But didn't you know that NTFS doesnt' need defregging (I'm kidding, but that was the original claim)?
It doesn't. At least not if you don't fill the drive up and the gotcha there is that you can't even defrag NTFS when you fill your drive up. I've never seen any figures saying defragging somehow improves performance, I have however seen it degrade mine. So no I honestly don't think NTFS needs defragging and I don't think you should be defragging an NTFS drive. I don't however use windows all that much so maybe I've just been (un)lucky.
The reason is slightly more subtle than that. The GPL does not allow GPL-licensed code to be incorporated into a larger work where other parts of the work are under a more restrictive licence. There is much debate about whether a device driver with a closed source licence is a derivative work of the kernel, but most distributions err on the side of caution and don't distribute them.
You are right but I'd just like to add that the reason codecs aren't distributed can differ wildly. Most of the time it has to do with patent law (it might not be legal to distribute implementations of an algorithm), or the licenses of said codecs (not an issue for mp3 in linux, but maybe others) that don't allow redistribution. It has little or nothing to do with the GPL.
Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
Sadly I can second the Nautilus slowness issue.
After a recent upgrade of my Ubuntu machine (within the last month or two) I had to start using Konqueror instead of Nautilus as Nautilus will hang for up to about three minutes whenever it's started or a directory is changed.
There's a difference between general slowness and what looks like a major bug somewhere. I don't think the rest of the people on here are complaining about the same thing you are complaining about.
Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
·
· Score: 1
But for the rest, KDE owns. KDE has amarok, k3b, and konqueror, all three of which are outstanding in their respective fields. And they're always talking about how KOffice 2 is going to replace OO.O and gimp.
If you mean konqueror as a file browser, then maybe. If you mean Konqueror as a web browser, ehm, no. I've been using it for a while and it has tons of annoying little bugs. One that I reported and still hasn't been fixed AFAIK is the completely broken DNS behaviour. So for now, I'm back to firefox most of the time.
It doesn't just snap happen like that, it takes time and is a macro-effect. In Europe gas has been a lot more expensive than what you'd pay in the US for many years (due to taxes). If you compare cars in both countries you'll notice that on the whole European cars are smaller and more energy efficient. (also a result of taxes on big cars) The same kind of dynamic works in other areas.
Where the cost of gas might influence your driving might be when you only have to go about half a mile or something and you say "oh I'll walk instead". But the price would have to be very high to have that kind of direct effect, mostly you'll just see people thinking about it when they buy a new car.
Depends on who's maintaining your software in Debian. If they think it's an upstream problem (i.e. serious bug) they should coordinate with you. If it's something that's already been fixed in a newer version they will most likely backport a fix, which might break things as you describe. Even if it's just a minor bug most devs I know would be friendly enough to at least submit it in the projects' bugtracker, but as I said it depends.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
The better question is, "What part of 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' do you not understand?"
[...]
Then again, I wouldn't expect someone who refers to Marx (a man whose ideas are responsible for the deaths of about 200 million people in the 20th century) favorably would understand such nuance.
The two mentioned in my post are certainly xenofobes to say the least. There are plenty of people opposed to immigration who are not described as such, it's just that the ones that go to extremes in this usually seem to coincide with the political racist contingent. Calling things by their names doesn't prevent any debate at all. Many European countries have adopted ever stricter immigration laws in the last couple of years, regardless of any discussion about racism. Personally I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The example is still stupid. Come back to me when an entire political party bases it's platform around hatred of the Muslims.
Uhm, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Front National in France. Okay, okay, they're mostly against immigrants and most immigrants are muslim. Still, dangerously close.
Using an open source tool and modifying it are two deeply different things.
Not while "linking" and "modifying" remain synonymous, they're not.
It's true that the FSF's position on the GPL's interpretation is that merely linking against a library is enough for your product to be a "derived work". In most cases I would disagree with them (IANAL but I've researched the subject somewhat) but courts are usually expected to look favorably upon the copyright holder so indeed you should never link to GPL code and redistribute it with your works, just to be on the safe side. Anything that doesn't include redistribution is of course okay, though if you ever want to sell a propietary product that includes GPL code you'll have to sell your customers the code under the GPL or replace those GPLed parts. I think this is mainly what's freaking out the business types.
If people are dying because they can't afford food that's not the fault of the guys making and selling the food (not unless they're doing some serious price fixing). You could reject the entire notion of capitalism on the same basis. Communist.
You have a point, but then if you're using VOIP software to call someone with a telephone number, you're paying somebody and that somebody will be paying one of the providers won't they or am I missing something?
If you want the human race to survive for another couple of million years, or even hundreds, you better believe we should manage the earth. You can't dump your industrial waste unfiltered into the oceans and then complain when suddenly a major source of food completely dies out. Who says we don't have to manage the earth?
