I thought GPL licensing was incompatible with BSD?
It is in a sense, but only one-way. GPL code can't be incorporated into a BSD project because the GPL is less "permissive" than the BSD, but not vice-versa, BSD code can be incorporated into a GPL project because the BSD license is more "permissive".
The GPL has more restrictions than the BSD, but those extra restrictions are only meant to ensure the future "freedom" of the code (downstream from you, i.e., derivatives), yet the presense of those extra restrictions clashes with the common meaning of the word "free" (current "freedom", ignoring the future), hence the never-ending arguments between the GPL proponents and the BSD proponents here on/. and elsewhere.
Unfortunately no one, from the beginning up till now, has found a better word or short phrase to use to describe the difference.
Microsoft can use ANY amount of GPL'ed code they want. In fact, they have a "Unix-compatibility layer" that has a cornucopia of GPL tools.
Stand-alone tools and minor apps that are separate (not linked or part of the source code) from their operating system is no problem for them, but they'll never use GPL'd code as part of their core OS proper because they can't embrace and extend (and optionally extinguish) it.
And you can bet your ass that if they could somehow kill off all the *nixes, their "compatibility layer" support tools would vanish as well. They provide that only because they have to.
It's not that the US is the 'Darth Vader', it's the fact that the British police arrested McKinnon and conducted an investigation that didn't even lead to charges (much less to a court case) that is pertinent here.
Yea, thats what I don't get either, they didn't prosecute him (why? he's admitted in other interviews to at least some of the charges against him), but the UK courts also summarily rejected all his appeals against extradition too (why? - I'm obviously not a Brit so I don't how the appeals process works over there).
This is in fact why I started googling for more info on this story, it just sounds contradictory. Why wasn't he at least prosecuted for the crimes he did admit to, and/or if the case against him is so dodgy why did his appeals go absolutely nowhere?
I wonder if this is parent #2 deciding to "remain quiet", and letting parent #1 handle the punishment (and taking all the heat for doing so)? Or did parent #1 "bully" parent #2 into letting them handle it themselves?
I don't know, but the extradition thing is something only the Brits can decide on themselves.
Since the supposed crime had already been investigated here, and no charges were brought, the correct response to the extradition request would have been a polite "Please fuck off"
You know, before everyone decides this guy is innocent and the US is being the big bad bully as usual, you may want to do a google on this guy's name and read some of the things I just did. There seems to be more than one "take" on this situation (warning: some of you Brits may not like this "interpretation").
In particular (from the above link):
According to his lawyers, the United States offered McKinnon a deal of six months to a year in U.S. federal custody, followed by repatriation by the U.K., where he'd be eligible for parole after six months. McKinnon turned it down, then went running to the U.K. courts whining that the big bad Americans were trying to extort him into pleading guilty. You think? That's what a plea bargain is, slick.
And six to 12 months is quite a bargain indeed. It's minimum security camp time: We're talking ping-pong tables and a sunny running track. Now he's looking at the same kind of sentence U.S. hackers get -- measured in years, not months, and based on the financial losses a jury finds him responsible for.
Ok, since he himself has admitted to the crimes, and we offered him a plea bargain that would have had him serve less jail time than an American would do for the same crimes, how are we the big bad bullies in this?
I suspect you'll find this kind of response anywhere in the world: law enforcement catches a law-breaker, law-breaker doesn't cooperate and accuses law enforcement of all sorts of mean and nasty things, law enforcement becomes annoyed with the unrepetent law breaker and "throws the [law] book" at him.
Or for those of you with children, does this scenario sound familiar: child is caught by parent #1 doing bad thing, child goes crying to parent #2 claiming innocence and that parent #1 is being harsh/unfair/mean. If the marriage is dysfunctional, the child succeeds in playing one parent against the other and his original sin is forgotten in the parental fight that follows. If the marriage is a healthy one (or the child has done this before), the parents unite, and the child is punished not just for the original sin, but for later trying to manipulate his parents (by lying) to avoid punishment. So again I ask, how did the US end up being the Darth Vader of this story?
Not really arguing, but technically our problem is a "Cowboy President", not "Cowboy Laws", although if you have too many of the former, in succession, you end up with the latter.:)
Since our current shoot-first-and-maybe-ask-questions-later style of diplomacy and foreign policy hasn't quite worked out so well, I'm hopeful we'll fix this problem come November 4...
MS will push people away, but to Apple, not Linux.
To both, not just Apple...
While it does cost money to switch
...and that is why it will be to both.
Consider: why should anyone buy a completely new computer just to get a different operating system, when there is nothing wrong with their current machine (except for its current MS OS)?
Further: why should one, after getting fed up at being treated like a criminal by MS while using its proprietary operating system, switch to yet another proprietary operating system?
You don't seriously believe that Apple would still be "nice" to its customers if it had 90% of the market and people were pirating its software do you? Of course Apple doesn't have the piracy problem because they control their own hardware platform too, and they like "control" just as much as MS does, which is why they sue anyone who tries to make a clone of their hardware. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me...
