The post I replied to seemed to be about Europe in general. Of course it doesn't work like that as your post shows clearly, the actual law and its implications differ from country to country. The situation as I described it is true for the Netherlands, and likely some other parts around Europe, but isn't generally true for Europe as a whole either.
Another interesting difference I noticed is that German law seems to explicitly deal with 'illegal' sources, whereas Dutch law doesn't care about the status of the source whatsoever (at least for now)
On another note.. the levy on recordable media here is insane compared to Germany (I spend a lot of time in Berlin).
But good to know that when in Germany and using localy bought media, I can actually make copies for family and relatives there.
Actually, it's quite the opposite; copyright is about the interests of the artist. The point is to give an artist the ability to make money on what they create
No, the point is to put the artist in a better position to recoup the cost of producing and make some money also. This may sound like hair splitting, but the way you put it sounds a bit too much like an implicit right to make money on a creation, there is no such right.
, so that artists have an incentive to go on creating, thus encouraging the progression of the arts. The individual consumer's interests are not central to the idea of copyright at all.
No, but neither are the interests of the artist according to your own explanation of what the constitution says.
One could argue that while it is not intended to serve the interests 'the consumer' as an individual, it is intended to serve the interests of 'consumers' of works of art as a group
except when they only sing a song created by someone else
And that is where you are wrong (both with the specific bit that I quoted, as with the similar conclusions about who does and doesn't 'create' things).
You mention copyright more then once. Have you ever noticed how copyright on a song and copyright on a specific performance of that song are seperate? A 'performance' definitely creates something new, abeit based on the performer and the piece being performed.
There is one more fundamental flaw to your post however.
Grandparent is talking about how certain groups get repeated payment for a single bit of work and others do not.
You defend this situation by pointing at copyright.
Copyright in no way provides the reason for this differentiation, it merely provides the means by which this difference is encoded in law.
Please try again when you can explain WHY we have copyright, without ending with a circular argument, and without just pointing at the need to 'reward artists'.
They taxed the media for when you make a copy of a CD you already own for your car.
First of all, it is a levy, not a tax. It is intended to compensate for private copying. Second, unlike what you believe, you do not have to own a legal source for your copy, but you are only allowed a single personal copy made in such a way from each specific work. For example, it is completely legal for me to borrow a CD from someone (or a library, or why not rent it..) and make a personal copy of it on a CDR for which this levy has been payed. This copy stays legal also after I return the original. I am however limited to making that one copy, and I cannot make it for anyone other then myself.
This levy does not give you the right to distribute.
Seeing what efford people took to somehow hack client to client file transfers into irc clients, I am pretty confident that users simply want this feature, and any client not having it is going to be ignored by a substantial number of users.
So.. stick a virus scanner in there maybe if this is a concern.
Indeed. sorry, didn't have a link, I obtained an official copy a few years ago in paper form. Anyway, anyone involved in computer security in the US military (and outside it as well for that matter) at least should know about those books.
The DOD has a nice series of books related to this subject, often called the rainbow series. You are specifically interested in the 'orange book' from it if you want to know a bit more about guidelines for building secure systems.
Verifying the origin and production of hardware and software are definitely a part of those guidelines.
Preface: I am not 'American', rather I am European, but the reasoning you present is pretty common.
That said, I'm not sure how you can really avoid this anymore. If you can buy a computer which is both assembled and has a majority of its parts made in this country, I'd really like to know where to get one (and how many thousands of dollars it costs). Except for food, pretty much anything that gets bought, either by a private citizen or the government, is going to increase our current-account deficit.
There is a real concern there, and it is really easy to understand why it is happening.. people don't care at all about the long term consequences when it can save them a dollar (euro for the people overhere) today.
Interestingly, this is much more true then it was say 50 years ago (people from older generations here often want a 'local product' or if not possible, at least a 'local brand').
Maybe the real problem however is that money is considered more important then any other arguments for the typical person.
At any rate, I can quite support your call to Americans to 'buy American'.
I admit to not being an economist, so when I get told by people knowledgeable in these things that "free trade helps our economy more than it hurts it," I have to basically shrug and agree. Maybe it's more advantageous to have completely free trade than to engage in protectionism. It sure doesn't seem like this intuitively; in fact it really seems like we're dying the death of a thousand cuts as we slowly outsource everything, and are on a path that seems suspiciously unsustainable. If this is not the case, if a complete "service economy," where everybody is getting paid for doing something and then turning around and spending their paycheck to buy imported goods, is infinitely sustainable, than that argument sure isn't being sold to the American public very well, because there are a lot of people more unhappy than I with the current direction. (And I'm not talking about politics / disliking the President here, we're talking about things bigger than any one administration.)
A few issues here:
1. Free trade does nowhere mean that you cannot prefer local products, rather, it says that your government should not get in the way of such choices.
2. If people decide to prefer local products, it provides a reason for companies to make products locally. This is quite how 'free trade' is supposed to work.
3. In this case, the primary concern is security as per the DOD orange book on building secure systems. This is a set of guidelines that was written in the 70s already, and still applies today. It is good to see that someone there remembers them. This specific case has nothing to do with free trade.
