Only available by FTP and not redistributable does not count as Free in any opensource book that I've read.
I think you've been misreading your books. The GPL (under which most of SuSE is licensed and which is pretty hot on ensuring distribution) certainly doesn't specify what protocol stuff should be available through - ftp only is fine. They do ask you not to redistribute the CDs or ISOs, but that's okay - they're within their rights to limit redistribution of YaST, which is on the CD, and all the Free stuff is available via ftp and redistributable. There are plenty of SuSE rpms being redistributed on rpmfind, etc. and there is nothing SuSE can do to prevent you redistributing rpms of Free software even if packaged to fit a SuSE distribution.
There's nothing to prevent SuSE making money from Free software and (with the exception of YaST which you can replace with yum or apt) that's what they do.
On one hand the whole distribution could be installed for ree by ftp install, but a part of it wasn't ree.
On the other hand, they didn't force you to use YaST so it was possible to pay SuSE for a ree distribution, thus making it not ree.
I always found SuSE intriguing - it certainly looked extremely promising for a rpm-based OS - but never had the time to wrestle with all those weird ree/ree issues. -- Of course, I gave in eventually so that my nVidia card would run properly...:-/
Consider:
The lack of good font support in X. But it's not just X. It's applications too. There's no unified way to use fonts, or to use the "right" fonts.
There is good font support for X (which as far as the average Joe need care is the same thing as "in X")- the truetype fonts I have installed here look wonderful. The problem is not all applications use them - even gnome and KDE behave totally differently. The quality is certainly available, but I agree there needs to be a lot more standardisation.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to
make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
The traditional Free Software argument would be that this is a feature, not a bug, and it's the fault of the proprietary software. I think that's a bit facetious, and more to the point it is possible. Mozilla, Acrobat, nVidia, even RealPlayer have installers that work okay with pretty much any sanely-set-up linux distribution. Yes, they generally work from the command line and aren't friendly enough for Average Joe, but it is certainly possible to achieve with a bit of development.
Drivers: Linux intentionally makes it difficult for people to release binary-only drivers. Of course, Binary only drivers are a bad idea anyway, some vendors will insist on it such as NVidia.
NVidia was a bad example to quote, because for a while they have had a very good driver installation program that has Just Worked on every distro I've tried it on, from Mandrake to gentoo to Debian. It doesn't use an X interface (necessarily so) but if included with distributions it could be incorporated flawlessly into an installation procedure.
Yeah, basically I agree with you. I don't think any of the problems are insuperable, or even as dramatic as you imply, but they definitely are problems. You use it on your desktop, I use it on mine. But we know how to dig about under the bonnet. The average user could easily use a well-set-up linux machine, it's the installation that is problematic. Even with something comparatively good, like Mandrake, I find I have to fiddle about with a newly-installed distro to get everything looking good and working properly, and that just shouldn't happen. Maybe it's easier with the commercial distros like SuSE (in terms of having java, flash etc. preinstalled), I might give SuSE 9 a try at some point.
While I sort of agree with you about using MacOSX rather than Windows, it doesn't help those who already have an x86 system but want to ditch Windows. For them I guess they need to find their local linux geek to help get everything set up...
Let me clarify. I'm not anti- the USA [as a country]. By which I meant that by and large I think its citizens are decent people. I even think that in many cases[0] it has been a stabilising force in the world, which is probably a lot further than many/.ers would go. The foundation on which its laws are based is a good one. However I am anti- the [often bizarre behaviour of the legislature of the] USA. By which I mean, it seems to have some kind of weakness whereby its elected leaders take the solid foundation of the constitution and pile crap on it in the form of very silly laws. This is the fault of a very small fraction of the population[1], not the USA at large. You are being confused by my use of "the USA" to refer, on one hand, to the country at large, and on the other, to its government. I think I can be in favour of one but not the other without contradiction.