Yes, some will go to Apple, but some, who have gotten sick of the whole proprietary operating system madness, with its EULAs, its black-box interface style (never knowing what the OS is doing or why), look-but-don't-touch mentality (Father Bill & Brother Ballmer have already vetted the code, no need for anyone else to see it, and you can trust them, of course), never mind the customer-is-assumed-to-be-a-thief mindset, will just get fed up... and install Linux (or a *BSD).
[/self = 100% Windows Free for more than a decade]
You aren't -1 any more, but I don't think you deserve the score you have now either. The AC you responded to referred to "KDE4 running on the nvidia linux blob".
NVIDIA's linux driver is notorious for poor 2D performance (on top of their hardware having the same problem), and KDE4 is a new beast that many people have had problems with and is not yet as optimized and tweaked as KDE3 is.
His problem has nothing to do with X11 or KDE in general, which makes your anti-X11 response a pointless, and incorrect, troll.
aren't both Intel and AMD having their own problems with anti-trust litigation
Intel yes (in a fight with EU right now IIRC), but AMD no, because AMD only has about 20% of the CPU market at the moment, and they've never been on equal footing with Intel marketshare-wise.
AMD has always been the underdog in this fight, which makes their accomplishments, and survival, for all this time even more impressive. After all, they did what Intel thought couldn't be done: extend the 32bit X86 architecture to 64bits in a backwards compatible way without losing performance. Intel originally created a completely different architecture, the Itanium, as their solution for the 64bit architecture market, but it wasn't long after AMD released its "AMD64" architecture extension, in its Athlon64 CPUs, that Intel realised it was a better solution overall and ended up adopting it wholesale for their own chips (referring to as "EM64T" in their chips).
Re:Maybe they understand something you don't
on
Boost 1.36 Released
·
· Score: 1
they probably know something you don't
On the other hand, this is/. with open posting and open moderation, so they probably don't...
Yea, I know they don't like C++/Boost, I don't expect everyone to like it, and I myself don't like every language/library out there either, but I don't bother *posting* that, and when I mod, I don't reward (or punish for that matter) statements of likes/dislikes that have no other redeeming value (and I reward only if I *know* that the "redeeming value" is factually correct & relevant). Sure some of the criticisms above have some redeeming value (eg, bad docs for some Boost components), but clearly not all of them (nor do I think the GP meant that all criticisms were trolls), and some of those got modded up too. I especially love the "insightful" comparison of C++ (compiled language) to Java (byte-interpreted, managed-code, major runtime environment required), yea, that was truly brilliant.
But then I've come to expect this, since this is what you get with open posting and open moderation, where the trolls and script-kiddies get mod points too, but like the GP, I would swear the signal-to-noise ratio used to be a little higher around here, particularly on programming related topics. People still argued and disagreed (when have they not, people are peculiar that way!), but at least they generally knew something of the subject at hand, and made a half-way decent effort at logical arguments. Now we've got folks bitching about nothing other than a library's naming convention, or even better, comparing apples to oranges, and getting modded insightful... [sigh]
ZFS won't protect you either. From the article you linked to:
As well-informed commenter Liam Newcombe notes:
The key point that seems to be missed in many of the comments is that when a disk fails in a RAID 5 array and it has to rebuild there is a significant chance of a non-recoverable read error during the rebuild (BER / UER). As there is no longer any redundancy the RAID array cannot rebuild, this is not dependent on whether you are running Windows or Linux, hardware or software RAID 5, it is simple mathematics. An honest RAID controller will log this and generally abort, allowing you to restore undamaged data from backup onto a fresh array.
AFAICT, this problem is inherent in the RAID Standard itself (i.e. the firmware of the RAID controller), not specific to any OS.
You can use non-GPLed apps on Linux, clearly, Linux wouldn't have gotten to where it is today otherwise, so what exactly are you trying to say here?
Do you hate Linux so bad that you'll post troll comments without a lick of logic in them? I mean, heaven knows there are plently of plausible things you can bash it for, but what, you just couldn't wait for the next opening? This is/. after all, its not like reasonable openings for Linux bashing are rare or infrequent...
Interest that has been eroding since the advent of Linux...
How do you convince someone to buy Solaris when there are free alternatives in BSD and Linux?
yet Sun didn't have this problem when there were just the BSDs around...
The only way to compete with Linux for that "mindshare"
Was it a freudian slip on your part not to include the BSDs here as well (as you did up to this point)?:)
This is exactly the point the GP is making: It is the success of Linux that is forcing Sun to open up Solaris in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, not the BSDs, which have been around almost from the beginning. If your argument were anywhere close to correct we would have seen something like OpenSolaris long before Linux, because of the free BSDs.
