The net result seems to be that Linux, after many years, remains an experimental kernel for hackers, rather than an operating system, promoted by zealots who care more about GPL purity than they do about getting things done.
maybe if people like you stopped sticking up for scum bags that rob people and bash/rape young girls we wouldn't be over run with violent crime?
Just because you think we are overrun with violent crime doesn't make it so. Actually we are currently at an all time low for violent crime and the one western country that still practices the death sentence, the US, has a relatively very high violent crime incidence. Not that they are necessarily related of course, but if you posit that shooting all criminals will solve anything, then that'll do just fine as a counterargument.
The EU is not a country and it should not be treated as one. If you're going to go that route you're really obliged to grant us the NAFTA region for comparison, I haven't crunched the numbers on that, but I think that NAFTA is still larger than the EU.
It's not a full country but it's also not a free trade agreement. It's a little more invasive than that. I don't think NAFTA comes with its own government, parliament and huge corpus of law.
See now we're generalizing again. All that stuff was taught to me in history class so I can't see how Europeans could have "forgotten about it", but then it's really hard to extrapolate from myself to Europe (which includes eastern europe, I guess, a whole other ballgame).
The US is often criticized mildly in this context though as the general notion in (Western) Europe is that it took the US way too long to get fully involved. Not taking away the fact that most people are well capable of understanding and appreciating the what and why of it. But I guess that's a bit too nuanced for this discussion.
Under what conditions would a patch not be worth applying? Thanks to the new shorter dev cycle once a kernel is marked stable it doesn't need or get new features.. only bugfixes.
I would think this is completely obvious. New versions of any software program can always include feature regressions.
What if the new version of linux includes a subtle bug in one of the disk device drivers that cuts your performance by half? What if you are a dedicated hosting company and you rely on that performance? There are often very hard to catch bugs in there that only pop up in certain circumstances. So you rely on the early adopters and the distro testers to find them for you and you wait for them to vet it for you. If all a new kernel version might buy you is slightly better performance and a few features you don't really need, you don't upgrade. It is not worth the risk. If it is a security upgrade, then that equation changes of course.
That being said, the entire story is moot as it's the distribution maintainers' job to know about security vulnerabilities, many of which are documented in other ways than the changelog.
I wouldn't say that. You can play WoW (sort of) with a 1s latency. Pretty much within the numbers I've seen mentioned here (700ms sounds like a sort of good connection). Sure, if you want to do pvp you might run into some problems (you'll never beat anyone who knows what he's doing and running at 50ms latency) but I'm sure it works, as I know someone who did it (on piss poor 2.5G cellular).
My experience with research is that there is barely anyone doing it that doesn't speak English. Just ask yourself what the de facto publication language is and there you have it.
If you're learning a different language don't do it for professional reasons, look at it more as an indirect enrichment of personal culture and intellect.
In this day and age, it's not that you need to legally become a company, you need to become an entertainment company. They seem to have all the power.
And that is exactly the problem. There's nothing wrong with copyright as such, there is a whole lot of things wrong with the DMCA and similar laws that were passed in the last ~20 years as an attempt to protect the domestic recording industries. Let's hope the coming generations of politicians aren't so gullible when it comes to copyright law.
So here's a message to our politicians : next time someone tells me about how pirating MP3s is evil - give me news from the nice chinese people who are *making money* OFF MY FUCKING BACK! Then I'll listen!
Most likely what happened was the cops didn't deem you important (i.e. rich) enough to apply the resources. You think when somebody's bike gets stolen they actually send uniforms out to go and look for it? Get real.
Well you don't generally find WoW players dying from dehydration or starvation either. If you're gonna post a response, at least give me more than 2 sentences to work with. (I'm aware of the irony btw)
Certainly fun things can be addictive, but as a glaring example, both rock climbing and sex have a natural end-point, you get to the top and that's it for right then. Sure you can come own and do it all over again, but then the body has it's natural limits. You feel tired and fulfilled, and you don't feel like you need any more for a while.