I'm not at all complacent about the situation in the EU (yes, I have written to my MP to make my views known), however there is a reasonable amount of precedent for the EU making sensible decisions that don't necessarily agree with the interests of big businesses (see the differences between the USA and EU Microsoft anti-trust cases and, more pertinently, the recent limitations on software patents which should come into force in November). Most of the governing structure of the EU (under one name or another) has been around since the sixties, which is plenty of time for it to have been bought, but it doesn't appear to have happened yet.[2]
[0] Not all.
[1] If there had been a significant difference when the Democrats were in power I might say it was the fault of the populace for having voted them in. But there wasn't.
[2] I'm not saying we (the British) can take the credit here, we adhere pretty slavishly to EU legislation and have altogether too high a regard for it. Fortunately the French have a very healthy skepticism about legislation favouring large companies and have wangled a lot of influence in EU policy decisions.
Things might just be looking up in the EU anyway - hopefully the law will clarify the software patent situation soon, with all the limitations agreed a while back.
As it happens (mar1boro) I'm not particularly anti-USA (and I definitely have sympathy for all the normal folk who live there, as I said in my previous post), I just think it's funny the way your legislators and business interest groups often behave as if they are in a position to create laws that directly apply to the whole world. Of course, often the USA's laws do affect the whole world in trade terms but it isn't necessarily so and it's quite easy to foresee a situation where the USA misjudges things and completely hamstrings themselves in some area of international trade.
On the other hand, Iran and other countries are biological research anyway, so we might as well prepare for it.
A better way of preparing for it might be to research cures for bioweapons rather than making our own. After all, we already have more than enough nukes to utterly level Iran or any other country, and at least what happens after a nuking is well understood; radiation, though bad, decays predictably over time. Once biological weapons are used there is no way of knowing how the bioagents will evolve, spread.... Use of biological weapons is a far more plausible cause of Armageddon than nuclear war IMO.
I take it you've thought about speed issues? RAID over a 100mbit link doesn't sound like great fun - leastways I wouldn't put my swap on such a drive:)
Gigabit might work though.
America is not the world. (Reminded about my earlier gaffe about Canadians, perhaps I should say "the USA is not the world.) If the GPL is ruled unconstitutional in the USA then the rest of the world simply goes for a dual license. With apologies to all the sane people in the USA, I go for something along the lines of: "GPL applicable outside the USA. No licensing terms available within the USA." We move repositories of GPL stuff out of the USA and the rest of the world gets on with business as usual, apart from possibly a few years setback having to replace key developers. The USA, meanwhile, carries on smoking its crack pipe.
Homer : Five-alarm chilli, eh? (He tastes it.) One...two...hey, what's the big idea?
Ned: Oh, I admit it! It's only two-alarm, two-and-a-half, tops! I just wanted to be a big man in front of the kids
Todd : Daddy, are we going to jail?
Ned: We'll see, son. We'll see.
All this rhetoric is getting old. I just wish that when it reaches court IBM would file a motion requesting to "televise" the whole thing via a webcam. It would be better than OJ!
Many temporary traffic lights in the UK operate a slightly different, but equally hackable, system. There's a simple (no doubt cheap) light sensor that detects the vehicle's flashing light. If you get to one of these lights when it's read (and there are no cars in front of you) it only takes a little practice to get them to change by flashing your headlights at it.
You can tell the ones this will work on as they have a small black box on the stalk with a smooth side facing the approaching traffic.
Er, what complaints? I wasn't complaining about anything, just speculating on the nature and limitations of the technology. Anyway (see other post) I've now read it and my speculations turned out to be pretty much right - the points I mentioned are requirements, and to some extent they're met.
Hmm. I've now read the article and it seems I was right. The watermarks aren't perfect though, 8% of them can be destroyed by either a decompile/recompile or an obfuscator attack. It seems pretty specific to java, too, which (to my mind) makes it of pretty limited use given how desperate the rats seem to be to get away from that particular sinking ship. (Yes, I know Java's great'n'lovely'n'wonderful, but Windows support is laughable so 95% of users are barely able to use it, so save your flames for Redmond...)
