How do you figure that? Are you aware of such companies as Trolltech (who owns the copyright to the QT libraries and licenses these copyrights differently according to the situation) or MySQL AB who does the same with many (most/all?) of their products? There are no restrictions placed by the GPL on these companies and how they see fit to distribute their software. The GPL does, however, place restrictions on whoever decides to redistribute this software under the terms of the GPL
"They offered to refund people's money. Is that not an acceptable response for a product that doesn't work?
That depends. How far into the installation are these users before they discovered this? Is the former OS no longer bootable? IF that is the case a simple refund does nothing for the customer that was just left high and dry. As I recall, "upgrade" versions of Vista invalidatethe key used for previously installed version of Windows (thus making a reinstall a moot point).
"A lot of the problems with free software drivers is lack of information on how a device works..."
I agree 100%. Also, there are many companies that would provide information if you are willing to sign an NDA with regards to hardware specs (ie. the manufacturer would like to be open, but their lawyers think otherwise). I think the following (from the article) helps tremendously in that regard: "If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF's Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled."
"When they open source Photoshop then we will know they support open source strategies.
Actually, Adobe did not open source anything with this move. They opened up the specification for the file format for PDF files. This is still a great move because other companies can now support PDF in both directions (read and write) but it is not open sourcing Acrobat. The equivalent move with regard to Photoshop would be to open up the file specification for the Photoshop work files (some sort of PNGs I believe).
On a different subject, this still leaves Linux (and BSD, ReactOS, Haiku etc., etc.) users in a spot of bother. I don't understand if having a movie key would allow you to watch something on the disc even without the right player software to access the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive, but even if you don't need special software it still looks like extraction of the movie keys can only be done with Windows software, and presumably OSX software in the future. I'd still really like to see a proper, Free Software, libdvdcss-style crack for these formats. I'd like to think it's only a matter of time...
From the article: Additionally, he made available an open source program named BackupHDDDVD... My 2 programs are only "proof of concept" software. Right now, the community's contribution is vital. They will bring this software to higher level. I just tell people it was possible and I made the demonstration.
Also, following the links of the original announcement produces this forum article that has links to the original source code buried within. The authors development was done with Java, however he only meant to provide the means -- it is up to other developers to implement this in a "transparent to the end user" way.
"Would I be somewhat mollified by 20 days of play tacked onto my account and an e-mail apology with an admission of "We screwed up, sorry" to boot?"
I played SWG for over 2 years, at times with as many as 3 accounts. I *never* saw sony act with as much class with regards to the multitudes of bugs and screwups they produced. I never even saw sony admit to any wrongdoing or mistakes on their part. Having had that experience with a game publisher, I would say that Blizzard reacted in the best manner possible. Not only did they admit to a mistake, they went ahead and fixed it (for an unsupported platform nonetheless) and gave away some free play time to boot.
"So what's missing, and if it's "secret stuff", how do they know it exists? And how do you prove it doesn't, if it doesn't?
Seems to me that if your fines are based on something that isn't falsifiable, then you have no business levying such a fine.""
Pretty simple actually if you are referring to across the wire protocols such as smbfs/cifs etc. Simply sniff the wire and anything that goes across that is not documented yet it exists. There are very similar techniques available using debuggers for watching what arguments are passed to/from file system libraries.
Had this been any other company I would be willing to give your argument the benefit of doubt. However, I know of many companies that have partnered with Microsoft yet do not know of any that came out of that partnership in better shape than when they entered it.
And where exactly are the line level protocol descriptions for such network protocols as SMB (a.k.a CIFS) provided by MSDN and Technet? We are not talking about MFC Classes and their respective APIs here; we are talking about something MS has never publicly documented anywhere, to subscribers or not.
Most of the time you can copy all of the contents of the disks to a single directory on your hard disk and run the install from there. I have done this with Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft and Far Cry and it worked flawlessly -- usually a faster install than doing it from cdrom. YMMV, IANAL, etc....