Look, you don't have to like the GPL, thats ok, but pretending it is not the underlying reason why it is Linux thats gaining mindshare and usage at the expense of Solaris and most of the other commercial *nixes, and not the the BSDs themselves, doesn't do you any good in the long run... nevermind that it leads to a lot of freudian slips along the way.:)
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years,
Sadly true, but note that our Navy is in better shape relative to our ground forces right now, while at the same time Russia's Navy deteriorated badly after the fall of the Soviet Union and has not been significantly rebuilt yet, especially with respect to capital ships (and any conflict between Russia and Canada over Canadian possessions would be primarily a naval confrontation). As the other responder pointed out, Russia, for the moment at least, would be badly outclassed at sea.
they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid
Umm, well no, actually, because we don't consider our geographical neighbors to be just "anyone", and I suspect every other nation feels the same way: the closer to home the location is, the more important events at that location are viewed.
And in this specific case this is especially true since we have a certain not-so-small and not-so-insignificant possession located prominently in the conflict area (never mind that one of these belligerents is a long standing ally, and the other is a long standing adversary).
Now if we don't fix our economy and stop spending money we don't have, then in 20 or 30 years we won't be able to afford the military we have now and won't be able to come to our own aid, much less anyone elses, thats true enough, but for now at least, its just about guaranteed that a Russia trying to expand at Canada's expense would quickly result in at least 3-5 US Carrier Battle Groups freezing their butts off in Canadian Arctic waters...:)
If you have one of these boards, you need DOS to fix the BIOS.
If Gigabyte's most recent motherboards are any indication, this kind of problem will slowly become a thing of the past. Recent Gigabyte boards, ones with an 'S' in their model name (S=Smart/Safe), have a back-up BIOS copy on the ROM, and the BIOS now has the flashing code builtin, so one BIOS copy can flash-update the other BIOS copy (even getting the actual update patch via the net), eliminating the need for any boot disk.
Its still a non-free BIOS, so its not perfect, but it at least eliminates the need to keep that ridiculous DOS floppy disk around just for flashing junk every once in a blue moon...
FWIW, I have no idea why you were modded Troll. Looks like/. is giving out mod points to just about anyone nowadays...
I used Gentoo for a few years (from 2003 to late 2006-ish)
but as it turns out, I just had control over which of the prescribed USE flags I enabled
You used Gentoo for 2 years and in all that time you never heard of an 'overlay'? Sounds to me like Gentoo wasn't the kind of distro for you anyway. No problem, stay with Ubuntu and be happy, just remember, what works for you doesn't work for everyone else.
Sounds about like my last romantic engagement, it lasted all of about 8 minutes or so before she decided to take her ball and go find a cuter puppy... [sigh]
There are an infinite number of bad things that can lock your box that compiling from source doesn't fix.
I never said compiling from source fixes *everything*.
This is what drove me off of Gentoo. In the unstable branch, wget broke, with the emerge world finishing. Leaving emerge unable to fetch new code to fix the conflict that broke wget (hint what does portage use to fetch source?).
So you use your browser/ftp client and go fetch the source manually, then downgrade to the previous version. Compared to being unable boot your system, or something like glibc being completely hosed, this is trivial. And this kind of problem can happen on any distro.
In Ubuntu, the package maintainers actually care about the installed packages from repos running once they're installed.
Great, keep using Ubuntu if you like it. If I ever decided to use a binary distro again, I'd probably try them first.
In Gentoo world, not so much.
Life on the bleeding edge is not for the faint of heart. For many, its not worth the headaches, but for some, its the only way to live. With Linux thankfully, we have so many choices.
Provided you get rid of daemons you don't use, you'll find minimal speedups when something is optimized for a generic i686 compared to something optimized for core2
What about the "daemons" that you can't get rid of as they are required by the app because that app's maintainer, or "higher-ups" in the distro's management decided that the app must include this or that feature (for whatever reason)? For many Gentoo users, its not about recompiling the exact same code over and over again, because in that case, you'd be right, there would be minimal improvement in the resulting apps, and a lot of work for almost nothing.
Others have mentioned all the other reasons why some like Gentoo: Choice, Configurability, (Slight) Performance gains, but I don't think anyone mentioned my reason, although the 'configurability' comes close. My reason? CONTROL. I'm a control freak.:)
Gentoo's use of 'USE' flags to control how software is built, and its direct support for customization of software via 'local overlays', which basically allows anyone who wants/needs to, to override the default build scripts of any of the system's software and make any changes to how that software is built is a control freak's wet dream. Even if you rarely use these features, just knowing you can if you want to is comforting for those who can't stand the idea of not being in total charge of their own computer.:)
If an app has been built to support everything under the sun, it tends to have a lot of dependencies that result in 'everything under the sun' getting installed onto *your* system. Only, what if you know you're not going to use even half of that stuff? On a binary based distro, that happens a lot because they're building stuff for the 'largest common demoninator', and there is little to nothing you can do about it. This was the second biggest reason that drove me away from Debian way back when: No control over what was getting installed on my system, and no easy way to customize anything (when I left Debian, rebuilding things from source, i.e. creating your own.debs, to make your own customizations was a genuine PITA, whereas Gentoo's overlays feature builds the customization ability right into its package management system right from the get-go). I'm not dissing Debian, I still like it, but a source-based distro gives you a level of control that no binary-based distro can offer. Period. Full-Stop. I guaranttee you there is stuff on your system, stuff that gets installed automatically on virtually every Linux distro out there, that is *not* on my system (or the systems of many Gentoo users).
