But software doesn't scale the same way as hardware does. Hardware is a linear scale business. But in software, if you can only spend 50% more time on development, and sell it to 40 times the number of people you have been selling to, you'll make bank. The x86 market is just about 40 times the the Mac market...why *wouldn't* they want to tap it, especially considering that it wouldn't require anything like 40 times the work to support some extra hardware. Heck, make an official "hardware compatibility list", make some delas with hardware manufacturers, and get going. There is money to be made.
I know Apple is a hardware company, but let's face it, if you do it right (hell , you don't even have to do it right, look at MS), you can make a lot of money selling operating systems. Especially now that people are getting increasingly fed up with the lame offerings from Redmond.
Ogg doesn't have to use Theora...it can use other video codecs. For example, I rip a lot of my DVDs to ogg using Ogg Vorbis for audio, with XVid for the video.
Eh, not really. I try a lot of distros. I installed SuSE on my secondary laptop last week in response to the announcement. I don't really ever "switch" distros. All the main computers I use run Gentoo, and that is pretty much the end of the story.
My main laptop runs Kubuntu. As I said, I recently pulled Kubuntu off my secondary and installed SuSE.
That said, Fedora Core is laughable. Now, I admit, I am biased against Gnome, so I never really liked Red Hat's push for that DE in the first place. But that aside, my user experiences since using FC.95-4 have been mediocre. Lots of buggy interface issues and design decisions that are just plain amateurish.
For one, at some point near the release of FC1, RH decided to make their package manager (in the GUI), suck. I am a hard core command line guy, but I'll use GUIs out of a desire to know how to do things both ways. But in the case of Red Hat, their GUI package manager lists about 40 packages. If it is going to the distro's package manager, I should be able to manage all the distro's packages from it. Instead, I find myself digging up Synaptic/Kynaptic to do GUI package management in leiu of yum on the command line.
There are lots of little things like this. In general, they try to pry decision away from the end user, which, for a lot of people, is why they use Linux in the first place. I also don't like that they label things "Web Browser", "Email Client". WTF? *Which* web browser? How do I switch it? I want the darn icon to reflect the program it's running, not be come generic "blue curve" androgenous Gnome-wants-to-mix-with-KDE mess.
SuSE does this in places, too, but they make choices that I would make anyway (KDE, for one). But they provide program groups that have colections of programs in a category. Take a look at 9.3 sometime and look at the program lists under Internet, Email, etc.
Frankly, SuSE is just better designed, IMO. So if I were to actually switch, that would be why. Because it is better designed. The thrust of my post above was that I think it is better designed because SuSE exists to focus on end user experience, whereas Fedora Core exists as a testing ground for RHEL, and makes no mention anywhere of end user experience being a priority.
Well, it is exactly this attitude in the community that led Red Hat to stop supporting non-commercial end users of Red Hat Linux.
My basic MO is that I try the disto without paying, and if I find myself using for a real machine that supports my daily operation (either on my main desktop box, either of my laptops, or my MythTV), then I donate/pay. I want to support companies that devote developer time to providing a polished desktop distro for the home user. Novell/SuSE is one of those, and they don't ask for very much money in return ($69 last time I checked, including shipping).
Even if you only buy a copy once every 2 or 3 releases, it still helps Novell recognize that Linux end users are willing to support them.
No. They provide ISO's (both CDs and a DVD) for download, free of charge. The ISOs are images of a complete retail version of the product, despite the "eval" in the name.
The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates--through an open and transparent development process--a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.
So, more than simply YasT. One of the things that drove me away from Fedora was that it is publically acknowledged to be public grounds for vetting Red Hat's technology which will be the basis for RHEL. Novell is taking a very different approach when they indicate that OpenSuSE will be directed towards end users, and will focus on the user experience. That was never a focus of Fedora Core, and, IMHO, is why a lot of people are fed up with it.
Looks really nice! I second the above post: I only use Mac and Linux in my home. This would make my list for sure if it ran on those platforms! Any chance for a port?
Try MyWay. They're ad-free too. I've been using them for years. They don't have some of the newer stuff, but they have a notepad, calendar, address book, news, email, search, games, etc.
Eh, you're FAR more endangered by the sun's radiation than any of that, and you don't have any choice about being exposed to the sun, either. But, I certainly will support your freedom to be a nut. =) Who knows, maybe all that stuff IS worse for us than we know.
None of those packages were licensed to me under the the licenses you mention; they were licensed to me under the license SuSE uses.
I never saw (or agreed) to any license other than SuSE's license. I just re-read that license, and confirmed that it contains NO clauses regarding Java, Acrobat, or any other software included in the SuSE distribution, other than free software.
