Great! I like to go on advocating gentoo, especially to folks who are developers because it can do wonders in many places that binary only distros fail. The sad thing about it is that the quality of the distro has really dropped, nowadays I am really surprised if a month goes by without any show stopper core bugs. It was an amazing concept in its hay days, and it still is. The other problems with it are the constant flux in core design and lack of a roadmap among others.
But amazing things are possible, and because it is a community backed distro, upgrades to stuff like glibc and the kernel are very generic and don't wreck the whole thing apart. Other good points are the fact that you can upgrade smoothly - upgrading from one version to another is possible by keeping the same root partition - you have to reboot only to upgrade the kernel, which isn't tied to the profile update! I could go on and on. Who knows, maybe I'll have a convert in you:)
I hate it when trolls go endlessly about how compiling from source helped them improve their system performance by [insert random number]%. Those idiots are doing more harm to the project by driving prospective switchers away.
Actually, mplayer is a bad example of an app whose performance will be affected using CFLAGS. It supports runtime cpu detection, and the mplayer devs recommend using it instead of the gcc optimization because it is tricky to extract cpu power efficiently using the already comlex codecs.
True, but there's a huge difference in the way unstable in Gentoo and unstable in Debian work. Debian has an entire set of packages built for you. If you want to take Debian's unstable libogg and slap it on a stable etch install, you'll be breaking mplayer, xine-lib, vlc and whatever you have installed. In gentoo, its just as easy as unmasking a package, emerging it and a revdep-rebuild.
The power of gentoo is in this customisability - you can mix and match whatever you want without worrying about rpm hell (Strangely, I haven't heard anyone say dpkg hell). Now, you can compile xine-lib from source, and the many packages that were broken in the process but if you want that customisability, then why not use a distro that lists this as one of its killer features.
99.99% of the linux users don't want this. They'll prefer/are better off with the distro packagers making this decision for them. They don't want to go into the finer details of building a distro for themselves. You fall into this category, and I perfectly understand and respect your decision. But for people like me, gentoo is god send. I want to run amarok cvs (btw, another strong point of gentoo - you can run a cvs build of most packages with complete and full support from the package manager) while using a stable version of xine-lib. I want to run unstable kde, but i want to keep the stable versions of glibc, libxml etc...
Unstable for gentoo means more or less the same it means for debian. We have package hard masks for the really experimental packages. It all boils down to customisability. I am too pampered by emerge that I can't shift to another distro, even though gentoo's quality in the last 2 years has gone down the toilet:(
I'd like someone with more authority on the subject to say whether Opera or Konqueror introduced mouse gestures first. They've been there in konqueror since ever, it seems to me.
Not one item from the list looks like from outer space - all are concepts which any monkey can bring into a browser. If he doesn't like the deal he's getting these days, perhaps he should start patenting stuff or quit the software business altogether. Anyway, I am getting bored with all the Linus interviews, this is atleast a welcome change.
I've been reading on and on about how easy it is to remove the watermark, but is it that easy?
Let's say that the number 1234 is watermarked in 2 files, one at 22 KHz and the other at 25 KHz at the exact same spot. Let's also consider that the cd too has a washed down version (pun intended) with the watermark at another frequency. How will you be able to know which version is the original? Even if you compare the data to what's in the cd, you will not be able to remove it without much damage to the audio since you do not have a good quality sample of the original.
The record companies aren't really saints, they must have something like this in their mind. Whatever it is, I am okay with unrecognizable watermarks. Its much better than DRM, will play n number of times and on any player.
I don't know what's worse... the fact that I get marked as a troll or the fact THAT YOU STILL DON'T GET IT. If you distribute any GPL binaries, YOU HAVE TO MAKE AVAILABLE THE CODE. I am not TALKING about their binaries or anything that links to the kernel. If they are in fact using a linux kernel, they have to make the code they used available. End. Of. Story. They don't have to make the code available, they have to ensure that the code of their binary is available. If they are using the stock kernel, all they have to do is point to the link in kernel.org for the corresponding source. The difference may be thin, but is significant.
I believe this is what they are doing, I am still guessing blindly.
You're an idiot. If it is running on Linux, THEY STILL have to pony up the kernel code (and code for any other GPL code they distribute). Modified or not. You're one hell of a troll, still here's the deal. Read the very first line of this license and atleast try to understand what that means.