How have you shown that the same is not true for a game such as WoW or any game? WoW specifically is designed so that you do an "instance" for maybe max five hours (they used to be longer, but five is really pushing it now). At the end, you have killed the boss (or have given up on it). The next day you can come back, you can try to go again the same day. How is this different from always having a bigger, better rock to climb? You're arguing physical exertion is somehow completely different from mental exertion while the both of them are intricately linked. I know after five hours of WoW I'm not about to keep playing. Which brings me to your last paragraph.
Not so with games like WoW, which are specifically designed to be addictive. You can keep playing until you die from starvation, and people have.
You can keep climbing till you fall off from exertion. You can keep drinking water till you die of water poisoning (and people have!). According to the myth around the whole invention of the marathon, the first ever person to run one died from exertion at the end of it. I think you're really reaching here, but feel free to prove me wrong.:)
Most likely you are just trolling but to anyone who modded this "insightful" I would like to point out that there is very little harmonization during primary and secondary education in the various member nations of the EU (let alone Europe), so the above statement is really just a particularly egregious example of anecdote vs. data. It's pure bullshit really, nothing insightful about it.
Actually, if you keep your default editing mode set to plain old text you can use tags. In this mode you don't have to do the paragraph coding yourself (which makes html mode really annoying). I wouldn't say it's a bad way of working, a bit verbose maybe but not a bad way of working. Beats having to select everything you want to highlight first, as you can just keep typing away instead, as long as you know the tags (you want and probably).
I wrote up an entire post arguing that e-mail involves an expectation of privacy, but even if it would not you're not saying anything that would make the GP wrong. If I publish something on my website that does not give you the right to republish it. The only copies of an e-mail that are legal are those that you authorized. This gets a bit hairy when considering forwarding. I'd say forwarding falls under fair use and there's a distinction between forwarding to a select group of people and the entire internet (e.g. via a website) but the case law on that point I do not know and it might not exist yet.
I think the No HTML e-mail thing is pretty normal given what you get in your inbox at times. People get the option to use colours (not to mention all the other crap), so they start using them at every opportunity. It can get a bit annoying. During my last job I got a lot of serious business mails with the most hideous possible footers you could imagine, but luckily it was only the footers.
The reason why this should reflect badly on HTML e-mail is exactly the reason stupid usage of powerpoint reflects badly on it: it gives people too much rope to hang themselves by. But I agree that in general HTML e-mail can be plenty useful. Though I don't see the problem in using _emphasis_ or *emphasis* in a simple text-only mail. Most clients will highlight it anyway, and if not people can read it perfectly fine.
Most of the problems with integration have nothing to do with some war that happened 50 years ago. You try to paint it as some sort of French vs. Algerians thing, which is patently wrong, as there's plenty different nationalities involved and old war wounds make almost no appearance in the referenced "hate speech". Your basic assumptions here about the "ongoing problems" are just plain wrong.
It's actually essentially the same problem you see everywhere in the richer part of the world, especially in modern day Western Europe where there was never any real consideration to the results of widespread immigration. There's problems with communities getting insulated, ghettoization, poverty, questions to be asked about cultural and religious integration etc. Yes, France could have just closed its borders to everyone, but there's some short term (illegal immigration) and long term (cultural stagnation) problems with that, as you might surmise.
If you're an american, think Mexico vs. the US border and that'll get you a long part of the way in any case. It's just that some of the more extreme views that you will always get are legal to express in the US, where they are not in France.
Now explain why we would want to help them.
GPL code can be used in a lot of ways, and perhaps Noika can use it in the way they desire. But I have no desire to help them in doing so. And I see no advantage in helping them in doing so.
The upside about having linux run on these cellphones is that porting existing applications and writing new ones for this platform will become easier. For many people it will not matter if the phone itself is locked down, rather it only matters that they will be able to write their own applications or modify existing ones and deploy with minimum hassle. If Nokia is against that, well then they're barking up the wrong tree and their relation with the open source community will necessarily be a cold and distant one. But if in the process of trying to make the address book work a little bit better, or get your new nifty game running you happen to find and fix some bugs in their code, well it's only natural you'd try to get your fix upstream.