As far as I can tell, the licenses you mentioned only apply if you are obtaining the JRE or Acrobat from their respective websites, which I didn't. I'm sure Novell made Sun and Adobe aware that it was going to be allowing its users to redistribute, and it has licenses worded accordingly with the providers of the software included in its distribution. If they do not, it is not the end user's problem.
In the absence of you presenting me with a license agreement that I clicked "OK" to during the SuSE install that says otherwise, I think folks are free to redistribute SuSE in accordance with the SuSE license agreement that they agreed to.
I buy a laptop from Los Alamos Computers (LAClinux.com), and choose not to get an 802.11 card in it, thinking "Ah, what the hell, Linux won't ever support the Intel cards well...". That was over 18 months ago.
Sure enough, in a few months along come the ipw2100/ipw2200 drivers, and I go online and purchase the Intel 2100 internal card for my laptop. I install the new card, and fire up the computer. Of course my network is encrypted with your standard flavor of WEP, so I spend some time configuring the computer to automagically log into my home network at startup.
There is a lot of trial and error, so I use the KWifiManager to see if I'm on the network (those little green bars in the tray can be useful!). I think I've got everything fixed (the drivers loaded with the right firmware, the essid, the key, the mode, the channel, etc) and I log in. Sure enough, the little task tray applet it showing I'm connected!
So I log into my router (Linksys WRT54g) at 192.168.1.1, and notice that somehow in messing with my router to get my laptop working (I had messed with the key, the encryption settings, etc.) I had somehow reset my router! Miffed, I started putting my old settings back in: essid, key, port forwarding, etc.
Well, it became clear in the next couple of minutes that I had logged into my neighbor's router (an identical model) while sitting on my couch in my living room (I live in a condo). I frantically try to figure out which is which now that they have the same essid and key, so I can log into the correct one (my neighbors) and switch all the settings back to default - hopefully they won't miss a beat and wonder "What broke the internet?"
Anyway, all was well, and I fixed it (and fixed my login sequence to use MY network!). But the point here is that sometimes, you really do simply log into some else's network and not even know it. When I see articles like this, I wonder what facts the courts look at, because many computers actually DO (Windows XP, all 4 of my Linux boxes, and my wife's Pwoerbook) log into the first available unencrypted network on boot. Unless you actively check which network you're on, you'd never know if it was yours (at home) or your neighbors.
Heck, if I chose to run an unencrypted network with my router's essid as "linksys" and no key (the *default* configuration), how could I tell easily if I were logged into my router or my neighbors? Most non-geeks wouldn't know to read the router info page, and even if they did, they wouldn'd know their router's external IP when they saw it.
This is a different question than "permission to use", but is related...and probably worth some thought before we go overbaord throwing people in jail for using someone else's internet connection. Hopefully, only the malicious cases make it to court. In that case, however, we shouldn't be making laws that are only reasonable when a benevolent government is assumed.
Software development was governed by design patterns long before the GoF wrote their book.
Really? Where? Because software design patterns are not present (even OO programming isn't present) in the vast majoity of code written in 1995.
What makes a pattern important is that it is widely recognized - it allows not only for reusable code, but more importantly, reusable thinking. Others can pick up your code and see what patterns you used, which allows for a sort of instant comprehension. It also allows you to frame other programming problems in familiar terms, allowing for you to carry thinking over from problem to problem, speeding development.
(1) people like you think these people actually invented patterns
Actually, I don't. If I had to give credit to someone, it'd probably be Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham (of wiki fame) who did their work in the late 1980's. That doesn't mean that they made patterns popular though. The GoF made great strides to make their work usuable by identifying 23 patterns that were oft used.
(2) you didn't figure it out for yourself before picking up the book
I apologize. I am not as gifted as some in these areas.
(3) most of the actual patterns in that book are workarounds for limitations of current OOLs
A criticism often leveled at design patterns. Perhaps valid, but it doesn't change the fact that the patterns are needed, given the "limitations of current OOLs".
(4) people like you think that all of that is really just fine. It's the blind (GoF) leading the blind (people like you).
I don't think it is fine. I think it is great. What is currently cutting edge becomes mundane in 50 years. Calculus was at one time very advanced, and only the most educated understood it. I think it is an advancement that most everyone knows calculus today. Similarly, I think it is progress to have GoF broadly understood. This is usually best accomplished by writing a book that people can read about the subject, and GoF did us that courtesy. Again, I think they are quite deserving of the award.
A great man I work for says "Well, you can always design software badly."
