It was fine for the game platform, im reality it was nothing too different from a cart - but i do wonder how long it is before someone comes out with a handheld gaming platform that aims to do at least some of these things:
- Linux based - open cartridge interface - the ability to plug in your own/code games.
cause if you can make that, then its only 1 step to linux console, and only one step to mythtv as well... I can understand why companies dont want to do it, its a brave move amongst other things (like drm and copy protection) - but not that different from a ps2/ps3 really.
Then maybe, just maybe, the big gaming companies will start going "hmm, maybe we should use opengl instead?"
im living in a dream world of course, im well aware of that...
While i'm quite happy that a 3rd party developed this, third party plugin's tend to be a bit of an admin nightmare... I can just imagine having a conversation with my boss after sending him an odf formatted document:
Boss comes running over: "what is and ODF? do I open it in photoshop?" me: "no, its a document format, you have do download a plugin from sun that works with microsoft word" Boss wanders off for 10 minutes, comes back and says "ok, i downloaded the plugin but it wont let me install it cause i dont have permissions". I wander back to the bosses desk to find he's gone to son.com and downloaded 15 different forms of virus, 2 pieces of spyware, a keylogger and his bank is ringing him on the mobile about a "$100,000 debt that just rang up on his bank account".
Dell, i love you.. ok, thats 4.. dam, now thats 7.. UG.
Seriously though, that is a big plus - being a very firm fedora person, its great to see this step forward - its a big thumbs up for what linux has become!
How much of this is based on what microsoft wanted to do and what was wanted by other 3rd parties (and by that i mean the government).
While I seriously wouldn't doubt that ms are behind it all (in a bid to beet google at the ad game by leveraging their OS to force you to view better ads and hence give them a tremendous advantage), there is a little voice in the back of my head going "hey you know i wonder if the NSA, CIA, FBI,... are behind at least part of this". It opens up some alarming possibilities as well for things like the novell/others patent agreements (as in, are MS trying to get code into linux to do the same thing?).
Of course theres always the even more disturbing thought that MS were given an "open slather" by the US govt to "gather any and every piece of intel you possibly from your users and we dont care how you use it so long as we have access to it".
I know it sounds a bit far fetched and more than a bit tin-foily but i cant help but wonder in this post 9/11 world just how likely that is.
Now assume it is true for a second, would disabling all the things that collect this information get you marked as a terrorist? scary thought.
Very intersting... i made the logical assumption that it would be supported under 64bit, even more interesting to know microsoft don't even support the zune under their own 64bit os's..
altho someone saying "apple will support linux 64 bit before windows"... well, when did apple do anything linux related again?
Im not an apple user so my comments are possibly quite inaccurate but I do find it quite odd that apple seem more intent on supporting and getting support for microsoft products in their platforms that OSS. At least, thats my perception
Was either a comparison of windows vista security flaws as it ships from dell with all its third party software versus those distro's (given thats how alot of users are going to "get" vista - crammed with third party apps from the manufacturers they buy their pc's from). Or a comparison against and OS that followed the same business model (solaris 9 perhaps?, hp-ux? aix?). It's really hard to sit back and say "we're so secure" when the basis of comparison is moderately flawed in the first place.
In alot of ways, Mac OS X is perhaps the best thing to compare vista to in that regard, but even thats a little tough.
Lets give Jobs, et al time to produce their own twisted statistics to prove exactly the same thing for their own OS's.
just remember there are 3 types of lies, "lies, damn lies and statistics".
Not that im claiming he's wrong mind you, just that history has proven to be a battle of seemingly erroneous statistics stacked on top of one another that seem to claim totally different things.
Is it going to make me switch to vista? no... But i cant say i really care either, probably the most insecure part of my home server is the code i've written for it!
Why is it when i read about the space elevator i think of the episode on the Simpsons where Marge says: "And that was the only folly the people of Springfield ever embarked upon. Except for the popsicle stick skyscraper... etc"
Hmm... I find it hard to understand. I bought my laptop from Dell thru work via dell's site and the default was "no os", and that was only about 4 months ago now i think?
And i dont know if its the "right" way, but i was confused enought with gplv2 without throwing gplv3 into the mix. So i did is remove all external code (unless it was things like libc) and stopped depending on libraries (as such). Where i couldnt get away with this i simple deleted anything i'd used from my project that was in my code tree and made the install notes say things like "download version 2.1.15 of open=excelent=app, and place it here".
As i said, i have no idea if thats fair or just but im beginning to get the feeling that i need a lawyer for coding oss;)
I understand what the contract means - regardless of the OS you run, your going to pay a windows license for the box (even if it is running mac osx).