On a slight tangent: I feel the same way with the Iraq reconstruction efforts. I found it slightly comical when the European governments were protesting about the number of U.S. reconstruction contracts going to U.S. companies. Can you say, "no shit, Sherlock?" Unless they're needed for some particular skill that simply isn't obtainable from a U.S. contractor, there better not be any European companies on the taxpayer payroll over there. Opinions on the war, WMDs, and "Iraqi Freedom" aside, I think we can all agree that it was never sold to the public as a welfare program for foreign contracting corporations. If a particular set of skills is needed at a particular time and place, and a foreign company is the only one in a position to provide that, by all means hire them. But the second a U.S. company is in a position to take over, that better be where the tax money is going. I'm not a big fan of Halliburton, but I'd rather they be the recipient of my tax dollars than Siemens, ABB, or Mitsubishi Estate. Unless someone can come up with a very convincing argument on why spending tax dollars there brings back more benefit to the U.S. taxpayer than keeping it domestic.
You see, France and Germany objected. The UK, Spain, Poland, The Netherlands, Italy a
I really suggest you go read the DOD's 'orange book' on secure systems, it explains the issue very well. While this book is old, and some things in it are outdated, the ideas and methods it suggests are still quite relevant.
And when you report to Nvidia they tell you to wait for the next release of their driver that doesn't mention anything about your bug in its changelog. So you pop the new driver version in and see if it works. Nope, they didn't fix your bug. Contact Nvidia again, and they say that they're going to fix it in the next driver release. Great, wait around. Install the new driver when it comes out that doesn't mention anything about your bug in its changelog... and it works! The bug was fixed.
That might have happened, but considering what is in their changelog, quite a few do get mentioned there.
Upgrade your kernel a few days later and it breaks again. Contact Nvidia yet again and yet again have them tell you to wait for the next driver. Install the next driver when it comes out and find out that Nvidia discontinued support for you card.
Interesting.. I have used nvidia drivers for the last 2 years on a variety of platforms including Linux and FreeBSD. On both issues between the kernel and driver are the exception, tho they happen somewhat more often on Linux. Maybe that is telling..
At the moment I am using 2 old tnt2 cards (with a legacy driver since they are no longer supported by the current drivers), but both on FreeBSD where they work with basicly all versions between 4.11 and 7.0 (current development release), no idea if that would be an issue on Linux now.. I only use a fx5200 on Linux at the moment, which is supported perfectly fine.
Fuckers! Rip the damn thing out and deal with crappy performance from an old ATI card with open source drivers.
Well, obviously you could already live with the low performance of an old card and the open source drivers for ati cards do quite nice on an old card. I do the same on one machine where high quality graphics on 2 tft screens and a little bit of opengl (which would be feasable to do entirely on the cpu I guess) for the desktop is what I need.
I do however like a bit of gaming every now and then.. Since Enemy territory and some mods satisfy that nicely, I see no reason to have a windows install or a console when I can also solve that by spending some tens of euros every few years on a graphics card. For now a mx440 or better with the nvidia driver runs circles around any ati card with the oss drivers, and a mx440 isn't really gonna be enough nowadays for a bit of gaming.
As a sidenote, what I just can't understand is what the issue is many Linux users have with people actually having choice.. It means they could decide something other then what you'd do.. but really, that is what 'Free' is about.
One of the research fellows decided he needed a top end machine to explore imaging technology for something. We dropped a cool $15,000 on an IBM box that I thought was nothing more than a souped up PC. Heck, real workstations from IBM, Sun, DEC, and HP were available for that kind of money!
Judging from the next part of your post, and the price indication, it sounds like you ended up buying a model 9590 (desktop) or a 9595 (deskside), which are both 'pc compatible' from a software point of view, but are not like a pc in how they were built. Besides the better performance that you could get from them, their main argument is that they could grow with your requirements.
An interesting detail of the xx90 and xx95 machines is that the cpu, memory controller and dma controller and mca were integrated onto what was called the processor complex. This was an easy to replace module. The consequence of this setup was that upgrading the processor complex also got you an appropriately faster memory and dma controller, at times with new functionality also. The old 8595 that I have went from a 20mhz 32bit mca bus with 24bit addressing for dma to a 50mhz bus with 32bit addressing and 64bit 'streaming' data transfer for dma with cards that supported that (besides going from its initial 486dx to a p200)
Another interesting thing is that from the start those machines did interleaved access to memory, effectively allowing 64bit or double rate 32bit memory access.
So yeah, for all practical purposes you bought an x86 based workstation, not a pc.
At any rate... there was a small group of people that needed such machines for desktop use (many more wanted them for server use) but overall this idea didn't work out well in the rapdily changing pc world. Actually, the whole concept of the traditional workstation seems outdated by now, and for most purposes it was once the 686 class cpus started becomming available, and x86 smp machines became a practical idea. That incidentely also spelled the end of line for the 9595 (which had been renamed to pc server 500 or something like that by then). The 9590 and other 'desktop' mca machines had dissapeared before that already.
Just for the heck of it, I priced out a roughly equivalent PCI based clone. I couldn't quite reach the kind of performance numbers of that IBM MCA box, but I could get 80+ percent of the performance for less than half price. I didn't tell anyone, but someone else must have run the same exercise. That was the last IBM MCA machine that lab bought.