It doesn't seem like much on the surface, but he strikes at the heart of statements like yours. No matter wat you do to your language, you cannot systematically replace discipline with procedure. In this case, you are basically blaming the language for the need to learn design patterns. But really, no language will free you from having to learn how to program in the correct way.
Another mentor of mine told me that design patterns in object oriented programming try to imitate aspect oriented programming, and I think he is right. But that still doesn't change anything: you can still scrrew up in aspect oriented languages (*especially* in aspect oriented languages!).
Anyway, it is interesting that you demean the book...I think if more software designers understood design patterns, the world would be better place, at least with repect to the state of the art in computer programming. There is a lot to be said for proving a pattern to be effective at solving a problem once, and them implementing it many times, relieving its implementors of having to prove again and again its validity. Design patterns allow you to merely prove that you implemented the pattern correctly; you can stand on the shoulders of giants and allow those that created the pattern to prove it's validity.
Is it depressing, as you say? I don't think so...it is par for the course. Object oriented programming is very important, but was only picked up en masse in the 1990's, 30-40 years after it was developed. The fact that this book has been picked up and recognized as important a mere 10 (give or take) years after its publication is heartening. Sometimes the importance of a work is not apprent immediately, and so it was in this case, at least to some.
Others, well, at BBN every new programmer was given a copy when he or she was hired. I wasn't so fortunate at my company, but I was nevertheless encouraged to read and understand the ideas in GoF. A copy sits next to my keyboard, and I read it nearly everyday. I think it is quite deserving of the award.
It's worse than that - the TITLE says "Debirs seen hitting shuttle" and the summary (yeah, the one right below the title) say "While the debirs didn't hit the shuttle..."
IANAL. You ask an interesting question. The meat of the answer lies in Section 1201.a.2:
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Note that they do not include "possess" in the opening paragraph of this section - the DMCA is aimed at people who would "traffic" in such material, not merely possess it. Hence, it is not illegal to simply have a copy of DeCSS on your computer. In fact, it doesn't even mention utilization of the technology, merely distribution/traffiking.
But even if it did, Section 1201.c.1 through section 1201.c.4 clarifies:
(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED:
(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
(2) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish vicarious or contributory liability for copyright infringement in connection with any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof.
(3) Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).
(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.
Emphasis mine. So there does exist a provision specifically designed to retain the notion of "Fair Use", which is one of the great ironies of the DMCA that I often note. Fair Use makes it legal for you to view the DVD you purchased in a way that suits you (i.e. on your Linux computer), but the DMCA simply makes it very difficult for you to do so. Similar arguments apply when discussing ripping of songs from CDs, for example. If they were to institute a DeCSS-like algorithm on CDs, it would still be legal for us to circumvent it to put the music you purchased on your MP3 player, but it would be illegal for you to distribute the software that allowed you to do so. It is a sort of odd state of affairs, if you ask me, which is why the DMCA was a mistake.
Actually: 1) I use dvd::rip running on Gentoo on my main drive to do all the DVD ripping. I only use the second drive for storage. and 2) I don't violate the DMCA by ripping my DVDs because the DMCA has a specific provision for "Fair Use", which allows me to rip DVDs I purchased for viewing in my own home. I don't share on P2P, and I don't rip DVDs I haven't bought.
This might sound like it's way out in left field, but this has happened to me. Twice. I have this second hard drive that alternates between holding my rips of DVDs and being a Windows drive for gaming. That only worked three or four times (switching back and forth, I mean) before it wouldn't let me use my key anymore. No message explaining why, just the standard "Invalid Key" dialog. Pisses me off. One of the reasons I use Linux. Oh, and no plans to buy Longhorn/Vista either...
Patent (and Copyright, for that matter) violations don't exist merely as artifacts of the law, like, for example, contempt of court.
Patent violation is like robbery - it can happen regardless of whether or not a court has found that it happened. Sure, you can't say "legally" that the robbery occured, but you know it did. You don't have to wait for a judge to tell you that (but it isn't legally binding until he or she does).
I am morally certain that there are patent violations in practically every piece of software out there today, and I'm sure Linux has its fair share. All you have to do is look at the patent minefield even small developers have to wade through to understand how much the patent system is bogging us down in software development.
With that backdrop, all you have to do is add the piece about "selective enforcement" and it is easy to see why our system is deeply flawed. Essentially, there is a huge motive to patent everything in sight, to be used defensively, or offensively, which is a decision that can be made sometime in the future. Once you have the patents to use as weapons, you can then use them as bargaining chips, bullying some competitors and not others, at will. I think it would be very inteesting if companies were required to prosecute every violation of a patent issued to them. I think they would have to give a lot of thought to every patent they filed, both from a strategic perspective, as well as a resources perspective (who else does it hurt when I patent this? Are they my business partners? Do I have the legal and technical resources to hunt down every violator?)