What i dont understand is how that is legal ANYWHERE in the world. How many govt types must MS own in the USA in order to get away with that? Thats just criminal behavior - akin to a mafia protection racket.. ok, so im exaggerating but not by a long stretch.
Can you imagine bridgestone knocking on your door one day demanding a "car type license" for your dunlop-fitted motorbike? its absolutely insane.
On a side note though, one person said dell make alot their cash from the difference between what they pay for putting ms vista onto a machine and what grey-box retailers pay. Now thats definitely not true, quite a large chunk of dell's customers are enterprise class, and if your enterprise class you buy machines (including laptops) without the OS. In fact, you choose the OS as an option and the base is no-os or freedos or something, every other option is a +$ option (including windows). Add to that the fact enterprise guys pay less for boxes (even when only buying 1) and its certainly not where dell are making their cash.
I read this article and had to check my watch - i was wondering if i'd overslept this morning and it was the 1st of april all of sudden.
After realizing it wasn't I still wasn't sure if it was an improvement knowing i hadn't spent the last couple of months in a coma and that the law really is that insane after all..
I really dont know what to make of it all... MS is certainly "up to something", it's what they specialize in. I.e. "destroying any type of competition". What i certainly will try not to do is do anything that results in MS making money from linux, to me that is the ultimate blasphemy.
But on the other hand, i've got to wonder if it'll work in our favor.. i.e. gplv3 comes along and suddenly microsoft destroy's half its own patent's. Though, some of it reminds me of an article I cant find in slashdot anymore about "the top 10 things MS can do to kill linux" and im sure soem of this type of behavior was on the list.
Of course the thing that makes me bang my head against the wall from the very beginning is the stupidity of the US patent laws in the first place.
IANAL seems to rule my life, so much so i really dont often know whether to unleash something i do upon the general public because i dont know (even though everything i do is completely free and OSS):
a) who's feet i might tred on b) if my project really is GPL'able c) how i release it in such a way as to make it GPL'able.
Its really quite hard to comprehend. As an example, i had a project that i wrote that combined a nice firewall gui with a bunch of projects of various licenses. It had QOS, load balancing, routing and alot of other features with software provided by a tonne of other projects. I wanted to release a binary image (iso) of it, and then release the build code. This is where i got very lost. I eventually decided that i'd release the code i'd written without any of the code from the other OSS projects plus the binary iso and as part of the INSTALL for people who wanted to build the project they'd have to download the original source themselves, put them into the tree and hit make.
But i didnt cause i didnt know how right or proper it was to release any of this, and i wasnt in a position to take (or even want) money for it, which resulted in one thing - i abandoned the project. Even more frustrating, i didnt even know where i could turn to find out how to do it aside from "ask slashdot".
You would be hard pressed to find any music in my house thats less than 5 years old, and all of it i own legally. I still listen to music however, but i think my newest CD was pearl jam's binaural. Not really sure if thats just me getting older or sick of hearing about all the music fiasco and i cant say i really care either!
Even if they did say that, it is so cute he believes it.
I never said i believed it, just that i would switch if i did. I really like nvidia cards to be totally honest, but here was the article i was refering to. Unless I've miss-read that, then it says AMD will OSS the ATI drivers.
When it comes to hardware, i'll happily support any vendor that delivers something usable in the linux community.
TBH, i really dont care that much. I dont use VS or VSEE and am unlikely to in the future.
The thing that kinda bugs me about all of this is that he managed to get the add-on to work in the express edition without "hacking it" in anyway. Now, sure he's in violation of the EULA, but translate that to the OSS world -
"We've implemented a new piece of software we call Mutt Express Edition, with Mutt express your not allowed to attach binary files". Only the mutt keys to attach the files still work so you dont even realise your doing something wrong. One day, a Mutt rep knock's on your door and says "hi, we hear you've been attaching files in emails with Mutt against our license".
Someone a couple of RIAA articles back was asking when they'd get bitten back, its good to see the comunity banding together in OSS fashion for a very quick time to market with such a response!;)
Seriously though, it would be good to see the RIAA taken to the wall with this. To see them loose 10 or 20 times the amount they've gained from every ligitation they've performed would seem like justice to me, and perhaps it would make them think about whether all the litigation and drm technology is worth it..
More then likely it result in two things (should they loose), 1) deciding a set of laws they can use to prosecute people without exposing themselve. 2) buying more govt types to change the law to help 1) (are govt types an off-the-shelf item in the USA or something? the way they seem purchasable certainly makes them sound very commodity-based)
When the iPhone was announced and later after i had a quick play with one, I had made the assumption that there would be a development env for it. I guess part of that stems from owning a palm pilot, etc you just make the assumption that you'll be able to write your own applications for it.