And that was indeed the real problem. Yes, the machine can be a bit faster, and would likely outlast any clone that was relevant at the time due to its upgradability.. but in the end that idea only worked well for servers, for a desktop it was simply easier to buy a new one once the current one becomes outdated (not cheaper on the long term maybe, but definitely a lot cheaper on the short term)
I can see how this argument can be made for a 3 or 5 year-old, since they are starting to have personality and make their own choices.
You are trying to make a rational argument about what is mostly an emotional issue.
No, there is typically no reason to (for example) be scared of most spiders, flying in an airplane or such, yet people are even when understanding why it is unreasonable.
PC vs console for gaming is another discussion alltogether. I tend to agree with your point of view.
That said, most people have a tv at home, and if they care about 'home entertainment' they might even have a hdtv already, so for them a console would be quite a bit cheaper then for you. Many of them don't seem to care what their game runs on as long as it looks 'cool' and gives them the playing experience they want. Yeah, I know people with high-end gaming rigs, and an xbox 360 and a ps2 and a gamecube and.. (you get the picture).. Seeing such people you might even wonder if you would qualify for 'hardcore gamer':)
but having been granted a patent implies validity.
That is part of the problem, no, it doesn't imply validity. It implies that the patent was filed and is not obviously invalid at first glance by the patent office.
I wasn't implying there was any technical connection between MCA and OS/2, the fear among clonemakers was that IBM would "bundle" them somehow.
Well, in a way they did, but that was more in the sense of 'a new generation pc and to make proper use of the technology, there is also a new OS.'
This link may have been part of what made people doubtfull indeed despite there being no technical reason to believe this linking in marketing also implied that other operating systems would be restricted somehow from using it (properly?)
At any rate, mca, just like os/2 were from a technical point of view pretty nice, but got screwed over by IBM needing its time to realize how much the world had changed really...
By 1988 they had just caught up with the reality of clones and thought they had figured a nice way to proffit from them (still wonder if they realized how clones had caused the explosive growth of the pc market that had been going on for a while, and how they were already proffiting a lot from that)..
That pcs were turning into a mass market product by then was something they had to get to terms with still (despite the signs being rather clear by then). The only area where they did catch up with the pc market in time was with laptops.. but thats a few years later already.. for the rest it always seemed to me like they were just trying to catchup with reality all the time.
I still have a few mca machines around, the nicest one is a rather 'modded' ps/2 8595, (very early production model from 1992). It currently has an Intel p200 cpu (modified p60 cpu complex). This machine saw active service from its introduction (with a 486dx25 cpu) till 2001 when it became extremely difficult to upgrade to a newer generation cpu. The rest of the machine was still quite comparable to the typical machine of that time, outdoing many in i/o and memory performance. It was insanely expensive for a pc at the time (think in the $15-45k), but then, it basicly stayed current for almost a decade. Oh, and it was built like a tank. You won't do much to it with a sledgehammer:)
Very nice piece of technology, but not the kind of cost effective solution that PCs are about.. It is showing what the technology could do, and as a server it has been pretty succesfull, but in that it is also the exception to the rule for a mca based machine.. the rest of them were far from succesfull and were generally expensive for what they offered. This one wasn't, provided you maintained and updated it.
IBM could have used the MCA license to basically dictate what sort of machines the PC industry could build
That they could, altho for all I can tell from the inside back then, IBM at that time lived in fear for being split up like AT&T was earlier. They were uncomfortable with not being in control over the pc market, but from what I can tell, by 1988 or maybe earlier already they had realized that they'd have to compete based on quality and features also (still believed in that the name would do at least half of the selling.. but seeing that that was changing rapidly). Yeah, they'd have liked to gain back that control, but fear for being split up or otherwise being restricted by court made them play pretty fair with regards to their attempts to get some control.
Their licencing terms were strict, and they were definitely trying to make a buck from their competitors, and specifically, they were trying to get some money from those whom had been undercutting their prices while also ignoring their patents.. but for all I can tell that was the main purpose of it.
, and even what operating system to put on them. Or that was the fear anyway.
The first 'fear' is for something that was possible, tho for what I know not very likely. The second 'fear' is just nonsense as everyone knows who ever looked at the interface it offers to an OS. It is very clean and well documented, and seems pretty easy to use.. Machines using it can run most operating systems that will also run on other x86 hardware from that time, at least I have had Solaris (2.6...), NetBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, DOS and NT 3.5 on MCA based machines, and when looking at the Net/FreeBSD mca code, the bus seems to be a lot more straightforward and easy to use then say pci or the mess that is isa pnp. Auto configuring, and can tell you basicly everything about every card you'd need to know to attach a driver to it in a nicely structured way.
I just bought a new card for around $50.. No, its not the best performer out there, but it works well enough with all modern games that they are nicely playable. In a year or 2 I'll get me a new one.. total expense over 5 years.. 2 1/2 * $50.. which doesn't come close to what you suggest spending on one card.
Ah.. you were talking about a hardcore gamer who does spend $400+ on a graphics card? those same people won't have a problem spending $600 on a console either if the games are convincing enough.
This sounds very much like IBM's problems in the 80's. IBM had a very proprietary attitude regarding busses (MicroChannel Architecture), networking (LUA / SNA), and probably others. My impression (and I worked at IBM for a while) was that IBM figured it could get away with designs that required end-to-end IBM'ness, because the big customers would buy ALL their kit from IBM anyway. And in that sales situation, why let other companies have an in?