In the case of MS, I think they would be perfectly willing to take Linux vendors to court. The main problem is that they wouldn't be able to change a whole lot by doing that, because you can just torrent the downloads and host them in a data haven like Sea Land. Sure, Red Hat would get litigated into oblivion, but then there'd be the next guy. Everyone moves to Debian, or Gentoo, or SuSE, or Mandriva, or whatever.
IBM saw the patent issue for what it is: a sword of Damocles over the head of open source software. So IBM responded by "donating" those patents to open source, i.e., promising not to sue if those patents were used in the Linux kernel (IIRC, not sure if it might have been other software as well).
Anyway, the point is that patents ARE a threat to open source, and one of the worst things you can do is ignore them or dismiss them. We can't afford to wait for a judge to rule about the violations, there needs to be some other plan.
Actually, one of Google's biggest innovations was that their interface is fast, intuitive and clean, and all their services are fast and responsive, and always available. I've never has a problem getting through to any of their services, and a search has practically never taken more than 1 second. I can't say the same of any other engine.
Besides which, a product to debut in July 2005 doesn't exactly beat Google Maps to the punch...seeing as how Google maps came out months ago. Also, seems I'm having a bit of trouble getting to your link above (no response). It makes it hard for me to evaluate it against Google Maps which I can get to just fine.
Tying in their main engine with local searches, and binding those to satellite and maps with pop-up markers directly on the map? Yeah, that hasn't been done anywhere else. Big innovation in my book.
Neither has GMail. It was the first free email service that didn't have some stupid restriction on how much space you could use.
Have you looked at Google Labs? Their mobile phone text message search was a first (to my knowledge), as is their Google Sets functionality.
I guess what I'm getting at is the innovation at Google is doing things right. A lot of the time they're the first, and when they're not, they're successful because they took an old idea and made it fast, reliable and usable for the general public. And that's why people use them...because they are always available and deliver pretty darn decent results.
I think they're also the first engine to index over 8 billion pages.
There are a lot of related questions, but going in the opposite direction, like:
Linux that use central repository package management use Firefox versions which were never downloaded from the Firefox site, and were never counted.
Anyone who uses The Open CD, or Knoppix, uses Firefox but hasn't "downloaded" it.
OEM CDs, as well as ISP's CDs contain Firefox, and are not counted.
And lastly, as the post above mentioned, corporate rollout of the browser will never have a number of downloads equal to the number of computer upon which the program is installed.
In others words, your point is perfectly valid, but only serves to show that the whole "counting the number of users" idea is actually quite a challenge.
...a lot of people taking the moral "high ground" on this one and deriding these types of tactics. Let me draw another picture:
Rather than taking an offensive stance, let design a system that runs in a distributed way (a network) that can detect a particular spam email as it is sent out to millions of addresses. Then, merely in response to that event, the nodes on the network coordinate to create an automated reply to unsubscribe from that piece of email.
Now, I am sure there are those among you that would argue that this is a DDoS type approach. And it is. Except I think you'd stand a very good chance in court (if it ever even made it that far) of arguing that is perfectly legal. Spamming is illegal, and they are required to provide a link to unsubscribe. In the case that they do not, some nodes on the network could sleuth down the appropriate address to send the request to and provide it to other nodes. Thus, the network would never initiate an attack, it would merely recognize and respond (using the channels provided for in law) to the emails that are sent out. Sure, the end effect would be a DDoS, but so is a Slashdotting - and that isn't illegal.
I haven't done my homework on the wording of the law that makes a DDoS illegal (besides, in whose jurisdiction is it illegal?), but there are so many DDoS-like events on the web that the law cannot make them ALL illegal, and if Slashdotting is OK, I'm sure the scheme outlined above would be OK, too.
I guess you could say that "Closer" and "Garden State" were "random crap that no one cares about", but I actually liked both films. Both above average, IMHO.
They were particularly interesting because they clearly demonstrated that Natalie can act quite well - when she's not being directed George Lucas, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
But software doesn't scale the same way as hardware does. Hardware is a linear scale business. But in software, if you can only spend 50% more time on development, and sell it to 40 times the number of people you have been selling to, you'll make bank. The x86 market is just about 40 times the the Mac market...why *wouldn't* they want to tap it, especially considering that it wouldn't require anything like 40 times the work to support some extra hardware. Heck, make an official "hardware compatibility list", make some delas with hardware manufacturers, and get going. There is money to be made.
