MS is a company. So is Apple. Companies do things like this all the time. Yes, I concede that not all companies act with the same degree of nastiness, but most will do whatever is necessary to win (or they will loose).
They do have 1 legit point: the iPod/iTunes combo is the worst for lock-in.
So, I'd like to find a player that supports MP3, WMA, and AAC (OGG would be nice too). Is there such a thing? I realize that this would not include the apple drm.
Fortunately, anything with video (ie. MP4) will support AAC. Since Nokia has now signed on with MS, I guess future Nokia phones will meet this criteria. Speaking of which, if I get a symbian phone with music capabilities, I can add stuff like Ogg myself. I wonder if music phones are any good for sound quality.
The important differences are: (1) that we don't have much choice with SAMBA. It was created specifically to access an MS tech. You can't access MS SMB without SAMBA or something like it. With Mono, we are considering using it instead of Python/Java/C++, etc. We have to choose the best option.
(2) MS created SMB a long time ago when they only had 1/10th the # of lawyers they do now. When MS created dotNET, they had already identified FLOSS as their #1 threat, so they probably prepared a strategy for handling it.
One of the differences between this and other GPL software is that, in this case, these issues will come up. When MS created dotNet, they must have had a plan about how all this would play out. When Novell bought into Mono, they too must have had a plan and a legal opinion. That plan/opinion probably did not look anything like your FAQ. For example, we know that MS WILL enforce it's patents, and that Novell, RH, etc. will then have the option of licensing the tech on reasonable terms as per the EMCA. Unfortunately, this means that non-licensed distro's will be excluded, and MS is under no obligation to license WinForms/ASP.NET to anyone it doesn't like.
But I shouldn't be saying this. IANAL. There are other people who have looked at this question and are lawyers. They work for Novell, RH, IBM, MS, etc. And I'd be curious to know what they have to say.
Rather than Miguel having to repeat himself over and over in defense of Mono, why doesn't Novell just release the legal opinions they have on the important issues related to Mono?
Instead of telling us not to worry, just give us the facts.
I realize that this is a lot to ask of a company, but the FLOSS community is hard to satisfy. It wants to get the real info, not just the marketing.
Novell doesn't need to release their whole Mono legal opinion. Just enough to answer the questions that concern OSS developers. For example, could the EMCA parts of Mono ever require a license other than the GPL? What is likely to happen with the Mono implementation of ASP.NET?
Several people have commented that it is nice to see Google using an existing code site (sf) rather than create their own.
I'm also glad to see that they are using an existing and respected license (BSD 2.0) rather than invent their own. The other big companies (eg. Sun, MS) always have to create their own pseudo-FLOSS licenses when they release code, with their own little catches and gotchas.
Companies don't come out and say 'we are trying to undermine the standard for strategic reasons'.
Instead they say - the standard is flawed, - the standard process is flawed, - it isn't what our customers are asking for, - we have created something better, etc.
And sometimes there might even be some truth in some of these, but that's not the point. The reader must translate.
Hey, even Trolltech are doing it now.
Major Features Dropped From GCC 4.0
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
At the GCC conference in Ottawa in the summer of 2003, there were two very interesting features presented that they said might make it into GCC 4.0.
- LLVM. Low Level Virtual Machine. This is a low level and generic pseudo code generator and virtual machine. http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/ This sounded fabulous, and the project appears to be progressing well (it's at v1.4 now). If I understand correctly it is only politics that has kept it out of GCC 4. Can anyone shed more light on this?
- Compiler Server. Rather than invoking GCC for each TU you would run the GCC-Server once for the whole app and then feed it the TU's. This would make the compile process much faster and allow for whole program optimization. This would have been nice but perhaps they found better ways to achieve the same thing.
As many of you have pointed out, this has little to do with the iPod.
(But the iPod solution should be compared to a LiveCD - more like a LiveUSB key.)
On the other hand, if IBM has created a Linux distro for managing and repairing Windows PC's then maybe it has some features that the other Linux distros (like Knoppix) don't have. For example, does it support captive for NTFS defragging and writing?
Yes, I've tried BartPE. I find it's functionality to be quite limited.
It is natural that they would want to eventually stop maintaining two seperate product lines.
But, it was nice having an integrated suite. Perhaps they could offer a suite of firefox/tbird/sbird/composer? Preferably they would all share common code like Gecko.