That's all very good and all, but if you're organising a raid you can still keep track of these things. Put dps warriors in dps roles. Pick and match classes with certain builds. It sounds like you're saying that you can't do endgame raiding with other specs but the "standard" which really isn't true. If you're in one of the good guilds (to me that's the ones that don't mind trying something new) you'll often see all sorts of weird combinations being used.
It's unfortunate that I do not have the time for the hardcore raiding bit (do some casual stuff though) but then it'd probably be full with 'tards who say "you need to spec XYZ, and have that specific gear and grind 5 hours for blah". The ones I really respect are the ones that will try to rotate the tanking roles between feral druids and warriors, put a balance spec druid in their line-up, try out how shammies and pallies can work together, you know, getting the most out of the game instead of following the same damn tacs everyone knows by now. I think that was also blizz's intention with the way they (re)did the talent trees.
This is not a linux problem, it's a vendor problem. It is also, incidentally, the problem certification is designed to solve. If Dell tells you "You can run Suse Linux on this" then you can go out, buy that laptop/desktop/whatever and put suse linux on it. No need to know about any of the hardware. You might have noticed that they also certify hardware for windows, it's the same principle.
No I'm one of those who thinks Apple is being facetious when it tells people it can't share its DRM while it technically can but it's making bundles of money precisely because of this DRM. Not all music stores are actually tied to a particular player, but all the music stores out there already are now unable to compete with Apple in the digital music space. If they were, they could conceivably offer lower prices for the same music, or other payment plans than the ones Apple has. That is probably not extremely likely considering the stranglehold the music industry has on all of them, but it would still make for a more healthy market.
It's the other way around. The iPod makes iTMS popular. Conceivably if other stores would be able to sell music for the iPod free market mechanisms could take hold. You can't sell music without DRM atm and nobody can sell DRM-ed music for the iPod (which _is_ the most popular music player).
"It could create an exploit" is not sufficient reason. Smells like a strawman argument to me, actually. There are plenty of ways to implement this, and none need be exploitable. How about just sending an unencumbered AAC file, what's wrong with that? You can't fool iTunes into playing an unencumbered file since it's encrypted. That's the entire point of encryption: if you don't have the key you can't get to the contents.
As the article itself notes it's already possible to play a song in iTunes and extract the unencrypted version. After all, iTunes needs to store that somewhere in memory before playback, so you can already circumvent the encryption. That's the entire reason DRM is fundamentally broken and, co-incidentally, the reason for the whole TPM idea. The article also doesn't seem to make a convincing argument against allowing other vendors to use this DRM system either, they could conceivably just install their own set of user keys into iTunes.
What I don't get is how this is different than any other car commercial where they do crazy shit with the newest hottest sports car. Like driving 100MPH down twisty country roads, or spinning around mercilessly on flat rainy roads, or doing a little fade-skid to stop at the very end of the commercial. Oh yeah, in tiny print at the bottom they say "Professional driver on closed course." like that makes it OK. If there's one thing car makers do NOT advertise it's how to drive safe. So just put a disclaimer at the bottom "This is really a 30-year-old man dressed up like a 2-year-old, on a closed course" and all will be well...
Heh, reminds me of one of the new mini commercials. Has these guys driving around through some sewer system and on the bottom it says "this was filmed at a closed location". Well DUH. If you're going to be stupid enough to emulate this and take your car down a sewer, you shouldn't have been given your driver's license in the first place. Seems to me there's a certain point where people need to take responsibility for themselves (and their children) instead of expecting society to do it for them. I'm sure the guys who made the commercial put that in there to not get sued, but why should you have to? If you get yourself killed in a sewer somewhere it's your own damn fault.
I imagine it's more aimed at small-sized companies(think mom and pop) that run just about everything on one single windows server and are disinclined to actually go out and buy another couple of licenses for MS SQL Server. MS knows that these people will either pirate SQL Server or find some replacement that doesn't cost them anything, so they might as well keep 'em happy by giving a short primer on installing it.
There is an impact of the network communication but it is negligible when compared to the cost of doing the actual graphical operations. Many of the problems where X is slow atm seem to be caused by architecting issues in the ways the drivers are set up and the way they use the video memory. This is where most of the effort is going, the impact of the network transparancy is max 2fps.
But without any patents, what would be the motivation for that individual to share their idea at all? Bringing an idea to fruition as an invention takes a lot of work. If you know that the day after your product goes to market, a dozen other identical ones will be on the shelf next to it, why bother?
Patents exist for the benefit of the market, not of the individual. A market is most efficient (or at least more efficient) when entry barriers are low and competition is high. Granting a monopoly on a certain technique counteracts normal market principles in an effort to encourage innovation when entry barriers are high. For patents to be worthwile the negative economic impact (by granting a monopoly, stifling further innovation on the subject in some cases) should be lower than the positive impact (new technology entering the market, innovation, etc. that would otherwise not be there).