Re:Goodwill Squandered, starring Matt Damon
on
Will Red Hat Survive?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am one of the people much like the GP who got burned by Red Hat during the RH9 to enterprise Linux conversion. I had just bought a (personal) subscription to show support for a company that I respected, which was canceled with no refund about 3 months into a year contract. This, unsurprisingly, left a very bad taste in my mouth.
However, all is not lost for those who prefer a Red Hat style distribution that is stable rather than the Fedora line. I am currently extremely happy with CentOS, a community rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line. I never used Red Hat's support other than for updates and now I find that I prefer yum over up2date for updates anyway. I would also like to take a hat off to the KDE-RedHat and RPMForge projects, who provide many of the packages that RH is lacking; especially in the area of desktop support.
My point here is that while I was an avid supporter of Red Hat, I have found that with Linux I am not tied to a single vendor and in fact, my experience is exactly the opposite. The only one losing here is Red Hat because I no longer buy support from them.
Could you please express that number in Libraries of Congress? If you laid out all those lines of code without newlines, how many times would it wrap around the Earth?
I agree that a "Max Version" shouldn't be "hard-coded" (it is a text file and editable) however I don't think your solution would work either and here is why:
1). In many circles any software that "phones home" is considered spyware and immediately blocked. Also, just because you have a browser does not mean you are connected to the internet (technical reasons, policy etc...). You may even be "LAN-Locked" on a large corporate intranet.
2). See #1
3)....maybe try to load the extension anyway failing gracefully if an error occurs. Agreed.
"It seems to me 3 years is a reasonable lifetime for a box given how much things advance."
Dude whose budget are you spending? I have several machines that are dual xeon 2.4Ghz that are around 3 years old. Those things have a shelf life of 5 years(normally; hard-drives are the only thing I usually have trouble with -- I use SuperMicro machines almost exclusively) and then with memory/processor/hard-drive upgrades I get *another* 5 years out of em (usually). $300 for a mobo vs $4500 for a new server (not too mention time to move everything over) makes no sense unless the server was overworked and needed upgrading to begin with. I *still* have dual PIII machines doing real work, and some those machines are circa 1998. Hell, I have a test server that is dual 450 Slot 1 that is a perfect test server for many internal projects.
"Even though that new server could do the job of 5 to 10 of the old servers?"
Also, I don't know what orifice you pulled those numbers out of but it will absolutely not gain you a factor of 5 in performance let alone 10. When a server is overworked and needs replacing, you plan and then implement that. You don't jump willy-nilly into a new nightmare when you don't need the extra performance.
Although VMware appears to be better for now, will it have the same level of support and compatibility that Microsoft provides?
If you are referring to compatibility amongst MS products I suspect the answer would be yes, it will probably work great for running MS products on top of MS products. However, keeping in mind MS' contempt for their customers coupled with the fact that MS has a very very difficult time "playing fair" with any competitors, I would assume that anything other than a MS product that you try to run will fail. It will not fail miserably or refuse to install, it will just be "buggy" and MS will point the finger squarely at whatever "unsupported" OS it is that you are using. Now as far as compatibilty goes, could you elaborate what you mean there? MS is famous for not being compatible with anything (including older MS software itself). You will also want to keep in mind that VMWare has been doing this for a long time. This is Internet2 for MS -- they missed the boat big-time and are now trying to catch up.
1).HDMI is also not required in all cases, because during this early transition period, many discs won't have the ICT enabled.
2).Yes, although the DRM is evil and surely hurting sales....
3).I also won't purchase these things because the technology is very much in movement both as for TV's and players.
Dude, where I come from we call that a "Hat Trick";)
Slashdot Mirror
...nothing at all to do with the kernel :)
:)
Actually, isn't the "some penguin in the corner" framebuffer built in to the kernel? Just asking.
It not only can, it does.