Why is hardware MPEG-4 decoding a waste of time? From my reading of MythTV docs it seems that hardware encoding and decoding would allow me to get away with a much lesser PC.
Also, you mention the MPEG-4 video codec. I thought that MPEG4 could use one of several video codecs? And where does XVid fit in? I thought it was one of the MPEG4 codecs?
I'm most productive using Windows because I know it the best. No matter how good Linux/OSX are, it would take my a very long time to become more productive with them.
My understanding is that it is NOT native widgets.
Instead OOo did a lot of work to upgrade their own unique GUI framework to look and behave LIKE native widgets. This should guarantee longer load times, some unusual behaviors, and difficult integration. Most importantly though, this guarantees a duplication of effort as they maintain a completely seperate code base rather than contributing to one of the alternatives (eg. GTK+, wxWindows, SWT).
As a C++ developer, I'm not going to work with the OOo code until they get their act together and start sharing code and work. Until then their code base is innaccesible to me.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about what OOo is doing (I hope I am).
From reading the articles mentioned by previous posters it seems pretty clear that the best desktop cpu's are the AMD64 90nm CPU's. Assuming you care about power/noise/heat, this is.
The articles I'm referring to are:
From AnandTech http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh owdoc.aspx? i=2353&p=4
From the Tech Report http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/p entium4- 600/index.x?pg=16
Please, no more anouncements of products that aren't expected for 3Q's.
If it is currently expected in Q4 2005, that means 50% it will be cancelled before it comes out, and 50% chance it will ship 6 months late. EVen if it does ship on time, announcing it today doesn't make much sense (it guess it makes pr sense, but not practical sense).
It is my understanding that one of the alternatives proposed by the EU was that MS include both their own media player + the real player (& maybe quicktime?), all with equal placement.
Can someone confirm this?
For the consumer, that would have been the ideal solution.
As a Windows C++ developer, Qt4 is now open-source for my purposes. Since Qt4 is obviously much better than MFC this is very significant.
But it is very frustrating since Qt could have been a very significant C++ framework on windows if it had done this years ago. Now it is a bit late for most of us.
The other frustrating thing is that TT, in the best tradition, is pursuing lock-in (vs. standards) in QT4. By deciding to embrace templated containers in their own proprietary way, vs. the standard, STL, way, they make it much harder for a programmer like me to convert to QT, both practically and morally.
I know they will have all the usual excuses for breaking the standard (I've heard them from MS in the past). It's kind of ironic that, just when MS stops playing games and finally puts out a truly standards compliant compiler (VC7.1) with a great standard library, TT decides to imitate the old MS.
I've run NT4, Win2K, and WinXP as my desktop for many years and I've never had a single virus/trojan/malware etc.
In my whole family, including SO's, we have only had 1 such event.
For myself, I mostly use open-source software (which in my experience is always 100% safe and trustworthy), and I respond NO to every prompt while browsing (with Moz/Firefox only).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (barring big security holes) you can't actually get one of these nasties passively. I mean that you must run something on your computer, or give an ActiveX control permission, or something like that, right? You're not going to get one of these things just from browsing HTML and Javascript.
I know that many people have more trouble than I do, but I think that articles like this one (which says that four minutes after connecting your Windows PC to the internet it will melt down) are basically FUD.
RIM is about our only unstained big high tech company left.
Corel, Nortel, ATI. They all turned out to be crooked or run by crooks (the ATI case is still before the OSC, but they sure sound guilty).
I guess we aren't really as much different from the Americans as we though.
Well, at least it wasn't us that made Conrad Black into a Lord. That must have been pretty embarrasing for the Brits. We just let him set the editorial direction of our media.
Is RIM crooked? Or are the RIM founders decent people?
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm not saying that it is the fault of the sites, or of MSIE. I'm just saying that the main problem for users of firefox is that some sites use html that is not compatible with it.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is a company. So is Apple. Companies do things like this all the time. Yes, I concede that not all companies act with the same degree of nastiness, but most will do whatever is necessary to win (or they will loose).
Linus is not a company. Nor is Linux.
They do have 1 legit point: the iPod/iTunes combo is the worst for lock-in.
So, I'd like to find a player that supports MP3, WMA, and AAC (OGG would be nice too). Is there such a thing? I realize that this would not include the apple drm.