I know Apple is a hardware company, but let's face it, if you do it right (hell , you don't even have to do it right, look at MS), you can make a lot of money selling operating systems. Especially now that people are getting increasingly fed up with the lame offerings from Redmond.
Huh?
IRiver (Most models, though they're phaing them out)
Neuros (all models)
Rio (Karma)
JetAudio (new, makes great players, all support Ogg)
And a bunch of others. I've been happily listening to my 100% ogg vorbis collection on the go (cars, walking, whatever) for 3 years.
If you don't think slick Ogg players exist, check out my newest one: JetAudio iAudio X5. It is pretty amazing, and it plays FLAC too.
Ogg doesn't have to use Theora...it can use other video codecs. For example, I rip a lot of my DVDs to ogg using Ogg Vorbis for audio, with XVid for the video.
Eh, not really. I try a lot of distros. I installed SuSE on my secondary laptop last week in response to the announcement. I don't really ever "switch" distros. All the main computers I use run Gentoo, and that is pretty much the end of the story.
.95-4 have been mediocre. Lots of buggy interface issues and design decisions that are just plain amateurish.
My main laptop runs Kubuntu. As I said, I recently pulled Kubuntu off my secondary and installed SuSE.
That said, Fedora Core is laughable. Now, I admit, I am biased against Gnome, so I never really liked Red Hat's push for that DE in the first place. But that aside, my user experiences since using FC
For one, at some point near the release of FC1, RH decided to make their package manager (in the GUI), suck. I am a hard core command line guy, but I'll use GUIs out of a desire to know how to do things both ways. But in the case of Red Hat, their GUI package manager lists about 40 packages. If it is going to the distro's package manager, I should be able to manage all the distro's packages from it. Instead, I find myself digging up Synaptic/Kynaptic to do GUI package management in leiu of yum on the command line.
There are lots of little things like this. In general, they try to pry decision away from the end user, which, for a lot of people, is why they use Linux in the first place. I also don't like that they label things "Web Browser", "Email Client". WTF? *Which* web browser? How do I switch it? I want the darn icon to reflect the program it's running, not be come generic "blue curve" androgenous Gnome-wants-to-mix-with-KDE mess.
SuSE does this in places, too, but they make choices that I would make anyway (KDE, for one). But they provide program groups that have colections of programs in a category. Take a look at 9.3 sometime and look at the program lists under Internet, Email, etc.
Frankly, SuSE is just better designed, IMO. So if I were to actually switch, that would be why. Because it is better designed. The thrust of my post above was that I think it is better designed because SuSE exists to focus on end user experience, whereas Fedora Core exists as a testing ground for RHEL, and makes no mention anywhere of end user experience being a priority.
Well, it is exactly this attitude in the community that led Red Hat to stop supporting non-commercial end users of Red Hat Linux. My basic MO is that I try the disto without paying, and if I find myself using for a real machine that supports my daily operation (either on my main desktop box, either of my laptops, or my MythTV), then I donate/pay. I want to support companies that devote developer time to providing a polished desktop distro for the home user. Novell/SuSE is one of those, and they don't ask for very much money in return ($69 last time I checked, including shipping). Even if you only buy a copy once every 2 or 3 releases, it still helps Novell recognize that Linux end users are willing to support them.
No. They provide ISO's (both CDs and a DVD) for download, free of charge. The ISOs are images of a complete retail version of the product, despite the "eval" in the name.
The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux. The openSUSE project creates--through an open and transparent development process--a stabilized, polished Linux distribution (SUSE Linux) that delivers everything a user needs to get started with Linux. (SUSE Linux is consistently cited as the best-engineered Linux and the most usable Linux.) To fulfill its mission of bringing Linux to everyone, the openSUSE project makes SUSE Linux widely available to potential Linux users through a variety of channels, including a complete retail edition with end-user documentation. Only the openSUSE project refines its Linux distribution to the point where non-technical users can have a successful Linux experience.
So, more than simply YasT. One of the things that drove me away from Fedora was that it is publically acknowledged to be public grounds for vetting Red Hat's technology which will be the basis for RHEL. Novell is taking a very different approach when they indicate that OpenSuSE will be directed towards end users, and will focus on the user experience. That was never a focus of Fedora Core, and, IMHO, is why a lot of people are fed up with it.
Looks really nice! I second the above post: I only use Mac and Linux in my home. This would make my list for sure if it ran on those platforms! Any chance for a port?
Try MyWay. They're ad-free too. I've been using them for years. They don't have some of the newer stuff, but they have a notepad, calendar, address book, news, email, search, games, etc.
Eh, you're FAR more endangered by the sun's radiation than any of that, and you don't have any choice about being exposed to the sun, either. But, I certainly will support your freedom to be a nut. =) Who knows, maybe all that stuff IS worse for us than we know.