PS: You can tell the control freaks from the speed freaks simply by their CFLAGS: they left it set to the default. They figured out what you were talking about a long time ago, and a four line CFLAGS, starting with '-O9' (LOL!), is not *their* idea of nirvana. But you probably shouldn't look in their local overlay directory if you value your sanity...:)
PPS: Somebody please mod up that AC below me who made the 'if it compiles, it runs' comment. He's dead-on: that is the single most important reason I left binary distros. After an install, there is NO guarantee that your system will work. In a source-based distro, if the build/link/install completes successfully its almost certain that at least you'll be able to get back into your system the next time you reboot, because in the act of compiling and successfully linking an app, your system has effectively verified that the app has no missing library dependencies.
Gentoo ain't perfect, but I'll still take it over any binary-based distro without even a first thought.
Someone above has already mentioned Lyx, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are already using the KDE environment, there is also Kile which is a Latex front-end app similar to Lyx, but for KDE.
I run Adblock Plus and Filterset.G and honestly I'm so used to them that I'm surprised when I have to use another browser on another computer and find out that the web still has ads.
Same here.:)
until they ask me to find out why the computer is running so slowly.
I had to clean up my cousin's computer (Windows) because she had that "problem"... [shudder]
When I was done, I installed FF, and set it as the default browser, and told her to use that instead.
But it takes ages to convince a lot of people (example, my parents and younger siblings) who just use "the Internet" shortcut that came with their computer that they need to switch to another browser
And that is the true source of Microsoft's monopoly power: user ignorance and/or inertia. [sigh]
why adblocking and flash-disabling and noscripting are still just niches
Ok, no offense here, but I'm going to guess you're an IE user right? Because guess what are the #1, #6, and #14 most popular plugins for Firefox 3 right now?
Yep, Adblock Plus (almost half a million downloads!), Noscript, and FlashBlock, all on the first page. The first two are 'recommended' addons by Mozilla, so anyone going to the addon menu within FF will see them listed. Oh yea, all these addons can be gotten from within FF, from the Mozilla website. Download and Installation is done automatically.
Secondly, I don't know what stuff you've tried, but setting these things up is just a matter of pointing and clicking. Adblock has an addon plugin called Filterset.G Updater, that will automatically get you a community-maintained blacklist, no need for you to edit anything yourself, and when you come across something not already in the blacklist, its just a right-click for the context menu, and select "adblock this image" (or whatever) to have it added to the blacklist. Noscript works either from an icon on the toolbar or the statusbar, and prints its messages to the statusbar, so turning on/off scripting for each site you visit, is just a matter of answering the message on the statusbar, or clicking on its icon at any other time. All of these settings are remembered, and can edited later from within FF, if necessary.
Because you make it sound so hard and/or hopeless to do these things, I'm guessing maybe you haven't tried Firefox lately?
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows or IE in nearly a decade now, and for the last 3-5 years of running Windows, I was using FF anyway, so I can't even remember anymore what IE looks like (if only I could say the same about Window's BSOD... sigh). I never bothered with a Flash player as I've never found it necessary for the parts of the Net that I use. I also know nothing of the other major browsers like Opera, etc, so I'm not saying FF 'rulez' and everyone else's browser sucks (except MS's IE, because no offense, it does suck, massively).
In fact, for some simple websites, I would often use KDE's browser simply because it was (and still is a little) faster, but, FF 3 is *noticably* faster than 2.x, FWIW, and now they've got the zoom feature working well, and FF remembers your zoom setting for each site now, so its a lot easier to use - no more constantly fiddling with text/image size on Linux. FF 3 may become my default/only browser now.
Re:Stallman hasn't gone to hell yet?
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
I don't have time to "give back to the community" because I had to use GPLed software
Care to tell us which GPL'ed software you incorporated into your proprietary product? I'm sure those authors would love to know you're violating their license.
No one is forced to use GPL'ed software... period... full stop.
The GP's post is not naive, like he said, you are a leech.
Why should I be forced to enable 32bit backwards-compatibility on my system, and waste megabytes of extra space for all the essentially redundant 32bit libraries that are required, especially when I don't need that for *anything* else?
The only things not available on a Linux 64bit system which are "needed" for full web browsing is the proprietary stuff like Flash and Java, and now that Sun has GPL'd Java, that list will soon be down to just Adobe's Flash.