Fortunately, anything with video (ie. MP4) will support AAC. Since Nokia has now signed on with MS, I guess future Nokia phones will meet this criteria. Speaking of which, if I get a symbian phone with music capabilities, I can add stuff like Ogg myself. I wonder if music phones are any good for sound quality.
Yes, SAMBA is an important question too.
The important differences are:
(1) that we don't have much choice with SAMBA. It was created specifically to access an MS tech. You can't access MS SMB without SAMBA or something like it. With Mono, we are considering using it instead of Python/Java/C++, etc. We have to choose the best option.
(2) MS created SMB a long time ago when they only had 1/10th the # of lawyers they do now. When MS created dotNET, they had already identified FLOSS as their #1 threat, so they probably prepared a strategy for handling it.
Thanks for the response.
One of the differences between this and other GPL software is that, in this case, these issues will come up. When MS created dotNet, they must have had a plan about how all this would play out. When Novell bought into Mono, they too must have had a plan and a legal opinion. That plan/opinion probably did not look anything like your FAQ. For example, we know that MS WILL enforce it's patents, and that Novell, RH, etc. will then have the option of licensing the tech on reasonable terms as per the EMCA. Unfortunately, this means that non-licensed distro's will be excluded, and MS is under no obligation to license WinForms/ASP.NET to anyone it doesn't like.
But I shouldn't be saying this. IANAL. There are other people who have looked at this question and are lawyers. They work for Novell, RH, IBM, MS, etc. And I'd be curious to know what they have to say.
There is a very simple solution to all this.
Rather than Miguel having to repeat himself over and over in defense of Mono, why doesn't Novell just release the legal opinions they have on the important issues related to Mono?
Instead of telling us not to worry, just give us the facts.
I realize that this is a lot to ask of a company, but the FLOSS community is hard to satisfy. It wants to get the real info, not just the marketing.
Novell doesn't need to release their whole Mono legal opinion. Just enough to answer the questions that concern OSS developers. For example, could the EMCA parts of Mono ever require a license other than the GPL? What is likely to happen with the Mono implementation of ASP.NET?
The hard part isn't bookmarks or email - there are mechanisms to mirror/sync/port these.
It's stuff like extensions (firefox) or blobs & newsgroups (tbird).
Several people have commented that it is nice to see Google using an existing code site (sf) rather than create their own.
I'm also glad to see that they are using an existing and respected license (BSD 2.0) rather than invent their own. The other big companies (eg. Sun, MS) always have to create their own pseudo-FLOSS licenses when they release code, with their own little catches and gotchas.
Companies don't come out and say 'we are trying to undermine the standard for strategic reasons'.
Instead they say
- the standard is flawed,
- the standard process is flawed,
- it isn't what our customers are asking for,
- we have created something better,
etc.
And sometimes there might even be some truth in some of these, but that's not the point. The reader must translate.
Hey, even Trolltech are doing it now.
At the GCC conference in Ottawa in the summer of 2003, there were two very interesting features presented that they said might make it into GCC 4.0.
- LLVM. Low Level Virtual Machine. This is a low level and generic pseudo code generator and virtual machine.
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/
This sounded fabulous, and the project appears to be progressing well (it's at v1.4 now). If I understand correctly it is only politics that has kept it out of GCC 4. Can anyone shed more light on this?
- Compiler Server. Rather than invoking GCC for each TU you would run the GCC-Server once for the whole app and then feed it the TU's. This would make the compile process much faster and allow for whole program optimization.
This would have been nice but perhaps they found better ways to achieve the same thing.
In this case I'm more interested in open protocol alternatives. That would allow multiple clients (including open source ones) to compete.
Skype is not all bad - they do provide a Linux client - but the proprietary protocol is a big problem.
As many of you have pointed out, this has little to do with the iPod.
(But the iPod solution should be compared to a LiveCD - more like a LiveUSB key.)
On the other hand, if IBM has created a Linux distro for managing and repairing Windows PC's then maybe it has some features that the other Linux distros (like Knoppix) don't have. For example, does it support captive for NTFS defragging and writing?
Yes, I've tried BartPE. I find it's functionality to be quite limited.
It is natural that they would want to eventually stop maintaining two seperate product lines.
But, it was nice having an integrated suite. Perhaps they could offer a suite of firefox/tbird/sbird/composer? Preferably they would all share common code like Gecko.
Why is hardware MPEG-4 decoding a waste of time?