Gaming wasn't a "loser" at +64%, but I get your point. Thanks for the numbers. I didn't remember where I read it, and was too lazy to look it up. =)
Yeah, but their gaming division is something like 60% up from last year. They are experiencing the exact opposite of what MS is experiencing. =)
None of those packages were licensed to me under the the licenses you mention; they were licensed to me under the license SuSE uses.
I never saw (or agreed) to any license other than SuSE's license. I just re-read that license, and confirmed that it contains NO clauses regarding Java, Acrobat, or any other software included in the SuSE distribution, other than free software.
As far as I can tell, the licenses you mentioned only apply if you are obtaining the JRE or Acrobat from their respective websites, which I didn't. I'm sure Novell made Sun and Adobe aware that it was going to be allowing its users to redistribute, and it has licenses worded accordingly with the providers of the software included in its distribution. If they do not, it is not the end user's problem.
In the absence of you presenting me with a license agreement that I clicked "OK" to during the SuSE install that says otherwise, I think folks are free to redistribute SuSE in accordance with the SuSE license agreement that they agreed to.
Agreed. But me me tell you a true story.
I buy a laptop from Los Alamos Computers (LAClinux.com), and choose not to get an 802.11 card in it, thinking "Ah, what the hell, Linux won't ever support the Intel cards well...". That was over 18 months ago.
Sure enough, in a few months along come the ipw2100/ipw2200 drivers, and I go online and purchase the Intel 2100 internal card for my laptop. I install the new card, and fire up the computer. Of course my network is encrypted with your standard flavor of WEP, so I spend some time configuring the computer to automagically log into my home network at startup.
There is a lot of trial and error, so I use the KWifiManager to see if I'm on the network (those little green bars in the tray can be useful!). I think I've got everything fixed (the drivers loaded with the right firmware, the essid, the key, the mode, the channel, etc) and I log in. Sure enough, the little task tray applet it showing I'm connected!
So I log into my router (Linksys WRT54g) at 192.168.1.1, and notice that somehow in messing with my router to get my laptop working (I had messed with the key, the encryption settings, etc.) I had somehow reset my router! Miffed, I started putting my old settings back in: essid, key, port forwarding, etc.
Well, it became clear in the next couple of minutes that I had logged into my neighbor's router (an identical model) while sitting on my couch in my living room (I live in a condo). I frantically try to figure out which is which now that they have the same essid and key, so I can log into the correct one (my neighbors) and switch all the settings back to default - hopefully they won't miss a beat and wonder "What broke the internet?"
Anyway, all was well, and I fixed it (and fixed my login sequence to use MY network!). But the point here is that sometimes, you really do simply log into some else's network and not even know it. When I see articles like this, I wonder what facts the courts look at, because many computers actually DO (Windows XP, all 4 of my Linux boxes, and my wife's Pwoerbook) log into the first available unencrypted network on boot. Unless you actively check which network you're on, you'd never know if it was yours (at home) or your neighbors.
Heck, if I chose to run an unencrypted network with my router's essid as "linksys" and no key (the *default* configuration), how could I tell easily if I were logged into my router or my neighbors? Most non-geeks wouldn't know to read the router info page, and even if they did, they wouldn'd know their router's external IP when they saw it.
This is a different question than "permission to use", but is related...and probably worth some thought before we go overbaord throwing people in jail for using someone else's internet connection. Hopefully, only the malicious cases make it to court. In that case, however, we shouldn't be making laws that are only reasonable when a benevolent government is assumed.
Really? Where? Because software design patterns are not present (even OO programming isn't present) in the vast majoity of code written in 1995.
What makes a pattern important is that it is widely recognized - it allows not only for reusable code, but more importantly, reusable thinking. Others can pick up your code and see what patterns you used, which allows for a sort of instant comprehension. It also allows you to frame other programming problems in familiar terms, allowing for you to carry thinking over from problem to problem, speeding development.
(1) people like you think these people actually invented patterns
Actually, I don't. If I had to give credit to someone, it'd probably be Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham (of wiki fame) who did their work in the late 1980's. That doesn't mean that they made patterns popular though. The GoF made great strides to make their work usuable by identifying 23 patterns that were oft used.
(2) you didn't figure it out for yourself before picking up the book
I apologize. I am not as gifted as some in these areas.
(3) most of the actual patterns in that book are workarounds for limitations of current OOLs
A criticism often leveled at design patterns. Perhaps valid, but it doesn't change the fact that the patterns are needed, given the "limitations of current OOLs".