Personally I think they were more trying to say something along the lines of "look, even with linux on it there will be some things we can't allow you to do", which for a lot of people will probably be fine. After all, there's plenty of windows open source projects as well, the propietary nature of their platform doesn't seem to bother them very much...
The more important benchmark, especially for applications like google docs and other pseudo-application applications is the rewritten JavaScript engine in Opera 9.5, which is indeed extremely fast.
Honestly I feel like it's opera who has something to prove here. I apparently hang out on a lot of all those web 2.0 websites, which I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't tried opera and noticed the painfully slow javascript support at times. Sure, the html rendering was lightning fast, but that doesn't matter much if you're opening say a google reader or a gmail.
I have not found the process of setting up dual monitors using my nvidia cards easy for any linux distribution I've used. In ubuntu, I can't use the built-in video configuration to achieve this, I have to find, install, and use the nvidia control panel and play with it for a while (not too long) before I get my two screens.
Yeah that's what gets most people I think. Ubuntu ships some apps to change some settings, but they don't actually work. It's not that linux isn't ready for the desktop, but little things like this really annoy users. Lack of polish as they say. 90% of problems I see mentioned are all due to X configuration issues really, graphics drivers etc. Ironically, or unsurprisingly, this is also where windows has the most problems (mostly in the form of nvidia drivers crashing windows then).
Personally I'm of the opinion that if the ubuntu devs can't get the little configuration windows right, they should point people to the x.org config files and just document how to edit those. It might seem a little harder for the end user (you'll have to read a bit more documentation that's for sure) but at least it won't be a black art anymore. Assuming you can get it to work, and don't run into any of the myriad bugs with the new accelerated architecture.
The OP also mentions wireless. I've seen similar problems in feisty where the wireless drivers seem to get "confused" over what network they're in. Never did manage to track this down, but I'm of the opinion there's some timing bugs in the NetworkManager code, somewhere. Was hoping this got fixed in hardy actually.
What I believe he's saying is that the US government has a lot more chance to shut a project down than a country like, say, Iran. Generally most of the (popular) projects on sourceforge have a strong presence in the west, which is exactly where the US has the most pull. Apologies to the GP if I misunderstood him.
Cops at my locale used to hate this type of users reporting speed traps. Until they realised they could be at 5 places at once by just changing location every hour or so. You can't really be sure they've left since they're not always in plane view, and you'd need a reliable source to know they've left. (someone could call in and just lie as a prank) So the net result is that they seem to have a lot more manpower than they do, and people are driving slower at a lot more spots than there are speed traps. So in the end they stopped trying to get it banned, since the net effect was actually positive for them.
So yes the GP was only half right but he was essentially talking about the same thing. It does discourage people from speeding in a lot more places than just where the speed traps are, which as you note is essentially the aim. That, or making some extra money for the state.
Give me new areas that I can explore on my own or with a friend or two. New quests outside of killing 10 more of those things or gather 20 more flowers.
While I understand what you're saying I must say I wouldn't be playing WoW if not for the five and ten man content. It can be a lot of fun just trying to beat one of those encounters and getting a group of people working together and getting it right. So that content is absolutely vital to some players in the game. Others have more fun doing the ordinary quests. (but you can't do that for more than a year or two, at least I can't)
The press and lots of players often seem to portray this as the "casual gamer" vs. the "hardcore raider", two stereotypes with mystical powers it seems. In reality there's an entire continuum of players. There are those that never seem to get any of their characters above lvl 50 (although little of those nowadays), those that get up to the level cap and just stick with the quests and some grinding, those that do the instances but never get into heroics etc, those that do the heroics and the occasional pug to kara, those that raid now and then, maybe once or twice a week, those that raid all week and those that never sleep. Oh and then there's chinese gold farmers, of course.
I think blizzard really understands this about their players and they have been actively trying to keep the game fun for all those different play styles. That was mostly the lesson they tried to bring to the expansion (TBC) from the original WoW since all too often that did devolve in casual vs raider. (anyone remember the borefest that was MC?)