While I see the logic in your statement, a lawsuit is very impossible. Open and Office are generic words, and you can't simply trademark words and outlaw their regular meanings in English. Perhaps Microsoft choose the name intentionally, who knows.
If any, the opposite can also be argued. Open Office is a very generic name and they own the trademarks only for the word openoffice.org AFAIK. A lawsuit, it is not, very.
I am not the OP, but he raises a valid point. Gratification is fine, and is the base of many systems that we have here. The problem is when the sentence tends to be more like "As long as I get what you want, I'm OK with ___ being screwed and dry".
There are also some things called principles and doctrines. If everyone stops giving a damn about them, this world will end up a different place.
the way that they crippled kde so that gnome looks better (I dont want to start a holy flame war, but this *was* the state of things 5-6 years ago),
No it wasn't. It was a complaint made by many who never used it.
It's not true, and never was true.
And I've been using KDE with Redhat (and now Fedora) since '99 I'll bite on that one. Please explain then why this site came up, and why it had an active user and devel base. Fedora when it was at core 1 or 2 realized the mistake redhat was doing by crippling kde, and they started including the default packages with less modifications. In case you wanted a list of stuff that were removed out - they were xine-lib support for kde-libs, arts threading, a lot of the standard applications, custom modifying a few kde headers (this caused problems for me while trying to compile kbear 2.0 at that time).
I remember all of this because I was a redhat fan since 6.0. But RH 8.0 drove me too crazy within the first month that I switched to mdk9. It may have worked for you, and I am not nitpicking you as a user. But there were a large number of users like me who were frustrated, a lot of them swicthed distros, some of them started using the unsupported packages from kde-redhat. The fact that there were a lot of discontented users atleast shows that there was a problem somewhere.
Alan Cox and the other big shots at Redhat have in the past repeatedly said that they will not add support for mp3, or any other patended technology into Redhat. It all started with 8.0, and RH's policy has been AFAIK to tell the user that so-and-so will never be supported until the patent expires. Its sad to see such a good ideaology been tossed aside because of market pressure.
Whatever, I am not one to complain, but given the way Bluecurve was thrust upon users, and the way that they crippled kde so that gnome looks better (I dont want to start a holy flame war, but this *was* the state of things 5-6 years ago), I doubt whether they will make any serious dent in the market. But this is free software, the more people focussing on an area usually only brings the better - atleast its going to be code that others can use too.
> So what is it that makes this any different?
It's entirely possible that the wm could run as the user "joeturd" and not root, as in windows. Still, yeah it's another example of sexy technology winning over common sense and security. Most people really don't care because they do not understand the implications of a cracked box. I've tried explaining "keylogger" to people before and they just look at me like I was talking to them in Estonian. They do not, and don't want to, "get-it"
There is a difference. KDE has had kioslaves for years, where the browser can open more than 20 different protocols, including http,ftp, webdav, ldap etc... When you look at it, the sound design of it wins you with all the advantages it can offer. Everything is a different library, and it takes a good exploit in one to compromise another, something which hasnt yet occurred iirc. Plus the benefits are easily observable, which include opening an mp3 over ssh in amarok, without the app even knowing that such a thing is happening. IE's integration AFAIK was just so that microsoft had an excuse to ship the browser as standard, and had no such advantages.
All said, doing everything via the browser is a bad idea. They should have something like applets which can use the gecko engine to make calls outside, and not have the whole os run off the browser. C++ exists as a system language for a reason - thats speed, performance and stability. I am not trading my desktop for a javascript app, heck I thought vista was a mistake with all its memory requirements!
Well, let me precise the announce :
The project will be shut down in March 2008, not before.
actually, it's Moshe only who will stop "leading" the project (as a reminder, he didn't really 'lead' many thing in the 2.6 version)...
After march, we will see who will get the 'leader' position, but I don't think that is really an important change (call that politics if you want). The fact is for now, oM 2.6 has 3 core devs (me, risc, and g4saa) and we are quite all busy elsewhere. Anyway, if I can make interesting progress this year on the oM2.6 code, I'll take over the project.
Don't fear, oM project is not yet buried...
