, are infringing IBM's patents, but IBM doesn't care until some company sues them. That's the point at which they turn round and fight back, using their patents as ammunition.
I've been saying this for ages - we need a bitoechnology GPL. In other words, you are free to use the technology and incorporate it into your own research/product developments etc., but if you distribute a product that uses this, your process must be made available under the same licencing conditions.
So if I invent a process that's useful in producing a wonder drug, anyone can use it, but all other aspect of this wonder drug must be available for others to improve upon.
I don't think you'll find this is always the case with Linux, although it of course depends on the distribution. Good examples being Kernel 2.6 being much more 'responsive' due to scheduler improvements, and KDE 3.2 being better optimised than 3.1 due to the use of valgrind to remove some of the bottlenecks. I've also heard that the next release of QT will have lots of optimisations in it. And of course, Linux support for many high performance file systems has been added in the last few years, so upgrading the file system can also make a big difference.
I bet you they will make sure that whatever licence they use is GPL-incompatible. That way Solaris code can't be incorporated into Linux. They are in effect trying to splinter the Open Source world - in a way that benefits them, and ultimately, Micro$oft.
On the assumption that this is what they do, I wouldn't go near this with a bargepole. They are clearly not motivated by wanting to make Open Source (and in particular GPL) software better, only that they think they can drive a wedge into the Open Source movement for their own gain.
It may not cost the film industry much to implement this policy, but the biggest cost will be to their reputation. They are following the music industry by removing one of their best forms of publicity - the small-scale, private piracy that ultimately leads to increased sales of their products.
Probably very true. So what incentive does the Sun have _not_ to start a campaign against high prices? I would have thought it would muster plenty of popular support and sell lots of copies..
People are becoming more aware in certain sectors - cars and alcohol being good examples. However it's still not universal by a long way. I bought a 120GB hard drive in the US recently - for USD130. The same model cost GBP129.99 here - that's USD232! Tax accounts for maybe 25% of the difference in prices, no more.
When I do buy here, there are a number of websites that offer much better value than the high street, but still not as cheap as the US. www.play.com is an example (no delivery charge!).
Now I must book that trip over to France, my wine cellar is virtually empty.....
GBP1.09 is expensive compared with US prices - iTunes at 99c (about GBP0.55, or half this price). This is yet another example of where us British have to pay substantially more for the same product than our American (and often European) counterparts. PCs and components have often been the same number of pounds here as dollars there. It's just not fair.
Come on, we're fed up of being ripped off by international big businesses. DVDs are another example - and of course region encoding is designed to stop us from importing more cheaply from the US.
All you British reading this, I urge you to boycott products at these prices - and write to the company concerned explaining your actions and why.
At least car prices have started to become a bit more reasonable recently, but only compared to the rest of Europe. I believe they are still a lot cheaper in the US.
In the UK drivers often get off with a 200 (USD350) fine and a one month ban for killing a pedestrian or cyclist. If there is no proof that they were speeding or in some other way driving dangerously, the system fails the more vulnerable road user very badly.
But yes with proof of his speed, he should be locked away for a very long time.
There's a lot of speculation on Groklaw as to whether this is good or bad for SCO (and Red Hat).
My view is that everyone will ultimately be a loser in this whole saga, except for the lawyers. If Red Hat, IBM, Novell etc. win the arguments in court, they are unlikely to get any money from SCO as by then they will have been bled dry.
(unless Microshaft or a.n.other give them another wodge of money).
If you do an FTP install of SuSE, there are a few other non-free things that you don't get. These are things like Java, Flash and Realplayer apps and possibly one or two others. These are easy enough to download and install from their suppliers, but the licence doesn't allow SuSE to include them in the free version - I believe SuSE pays a separate licence fee to these companies to enable them to ship them in their paid for, ISO version. It's not just YaST that (until now) has made it illegal to copy the ISOs and sell them.
YaST is not free software, in that it is not GPL-compatible. It is indeed the best part of SuSE by a long way, and I've always wondered why we don't have the best features of YaST re-implemented in, say Red Hat's Anaconda (which is licenced under the GPL). The way it displays the details of what you have installed and what you wish to do is second to none that I have seen, although Mandrake's control centre is a close second (can't remember what it's licenced under though).