While you are quite right with regards to IBM's general attitude back then, MCA isn't a very good example of it, it is actually an interesting incident.
As you may know, some companies (Appricot comes to mind inmediately) produced MCA machines as well. Compaq could have if they wanted to, but had its own reasons for wanting an alternative.
What happened was that those companies that actually produced, or could produce MCA machines had settled outstanding licencing issues regarding dma and some other patents used in pcs. This was basicly a requirement for obtaining a licence on MCA technology.
It never caught on for various reasons, the fact that you could mostly get IBM hardware for MCA was an important of them (I do have MCA cards from quite a few other companies here, including 3com, creative, adaptec and intel).
(former IBM employee during the late 80s and all of the 90s)
Why do people always asume that "desktop user" is someone who has a full time admin doing every thing for them?
I am not assuming that, I am assuming that as it is, FreeBSD, and to a lesser extent Linux, is not yet suitable for a desktop user who both lacks knowledge and an admin.
That said, supporting a few dozen freebsd desktops is far from a fulltime job.
Was I supposed to print one out when I downloaded the ISO's?? Sorry, most people are going to get here before they realize they are over their head and go back to Linux or probably Windows. I think delusional people like you hurt the chances of FreeBSD actually seeing ~5% of the desktop more than they help.
No you weren't. The system is supposed to get easy enough to use so that you will need a bit of relatively easy to get knowledge, but thats it. What I am saying is that right now it isn't there yet, and getting it a better installer isn't gonna help that situation right now, rather, it is more likely to make more people look at it and get frustrated because they could get it to install, but can't make it work as they'd like.
And if it doesn't? Seems to be an awful lot of weird behaviour that only happens to people running nvidia's DRI. Nvidia's not going to help you with other hardware, kernel folk aren't going to help you if you're running a tainted kernel.
First of all, I have used nvidia drivers on different platforms, including Windows, Linux (various distributions including FC4, Debian (testing from about 6 months ago), Gentoo) and FreeBSD. On none of those I found that the nvidia drivers were generally the cause of problems. In cases where they were, and where it was reported to nvidia, there usually followed a fix for the problem.
If you can show that their code causes the problem then they will at least try to help. I can say this from repeated experience. Yes it would be nicer if all the source was available. Yes you do run a risk of ending up with unsupported hardware over time when relying on a closed source driver, but knowing those risks, I find it highly preferable over not having the functionality it provides, esp. since as long as you don't buy the latest and greatest cards, I can buy a new one for less then I get payed for an hour of work.
So, what you indeed lack in support from the kernel developers, you can at least partly get back. But hey, pick whatever works best for you.
Supposed bugs or their potential existance is not an argument for using one piece of software or the other, all software has bugs, but few of those affect you most likely. Quality of code, seriousness of potential bugs, how do those get fixed, and support in general are usually good arguments however. If you feel more comfortable with only using open source software then be my guest, but stop spreading fud while trying to convince the world that your view is the only valid one.
And tested in more hardware configurations then nvidia ever will...
Yes. nothing new there. Guess what, in most untested cases it still works.
And it's not so easy to get code put into the kernel as you think - the code has to be portable, 64/32 bit safe, smp & kernel preemption friendly, etc etc. Many of these things will shake out bugs you wouldn't have known existed.
I have been involved in OS development for over 15 years, I am pretty aware of all that. I have code in 2 operating systems that are in current use, and some in one that is no longer being used much. I have worked with Microsoft developers, IBM developers, Linux developers, FreeBSD developers and many others. Yes, writing software can be quite complex and difficult. Sometimes a large group does a better job at it, sometimes a tiny group of very dedicated people do a better job at it, there is no telling in advance.
The one clear advantage that oss has is that you can interfer yourself, and while I have the capabilities often to do so, I seldom actually get to do so because in virtually all cases asking the current developers and providing them with GOOD INFORMATION for reproducing and locating the actual bug is a lot more effective, regardless of dealing with open source or closed source software.
I'm afraid that it's a guarantee for lack of support. (Running a tainted kernel guarantees you won't recieve support from the core kernel group if you're having troubles.)
So, you try to reproduce the problem without the tainting driver and if it no longer occurs, you report to nvidia, if it still does you report to the linux developers with a now untainted and supported situation.
Yes, it is a bit more troublesome, but by far not as bad as you are suggesting.
Furthermore, while being oss is no guarantee of quality, inclusion in the mainline kernel tree is (to some extent anyway
Ah, it does?
Sorry, but all that it does is ensure that the driver will be maintained to the level that it compiles, and hopefully works, and gets built automatically when updating your kernel.
Sure you can get fast real links cheap if you only utilise them lightly and either pay by the gigabyte or hit some other kind of punishment
Yes.. that was the point. bandwidth itself is cheap, data transfer is what costs. It is cheaper often when bought in advance, but it is still the main factor determining the price of your connection, not whatever bandwidth you can use during peaks.
That was my entire point, and it was in reply to the claim that bandwidth is very expensive.
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is almost certainly based around a mathematical method
While the mathematical method is not patentable, a novel way of using it in a device might well be.