For software patents, this just doesn't come up to a positive. There are tons of problems. First of all, the entry barriers in the market are low. It is easy to come up with a new algorithm, start a company, bring it to market and make a huge profit. In an industry where 2 years is a long time and the barriers to entry are so low (compare for instance a couple of thousand $ investment vs a couple of billion in other industries) it just doesn't make sense to allow software patents, since the net effect on your economy will be negative. There's not many studies yet with hard numbers but the ones that are out there all seem to point in the same direction: software patents do more harm than good. Therefore they are bad.
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He quite possibly meant reign but the sentence doesn't really make sense either way.
It doesn't. At least not if you don't fill the drive up and the gotcha there is that you can't even defrag NTFS when you fill your drive up. I've never seen any figures saying defragging somehow improves performance, I have however seen it degrade mine. So no I honestly don't think NTFS needs defragging and I don't think you should be defragging an NTFS drive. I don't however use windows all that much so maybe I've just been (un)lucky.
You are right but I'd just like to add that the reason codecs aren't distributed can differ wildly. Most of the time it has to do with patent law (it might not be legal to distribute implementations of an algorithm), or the licenses of said codecs (not an issue for mp3 in linux, but maybe others) that don't allow redistribution. It has little or nothing to do with the GPL.
There's a difference between general slowness and what looks like a major bug somewhere. I don't think the rest of the people on here are complaining about the same thing you are complaining about.
If you mean konqueror as a file browser, then maybe. If you mean Konqueror as a web browser, ehm, no. I've been using it for a while and it has tons of annoying little bugs. One that I reported and still hasn't been fixed AFAIK is the completely broken DNS behaviour. So for now, I'm back to firefox most of the time.
It doesn't just snap happen like that, it takes time and is a macro-effect. In Europe gas has been a lot more expensive than what you'd pay in the US for many years (due to taxes). If you compare cars in both countries you'll notice that on the whole European cars are smaller and more energy efficient. (also a result of taxes on big cars) The same kind of dynamic works in other areas.
Where the cost of gas might influence your driving might be when you only have to go about half a mile or something and you say "oh I'll walk instead". But the price would have to be very high to have that kind of direct effect, mostly you'll just see people thinking about it when they buy a new car.
Depends on who's maintaining your software in Debian. If they think it's an upstream problem (i.e. serious bug) they should coordinate with you. If it's something that's already been fixed in a newer version they will most likely backport a fix, which might break things as you describe. Even if it's just a minor bug most devs I know would be friendly enough to at least submit it in the projects' bugtracker, but as I said it depends.
The better question is, "What part of 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' do you not understand?"
[...]
Then again, I wouldn't expect someone who refers to Marx (a man whose ideas are responsible for the deaths of about 200 million people in the 20th century) favorably would understand such nuance.
"Ideas don't kill people, people kill people."The two mentioned in my post are certainly xenofobes to say the least. There are plenty of people opposed to immigration who are not described as such, it's just that the ones that go to extremes in this usually seem to coincide with the political racist contingent. Calling things by their names doesn't prevent any debate at all. Many European countries have adopted ever stricter immigration laws in the last couple of years, regardless of any discussion about racism. Personally I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The example is still stupid. Come back to me when an entire political party bases it's platform around hatred of the Muslims.
Uhm, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Front National in France. Okay, okay, they're mostly against immigrants and most immigrants are muslim. Still, dangerously close.
Using an open source tool and modifying it are two deeply different things.
Not while "linking" and "modifying" remain synonymous, they're not.
It's true that the FSF's position on the GPL's interpretation is that merely linking against a library is enough for your product to be a "derived work". In most cases I would disagree with them (IANAL but I've researched the subject somewhat) but courts are usually expected to look favorably upon the copyright holder so indeed you should never link to GPL code and redistribute it with your works, just to be on the safe side. Anything that doesn't include redistribution is of course okay, though if you ever want to sell a propietary product that includes GPL code you'll have to sell your customers the code under the GPL or replace those GPLed parts. I think this is mainly what's freaking out the business types.
The versions of MS Outlook I've worked with also required you to know the server address (and username stuff), so I think they just copied it over.
If people are dying because they can't afford food that's not the fault of the guys making and selling the food (not unless they're doing some serious price fixing). You could reject the entire notion of capitalism on the same basis. Communist.
You have a point, but then if you're using VOIP software to call someone with a telephone number, you're paying somebody and that somebody will be paying one of the providers won't they or am I missing something?
If you want the human race to survive for another couple of million years, or even hundreds, you better believe we should manage the earth. You can't dump your industrial waste unfiltered into the oceans and then complain when suddenly a major source of food completely dies out. Who says we don't have to manage the earth?