I don't expect SuSE will licence it under the GPL, so the best thing is for someone else to reimplement it's features and release it under the GPL. This would be preferable to taking YaST and modifying it, with the restrictions that its licence imposes on you.
OK, I'm opening myself up to be flamebaited here, but........
In my opinion, KDE is better than Gnome, for two reasons. Firstly, KDE is an older product that has had longer to mature. Secondly and more importantly, it is based on QT which is licensed under the GPL whereas GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL.
Sure, I understand that in the early days QT had licensing problems, and for this reason it was absolutely the correct thing for Gnome (and GTK+) to be brought into existence. However those licensing issue were resolved a long time ago when QT was licenced under the GPL.
This leads me to two questions:
1. Given that we have a very good desktop environment written in C++, is it worth the effort porting this (or any other desktop environment) to another language (Jave, C# etc.), given that it has already reached a high level of stability and maturity? Are we not just reinventing the wheel because we can?
2. I've read about proprietary companies preferring GTK+ to QT because it's licenced under the LGPL, which allows it to be linked to proprietary code. Is this really a good thing? Surely for software to be truly free, we need to discourage proprietary code, full stop. I therefore have my doubts about the LGPL and its suitability in the FOSS world. It can never be more than a stopgap measure, and I think it might actually be counterproductive - if anyone has strong views on this I'm willing to listen.
Seriously, these licencing issues really do concern me. I think if we don't get it right now, we are setting ourselves up for failure in the future when some predatory proprietary company manages to get a crackpot judgement in a crackpot court that undermines the GPL (or the LGPL). Microsoft have already succeeded in the Netherlands and Sweden against Lindows.com, and with patents coming to the forefront might get other spurious legal judgements - they are simply shopping around for a court that doesn't really understand the issues. They might be able to do the same with Mono/.NET, and that would be a disaster for the FOSS community if we don't get our choice of licence correct.
Can anyone confirm definitively that Broadcom-based devices work with NDISWRAPPER? Last time I tried my Belkin 54g PCMCIA card I didn't succeed, but it may be time to try again, it was a while ago.
But yes, we need native drivers, not some workaround that ultimately panders to the closed mentality of certain hardware suppliers. A closed source native Linux driver would be much better than no driver at all, a stepping stone on the road to the ultimate goal of open source drivers for all hardware.
Some ISPs periodically scan their users' computers to see if they are exhibiting open relay behaviour, then inform the user that they will be disconnected unless they fix the problem. Now I'm sure it can't be difficult for them to test for a whole load of possible infections/configuration problems on their networks and take an appropriate action. If they all did this, then the spam problem would be dramatically reduced.
Hey that's just given me an idea. OLEDs can be produced in multiple colours, right? If we want hot wallpaper, maybe we should have Red, Green, Blue and Infra-red pixels in our wallpaper. That way we can get rid of all those real fires, just pump up the infra-red to full power when we feel cold.
I'm currently using Fedora Core 2 Test 1 which I decided to try, and I can honestly say that although it feels polished in terms of look and feel, I've always found Mandrake to offer a much more comprehensive set of software for the Desktop user. I think Red Hat (and of course Fedora) is great for server use, but the lack of multimedia apps (doesn't even play MP3s!) makes it too restricted for less technical desktop users. Mandrake just hits the spot perfectly with a combination of multimedia, networking, office and geeky apps to satisfy a wide range of users and leave very few wanting.
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Popups? Never heard of them in Mozilla/Konqueror. Would that be an IE-specific thing then?
I would have thought with the collective power of everyone with SETI on their PC all these years, they should have found _something_ by now - yet I've not heard of anything?
Maybe the aliens are hiding?
Oh wait, I'm an Alien - at least that's what they tell me every time I pass through US immigration.
I know it's easy to add codecs to get it to work - but the codecs are still not freely available. What you need is the source code to the libraries you are talking about. Then they will be available for anyone to take, improve on or integrate into their own player. Of course, Real don't want you to do this, they want you simply to take their player - with any of its add-ons - because it's just easier and that way you are locked into 'their' codecs. It's clear to me that they want to become _the_ standard media player for Linux. Good luck to them, but I hope people who publish material choose Ogg Theora now that the format has been frozen.