The post I replied to seemed to be about Europe in general. Of course it doesn't work like that as your post shows clearly, the actual law and its implications differ from country to country. The situation as I described it is true for the Netherlands, and likely some other parts around Europe, but isn't generally true for Europe as a whole either.
Another interesting difference I noticed is that German law seems to explicitly deal with 'illegal' sources, whereas Dutch law doesn't care about the status of the source whatsoever (at least for now)
On another note.. the levy on recordable media here is insane compared to Germany (I spend a lot of time in Berlin).
But good to know that when in Germany and using localy bought media, I can actually make copies for family and relatives there.
Actually, it's quite the opposite; copyright is about the interests of the artist. The point is to give an artist the ability to make money on what they create
No, the point is to put the artist in a better position to recoup the cost of producing and make some money also. This may sound like hair splitting, but the way you put it sounds a bit too much like an implicit right to make money on a creation, there is no such right.
, so that artists have an incentive to go on creating, thus encouraging the progression of the arts. The individual consumer's interests are not central to the idea of copyright at all.
No, but neither are the interests of the artist according to your own explanation of what the constitution says.
One could argue that while it is not intended to serve the interests 'the consumer' as an individual, it is intended to serve the interests of 'consumers' of works of art as a group
except when they only sing a song created by someone else
And that is where you are wrong (both with the specific bit that I quoted, as with the similar conclusions about who does and doesn't 'create' things).
You mention copyright more then once. Have you ever noticed how copyright on a song and copyright on a specific performance of that song are seperate? A 'performance' definitely creates something new, abeit based on the performer and the piece being performed.
There is one more fundamental flaw to your post however.
Grandparent is talking about how certain groups get repeated payment for a single bit of work and others do not.
You defend this situation by pointing at copyright.
Copyright in no way provides the reason for this differentiation, it merely provides the means by which this difference is encoded in law.
Please try again when you can explain WHY we have copyright, without ending with a circular argument, and without just pointing at the need to 'reward artists'.
They taxed the media for when you make a copy of a CD you already own for your car.
First of all, it is a levy, not a tax. It is intended to compensate for private copying.
Second, unlike what you believe, you do not have to own a legal source for your copy, but you are only allowed a single personal copy made in such a way from each specific work. For example, it is completely legal for me to borrow a CD from someone (or a library, or why not rent it..) and make a personal copy of it on a CDR for which this levy has been payed. This copy stays legal also after I return the original. I am however limited to making that one copy, and I cannot make it for anyone other then myself.
This levy does not give you the right to distribute.
Seeing what efford people took to somehow hack client to client file transfers into irc clients, I am pretty confident that users simply want this feature, and any client not having it is going to be ignored by a substantial number of users.
So.. stick a virus scanner in there maybe if this is a concern.
So what does that say about the Microsoft antitrust case brought up by the likes of Netscape and others?
Microsoft's actions were directly intended to reduce competition and choice for the consumer.
Offering Explorer as a free browser was not the problem, tying it in with Windows in the way that they did was the problem.
Indeed. sorry, didn't have a link, I obtained an official copy a few years ago in paper form. Anyway, anyone involved in computer security in the US military (and outside it as well for that matter) at least should know about those books.
Read this and realize the USA is a party to this as well.
The DOD has a nice series of books related to this subject, often called the rainbow series. You are specifically interested in the 'orange book' from it if you want to know a bit more about guidelines for building secure systems.
Verifying the origin and production of hardware and software are definitely a part of those guidelines.
Preface: I am not 'American', rather I am European, but the reasoning you present is pretty common.
That said, I'm not sure how you can really avoid this anymore. If you can buy a computer which is both assembled and has a majority of its parts made in this country, I'd really like to know where to get one (and how many thousands of dollars it costs). Except for food, pretty much anything that gets bought, either by a private citizen or the government, is going to increase our current-account deficit.
There is a real concern there, and it is really easy to understand why it is happening.. people don't care at all about the long term consequences when it can save them a dollar (euro for the people overhere) today.
Interestingly, this is much more true then it was say 50 years ago (people from older generations here often want a 'local product' or if not possible, at least a 'local brand').
Maybe the real problem however is that money is considered more important then any other arguments for the typical person.
At any rate, I can quite support your call to Americans to 'buy American'.
I admit to not being an economist, so when I get told by people knowledgeable in these things that "free trade helps our economy more than it hurts it," I have to basically shrug and agree. Maybe it's more advantageous to have completely free trade than to engage in protectionism. It sure doesn't seem like this intuitively; in fact it really seems like we're dying the death of a thousand cuts as we slowly outsource everything, and are on a path that seems suspiciously unsustainable. If this is not the case, if a complete "service economy," where everybody is getting paid for doing something and then turning around and spending their paycheck to buy imported goods, is infinitely sustainable, than that argument sure isn't being sold to the American public very well, because there are a lot of people more unhappy than I with the current direction. (And I'm not talking about politics / disliking the President here, we're talking about things bigger than any one administration.)
A few issues here:
1. Free trade does nowhere mean that you cannot prefer local products, rather, it says that your government should not get in the way of such choices.
2. If people decide to prefer local products, it provides a reason for companies to make products locally. This is quite how 'free trade' is supposed to work.
3. In this case, the primary concern is security as per the DOD orange book on building secure systems. This is a set of guidelines that was written in the 70s already, and still applies today. It is good to see that someone there remembers them. This specific case has nothing to do with free trade.