Anyhow, if any of you guys feel like kernel/user cluster dev, please feel free to contact me (or the list directly, I'll answer it)
WE NEED MORE DEVS !! (as always anyway). Its sad that your comment is way down. The majority of the people that read slashdot comments just scroll till half way and then move on the next article. All said, why dont you try merging your changes to the standard kernel tree? That way you might be able to get more hands on to your code and hopefully, more devs. (I dont know the background about your project, but I've heard in my college years that openMosix is pretty amazing.) Anyway, all the best!
Why not just sell out to a company like Red Hat? That wouldn't make sense. If you are starting a company, will you sell it off in its infancy, just when you were starting to make some money and have an awesome product with very less competition? If the Xen guys knows hows to market themselves, they can be bigger than redhat is today. I wish them good luck, and looking at their strategy, I really can't find much fault with it, as long as the basic stuff remains GPL licensed.
"Just install Windows over" does not work. Most end users are not technically competent to install Windows on a PC. They want the machine to work out of the box. People who sell PCs and don't supply a mchine that works out of the box will be selling into only a small specialt market The users might not be, but they'll know the local IT guy who does. Companies there don't work on the same ways as Dell and HP does. The local whiz kid takes the blank pc and installs the counterfeit version of Windows on it. Funnily enough, the end user wont even know that the software is pirated, so that it has to be payed for.
Taking CS without math is like taking engineering without any physics.
But you don't engineer a bridge by thinking about the interaction of individual atoms, not because that isn't the "right" way of doing it, but because it takes too long and is too expensive. While its true that you do not need to know the atomic theory to deal with bridges, you need to have taken the courses in Material Strength, Kinematics and Fluid Mechanics to actually design one. (I know this because a couple of my friends in college are doing exactly this.) And all these courses need a good amount of mathematics, especially calculus, Fourier transformations and Laplace's theory.
My point is that any science without mathematics is a joke at best. While maths is not what each science is all about, it forms an essential core needed for the foundations of it. The same goes for CS - good algorithm design needs understanding of the big O principle, and why some algorithms might be better than others in certain use cases. I also have a soft corner for set theory and the probability courses - because I liked them:) I may be biased here because I am a CS grad, but computer science without the maths base would be very different and very less powerful and less interesting.
Yeah, don't keep all your routers in Cisco basket.
I don't agree the blame is with Cisco, not until I see more evidence. Cisco has some of the most stable operating systems. The cmd line interface can sometimes suck, but their stability is very remarkable. The fault I am guessing is with the ISP for not planning network redundancy and not scaling their networks in time. Cisco might look bad in this article, but their track record in creating an OS with less number of bugs is much better than Microsoft, Sun and the others.
I take it that you both haven't had to manage systems in an enterprise. Its a royal pain. Every tiny patch will need to go through change control vetted by a couple of PHBs, after first being tested in a qa and development environment. I'll any day apply 20 patches at one go (after going through this monkey dance), rather than 1 a day. I know that the systems might be unsafe, but this is _much_ more sane for me, than having meetings every day to educate everyone about why we suddenly have a lot of vulnerabilities that need daily patching.
So, if you ask me, the best vendors are oracle etc.. who release a quarterly patch set. No PHB ever has a problem applying that; they just look at it and say "Wee, thats a shit load of patches. Damn, apply them quick". I guess a lot of people here might share the same sentiment.
I've heard about a few others, but do you know what the quality of their linux drivers are like? RME is a company that has gone on record to say that they will develop alsa drivers and make their data sheets public. Are there any other manufacturers in the professional audio category that do the same thing? Even ones with a half assed driver will pass, I am just looking at the options that I have.
Slashdot Mirror
Rule No. 1: Never RTFA. never ever.
Rule No.2: See above.
Great! I like to go on advocating gentoo, especially to folks who are developers because it can do wonders in many places that binary only distros fail. The sad thing about it is that the quality of the distro has really dropped, nowadays I am really surprised if a month goes by without any show stopper core bugs. It was an amazing concept in its hay days, and it still is. The other problems with it are the constant flux in core design and lack of a roadmap among others.