(4) people like you think that all of that is really just fine. It's the blind (GoF) leading the blind (people like you).
I don't think it is fine. I think it is great. What is currently cutting edge becomes mundane in 50 years. Calculus was at one time very advanced, and only the most educated understood it. I think it is an advancement that most everyone knows calculus today. Similarly, I think it is progress to have GoF broadly understood. This is usually best accomplished by writing a book that people can read about the subject, and GoF did us that courtesy. Again, I think they are quite deserving of the award.
A great man I work for says "Well, you can always design software badly."
It doesn't seem like much on the surface, but he strikes at the heart of statements like yours. No matter wat you do to your language, you cannot systematically replace discipline with procedure. In this case, you are basically blaming the language for the need to learn design patterns. But really, no language will free you from having to learn how to program in the correct way.
Another mentor of mine told me that design patterns in object oriented programming try to imitate aspect oriented programming, and I think he is right. But that still doesn't change anything: you can still scrrew up in aspect oriented languages (*especially* in aspect oriented languages!).
Anyway, it is interesting that you demean the book...I think if more software designers understood design patterns, the world would be better place, at least with repect to the state of the art in computer programming. There is a lot to be said for proving a pattern to be effective at solving a problem once, and them implementing it many times, relieving its implementors of having to prove again and again its validity. Design patterns allow you to merely prove that you implemented the pattern correctly; you can stand on the shoulders of giants and allow those that created the pattern to prove it's validity.
Is it depressing, as you say? I don't think so...it is par for the course. Object oriented programming is very important, but was only picked up en masse in the 1990's, 30-40 years after it was developed. The fact that this book has been picked up and recognized as important a mere 10 (give or take) years after its publication is heartening. Sometimes the importance of a work is not apprent immediately, and so it was in this case, at least to some.
Others, well, at BBN every new programmer was given a copy when he or she was hired. I wasn't so fortunate at my company, but I was nevertheless encouraged to read and understand the ideas in GoF. A copy sits next to my keyboard, and I read it nearly everyday. I think it is quite deserving of the award.
It's worse than that - the TITLE says "Debirs seen hitting shuttle" and the summary (yeah, the one right below the title) say "While the debirs didn't hit the shuttle..."
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Note that they do not include "possess" in the opening paragraph of this section - the DMCA is aimed at people who would "traffic" in such material, not merely possess it. Hence, it is not illegal to simply have a copy of DeCSS on your computer. In fact, it doesn't even mention utilization of the technology, merely distribution/traffiking.
But even if it did, Section 1201.c.1 through section 1201.c.4 clarifies:
(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED:
(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
(2) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish vicarious or contributory liability for copyright infringement in connection with any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof.
(3) Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).
(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.
Emphasis mine. So there does exist a provision specifically designed to retain the notion of "Fair Use", which is one of the great ironies of the DMCA that I often note. Fair Use makes it legal for you to view the DVD you purchased in a way that suits you (i.e. on your Linux computer), but the DMCA simply makes it very difficult for you to do so. Similar arguments apply when discussing ripping of songs from CDs, for example. If they were to institute a DeCSS-like algorithm on CDs, it would still be legal for us to circumvent it to put the music you purchased on your MP3 player, but it would be illegal for you to distribute the software that allowed you to do so. It is a sort of odd state of affairs, if you ask me, which is why the DMCA was a mistake.
Actually:
1) I use dvd::rip running on Gentoo on my main drive to do all the DVD ripping. I only use the second drive for storage.
and
2) I don't violate the DMCA by ripping my DVDs because the DMCA has a specific provision for "Fair Use", which allows me to rip DVDs I purchased for viewing in my own home. I don't share on P2P, and I don't rip DVDs I haven't bought.
This might sound like it's way out in left field, but this has happened to me. Twice. I have this second hard drive that alternates between holding my rips of DVDs and being a Windows drive for gaming. That only worked three or four times (switching back and forth, I mean) before it wouldn't let me use my key anymore. No message explaining why, just the standard "Invalid Key" dialog. Pisses me off. One of the reasons I use Linux. Oh, and no plans to buy Longhorn/Vista either...
Patent (and Copyright, for that matter) violations don't exist merely as artifacts of the law, like, for example, contempt of court.
Patent violation is like robbery - it can happen regardless of whether or not a court has found that it happened. Sure, you can't say "legally" that the robbery occured, but you know it did. You don't have to wait for a judge to tell you that (but it isn't legally binding until he or she does).
I am morally certain that there are patent violations in practically every piece of software out there today, and I'm sure Linux has its fair share. All you have to do is look at the patent minefield even small developers have to wade through to understand how much the patent system is bogging us down in software development.