How do you figure that? Are you aware of such companies as Trolltech (who owns the copyright to the QT libraries and licenses these copyrights differently according to the situation) or MySQL AB who does the same with many (most/all?) of their products? There are no restrictions placed by the GPL on these companies and how they see fit to distribute their software. The GPL does, however, place restrictions on whoever decides to redistribute this software under the terms of the GPL
"...they give the users what they've read somewhere is good for the corporation."
:)
... they give the users what some marketroid who bought them lunch somewhere told them is good for the corporation.
There, fixed that for ya
"I sat here -- literally! -- for five years..."
:)
Dude, if you haven't completely atrophied you need to go for a walk or something!
"They offered to refund people's money. Is that not an acceptable response for a product that doesn't work?
That depends. How far into the installation are these users before they discovered this? Is the former OS no longer bootable? IF that is the case a simple refund does nothing for the customer that was just left high and dry. As I recall, "upgrade" versions of Vista invalidate the key used for previously installed version of Windows (thus making a reinstall a moot point).
"A lot of the problems with free software drivers is lack of information on how a device works..."
I agree 100%. Also, there are many companies that would provide information if you are willing to sign an NDA with regards to hardware specs (ie. the manufacturer would like to be open, but their lawyers think otherwise). I think the following (from the article) helps tremendously in that regard:
"If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF's Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled."
"When they open source Photoshop then we will know they support open source strategies.
Actually, Adobe did not open source anything with this move. They opened up the specification for the file format for PDF files. This is still a great move because other companies can now support PDF in both directions (read and write) but it is not open sourcing Acrobat. The equivalent move with regard to Photoshop would be to open up the file specification for the Photoshop work files (some sort of PNGs I believe).
I hate to respond to the same comment 2x, but I think I misunderstood what I read. :-$
I completely missed:
"like extraction of the movie keys can only be done with Windows software, and presumably OSX software in the future."
You are correct, you need a Windows(tm)(C)(All rights reserved) player from which to capture the key.
From the article:
Additionally, he made available an open source program named BackupHDDDVD...
My 2 programs are only "proof of concept" software. Right now, the community's contribution is vital. They will bring this software to higher level. I just tell people it was possible and I made the demonstration.
Also, following the links of the original announcement produces this forum article that has links to the original source code buried within. The authors development was done with Java, however he only meant to provide the means -- it is up to other developers to implement this in a "transparent to the end user" way.
"Would I be somewhat mollified by 20 days of play tacked onto my account and an e-mail apology with an admission of "We screwed up, sorry" to boot?"
I played SWG for over 2 years, at times with as many as 3 accounts. I *never* saw sony act with as much class with regards to the multitudes of bugs and screwups they produced. I never even saw sony admit to any wrongdoing or mistakes on their part. Having had that experience with a game publisher, I would say that Blizzard reacted in the best manner possible. Not only did they admit to a mistake, they went ahead and fixed it (for an unsupported platform nonetheless) and gave away some free play time to boot.
"So what's missing, and if it's "secret stuff", how do they know it exists? And how do you prove it doesn't, if it doesn't?
Seems to me that if your fines are based on something that isn't falsifiable, then you have no business levying such a fine."" Pretty simple actually if you are referring to across the wire protocols such as smbfs/cifs etc. Simply sniff the wire and anything that goes across that is not documented yet it exists. There are very similar techniques available using debuggers for watching what arguments are passed to/from file system libraries.
Had this been any other company I would be willing to give your argument the benefit of doubt. However, I know of many companies that have partnered with Microsoft yet do not know of any that came out of that partnership in better shape than when they entered it.
That is an incredibly broad brush you paint with. May you someday be judged by the same criteria.
And where exactly are the line level protocol descriptions for such network protocols as SMB (a.k.a CIFS) provided by MSDN and Technet? We are not talking about MFC Classes and their respective APIs here; we are talking about something MS has never publicly documented anywhere, to subscribers or not.
Most of the time you can copy all of the contents of the disks to a single directory on your hard disk and run the install from there. I have done this with Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft and Far Cry and it worked flawlessly -- usually a faster install than doing it from cdrom. YMMV, IANAL, etc....