:)
But amazing things are possible, and because it is a community backed distro, upgrades to stuff like glibc and the kernel are very generic and don't wreck the whole thing apart. Other good points are the fact that you can upgrade smoothly - upgrading from one version to another is possible by keeping the same root partition - you have to reboot only to upgrade the kernel, which isn't tied to the profile update! I could go on and on. Who knows, maybe I'll have a convert in you
I hate it when trolls go endlessly about how compiling from source helped them improve their system performance by [insert random number]%. Those idiots are doing more harm to the project by driving prospective switchers away.
Actually, mplayer is a bad example of an app whose performance will be affected using CFLAGS. It supports runtime cpu detection, and the mplayer devs recommend using it instead of the gcc optimization because it is tricky to extract cpu power efficiently using the already comlex codecs.
True, but there's a huge difference in the way unstable in Gentoo and unstable in Debian work. Debian has an entire set of packages built for you. If you want to take Debian's unstable libogg and slap it on a stable etch install, you'll be breaking mplayer, xine-lib, vlc and whatever you have installed. In gentoo, its just as easy as unmasking a package, emerging it and a revdep-rebuild.
:(
The power of gentoo is in this customisability - you can mix and match whatever you want without worrying about rpm hell (Strangely, I haven't heard anyone say dpkg hell). Now, you can compile xine-lib from source, and the many packages that were broken in the process but if you want that customisability, then why not use a distro that lists this as one of its killer features.
99.99% of the linux users don't want this. They'll prefer/are better off with the distro packagers making this decision for them. They don't want to go into the finer details of building a distro for themselves. You fall into this category, and I perfectly understand and respect your decision.
But for people like me, gentoo is god send. I want to run amarok cvs (btw, another strong point of gentoo - you can run a cvs build of most packages with complete and full support from the package manager) while using a stable version of xine-lib. I want to run unstable kde, but i want to keep the stable versions of glibc, libxml etc...
Unstable for gentoo means more or less the same it means for debian. We have package hard masks for the really experimental packages. It all boils down to customisability. I am too pampered by emerge that I can't shift to another distro, even though gentoo's quality in the last 2 years has gone down the toilet
I'd like someone with more authority on the subject to say whether Opera or Konqueror introduced mouse gestures first. They've been there in konqueror since ever, it seems to me.
Not one item from the list looks like from outer space - all are concepts which any monkey can bring into a browser. If he doesn't like the deal he's getting these days, perhaps he should start patenting stuff or quit the software business altogether. Anyway, I am getting bored with all the Linus interviews, this is atleast a welcome change.
I've been reading on and on about how easy it is to remove the watermark, but is it that easy?
Let's say that the number 1234 is watermarked in 2 files, one at 22 KHz and the other at 25 KHz at the exact same spot. Let's also consider that the cd too has a washed down version (pun intended) with the watermark at another frequency. How will you be able to know which version is the original? Even if you compare the data to what's in the cd, you will not be able to remove it without much damage to the audio since you do not have a good quality sample of the original.
The record companies aren't really saints, they must have something like this in their mind. Whatever it is, I am okay with unrecognizable watermarks. Its much better than DRM, will play n number of times and on any player.
I believe this is what they are doing, I am still guessing blindly.
While I see the logic in your statement, a lawsuit is very impossible. Open and Office are generic words, and you can't simply trademark words and outlaw their regular meanings in English. Perhaps Microsoft choose the name intentionally, who knows.
If any, the opposite can also be argued. Open Office is a very generic name and they own the trademarks only for the word openoffice.org AFAIK. A lawsuit, it is not, very.
I am not the OP, but he raises a valid point. Gratification is fine, and is the base of many systems that we have here. The problem is when the sentence tends to be more like "As long as I get what you want, I'm OK with ___ being screwed and dry".
There are also some things called principles and doctrines. If everyone stops giving a damn about them, this world will end up a different place.
No it wasn't. It was a complaint made by many who never used it.
It's not true, and never was true.
And I've been using KDE with Redhat (and now Fedora) since '99 I'll bite on that one. Please explain then why this site came up, and why it had an active user and devel base. Fedora when it was at core 1 or 2 realized the mistake redhat was doing by crippling kde, and they started including the default packages with less modifications. In case you wanted a list of stuff that were removed out - they were xine-lib support for kde-libs, arts threading, a lot of the standard applications, custom modifying a few kde headers (this caused problems for me while trying to compile kbear 2.0 at that time).