That's all very good and all, but if you're organising a raid you can still keep track of these things. Put dps warriors in dps roles. Pick and match classes with certain builds. It sounds like you're saying that you can't do endgame raiding with other specs but the "standard" which really isn't true. If you're in one of the good guilds (to me that's the ones that don't mind trying something new) you'll often see all sorts of weird combinations being used.
It's unfortunate that I do not have the time for the hardcore raiding bit (do some casual stuff though) but then it'd probably be full with 'tards who say "you need to spec XYZ, and have that specific gear and grind 5 hours for blah". The ones I really respect are the ones that will try to rotate the tanking roles between feral druids and warriors, put a balance spec druid in their line-up, try out how shammies and pallies can work together, you know, getting the most out of the game instead of following the same damn tacs everyone knows by now. I think that was also blizz's intention with the way they (re)did the talent trees.
This is not a linux problem, it's a vendor problem. It is also, incidentally, the problem certification is designed to solve. If Dell tells you "You can run Suse Linux on this" then you can go out, buy that laptop/desktop/whatever and put suse linux on it. No need to know about any of the hardware. You might have noticed that they also certify hardware for windows, it's the same principle.
No I'm one of those who thinks Apple is being facetious when it tells people it can't share its DRM while it technically can but it's making bundles of money precisely because of this DRM. Not all music stores are actually tied to a particular player, but all the music stores out there already are now unable to compete with Apple in the digital music space. If they were, they could conceivably offer lower prices for the same music, or other payment plans than the ones Apple has. That is probably not extremely likely considering the stranglehold the music industry has on all of them, but it would still make for a more healthy market.
It's the other way around. The iPod makes iTMS popular. Conceivably if other stores would be able to sell music for the iPod free market mechanisms could take hold. You can't sell music without DRM atm and nobody can sell DRM-ed music for the iPod (which _is_ the most popular music player).
"It could create an exploit" is not sufficient reason. Smells like a strawman argument to me, actually. There are plenty of ways to implement this, and none need be exploitable. How about just sending an unencumbered AAC file, what's wrong with that? You can't fool iTunes into playing an unencumbered file since it's encrypted. That's the entire point of encryption: if you don't have the key you can't get to the contents.
As the article itself notes it's already possible to play a song in iTunes and extract the unencrypted version. After all, iTunes needs to store that somewhere in memory before playback, so you can already circumvent the encryption. That's the entire reason DRM is fundamentally broken and, co-incidentally, the reason for the whole TPM idea. The article also doesn't seem to make a convincing argument against allowing other vendors to use this DRM system either, they could conceivably just install their own set of user keys into iTunes.
Heh, reminds me of one of the new mini commercials. Has these guys driving around through some sewer system and on the bottom it says "this was filmed at a closed location". Well DUH. If you're going to be stupid enough to emulate this and take your car down a sewer, you shouldn't have been given your driver's license in the first place. Seems to me there's a certain point where people need to take responsibility for themselves (and their children) instead of expecting society to do it for them. I'm sure the guys who made the commercial put that in there to not get sued, but why should you have to? If you get yourself killed in a sewer somewhere it's your own damn fault.
I imagine it's more aimed at small-sized companies(think mom and pop) that run just about everything on one single windows server and are disinclined to actually go out and buy another couple of licenses for MS SQL Server. MS knows that these people will either pirate SQL Server or find some replacement that doesn't cost them anything, so they might as well keep 'em happy by giving a short primer on installing it.
There is an impact of the network communication but it is negligible when compared to the cost of doing the actual graphical operations. Many of the problems where X is slow atm seem to be caused by architecting issues in the ways the drivers are set up and the way they use the video memory. This is where most of the effort is going, the impact of the network transparancy is max 2fps.
Now as a thought experiment take this post and replace all instances of "women" by "negros".
Patents exist for the benefit of the market, not of the individual. A market is most efficient (or at least more efficient) when entry barriers are low and competition is high. Granting a monopoly on a certain technique counteracts normal market principles in an effort to encourage innovation when entry barriers are high. For patents to be worthwile the negative economic impact (by granting a monopoly, stifling further innovation on the subject in some cases) should be lower than the positive impact (new technology entering the market, innovation, etc. that would otherwise not be there).
For software patents, this just doesn't come up to a positive. There are tons of problems. First of all, the entry barriers in the market are low. It is easy to come up with a new algorithm, start a company, bring it to market and make a huge profit. In an industry where 2 years is a long time and the barriers to entry are so low (compare for instance a couple of thousand $ investment vs a couple of billion in other industries) it just doesn't make sense to allow software patents, since the net effect on your economy will be negative. There's not many studies yet with hard numbers but the ones that are out there all seem to point in the same direction: software patents do more harm than good. Therefore they are bad.