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The net result seems to be that Linux, after many years, remains an experimental kernel for hackers, rather than an operating system, promoted by zealots who care more about GPL purity than they do about getting things done.
What are you smoking and where can I get some?
maybe if people like you stopped sticking up for scum bags that rob people and bash/rape young girls we wouldn't be over run with violent crime?
Just because you think we are overrun with violent crime doesn't make it so. Actually we are currently at an all time low for violent crime and the one western country that still practices the death sentence, the US, has a relatively very high violent crime incidence. Not that they are necessarily related of course, but if you posit that shooting all criminals will solve anything, then that'll do just fine as a counterargument.
Somebody needs their coffee before starting to mod. :-)
The EU is not a country and it should not be treated as one. If you're going to go that route you're really obliged to grant us the NAFTA region for comparison, I haven't crunched the numbers on that, but I think that NAFTA is still larger than the EU.
It's not a full country but it's also not a free trade agreement. It's a little more invasive than that. I don't think NAFTA comes with its own government, parliament and huge corpus of law.
See now we're generalizing again. All that stuff was taught to me in history class so I can't see how Europeans could have "forgotten about it", but then it's really hard to extrapolate from myself to Europe (which includes eastern europe, I guess, a whole other ballgame).
The US is often criticized mildly in this context though as the general notion in (Western) Europe is that it took the US way too long to get fully involved. Not taking away the fact that most people are well capable of understanding and appreciating the what and why of it. But I guess that's a bit too nuanced for this discussion.
Under what conditions would a patch not be worth applying? Thanks to the new shorter dev cycle once a kernel is marked stable it doesn't need or get new features.. only bugfixes.
I would think this is completely obvious. New versions of any software program can always include feature regressions.
What if the new version of linux includes a subtle bug in one of the disk device drivers that cuts your performance by half? What if you are a dedicated hosting company and you rely on that performance? There are often very hard to catch bugs in there that only pop up in certain circumstances. So you rely on the early adopters and the distro testers to find them for you and you wait for them to vet it for you. If all a new kernel version might buy you is slightly better performance and a few features you don't really need, you don't upgrade. It is not worth the risk. If it is a security upgrade, then that equation changes of course.
That being said, the entire story is moot as it's the distribution maintainers' job to know about security vulnerabilities, many of which are documented in other ways than the changelog.
Non-turn based games are obviously a non-option.
I wouldn't say that. You can play WoW (sort of) with a 1s latency. Pretty much within the numbers I've seen mentioned here (700ms sounds like a sort of good connection). Sure, if you want to do pvp you might run into some problems (you'll never beat anyone who knows what he's doing and running at 50ms latency) but I'm sure it works, as I know someone who did it (on piss poor 2.5G cellular).
My experience with research is that there is barely anyone doing it that doesn't speak English. Just ask yourself what the de facto publication language is and there you have it.
If you're learning a different language don't do it for professional reasons, look at it more as an indirect enrichment of personal culture and intellect.
In this day and age, it's not that you need to legally become a company, you need to become an entertainment company. They seem to have all the power.
And that is exactly the problem. There's nothing wrong with copyright as such, there is a whole lot of things wrong with the DMCA and similar laws that were passed in the last ~20 years as an attempt to protect the domestic recording industries. Let's hope the coming generations of politicians aren't so gullible when it comes to copyright law.
So here's a message to our politicians : next time someone tells me about how pirating MP3s is evil - give me news from the nice chinese people who are *making money* OFF MY FUCKING BACK! Then I'll listen!
Most likely what happened was the cops didn't deem you important (i.e. rich) enough to apply the resources. You think when somebody's bike gets stolen they actually send uniforms out to go and look for it? Get real.
Well you don't generally find WoW players dying from dehydration or starvation either. If you're gonna post a response, at least give me more than 2 sentences to work with. (I'm aware of the irony btw)
Certainly fun things can be addictive, but as a glaring example, both rock climbing and sex have a natural end-point, you get to the top and that's it for right then. Sure you can come own and do it all over again, but then the body has it's natural limits. You feel tired and fulfilled, and you don't feel like you need any more for a while.