Fortunately, for me anyway, Flash is far less "needed" than Java/Javascript is, so I happily do without it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought GPL licensing was incompatible with BSD?
It is in a sense, but only one-way. GPL code can't be incorporated into a BSD project because the GPL is
less "permissive" than the BSD, but not vice-versa, BSD code can be incorporated into a GPL project because the BSD license is more "permissive".
The GPL has more restrictions than the BSD, but those extra restrictions are only meant to ensure the future "freedom" of the code (downstream from you, i.e., derivatives), yet the presense of those extra restrictions clashes with the common meaning of the word "free" (current "freedom", ignoring the future), hence the never-ending arguments between the GPL proponents and the BSD proponents here on /. and elsewhere.
Unfortunately no one, from the beginning up till now, has found a better word or short phrase to use to describe the difference.
Microsoft can use ANY amount of GPL'ed code they want. In fact, they have a "Unix-compatibility layer" that has a cornucopia of GPL tools.
Stand-alone tools and minor apps that are separate (not linked or part of the source code) from their operating system is no problem for them, but they'll never use GPL'd code as part of their core OS proper because they can't embrace and extend (and optionally extinguish) it.
And you can bet your ass that if they could somehow kill off all the *nixes, their "compatibility layer" support tools would vanish as well. They provide that only because they have to.
It's not that the US is the 'Darth Vader', it's the fact that the British police arrested McKinnon and conducted an investigation that didn't even lead to charges (much less to a court case) that is pertinent here.
Yea, thats what I don't get either, they didn't prosecute him (why? he's admitted in other interviews to at least some of the charges against him), but the UK courts also summarily rejected all his appeals against extradition too (why? - I'm obviously not a Brit so I don't how the appeals process works over there).
This is in fact why I started googling for more info on this story, it just sounds contradictory. Why wasn't he at least prosecuted for the crimes he did admit to, and/or if the case against him is so dodgy why did his appeals go absolutely nowhere?
I wonder if this is parent #2 deciding to "remain quiet", and letting parent #1 handle the punishment (and taking all the heat for doing so)? Or did parent #1 "bully" parent #2 into letting them handle it themselves?
I don't know, but the extradition thing is something only the Brits can decide on themselves.
how did the US end up being the Darth Vader of this story?
Oh jeez, this is /. you ninny!
*smacks head sharply*
Uhhhh, just pretend I didn't actually say that, I already know the answer..
Since the supposed crime had already been investigated here, and no charges were brought, the correct response to the extradition request would have been a polite "Please fuck off"
You know, before everyone decides this guy is innocent and the US is being the big bad bully as usual, you may want to do a google on this guy's name and read some of the things I just did. There seems to be more than one "take" on this situation (warning: some of you Brits may not like this "interpretation").
In particular (from the above link):
According to his lawyers, the United States offered McKinnon a deal of six months to a year in U.S. federal custody, followed by repatriation by the U.K., where he'd be eligible for parole after six months. McKinnon turned it down, then went running to the U.K. courts whining that the big bad Americans were trying to extort him into pleading guilty. You think? That's what a plea bargain is, slick.
And six to 12 months is quite a bargain indeed. It's minimum security camp time: We're talking ping-pong tables and a sunny running track. Now he's looking at the same kind of sentence U.S. hackers get -- measured in years, not months, and based on the financial losses a jury finds him responsible for.
Ok, since he himself has admitted to the crimes, and we offered him a plea bargain that would have had him serve less jail time than an American would do for the same crimes, how are we the big bad bullies in this?
I suspect you'll find this kind of response anywhere in the world: law enforcement catches a law-breaker, law-breaker doesn't cooperate and accuses law enforcement of all sorts of mean and nasty things, law enforcement becomes annoyed with the unrepetent law breaker and "throws the [law] book" at him.
Or for those of you with children, does this scenario sound familiar: child is caught by parent #1 doing bad thing, child goes crying to parent #2 claiming innocence and that parent #1 is being harsh/unfair/mean. If the marriage is dysfunctional, the child succeeds in playing one parent against the other and his original sin is forgotten in the parental fight that follows. If the marriage is a healthy one (or the child has done this before), the parents unite, and the child is punished not just for the original sin, but for later trying to manipulate his parents (by lying) to avoid punishment. So again I ask, how did the US end up being the Darth Vader of this story?
a country with cowboy-law
Not really arguing, but technically our problem is a "Cowboy President", not "Cowboy Laws", although if you have too many of the former, in succession, you end up with the latter. :)
Since our current shoot-first-and-maybe-ask-questions-later style of diplomacy and foreign policy hasn't quite worked out so well, I'm hopeful we'll fix this problem come November 4...
MS will push people away, but to Apple, not Linux.
To both, not just Apple...
While it does cost money to switch
...and that is why it will be to both.
Consider: why should anyone buy a completely new computer just to get a different operating system, when there is nothing wrong with their current machine (except for its current MS OS)?