What would be the point in watermarking text? I take it (I haven't read the article but I don't reckon you have either) what is proposed is some way of coding so that a particular watermark structure has to get generated by the compiler and will appear in the executable binary. I have no clue whether this is possible or not, whether it would survive (say) an obfuscator program being run on the source or being compiled with a different compiler, or minor changes to the code, but imagine these would be pretty crucial features.
Don't be so naive. They might be procuring this software just to make people (us, other governments)/think/ they don't have a quantum computer. People happily go on using our 2048-bit GPG keys assuming no QC exists, the NSA happily break all the crypto.
Just 'cause you're not paranoid don't mean they're not out to get you!
Sorry, I can see that this argument has merit when it comes to complicated stuff like embedded routers, but why the hell should a CD-ROM need to be firmware-upgradeable? It should correctly support all the standards that are available when it is released, and that's it. It isn't like there's a new CD standard out every week.
If firmware updating is something that is required there should at least be a lot of safeties, preferably including a physical jumper switch.
Why would people put icons in the kernel? (Well, other than the Tux boot logo..)
I suggest you try tunning a distribution from 2 or 3 years ago, maybe Red Hat 6, and then comparing that with Red Hat 9. Or the equivalent Mandrake numbers or whatever else. There is a huge difference.
How much of an effect does all the seeking a knoppix CD does have on the lifetime of the drive?
For PCs where the off switch is an ACPI power button you can get the system to interpret this and execute a proper shutdown, I did this on my laptop a while back, unfortunatly I've forgotten how now.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of seeking a ban on the device why can't they invest in a system that works properly? Twat faces....
Only available by FTP and not redistributable does not count as Free in any opensource book that I've read.
I think you've been misreading your books. The GPL (under which most of SuSE is licensed and which is pretty hot on ensuring distribution) certainly doesn't specify what protocol stuff should be available through - ftp only is fine. They do ask you not to redistribute the CDs or ISOs, but that's okay - they're within their rights to limit redistribution of YaST, which is on the CD, and all the Free stuff is available via ftp and redistributable. There are plenty of SuSE rpms being redistributed on rpmfind, etc. and there is nothing SuSE can do to prevent you redistributing rpms of Free software even if packaged to fit a SuSE distribution.
There's nothing to prevent SuSE making money from Free software and (with the exception of YaST which you can replace with yum or apt) that's what they do.
Dammit, I totally screwed up that post by using the wrong sort of braces. Just ignore it... Sorry, it's far too late :)
Slashdot requires me to wait another 90 seconds to post this article. It only took me 30 seconds to write the damn thing..
On one hand the whole distribution could be installed for ree by ftp install, but a part of it wasn't ree.
On the other hand, they didn't force you to use YaST so it was possible to pay SuSE for a ree distribution, thus making it not ree.
I always found SuSE intriguing - it certainly looked extremely promising for a rpm-based OS - but never had the time to wrestle with all those weird ree/ree issues. -- Of course, I gave in eventually so that my nVidia card would run properly...:-/
Consider: The lack of good font support in X. But it's not just X. It's applications too. There's no unified way to use fonts, or to use the "right" fonts.
There is good font support for X (which as far as the average Joe need care is the same thing as "in X")- the truetype fonts I have installed here look wonderful. The problem is not all applications use them - even gnome and KDE behave totally differently. The quality is certainly available, but I agree there needs to be a lot more standardisation.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
The traditional Free Software argument would be that this is a feature, not a bug, and it's the fault of the proprietary software. I think that's a bit facetious, and more to the point it is possible. Mozilla, Acrobat, nVidia, even RealPlayer have installers that work okay with pretty much any sanely-set-up linux distribution. Yes, they generally work from the command line and aren't friendly enough for Average Joe, but it is certainly possible to achieve with a bit of development.
Drivers: Linux intentionally makes it difficult for people to release binary-only drivers. Of course, Binary only drivers are a bad idea anyway, some vendors will insist on it such as NVidia.