On a slight tangent: I feel the same way with the Iraq reconstruction efforts. I found it slightly comical when the European governments were protesting about the number of U.S. reconstruction contracts going to U.S. companies. Can you say, "no shit, Sherlock?" Unless they're needed for some particular skill that simply isn't obtainable from a U.S. contractor, there better not be any European companies on the taxpayer payroll over there. Opinions on the war, WMDs, and "Iraqi Freedom" aside, I think we can all agree that it was never sold to the public as a welfare program for foreign contracting corporations. If a particular set of skills is needed at a particular time and place, and a foreign company is the only one in a position to provide that, by all means hire them. But the second a U.S. company is in a position to take over, that better be where the tax money is going. I'm not a big fan of Halliburton, but I'd rather they be the recipient of my tax dollars than Siemens, ABB, or Mitsubishi Estate. Unless someone can come up with a very convincing argument on why spending tax dollars there brings back more benefit to the U.S. taxpayer than keeping it domestic.
You see, France and Germany objected. The UK, Spain, Poland, The Netherlands, Italy a
I really suggest you go read the DOD's 'orange book' on secure systems, it explains the issue very well. While this book is old, and some things in it are outdated, the ideas and methods it suggests are still quite relevant.
And when you report to Nvidia they tell you to wait for the next release of their driver that doesn't mention anything about your bug in its changelog. So you pop the new driver version in and see if it works. Nope, they didn't fix your bug. Contact Nvidia again, and they say that they're going to fix it in the next driver release. Great, wait around. Install the new driver when it comes out that doesn't mention anything about your bug in its changelog... and it works! The bug was fixed.
That might have happened, but considering what is in their changelog, quite a few do get mentioned there.
Upgrade your kernel a few days later and it breaks again. Contact Nvidia yet again and yet again have them tell you to wait for the next driver. Install the next driver when it comes out and find out that Nvidia discontinued support for you card.
Interesting.. I have used nvidia drivers for the last 2 years on a variety of platforms including Linux and FreeBSD. On both issues between the kernel and driver are the exception, tho they happen somewhat more often on Linux. Maybe that is telling..
At the moment I am using 2 old tnt2 cards (with a legacy driver since they are no longer supported by the current drivers), but both on FreeBSD where they work with basicly all versions between 4.11 and 7.0 (current development release), no idea if that would be an issue on Linux now.. I only use a fx5200 on Linux at the moment, which is supported perfectly fine.
Fuckers! Rip the damn thing out and deal with crappy performance from an old ATI card with open source drivers.
Well, obviously you could already live with the low performance of an old card and the open source drivers for ati cards do quite nice on an old card. I do the same on one machine where high quality graphics on 2 tft screens and a little bit of opengl (which would be feasable to do entirely on the cpu I guess) for the desktop is what I need.
I do however like a bit of gaming every now and then.. Since Enemy territory and some mods satisfy that nicely, I see no reason to have a windows install or a console when I can also solve that by spending some tens of euros every few years on a graphics card. For now a mx440 or better with the nvidia driver runs circles around any ati card with the oss drivers, and a mx440 isn't really gonna be enough nowadays for a bit of gaming.
As a sidenote, what I just can't understand is what the issue is many Linux users have with people actually having choice.. It means they could decide something other then what you'd do.. but really, that is what 'Free' is about.
One of the research fellows decided he needed a top end machine to explore imaging technology for something. We dropped a cool $15,000 on an IBM box that I thought was nothing more than a souped up PC. Heck, real workstations from IBM, Sun, DEC, and HP were available for that kind of money!
Judging from the next part of your post, and the price indication, it sounds like you ended up buying a model 9590 (desktop) or a 9595 (deskside), which are both 'pc compatible' from a software point of view, but are not like a pc in how they were built. Besides the better performance that you could get from them, their main argument is that they could grow with your requirements.
An interesting detail of the xx90 and xx95 machines is that the cpu, memory controller and dma controller and mca were integrated onto what was called the processor complex. This was an easy to replace module. The consequence of this setup was that upgrading the processor complex also got you an appropriately faster memory and dma controller, at times with new functionality also. The old 8595 that I have went from a 20mhz 32bit mca bus with 24bit addressing for dma to a 50mhz bus with 32bit addressing and 64bit 'streaming' data transfer for dma with cards that supported that (besides going from its initial 486dx to a p200)
Another interesting thing is that from the start those machines did interleaved access to memory, effectively allowing 64bit or double rate 32bit memory access.
So yeah, for all practical purposes you bought an x86 based workstation, not a pc.
At any rate... there was a small group of people that needed such machines for desktop use (many more wanted them for server use) but overall this idea didn't work out well in the rapdily changing pc world. Actually, the whole concept of the traditional workstation seems outdated by now, and for most purposes it was once the 686 class cpus started becomming available, and x86 smp machines became a practical idea. That incidentely also spelled the end of line for the 9595 (which had been renamed to pc server 500 or something like that by then). The 9590 and other 'desktop' mca machines had dissapeared before that already.
Just for the heck of it, I priced out a roughly equivalent PCI based clone. I couldn't quite reach the kind of performance numbers of that IBM MCA box, but I could get 80+ percent of the performance for less than half price. I didn't tell anyone, but someone else must have run the same exercise. That was the last IBM MCA machine that lab bought.