Further: why should one, after getting fed up at being treated like a criminal by MS while using its proprietary operating system, switch to yet another proprietary operating system?
You don't seriously believe that Apple would still be "nice" to its customers if it had 90% of the market and people were pirating its software do you? Of course Apple doesn't have the piracy problem because they control their own hardware platform too, and they like "control" just as much as MS does, which is why they sue anyone who tries to make a clone of their hardware. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me...
Yes, some will go to Apple, but some, who have gotten sick of the whole proprietary operating system madness, with its EULAs, its black-box interface style (never knowing what the OS is doing or why), look-but-don't-touch mentality (Father Bill & Brother Ballmer have already vetted the code, no need for anyone else to see it, and you can trust them, of course), never mind the customer-is-assumed-to-be-a-thief mindset, will just get fed up... and install Linux (or a *BSD).
[/self = 100% Windows Free for more than a decade]
You aren't -1 any more, but I don't think you deserve the score you have now either. The AC you responded to referred to "KDE4 running on the nvidia linux blob".
NVIDIA's linux driver is notorious for poor 2D performance (on top of their hardware having the same problem), and KDE4 is a new beast that many people have had problems with and is not yet as optimized and tweaked as KDE3 is.
His problem has nothing to do with X11 or KDE in general, which makes your anti-X11 response a pointless, and incorrect, troll.
aren't both Intel and AMD having their own problems with anti-trust litigation
Intel yes (in a fight with EU right now IIRC), but AMD no, because AMD only has about 20% of the CPU market at the moment, and they've never been on equal footing with Intel marketshare-wise.
AMD has always been the underdog in this fight, which makes their accomplishments, and survival, for all this time even more impressive. After all, they did what Intel thought couldn't be done: extend the 32bit X86 architecture to 64bits in a backwards compatible way without losing performance. Intel originally created a completely different architecture, the Itanium, as their solution for the 64bit architecture market, but it wasn't long after AMD released its "AMD64" architecture extension, in its Athlon64 CPUs, that Intel realised it was a better solution overall and ended up adopting it wholesale for their own chips (referring to as "EM64T" in their chips).
On the other hand, this is /. with open posting and open moderation, so they probably don't...
Yea, I know they don't like C++/Boost, I don't expect everyone to like it, and I myself don't like every language/library out there either, but I don't bother *posting* that, and when I mod, I don't reward (or punish for that matter) statements of likes/dislikes that have no other redeeming value (and I reward only if I *know* that the "redeeming value" is factually correct & relevant). Sure some of the criticisms above have some redeeming value (eg, bad docs for some Boost components), but clearly not all of them (nor do I think the GP meant that all criticisms were trolls), and some of those got modded up too. I especially love the "insightful" comparison of C++ (compiled language) to Java (byte-interpreted, managed-code, major runtime environment required), yea, that was truly brilliant.
But then I've come to expect this, since this is what you get with open posting and open moderation, where the trolls and script-kiddies get mod points too, but like the GP, I would swear the signal-to-noise ratio used to be a little higher around here, particularly on programming related topics. People still argued and disagreed (when have they not, people are peculiar that way!), but at least they generally knew something of the subject at hand, and made a half-way decent effort at logical arguments. Now we've got folks bitching about nothing other than a library's naming convention, or even better, comparing apples to oranges, and getting modded insightful... [sigh]
ZFS won't protect you either. From the article you linked to:
AFAICT, this problem is inherent in the RAID Standard itself (i.e. the firmware of the RAID controller), not specific to any OS.
You can use non-GPLed apps on Linux, clearly, Linux wouldn't have gotten to where it is today otherwise, so what exactly are you trying to say here?
Do you hate Linux so bad that you'll post troll comments without a lick of logic in them? I mean, heaven knows there are plently of plausible things you can bash it for, but what, you just couldn't wait for the next opening? This is /. after all, its not like reasonable openings for Linux bashing are rare or infrequent...
Interest that has been eroding since the advent of Linux...
yet Sun didn't have this problem when there were just the BSDs around...
Was it a freudian slip on your part not to include the BSDs here as well (as you did up to this point)? :)
This is exactly the point the GP is making: It is the success of Linux that is forcing Sun to open up Solaris in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, not the BSDs, which have been around almost from the beginning. If your argument were anywhere close to correct we would have seen something like OpenSolaris long before Linux, because of the free BSDs.
Look, you don't have to like the GPL, thats ok, but pretending it is not the underlying reason why it is Linux thats gaining mindshare and usage at the expense of Solaris and most of the other commercial *nixes, and not the the BSDs themselves, doesn't do you any good in the long run... nevermind that it leads to a lot of freudian slips along the way. :)
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years,
Sadly true, but note that our Navy is in better shape relative to our ground forces right now, while at the same time Russia's Navy deteriorated badly after the fall of the Soviet Union and has not been significantly rebuilt yet, especially with respect to capital ships (and any conflict between Russia and Canada over Canadian possessions would be primarily a naval confrontation). As the other responder pointed out, Russia, for the moment at least, would be badly outclassed at sea.
they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid
Umm, well no, actually, because we don't consider our geographical neighbors to be just "anyone", and I suspect every other nation feels the same way: the closer to home the location is, the more important events at that location are viewed.