Some of you seem to have missed this, they are only GPLing the Helix player. Realplayer10 is not being GPL'd, so they are not making any of their codecs available. It is therefore of very little extra value, as it is the codecs that we need to have. There are already a number of perfectly good free frameworks for multimedia. Nothing to see here folks, move on........
You miss the point. Big companies don't generally have patents in order to sue other companies (although there are exceptions, Microsoft being an obvious example). This costs lots of money, so if best avoided. They have them as armour to prevent other companies from suing them, in order to arrange cross-licensing. This is vastly cheaper than paying lawyers.
A good example of this is IBM's counter-suit against SCO. SCO like probably most companies, are infringing IBM's patents, but IBM doesn't care until some company sues them. That's the point at which they turn round and fight back, using their patents as ammunition.
Anyone thought about the fact that Methanol is highly toxic? I can see the headline:
"Small child dies in tragedy involving laptop".
I've not seen any discussion of this aspect of direct methanol fuel cells on the web, but it's an important one.
I've been saying this for ages - we need a bitoechnology GPL. In other words, you are free to use the technology and incorporate it into your own research/product developments etc., but if you distribute a product that uses this, your process must be made available under the same licencing conditions. So if I invent a process that's useful in producing a wonder drug, anyone can use it, but all other aspect of this wonder drug must be available for others to improve upon.
I don't think you'll find this is always the case with Linux, although it of course depends on the distribution. Good examples being Kernel 2.6 being much more 'responsive' due to scheduler improvements, and KDE 3.2 being better optimised than 3.1 due to the use of valgrind to remove some of the bottlenecks. I've also heard that the next release of QT will have lots of optimisations in it. And of course, Linux support for many high performance file systems has been added in the last few years, so upgrading the file system can also make a big difference.
We get it all the time in our company, software that previously worked and isn't touched just stops working. Maybe we've got some sort of infection.
I bet you they will make sure that whatever licence they use is GPL-incompatible. That way Solaris code can't be incorporated into Linux. They are in effect trying to splinter the Open Source world - in a way that benefits them, and ultimately, Micro$oft.
On the assumption that this is what they do, I wouldn't go near this with a bargepole. They are clearly not motivated by wanting to make Open Source (and in particular GPL) software better, only that they think they can drive a wedge into the Open Source movement for their own gain.
It may not cost the film industry much to implement this policy, but the biggest cost will be to their reputation. They are following the music industry by removing one of their best forms of publicity - the small-scale, private piracy that ultimately leads to increased sales of their products.
Probably very true. So what incentive does the Sun have _not_ to start a campaign against high prices? I would have thought it would muster plenty of popular support and sell lots of copies. .
People are becoming more aware in certain sectors - cars and alcohol being good examples. However it's still not universal by a long way. I bought a 120GB hard drive in the US recently - for USD130. The same model cost GBP129.99 here - that's USD232! Tax accounts for maybe 25% of the difference in prices, no more.
When I do buy here, there are a number of websites that offer much better value than the high street, but still not as cheap as the US. www.play.com is an example (no delivery charge!).
Now I must book that trip over to France, my wine cellar is virtually empty.....
GBP1.09 is expensive compared with US prices - iTunes at 99c (about GBP0.55, or half this price). This is yet another example of where us British have to pay substantially more for the same product than our American (and often European) counterparts. PCs and components have often been the same number of pounds here as dollars there. It's just not fair.
Come on, we're fed up of being ripped off by international big businesses. DVDs are another example - and of course region encoding is designed to stop us from importing more cheaply from the US.
All you British reading this, I urge you to boycott products at these prices - and write to the company concerned explaining your actions and why.
At least car prices have started to become a bit more reasonable recently, but only compared to the rest of Europe. I believe they are still a lot cheaper in the US.
DFJA
In the UK drivers often get off with a 200 (USD350) fine and a one month ban for killing a pedestrian or cyclist. If there is no proof that they were speeding or in some other way driving dangerously, the system fails the more vulnerable road user very badly. But yes with proof of his speed, he should be locked away for a very long time.