I remember all of this because I was a redhat fan since 6.0. But RH 8.0 drove me too crazy within the first month that I switched to mdk9. It may have worked for you, and I am not nitpicking you as a user. But there were a large number of users like me who were frustrated, a lot of them swicthed distros, some of them started using the unsupported packages from kde-redhat. The fact that there were a lot of discontented users atleast shows that there was a problem somewhere.
Alan Cox and the other big shots at Redhat have in the past repeatedly said that they will not add support for mp3, or any other patended technology into Redhat. It all started with 8.0, and RH's policy has been AFAIK to tell the user that so-and-so will never be supported until the patent expires. Its sad to see such a good ideaology been tossed aside because of market pressure.
Whatever, I am not one to complain, but given the way Bluecurve was thrust upon users, and the way that they crippled kde so that gnome looks better (I dont want to start a holy flame war, but this *was* the state of things 5-6 years ago), I doubt whether they will make any serious dent in the market. But this is free software, the more people focussing on an area usually only brings the better - atleast its going to be code that others can use too.
There is a difference. KDE has had kioslaves for years, where the browser can open more than 20 different protocols, including http,ftp, webdav, ldap etc... When you look at it, the sound design of it wins you with all the advantages it can offer. Everything is a different library, and it takes a good exploit in one to compromise another, something which hasnt yet occurred iirc. Plus the benefits are easily observable, which include opening an mp3 over ssh in amarok, without the app even knowing that such a thing is happening. IE's integration AFAIK was just so that microsoft had an excuse to ship the browser as standard, and had no such advantages.
All said, doing everything via the browser is a bad idea. They should have something like applets which can use the gecko engine to make calls outside, and not have the whole os run off the browser. C++ exists as a system language for a reason - thats speed, performance and stability. I am not trading my desktop for a javascript app, heck I thought vista was a mistake with all its memory requirements!
But you don't engineer a bridge by thinking about the interaction of individual atoms, not because that isn't the "right" way of doing it, but because it takes too long and is too expensive. While its true that you do not need to know the atomic theory to deal with bridges, you need to have taken the courses in Material Strength, Kinematics and Fluid Mechanics to actually design one. (I know this because a couple of my friends in college are doing exactly this.) And all these courses need a good amount of mathematics, especially calculus, Fourier transformations and Laplace's theory.
My point is that any science without mathematics is a joke at best. While maths is not what each science is all about, it forms an essential core needed for the foundations of it. The same goes for CS - good algorithm design needs understanding of the big O principle, and why some algorithms might be better than others in certain use cases. I also have a soft corner for set theory and the probability courses - because I liked them
I don't agree the blame is with Cisco, not until I see more evidence. Cisco has some of the most stable operating systems. The cmd line interface can sometimes suck, but their stability is very remarkable. The fault I am guessing is with the ISP for not planning network redundancy and not scaling their networks in time. Cisco might look bad in this article, but their track record in creating an OS with less number of bugs is much better than Microsoft, Sun and the others.
I take it that you both haven't had to manage systems in an enterprise. Its a royal pain. Every tiny patch will need to go through change control vetted by a couple of PHBs, after first being tested in a qa and development environment. I'll any day apply 20 patches at one go (after going through this monkey dance), rather than 1 a day. I know that the systems might be unsafe, but this is _much_ more sane for me, than having meetings every day to educate everyone about why we suddenly have a lot of vulnerabilities that need daily patching.
So, if you ask me, the best vendors are oracle etc.. who release a quarterly patch set. No PHB ever has a problem applying that; they just look at it and say "Wee, thats a shit load of patches. Damn, apply them quick". I guess a lot of people here might share the same sentiment.
You are talking about port forwarding. NAT has no such limits.
Its a feature, not a bug! How else would you be forced to read all those emails?
Microsoft did something like this? So does this mean that as an unprivileged user, I can
1) chmod u+s an executable (using whatever method that windows uses) and
2) chown Admin:Admin the executable?
Its a disaster waiting to happen IMHO.
I've heard about a few others, but do you know what the quality of their linux drivers are like? RME is a company that has gone on record to say that they will develop alsa drivers and make their data sheets public. Are there any other manufacturers in the professional audio category that do the same thing? Even ones with a half assed driver will pass, I am just looking at the options that I have.
I know you are joking, but there are _really_ expensive cards/dsp boxes out there with terrific alsa support.