And in this specific case this is especially true since we have a certain not-so-small and not-so-insignificant possession located prominently in the conflict area (never mind that one of these belligerents is a long standing ally, and the other is a long standing adversary).
Now if we don't fix our economy and stop spending money we don't have, then in 20 or 30 years we won't be able to afford the military we have now and won't be able to come to our own aid, much less anyone elses, thats true enough, but for now at least, its just about guaranteed that a Russia trying to expand at Canada's expense would quickly result in at least 3-5 US Carrier Battle Groups freezing their butts off in Canadian Arctic waters... :)
What are you worried about, MS changing the DOS API or something? ;-)
No, I'm worried about mobo makers specifically checking for "FreeDOS" in their ACPI scripts... :)
If you have one of these boards, you need DOS to fix the BIOS.
If Gigabyte's most recent motherboards are any indication, this kind of problem will slowly become a thing of the past. Recent Gigabyte boards, ones with an 'S' in their model name (S=Smart/Safe), have a back-up BIOS copy on the ROM, and the BIOS now has the flashing code builtin, so one BIOS copy can flash-update the other BIOS copy (even getting the actual update patch via the net), eliminating the need for any boot disk.
Its still a non-free BIOS, so its not perfect, but it at least eliminates the need to keep that ridiculous DOS floppy disk around just for flashing junk every once in a blue moon...
FWIW, I have no idea why you were modded Troll. Looks like /. is giving out mod points to just about anyone nowadays...
I used Gentoo for a few years (from 2003 to late 2006-ish)
but as it turns out, I just had control over which of the prescribed USE flags I enabled
You used Gentoo for 2 years and in all that time you never heard of an 'overlay'? Sounds to me like Gentoo wasn't the kind of distro for you anyway. No problem, stay with Ubuntu and be happy, just remember, what works for you doesn't work for everyone else.
Sounds about like my last romantic engagement, it lasted all of about 8 minutes or so before she decided to take her ball and go find a cuter puppy... [sigh]
There are an infinite number of bad things that can lock your box that compiling from source doesn't fix.
I never said compiling from source fixes *everything*.
This is what drove me off of Gentoo. In the unstable branch, wget broke, with the emerge world finishing. Leaving emerge unable to fetch new code to fix the conflict that broke wget (hint what does portage use to fetch source?).
So you use your browser/ftp client and go fetch the source manually, then downgrade to the previous version. Compared to being unable boot your system, or something like glibc being completely hosed, this is trivial. And this kind of problem can happen on any distro.
In Ubuntu, the package maintainers actually care about the installed packages from repos running once they're installed.
Great, keep using Ubuntu if you like it. If I ever decided to use a binary distro again, I'd probably try them first.
In Gentoo world, not so much.
Life on the bleeding edge is not for the faint of heart. For many, its not worth the headaches, but for some, its the only way to live. With Linux thankfully, we have so many choices.
Provided you get rid of daemons you don't use, you'll find minimal speedups when something is optimized for a generic i686 compared to something optimized for core2
What about the "daemons" that you can't get rid of as they are required by the app because that app's maintainer, or "higher-ups" in the distro's management decided that the app must include this or that feature (for whatever reason)? For many Gentoo users, its not about recompiling the exact same code over and over again, because in that case, you'd be right, there would be minimal improvement in the resulting apps, and a lot of work for almost nothing.
Others have mentioned all the other reasons why some like Gentoo: Choice, Configurability, (Slight) Performance gains, but I don't think anyone mentioned my reason, although the 'configurability' comes close. My reason? CONTROL. I'm a control freak. :)
Gentoo's use of 'USE' flags to control how software is built, and its direct support for customization of software via 'local overlays', which basically allows anyone who wants/needs to, to override the default build scripts of any of the system's software and make any changes to how that software is built is a control freak's wet dream. Even if you rarely use these features, just knowing you can if you want to is comforting for those who can't stand the idea of not being in total charge of their own computer. :)
If an app has been built to support everything under the sun, it tends to have a lot of dependencies that result in 'everything under the sun' getting installed onto *your* system. Only, what if you know you're not going to use even half of that stuff? On a binary based distro, that happens a lot because they're building stuff for the 'largest common demoninator', and there is little to nothing you can do about it. This was the second biggest reason that drove me away from Debian way back when: No control over what was getting installed on my system, and no easy way to customize anything (when I left Debian, rebuilding things from source, i.e. creating your own .debs, to make your own customizations was a genuine PITA, whereas Gentoo's overlays feature builds the customization ability right into its package management system right from the get-go). I'm not dissing Debian, I still like it, but a source-based distro gives you a level of control that no binary-based distro can offer. Period. Full-Stop. I guaranttee you there is stuff on your system, stuff that gets installed automatically on virtually every Linux distro out there, that is *not* on my system (or the systems of many Gentoo users).