I am one of the people much like the GP who got burned by Red Hat during the RH9 to enterprise Linux conversion. I had just bought a (personal) subscription to show support for a company that I respected, which was canceled with no refund about 3 months into a year contract. This, unsurprisingly, left a very bad taste in my mouth.
However, all is not lost for those who prefer a Red Hat style distribution that is stable rather than the Fedora line. I am currently extremely happy with CentOS, a community rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line. I never used Red Hat's support other than for updates and now I find that I prefer yum over up2date for updates anyway. I would also like to take a hat off to the KDE-RedHat and RPMForge projects, who provide many of the packages that RH is lacking; especially in the area of desktop support.
My point here is that while I was an avid supporter of Red Hat, I have found that with Linux I am not tied to a single vendor and in fact, my experience is exactly the opposite. The only one losing here is Red Hat because I no longer buy support from them.
Obligatory Beavis and Butthead quote:
"hehe... he said balls"
You probably need the new flashplayer9 beta. I was able to watch the video fine with it in Firefox2-rc3 on Gentoo :)
Get it here.
"What are some good sites that require flash8/flash9..."
:)
I think that is an oxymoron of sorts
Could you please express that number in Libraries of Congress? If you laid out all those lines of code without newlines, how many times would it wrap around the Earth?
What size font?
As I recall, Spamhaus fired their law team right after they requested (and thus accepted jurisdiction) a change of courts. Not too bright.
I agree that a "Max Version" shouldn't be "hard-coded" (it is a text file and editable) however I don't think your solution would work either and here is why:
...maybe try to load the extension anyway failing gracefully if an error occurs. Agreed.
1). In many circles any software that "phones home" is considered spyware and immediately blocked. Also, just because you have a browser does not mean you are connected to the internet (technical reasons, policy etc...). You may even be "LAN-Locked" on a large corporate intranet.
2). See #1
3).
"It seems to me 3 years is a reasonable lifetime for a box given how much things advance."
Dude whose budget are you spending? I have several machines that are dual xeon 2.4Ghz that are around 3 years old. Those things have a shelf life of 5 years(normally; hard-drives are the only thing I usually have trouble with -- I use SuperMicro machines almost exclusively) and then with memory/processor/hard-drive upgrades I get *another* 5 years out of em (usually). $300 for a mobo vs $4500 for a new server (not too mention time to move everything over) makes no sense unless the server was overworked and needed upgrading to begin with. I *still* have dual PIII machines doing real work, and some those machines are circa 1998. Hell, I have a test server that is dual 450 Slot 1 that is a perfect test server for many internal projects.
"Even though that new server could do the job of 5 to 10 of the old servers?"
Also, I don't know what orifice you pulled those numbers out of but it will absolutely not gain you a factor of 5 in performance let alone 10. When a server is overworked and needs replacing, you plan and then implement that. You don't jump willy-nilly into a new nightmare when you don't need the extra performance.
Although VMware appears to be better for now, will it have the same level of support and compatibility that Microsoft provides?
If you are referring to compatibility amongst MS products I suspect the answer would be yes, it will probably work great for running MS products on top of MS products. However, keeping in mind MS' contempt for their customers coupled with the fact that MS has a very very difficult time "playing fair" with any competitors, I would assume that anything other than a MS product that you try to run will fail. It will not fail miserably or refuse to install, it will just be "buggy" and MS will point the finger squarely at whatever "unsupported" OS it is that you are using. Now as far as compatibilty goes, could you elaborate what you mean there? MS is famous for not being compatible with anything (including older MS software itself). You will also want to keep in mind that VMWare has been doing this for a long time. This is Internet2 for MS -- they missed the boat big-time and are now trying to catch up.
1).HDMI is also not required in all cases, because during this early transition period, many discs won't have the ICT enabled.
;)
2).Yes, although the DRM is evil and surely hurting sales....
3). I also won't purchase these things because the technology is very much in movement both as for TV's and players.
Dude, where I come from we call that a "Hat Trick"