From my reading of MythTV docs it seems that hardware encoding and decoding would allow me to get away with a much lesser PC.
Also, you mention the MPEG-4 video codec. I thought that MPEG4 could use one of several video codecs? And where does XVid fit in? I thought it was one of the MPEG4 codecs?
This support sounds very good. I want something that supports both Windows and Linux, so this might fit the bill.
When it says mpeg4 encoding what does it mean? I thought mp4 was just a container format?
I guess if I'm going to be encoding TV into mp4 then it would be good to find a video card with TV out and hardware mp4 decoder? Any suggestions?
I'm most productive using Windows because I know it the best.
No matter how good Linux/OSX are, it would take my a very long time to become more productive with them.
My understanding is that it is NOT native widgets.
Instead OOo did a lot of work to upgrade their own unique GUI framework to look and behave LIKE native widgets. This should guarantee longer load times, some unusual behaviors, and difficult integration. Most importantly though, this guarantees a duplication of effort as they maintain a completely seperate code base rather than contributing to one of the alternatives (eg. GTK+, wxWindows, SWT).
As a C++ developer, I'm not going to work with the OOo code until they get their act together and start sharing code and work. Until then their code base is innaccesible to me.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about what OOo is doing (I hope I am).
From reading the articles mentioned by previous posters it seems pretty clear that the best desktop cpu's are the AMD64 90nm CPU's. Assuming you care about power/noise/heat, this is.
The articles I'm referring to are:
From AnandTech
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/s
From the Tech Report
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/
Please, no more anouncements of products that aren't expected for 3Q's.
If it is currently expected in Q4 2005, that means 50% it will be cancelled before it comes out, and 50% chance it will ship 6 months late. EVen if it does ship on time, announcing it today doesn't make much sense (it guess it makes pr sense, but not practical sense).
It is my understanding that one of the alternatives proposed by the EU was that MS include both their own media player + the real player (& maybe quicktime?), all with equal placement.
Can someone confirm this?
For the consumer, that would have been the ideal solution.
As a Windows C++ developer, Qt4 is now open-source for my purposes. Since Qt4 is obviously much better than MFC this is very significant.
But it is very frustrating since Qt could have been a very significant C++ framework on windows if it had done this years ago. Now it is a bit late for most of us.
The other frustrating thing is that TT, in the best tradition, is pursuing lock-in (vs. standards) in QT4. By deciding to embrace templated containers in their own proprietary way, vs. the standard, STL, way, they make it much harder for a programmer like me to convert to QT, both practically and morally.
I know they will have all the usual excuses for breaking the standard (I've heard them from MS in the past). It's kind of ironic that, just when MS stops playing games and finally puts out a truly standards compliant compiler (VC7.1) with a great standard library, TT decides to imitate the old MS.
Something like this exists, but it isn't free.
/ Komodo/
It's Komodo from ActiveState.
http://www.activestate.com/Products
I've never used it so I'm not commenting on its quality.
The idea of GTK+, KDE, and Windows all supporting the same API is enough to make a cross-platform developer giddy.
Go Cairo!
I've run NT4, Win2K, and WinXP as my desktop for many years and I've never had a single virus/trojan/malware etc.
In my whole family, including SO's, we have only had 1 such event.
For myself, I mostly use open-source software (which in my experience is always 100% safe and trustworthy), and I respond NO to every prompt while browsing (with Moz/Firefox only).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (barring big security holes) you can't actually get one of these nasties passively. I mean that you must run something on your computer, or give an ActiveX control permission, or something like that, right? You're not going to get one of these things just from browsing HTML and Javascript.
I know that many people have more trouble than I do, but I think that articles like this one (which says that four minutes after connecting your Windows PC to the internet it will melt down) are basically FUD.
RIM is about our only unstained big high tech company left.
Corel, Nortel, ATI.
They all turned out to be crooked or run by crooks (the ATI case is still before the OSC, but they sure sound guilty).
I guess we aren't really as much different from the Americans as we though.
Well, at least it wasn't us that made Conrad Black into a Lord. That must have been pretty embarrasing for the Brits. We just let him set the editorial direction of our media.
Is RIM crooked? Or are the RIM founders decent people?
Actually, I agree with (I started this thread).
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm not saying that it is the fault of the sites, or of MSIE. I'm just saying that the main problem for users of firefox is that some sites use html that is not compatible with it.