PS: You can tell the control freaks from the speed freaks simply by their CFLAGS: they left it set to the default. They figured out what you were talking about a long time ago, and a four line CFLAGS, starting with '-O9' (LOL!), is not *their* idea of nirvana. But you probably shouldn't look in their local overlay directory if you value your sanity... :)
PPS: Somebody please mod up that AC below me who made the 'if it compiles, it runs' comment. He's dead-on: that is the single most important reason I left binary distros. After an install, there is NO guarantee that your system will work. In a source-based distro, if the build/link/install completes successfully its almost certain that at least you'll be able to get back into your system the next time you reboot, because in the act of compiling and successfully linking an app, your system has effectively verified that the app has no missing library dependencies.
Gentoo ain't perfect, but I'll still take it over any binary-based distro without even a first thought.
Someone above has already mentioned Lyx, but if you (or anyone else reading this) are already using the KDE environment, there is also Kile which is a Latex front-end app similar to Lyx, but for KDE.
I run Adblock Plus and Filterset.G and honestly I'm so used to them that I'm surprised when I have to use another browser on another computer and find out that the web still has ads.
Same here. :)
until they ask me to find out why the computer is running so slowly.
I had to clean up my cousin's computer (Windows) because she had that "problem"... [shudder]
When I was done, I installed FF, and set it as the default browser, and told her to use that instead.
But it takes ages to convince a lot of people (example, my parents and younger siblings) who just use "the Internet" shortcut that came with their computer that they need to switch to another browser
And that is the true source of Microsoft's monopoly power: user ignorance and/or inertia. [sigh]
Agreed.
why adblocking and flash-disabling and noscripting are still just niches
Ok, no offense here, but I'm going to guess you're an IE user right? Because guess what are the #1, #6, and #14 most popular plugins for Firefox 3 right now?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=all&as=true&vfuz=true&appid=1&lver=3.0&hver=3.1&atype=1&pid=0&lup=&pp=20&sort=weeklydownloads/
Yep, Adblock Plus (almost half a million downloads!), Noscript, and FlashBlock, all on the first page. The first two are 'recommended' addons by Mozilla, so anyone going to the addon menu within FF will see them listed. Oh yea, all these addons can be gotten from within FF, from the Mozilla website. Download and Installation is done automatically.
Secondly, I don't know what stuff you've tried, but setting these things up is just a matter of pointing and clicking. Adblock has an addon plugin called Filterset.G Updater, that will automatically get you a community-maintained blacklist, no need for you to edit anything yourself, and when you come across something not already in the blacklist, its just a right-click for the context menu, and select "adblock this image" (or whatever) to have it added to the blacklist. Noscript works either from an icon on the toolbar or the statusbar, and prints its messages to the statusbar, so turning on/off scripting for each site you visit, is just a matter of answering the message on the statusbar, or clicking on its icon at any other time. All of these settings are remembered, and can edited later from within FF, if necessary.
Because you make it sound so hard and/or hopeless to do these things, I'm guessing maybe you haven't tried Firefox lately?
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows or IE in nearly a decade now, and for the last 3-5 years of running Windows, I was using FF anyway, so I can't even remember anymore what IE looks like (if only I could say the same about Window's BSOD... sigh). I never bothered with a Flash player as I've never found it necessary for the parts of the Net that I use. I also know nothing of the other major browsers like Opera, etc, so I'm not saying FF 'rulez' and everyone else's browser sucks (except MS's IE, because no offense, it does suck, massively).
In fact, for some simple websites, I would often use KDE's browser simply because it was (and still is a little) faster, but, FF 3 is *noticably* faster than 2.x, FWIW, and now they've got the zoom feature working well, and FF remembers your zoom setting for each site now, so its a lot easier to use - no more constantly fiddling with text/image size on Linux. FF 3 may become my default/only browser now.
I don't have time to "give back to the community" because I had to use GPLed software
Care to tell us which GPL'ed software you incorporated into your proprietary product? I'm sure those authors would love to know you're violating their license.
No one is forced to use GPL'ed software... period... full stop.
The GP's post is not naive, like he said, you are a leech.
Why should I be forced to enable 32bit backwards-compatibility on my system, and waste megabytes of extra space for all the essentially redundant 32bit libraries that are required, especially when I don't need that for *anything* else?
The only things not available on a Linux 64bit system which are "needed" for full web browsing is the proprietary stuff like Flash and Java, and now that Sun has GPL'd Java, that list will soon be down to just Adobe's Flash.
Fortunately, for me anyway, Flash is far less "needed" than Java/Javascript is, so I happily do without it.