NVidia was a bad example to quote, because for a while they have had a very good driver installation program that has Just Worked on every distro I've tried it on, from Mandrake to gentoo to Debian. It doesn't use an X interface (necessarily so) but if included with distributions it could be incorporated flawlessly into an installation procedure.
Yeah, basically I agree with you. I don't think any of the problems are insuperable, or even as dramatic as you imply, but they definitely are problems. You use it on your desktop, I use it on mine. But we know how to dig about under the bonnet. The average user could easily use a well-set-up linux machine, it's the installation that is problematic. Even with something comparatively good, like Mandrake, I find I have to fiddle about with a newly-installed distro to get everything looking good and working properly, and that just shouldn't happen. Maybe it's easier with the commercial distros like SuSE (in terms of having java, flash etc. preinstalled), I might give SuSE 9 a try at some point.
While I sort of agree with you about using MacOSX rather than Windows, it doesn't help those who already have an x86 system but want to ditch Windows. For them I guess they need to find their local linux geek to help get everything set up...
Let me clarify. I'm not anti- the USA [as a country]. By which I meant that by and large I think its citizens are decent people. I even think that in many cases[0] it has been a stabilising force in the world, which is probably a lot further than many /.ers would go. The foundation on which its laws are based is a good one. However I am anti- the [often bizarre behaviour of the legislature of the] USA. By which I mean, it seems to have some kind of weakness whereby its elected leaders take the solid foundation of the constitution and pile crap on it in the form of very silly laws. This is the fault of a very small fraction of the population[1], not the USA at large. You are being confused by my use of "the USA" to refer, on one hand, to the country at large, and on the other, to its government. I think I can be in favour of one but not the other without contradiction.
I'm not at all complacent about the situation in the EU (yes, I have written to my MP to make my views known), however there is a reasonable amount of precedent for the EU making sensible decisions that don't necessarily agree with the interests of big businesses (see the differences between the USA and EU Microsoft anti-trust cases and, more pertinently, the recent limitations on software patents which should come into force in November). Most of the governing structure of the EU (under one name or another) has been around since the sixties, which is plenty of time for it to have been bought, but it doesn't appear to have happened yet.[2]
[0] Not all.
[1] If there had been a significant difference when the Democrats were in power I might say it was the fault of the populace for having voted them in. But there wasn't.
[2] I'm not saying we (the British) can take the credit here, we adhere pretty slavishly to EU legislation and have altogether too high a regard for it. Fortunately the French have a very healthy skepticism about legislation favouring large companies and have wangled a lot of influence in EU policy decisions.
timidity -ig :-P
Works fine for me using ALSA 0.9
Things might just be looking up in the EU anyway - hopefully the law will clarify the software patent situation soon, with all the limitations agreed a while back.
As it happens (mar1boro) I'm not particularly anti-USA (and I definitely have sympathy for all the normal folk who live there, as I said in my previous post), I just think it's funny the way your legislators and business interest groups often behave as if they are in a position to create laws that directly apply to the whole world. Of course, often the USA's laws do affect the whole world in trade terms but it isn't necessarily so and it's quite easy to foresee a situation where the USA misjudges things and completely hamstrings themselves in some area of international trade.
MOD PARENT UP, they have an important point.
On the other hand, Iran and other countries are biological research anyway, so we might as well prepare for it.
A better way of preparing for it might be to research cures for bioweapons rather than making our own. After all, we already have more than enough nukes to utterly level Iran or any other country, and at least what happens after a nuking is well understood; radiation, though bad, decays predictably over time. Once biological weapons are used there is no way of knowing how the bioagents will evolve, spread.... Use of biological weapons is a far more plausible cause of Armageddon than nuclear war IMO.
I take it you've thought about speed issues? RAID over a 100mbit link doesn't sound like great fun - leastways I wouldn't put my swap on such a drive :)
Gigabit might work though.