There's a lot of speculation on Groklaw as to whether this is good or bad for SCO (and Red Hat). My view is that everyone will ultimately be a loser in this whole saga, except for the lawyers. If Red Hat, IBM, Novell etc. win the arguments in court, they are unlikely to get any money from SCO as by then they will have been bled dry. (unless Microshaft or a.n.other give them another wodge of money).
The people of Scunthorpe (England) had similar problems with hotmail.
You obviously chose the wrong browser.
Just don't all rush over to buy things in the US because it's cheap - that will make the currency stronger again and ruin it for the rest of us!
If you do an FTP install of SuSE, there are a few other non-free things that you don't get. These are things like Java, Flash and Realplayer apps and possibly one or two others. These are easy enough to download and install from their suppliers, but the licence doesn't allow SuSE to include them in the free version - I believe SuSE pays a separate licence fee to these companies to enable them to ship them in their paid for, ISO version. It's not just YaST that (until now) has made it illegal to copy the ISOs and sell them.
I don't expect SuSE will licence it under the GPL, so the best thing is for someone else to reimplement it's features and release it under the GPL. This would be preferable to taking YaST and modifying it, with the restrictions that its licence imposes on you.
In my opinion, KDE is better than Gnome, for two reasons. Firstly, KDE is an older product that has had longer to mature. Secondly and more importantly, it is based on QT which is licensed under the GPL whereas GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL.
Sure, I understand that in the early days QT had licensing problems, and for this reason it was absolutely the correct thing for Gnome (and GTK+) to be brought into existence. However those licensing issue were resolved a long time ago when QT was licenced under the GPL.
This leads me to two questions:
1. Given that we have a very good desktop environment written in C++, is it worth the effort porting this (or any other desktop environment) to another language (Jave, C# etc.), given that it has already reached a high level of stability and maturity? Are we not just reinventing the wheel because we can?
2. I've read about proprietary companies preferring GTK+ to QT because it's licenced under the LGPL, which allows it to be linked to proprietary code. Is this really a good thing? Surely for software to be truly free, we need to discourage proprietary code, full stop. I therefore have my doubts about the LGPL and its suitability in the FOSS world. It can never be more than a stopgap measure, and I think it might actually be counterproductive - if anyone has strong views on this I'm willing to listen.
Seriously, these licencing issues really do concern me. I think if we don't get it right now, we are setting ourselves up for failure in the future when some predatory proprietary company manages to get a crackpot judgement in a crackpot court that undermines the GPL (or the LGPL). Microsoft have already succeeded in the Netherlands and Sweden against Lindows.com, and with patents coming to the forefront might get other spurious legal judgements - they are simply shopping around for a court that doesn't really understand the issues. They might be able to do the same with Mono/.NET, and that would be a disaster for the FOSS community if we don't get our choice of licence correct.
But yes, we need native drivers, not some workaround that ultimately panders to the closed mentality of certain hardware suppliers. A closed source native Linux driver would be much better than no driver at all, a stepping stone on the road to the ultimate goal of open source drivers for all hardware.
Some ISPs periodically scan their users' computers to see if they are exhibiting open relay behaviour, then inform the user that they will be disconnected unless they fix the problem. Now I'm sure it can't be difficult for them to test for a whole load of possible infections/configuration problems on their networks and take an appropriate action. If they all did this, then the spam problem would be dramatically reduced.
Hey that's just given me an idea. OLEDs can be produced in multiple colours, right? If we want hot wallpaper, maybe we should have Red, Green, Blue and Infra-red pixels in our wallpaper. That way we can get rid of all those real fires, just pump up the infra-red to full power when we feel cold.
I'm currently using Fedora Core 2 Test 1 which I decided to try, and I can honestly say that although it feels polished in terms of look and feel, I've always found Mandrake to offer a much more comprehensive set of software for the Desktop user. I think Red Hat (and of course Fedora) is great for server use, but the lack of multimedia apps (doesn't even play MP3s!) makes it too restricted for less technical desktop users. Mandrake just hits the spot perfectly with a combination of multimedia, networking, office and geeky apps to satisfy a wide range of users and leave very few wanting.