With that backdrop, all you have to do is add the piece about "selective enforcement" and it is easy to see why our system is deeply flawed. Essentially, there is a huge motive to patent everything in sight, to be used defensively, or offensively, which is a decision that can be made sometime in the future. Once you have the patents to use as weapons, you can then use them as bargaining chips, bullying some competitors and not others, at will. I think it would be very inteesting if companies were required to prosecute every violation of a patent issued to them. I think they would have to give a lot of thought to every patent they filed, both from a strategic perspective, as well as a resources perspective (who else does it hurt when I patent this? Are they my business partners? Do I have the legal and technical resources to hunt down every violator?)
In the case of MS, I think they would be perfectly willing to take Linux vendors to court. The main problem is that they wouldn't be able to change a whole lot by doing that, because you can just torrent the downloads and host them in a data haven like Sea Land. Sure, Red Hat would get litigated into oblivion, but then there'd be the next guy. Everyone moves to Debian, or Gentoo, or SuSE, or Mandriva, or whatever.
IBM saw the patent issue for what it is: a sword of Damocles over the head of open source software. So IBM responded by "donating" those patents to open source, i.e., promising not to sue if those patents were used in the Linux kernel (IIRC, not sure if it might have been other software as well).
Anyway, the point is that patents ARE a threat to open source, and one of the worst things you can do is ignore them or dismiss them. We can't afford to wait for a judge to rule about the violations, there needs to be some other plan.
Actually, one of Google's biggest innovations was that their interface is fast, intuitive and clean, and all their services are fast and responsive, and always available. I've never has a problem getting through to any of their services, and a search has practically never taken more than 1 second. I can't say the same of any other engine.
Besides which, a product to debut in July 2005 doesn't exactly beat Google Maps to the punch...seeing as how Google maps came out months ago. Also, seems I'm having a bit of trouble getting to your link above (no response). It makes it hard for me to evaluate it against Google Maps which I can get to just fine.
Tying in their main engine with local searches, and binding those to satellite and maps with pop-up markers directly on the map? Yeah, that hasn't been done anywhere else. Big innovation in my book.
Neither has GMail. It was the first free email service that didn't have some stupid restriction on how much space you could use.
Have you looked at Google Labs? Their mobile phone text message search was a first (to my knowledge), as is their Google Sets functionality.
I guess what I'm getting at is the innovation at Google is doing things right. A lot of the time they're the first, and when they're not, they're successful because they took an old idea and made it fast, reliable and usable for the general public. And that's why people use them...because they are always available and deliver pretty darn decent results.
I think they're also the first engine to index over 8 billion pages.
There are a lot of related questions, but going in the opposite direction, like:
Linux that use central repository package management use Firefox versions which were never downloaded from the Firefox site, and were never counted.
Anyone who uses The Open CD, or Knoppix, uses Firefox but hasn't "downloaded" it.
OEM CDs, as well as ISP's CDs contain Firefox, and are not counted.
And lastly, as the post above mentioned, corporate rollout of the browser will never have a number of downloads equal to the number of computer upon which the program is installed.
In others words, your point is perfectly valid, but only serves to show that the whole "counting the number of users" idea is actually quite a challenge.
...a lot of people taking the moral "high ground" on this one and deriding these types of tactics. Let me draw another picture:
Rather than taking an offensive stance, let design a system that runs in a distributed way (a network) that can detect a particular spam email as it is sent out to millions of addresses. Then, merely in response to that event, the nodes on the network coordinate to create an automated reply to unsubscribe from that piece of email.
Now, I am sure there are those among you that would argue that this is a DDoS type approach. And it is. Except I think you'd stand a very good chance in court (if it ever even made it that far) of arguing that is perfectly legal. Spamming is illegal, and they are required to provide a link to unsubscribe. In the case that they do not, some nodes on the network could sleuth down the appropriate address to send the request to and provide it to other nodes. Thus, the network would never initiate an attack, it would merely recognize and respond (using the channels provided for in law) to the emails that are sent out. Sure, the end effect would be a DDoS, but so is a Slashdotting - and that isn't illegal.
I haven't done my homework on the wording of the law that makes a DDoS illegal (besides, in whose jurisdiction is it illegal?), but there are so many DDoS-like events on the web that the law cannot make them ALL illegal, and if Slashdotting is OK, I'm sure the scheme outlined above would be OK, too.
I guess you could say that "Closer" and "Garden State" were "random crap that no one cares about", but I actually liked both films. Both above average, IMHO.
They were particularly interesting because they clearly demonstrated that Natalie can act quite well - when she's not being directed George Lucas, of course.