How have you shown that the same is not true for a game such as WoW or any game? WoW specifically is designed so that you do an "instance" for maybe max five hours (they used to be longer, but five is really pushing it now). At the end, you have killed the boss (or have given up on it). The next day you can come back, you can try to go again the same day. How is this different from always having a bigger, better rock to climb? You're arguing physical exertion is somehow completely different from mental exertion while the both of them are intricately linked. I know after five hours of WoW I'm not about to keep playing. Which brings me to your last paragraph.
Not so with games like WoW, which are specifically designed to be addictive. You can keep playing until you die from starvation, and people have.
You can keep climbing till you fall off from exertion. You can keep drinking water till you die of water poisoning (and people have!). According to the myth around the whole invention of the marathon, the first ever person to run one died from exertion at the end of it. I think you're really reaching here, but feel free to prove me wrong. :)
Most likely you are just trolling but to anyone who modded this "insightful" I would like to point out that there is very little harmonization during primary and secondary education in the various member nations of the EU (let alone Europe), so the above statement is really just a particularly egregious example of anecdote vs. data. It's pure bullshit really, nothing insightful about it.
Actually, if you keep your default editing mode set to plain old text you can use tags. In this mode you don't have to do the paragraph coding yourself (which makes html mode really annoying). I wouldn't say it's a bad way of working, a bit verbose maybe but not a bad way of working. Beats having to select everything you want to highlight first, as you can just keep typing away instead, as long as you know the tags (you want and probably).
I wrote up an entire post arguing that e-mail involves an expectation of privacy, but even if it would not you're not saying anything that would make the GP wrong. If I publish something on my website that does not give you the right to republish it. The only copies of an e-mail that are legal are those that you authorized. This gets a bit hairy when considering forwarding. I'd say forwarding falls under fair use and there's a distinction between forwarding to a select group of people and the entire internet (e.g. via a website) but the case law on that point I do not know and it might not exist yet.
I think the No HTML e-mail thing is pretty normal given what you get in your inbox at times. People get the option to use colours (not to mention all the other crap), so they start using them at every opportunity. It can get a bit annoying. During my last job I got a lot of serious business mails with the most hideous possible footers you could imagine, but luckily it was only the footers.
The reason why this should reflect badly on HTML e-mail is exactly the reason stupid usage of powerpoint reflects badly on it: it gives people too much rope to hang themselves by. But I agree that in general HTML e-mail can be plenty useful. Though I don't see the problem in using _emphasis_ or *emphasis* in a simple text-only mail. Most clients will highlight it anyway, and if not people can read it perfectly fine.
BTW, you do know slashdot supports HTML right?
Most of the problems with integration have nothing to do with some war that happened 50 years ago. You try to paint it as some sort of French vs. Algerians thing, which is patently wrong, as there's plenty different nationalities involved and old war wounds make almost no appearance in the referenced "hate speech". Your basic assumptions here about the "ongoing problems" are just plain wrong.
It's actually essentially the same problem you see everywhere in the richer part of the world, especially in modern day Western Europe where there was never any real consideration to the results of widespread immigration. There's problems with communities getting insulated, ghettoization, poverty, questions to be asked about cultural and religious integration etc. Yes, France could have just closed its borders to everyone, but there's some short term (illegal immigration) and long term (cultural stagnation) problems with that, as you might surmise.
If you're an american, think Mexico vs. the US border and that'll get you a long part of the way in any case. It's just that some of the more extreme views that you will always get are legal to express in the US, where they are not in France.
The upside about having linux run on these cellphones is that porting existing applications and writing new ones for this platform will become easier. For many people it will not matter if the phone itself is locked down, rather it only matters that they will be able to write their own applications or modify existing ones and deploy with minimum hassle. If Nokia is against that, well then they're barking up the wrong tree and their relation with the open source community will necessarily be a cold and distant one. But if in the process of trying to make the address book work a little bit better, or get your new nifty game running you happen to find and fix some bugs in their code, well it's only natural you'd try to get your fix upstream.