America is not the world. (Reminded about my earlier gaffe about Canadians, perhaps I should say "the USA is not the world.)
If the GPL is ruled unconstitutional in the USA then the rest of the world simply goes for a dual license. With apologies to all the sane people in the USA, I go for something along the lines of: "GPL applicable outside the USA. No licensing terms available within the USA." We move repositories of GPL stuff out of the USA and the rest of the world gets on with business as usual, apart from possibly a few years setback having to replace key developers. The USA, meanwhile, carries on smoking its crack pipe.
Homer : Five-alarm chilli, eh? (He tastes it.) One...two...hey, what's the big idea? Ned: Oh, I admit it! It's only two-alarm, two-and-a-half, tops! I just wanted to be a big man in front of the kids Todd : Daddy, are we going to jail? Ned: We'll see, son. We'll see.
All this rhetoric is getting old. I just wish that when it reaches court IBM would file a motion requesting to "televise" the whole thing via a webcam. It would be better than OJ!
It's not like their trying to take over the world and force people to use the GPL.
*snort* Er, have you ever read any of Stallman's stuff? That's exactly what he's been trying to do, since the GNU project began.
Many temporary traffic lights in the UK operate a slightly different, but equally hackable, system. There's a simple (no doubt cheap) light sensor that detects the vehicle's flashing light. If you get to one of these lights when it's read (and there are no cars in front of you) it only takes a little practice to get them to change by flashing your headlights at it.
You can tell the ones this will work on as they have a small black box on the stalk with a smooth side facing the approaching traffic.
Er, what complaints? I wasn't complaining about anything, just speculating on the nature and limitations of the technology. Anyway (see other post) I've now read it and my speculations turned out to be pretty much right - the points I mentioned are requirements, and to some extent they're met.
Hmm. I've now read the article and it seems I was right. The watermarks aren't perfect though, 8% of them can be destroyed by either a decompile/recompile or an obfuscator attack. It seems pretty specific to java, too, which (to my mind) makes it of pretty limited use given how desperate the rats seem to be to get away from that particular sinking ship. (Yes, I know Java's great'n'lovely'n'wonderful, but Windows support is laughable so 95% of users are barely able to use it, so save your flames for Redmond...)
What would be the point in watermarking text? I take it (I haven't read the article but I don't reckon you have either) what is proposed is some way of coding so that a particular watermark structure has to get generated by the compiler and will appear in the executable binary. I have no clue whether this is possible or not, whether it would survive (say) an obfuscator program being run on the source or being compiled with a different compiler, or minor changes to the code, but imagine these would be pretty crucial features.
Don't be so naive. They might be procuring this software just to make people (us, other governments) /think/ they don't have a quantum computer. People happily go on using our 2048-bit GPG keys assuming no QC exists, the NSA happily break all the crypto.
Just 'cause you're not paranoid don't mean they're not out to get you!
You forgot: 1.5 See if anyone has got linux to run on the product yet.
PLF DVD RPMs worked fine for me with Mandrake 9.1 (libdvdcss and xine stuff).
Sorry, I can see that this argument has merit when it comes to complicated stuff like embedded routers, but why the hell should a CD-ROM need to be firmware-upgradeable? It should correctly support all the standards that are available when it is released, and that's it. It isn't like there's a new CD standard out every week.
If firmware updating is something that is required there should at least be a lot of safeties, preferably including a physical jumper switch.
Why would people put icons in the kernel? (Well, other than the Tux boot logo..)
:)
I suggest you try tunning a distribution from 2 or 3 years ago, maybe Red Hat 6, and then comparing that with Red Hat 9. Or the equivalent Mandrake numbers or whatever else. There is a huge difference.
Oh. Sorry. I have been trolled, I have lost
How much of an effect does all the seeking a knoppix CD does have on the lifetime of the drive?
For PCs where the off switch is an ACPI power button you can get the system to interpret this and execute a proper shutdown, I did this on my laptop a while back, unfortunatly I've forgotten how now.