And that was indeed the real problem. Yes, the machine can be a bit faster, and would likely outlast any clone that was relevant at the time due to its upgradability.. but in the end that idea only worked well for servers, for a desktop it was simply easier to buy a new one once the current one becomes outdated (not cheaper on the long term maybe, but definitely a lot cheaper on the short term)
I can see how this argument can be made for a 3 or 5 year-old, since they are starting to have personality and make their own choices.
You are trying to make a rational argument about what is mostly an emotional issue.
No, there is typically no reason to (for example) be scared of most spiders, flying in an airplane or such, yet people are even when understanding why it is unreasonable.
PC vs console for gaming is another discussion alltogether. I tend to agree with your point of view.
:)
That said, most people have a tv at home, and if they care about 'home entertainment' they might even have a hdtv already, so for them a console would be quite a bit cheaper then for you. Many of them don't seem to care what their game runs on as long as it looks 'cool' and gives them the playing experience they want. Yeah, I know people with high-end gaming rigs, and an xbox 360 and a ps2 and a gamecube and.. (you get the picture).. Seeing such people you might even wonder if you would qualify for 'hardcore gamer'
but having been granted a patent implies validity.
That is part of the problem, no, it doesn't imply validity. It implies that the patent was filed and is not obviously invalid at first glance by the patent office.
I wasn't implying there was any technical connection between MCA and OS/2, the fear among clonemakers was that IBM would "bundle" them somehow.
:)
Well, in a way they did, but that was more in the sense of 'a new generation pc and to make proper use of the technology, there is also a new OS.'
This link may have been part of what made people doubtfull indeed despite there being no technical reason to believe this linking in marketing also implied that other operating systems would be restricted somehow from using it (properly?)
At any rate, mca, just like os/2 were from a technical point of view pretty nice, but got screwed over by IBM needing its time to realize how much the world had changed really...
By 1988 they had just caught up with the reality of clones and thought they had figured a nice way to proffit from them (still wonder if they realized how clones had caused the explosive growth of the pc market that had been going on for a while, and how they were already proffiting a lot from that)..
That pcs were turning into a mass market product by then was something they had to get to terms with still (despite the signs being rather clear by then). The only area where they did catch up with the pc market in time was with laptops.. but thats a few years later already.. for the rest it always seemed to me like they were just trying to catchup with reality all the time.
I still have a few mca machines around, the nicest one is a rather 'modded' ps/2 8595, (very early production model from 1992). It currently has an Intel p200 cpu (modified p60 cpu complex). This machine saw active service from its introduction (with a 486dx25 cpu) till 2001 when it became extremely difficult to upgrade to a newer generation cpu. The rest of the machine was still quite comparable to the typical machine of that time, outdoing many in i/o and memory performance. It was insanely expensive for a pc at the time (think in the $15-45k), but then, it basicly stayed current for almost a decade. Oh, and it was built like a tank. You won't do much to it with a sledgehammer
Very nice piece of technology, but not the kind of cost effective solution that PCs are about.. It is showing what the technology could do, and as a server it has been pretty succesfull, but in that it is also the exception to the rule for a mca based machine.. the rest of them were far from succesfull and were generally expensive for what they offered. This one wasn't, provided you maintained and updated it.
IBM could have used the MCA license to basically dictate what sort of machines the PC industry could build
...), NetBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, DOS and NT 3.5 on MCA based machines, and when looking at the Net/FreeBSD mca code, the bus seems to be a lot more straightforward and easy to use then say pci or the mess that is isa pnp. Auto configuring, and can tell you basicly everything about every card you'd need to know to attach a driver to it in a nicely structured way.
That they could, altho for all I can tell from the inside back then, IBM at that time lived in fear for being split up like AT&T was earlier. They were uncomfortable with not being in control over the pc market, but from what I can tell, by 1988 or maybe earlier already they had realized that they'd have to compete based on quality and features also (still believed in that the name would do at least half of the selling.. but seeing that that was changing rapidly). Yeah, they'd have liked to gain back that control, but fear for being split up or otherwise being restricted by court made them play pretty fair with regards to their attempts to get some control.
Their licencing terms were strict, and they were definitely trying to make a buck from their competitors, and specifically, they were trying to get some money from those whom had been undercutting their prices while also ignoring their patents.. but for all I can tell that was the main purpose of it.
, and even what operating system to put on them. Or that was the fear anyway.
The first 'fear' is for something that was possible, tho for what I know not very likely. The second 'fear' is just nonsense as everyone knows who ever looked at the interface it offers to an OS. It is very clean and well documented, and seems pretty easy to use.. Machines using it can run most operating systems that will also run on other x86 hardware from that time, at least I have had Solaris (2.6
And $400 for a video card isn't?
I just bought a new card for around $50.. No, its not the best performer out there, but it works well enough with all modern games that they are nicely playable. In a year or 2 I'll get me a new one.. total expense over 5 years.. 2 1/2 * $50.. which doesn't come close to what you suggest spending on one card.
Ah.. you were talking about a hardcore gamer who does spend $400+ on a graphics card? those same people won't have a problem spending $600 on a console either if the games are convincing enough.