Personally I think they were more trying to say something along the lines of "look, even with linux on it there will be some things we can't allow you to do", which for a lot of people will probably be fine. After all, there's plenty of windows open source projects as well, the propietary nature of their platform doesn't seem to bother them very much...
Honestly I feel like it's opera who has something to prove here. I apparently hang out on a lot of all those web 2.0 websites, which I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't tried opera and noticed the painfully slow javascript support at times. Sure, the html rendering was lightning fast, but that doesn't matter much if you're opening say a google reader or a gmail.
I have not found the process of setting up dual monitors using my nvidia cards easy for any linux distribution I've used. In ubuntu, I can't use the built-in video configuration to achieve this, I have to find, install, and use the nvidia control panel and play with it for a while (not too long) before I get my two screens.
Yeah that's what gets most people I think. Ubuntu ships some apps to change some settings, but they don't actually work. It's not that linux isn't ready for the desktop, but little things like this really annoy users. Lack of polish as they say. 90% of problems I see mentioned are all due to X configuration issues really, graphics drivers etc. Ironically, or unsurprisingly, this is also where windows has the most problems (mostly in the form of nvidia drivers crashing windows then).
Personally I'm of the opinion that if the ubuntu devs can't get the little configuration windows right, they should point people to the x.org config files and just document how to edit those. It might seem a little harder for the end user (you'll have to read a bit more documentation that's for sure) but at least it won't be a black art anymore. Assuming you can get it to work, and don't run into any of the myriad bugs with the new accelerated architecture.
The OP also mentions wireless. I've seen similar problems in feisty where the wireless drivers seem to get "confused" over what network they're in. Never did manage to track this down, but I'm of the opinion there's some timing bugs in the NetworkManager code, somewhere. Was hoping this got fixed in hardy actually.
What I believe he's saying is that the US government has a lot more chance to shut a project down than a country like, say, Iran. Generally most of the (popular) projects on sourceforge have a strong presence in the west, which is exactly where the US has the most pull. Apologies to the GP if I misunderstood him.
Cops at my locale used to hate this type of users reporting speed traps. Until they realised they could be at 5 places at once by just changing location every hour or so. You can't really be sure they've left since they're not always in plane view, and you'd need a reliable source to know they've left. (someone could call in and just lie as a prank) So the net result is that they seem to have a lot more manpower than they do, and people are driving slower at a lot more spots than there are speed traps. So in the end they stopped trying to get it banned, since the net effect was actually positive for them.
So yes the GP was only half right but he was essentially talking about the same thing. It does discourage people from speeding in a lot more places than just where the speed traps are, which as you note is essentially the aim. That, or making some extra money for the state.
While I understand what you're saying I must say I wouldn't be playing WoW if not for the five and ten man content. It can be a lot of fun just trying to beat one of those encounters and getting a group of people working together and getting it right. So that content is absolutely vital to some players in the game. Others have more fun doing the ordinary quests. (but you can't do that for more than a year or two, at least I can't)
The press and lots of players often seem to portray this as the "casual gamer" vs. the "hardcore raider", two stereotypes with mystical powers it seems. In reality there's an entire continuum of players. There are those that never seem to get any of their characters above lvl 50 (although little of those nowadays), those that get up to the level cap and just stick with the quests and some grinding, those that do the instances but never get into heroics etc, those that do the heroics and the occasional pug to kara, those that raid now and then, maybe once or twice a week, those that raid all week and those that never sleep. Oh and then there's chinese gold farmers, of course.
I think blizzard really understands this about their players and they have been actively trying to keep the game fun for all those different play styles. That was mostly the lesson they tried to bring to the expansion (TBC) from the original WoW since all too often that did devolve in casual vs raider. (anyone remember the borefest that was MC?)
Yay rampant xenofobia backed up by a multitude of half-truths. Welcome to modern Europe.