This sounds very much like IBM's problems in the 80's. IBM had a very proprietary attitude regarding busses (MicroChannel Architecture), networking (LUA / SNA), and probably others. My impression (and I worked at IBM for a while) was that IBM figured it could get away with designs that required end-to-end IBM'ness, because the big customers would buy ALL their kit from IBM anyway. And in that sales situation, why let other companies have an in?
While you are quite right with regards to IBM's general attitude back then, MCA isn't a very good example of it, it is actually an interesting incident.
As you may know, some companies (Appricot comes to mind inmediately) produced MCA machines as well. Compaq could have if they wanted to, but had its own reasons for wanting an alternative.
What happened was that those companies that actually produced, or could produce MCA machines had settled outstanding licencing issues regarding dma and some other patents used in pcs. This was basicly a requirement for obtaining a licence on MCA technology.
It never caught on for various reasons, the fact that you could mostly get IBM hardware for MCA was an important of them (I do have MCA cards from quite a few other companies here, including 3com, creative, adaptec and intel).
(former IBM employee during the late 80s and all of the 90s)
Why do people always asume that "desktop user" is someone who has a full time admin doing every thing for them?
I am not assuming that, I am assuming that as it is, FreeBSD, and to a lesser extent Linux, is not yet suitable for a desktop user who both lacks knowledge and an admin.
That said, supporting a few dozen freebsd desktops is far from a fulltime job.
Was I supposed to print one out when I downloaded the ISO's?? Sorry, most people are going to get here before they realize they are over their head and go back to Linux or probably Windows. I think delusional people like you hurt the chances of FreeBSD actually seeing ~5% of the desktop more than they help.
No you weren't. The system is supposed to get easy enough to use so that you will need a bit of relatively easy to get knowledge, but thats it. What I am saying is that right now it isn't there yet, and getting it a better installer isn't gonna help that situation right now, rather, it is more likely to make more people look at it and get frustrated because they could get it to install, but can't make it work as they'd like.
And if it doesn't? Seems to be an awful lot of weird behaviour that only happens to people running nvidia's DRI. Nvidia's not going to help you with other hardware, kernel folk aren't going to help you if you're running a tainted kernel.
First of all, I have used nvidia drivers on different platforms, including Windows, Linux (various distributions including FC4, Debian (testing from about 6 months ago), Gentoo) and FreeBSD. On none of those I found that the nvidia drivers were generally the cause of problems. In cases where they were, and where it was reported to nvidia, there usually followed a fix for the problem.
If you can show that their code causes the problem then they will at least try to help. I can say this from repeated experience. Yes it would be nicer if all the source was available. Yes you do run a risk of ending up with unsupported hardware over time when relying on a closed source driver, but knowing those risks, I find it highly preferable over not having the functionality it provides, esp. since as long as you don't buy the latest and greatest cards, I can buy a new one for less then I get payed for an hour of work.
So, what you indeed lack in support from the kernel developers, you can at least partly get back. But hey, pick whatever works best for you.
Supposed bugs or their potential existance is not an argument for using one piece of software or the other, all software has bugs, but few of those affect you most likely. Quality of code, seriousness of potential bugs, how do those get fixed, and support in general are usually good arguments however. If you feel more comfortable with only using open source software then be my guest, but stop spreading fud while trying to convince the world that your view is the only valid one.
And tested in more hardware configurations then nvidia ever will...
Yes. nothing new there. Guess what, in most untested cases it still works.
And it's not so easy to get code put into the kernel as you think - the code has to be portable, 64/32 bit safe, smp & kernel preemption friendly, etc etc. Many of these things will shake out bugs you wouldn't have known existed.
I have been involved in OS development for over 15 years, I am pretty aware of all that. I have code in 2 operating systems that are in current use, and some in one that is no longer being used much. I have worked with Microsoft developers, IBM developers, Linux developers, FreeBSD developers and many others. Yes, writing software can be quite complex and difficult. Sometimes a large group does a better job at it, sometimes a tiny group of very dedicated people do a better job at it, there is no telling in advance.
The one clear advantage that oss has is that you can interfer yourself, and while I have the capabilities often to do so, I seldom actually get to do so because in virtually all cases asking the current developers and providing them with GOOD INFORMATION for reproducing and locating the actual bug is a lot more effective, regardless of dealing with open source or closed source software.
I'm afraid that it's a guarantee for lack of support. (Running a tainted kernel guarantees you won't recieve support from the core kernel group if you're having troubles.)
So, you try to reproduce the problem without the tainting driver and if it no longer occurs, you report to nvidia, if it still does you report to the linux developers with a now untainted and supported situation.
Yes, it is a bit more troublesome, but by far not as bad as you are suggesting.
Furthermore, while being oss is no guarantee of quality, inclusion in the mainline kernel tree is (to some extent anyway
Ah, it does?
Sorry, but all that it does is ensure that the driver will be maintained to the level that it compiles, and hopefully works, and gets built automatically when updating your kernel.
Sure you can get fast real links cheap if you only utilise them lightly and either pay by the gigabyte or hit some other kind of punishment
Yes.. that was the point. bandwidth itself is cheap, data transfer is what costs. It is cheaper often when bought in advance, but it is still the main factor determining the price of your connection, not whatever bandwidth you can use during peaks.
That was my entire point, and it was in reply to the claim that bandwidth is very expensive.