So to me the supprise factor of this article was more "oh, i didnt realise there was a question about that in the first place", but its good to know it'll be capable of it for sure.
Suprisingly, this article actually made me less excited about the iPhone and a little disappointed. The way the article reads, it makes it sound like apple will only throw an SDK at 3rd parties they choose and trust which is a bit of a shame really.
So, everyone who has any torrent program is responsible for 9/11 now... didn't see that one coming, which I think is the most amount of innovation i've seen from the IFPA/MPAA/RIAA/etc in quite some time.
I really loved the way they tout allofmp3.com as a site that was reposible for this and that and allofmp3 have attempted to pay the music industry on a number of occasions. Quite stupid really.
As some people have said, Hardware raid 5 will solve some of your problems. But at the low end of the market (and even the middle), hardware raid 5 can hurt (for eg, i've got 8 disks on sata using my gigabyte mb's raid controller, will it still work if my mb dies and i buy a new mb? and thats hard to answer).
Lets say tho, you take your 3x500's, raid 5 them up (make sure you partition at least 1 partition on them), you'll end up with 1tb SWEET!
But, you replace them later with 1tb drives 1 at a time, and you can just partition the 1tb drive up and get the mdadm tool to rebuild your array on the fly (this takes time), you then partition the rest of the space on your 1tb drives for raid, (sda2, sdb2, sdc2) and wham, you have another 500gb... but its in 2 partitions which isnt entirely usefull from a disk-management annoyance.
Enter lvm. Essentially you do the same thing, but you add/dev/md0 into the lvm (logical volume manager) vg (volume group) initially as a 1tb volume from which you'll probably create a 1tb logical volume... later on after replacing the 500's with 1tb drives you then create a second raid and have/dev/md1, which you can then add into the existing volume group, which can then be used to extend the original 1tb logical volume to 2tb. Assuming your using ext3, you can then online (and while mounted) extend the size of the volume in the box.
That's a brief run down of how you'd do it, but the kind of commands you want to look at: mdadm (for the raid5 encapsulation) lvm (for the volume management)
As a suggestion, get (free) vmware server, install it somewhere, install fedora/ubuntu/whatever into it. Add 3 2gb disks into the system as virtual disks, create the array, add in lvm. Then remove 1 disk, replace it with a 4gb disk, etc etc. Its a cheap and easy way of learning how it works!
On a side note, 2 companies I've worked with have black-listed SVN cause of its ability to be configured in an authentication mode involving plain-text. It didn't matter that no one there had planned on using that particular functionality, just that it even existed
Wow... do they also black-list CVS, apache and IIS?
No, no and no. The main reason for it as i understood it was because of the ease of configuring the svn daemon to run a repo with its plain text password database file thingy. The same isnt true for the others (as in, configuring more secure methods in the others is a snap compared to the svn side of things).
Slashdot Mirror
UMD - its like drugs.... just say no!
It was fine for the game platform, im reality it was nothing too different from a cart - but i do wonder how long it is before someone comes out with a handheld gaming platform that aims to do at least some of these things:
- Linux based
- open cartridge interface
- the ability to plug in your own/code games.
cause if you can make that, then its only 1 step to linux console, and only one step to mythtv as well... I can understand why companies dont want to do it, its a brave move amongst other things (like drm and copy protection) - but not that different from a ps2/ps3 really.
Then maybe, just maybe, the big gaming companies will start going "hmm, maybe we should use opengl instead?"
im living in a dream world of course, im well aware of that...
While i'm quite happy that a 3rd party developed this, third party plugin's tend to be a bit of an admin nightmare... I can just imagine having a conversation with my boss after sending him an odf formatted document:
;)
Boss comes running over: "what is and ODF? do I open it in photoshop?"
me: "no, its a document format, you have do download a plugin from sun that works with microsoft word"
Boss wanders off for 10 minutes, comes back and says "ok, i downloaded the plugin but it wont let me install it cause i dont have permissions".
I wander back to the bosses desk to find he's gone to son.com and downloaded 15 different forms of virus, 2 pieces of spyware, a keylogger and his bank is ringing him on the mobile about a "$100,000 debt that just rang up on his bank account".
I can't wait for the bofh to do a bit on this
Dell, i love you.. ok, thats 4.. dam, now thats 7.. UG.
Seriously though, that is a big plus - being a very firm fedora person, its great to see this step forward - its a big thumbs up for what linux has become!
How much of this is based on what microsoft wanted to do and what was wanted by other 3rd parties (and by that i mean the government).
... are behind at least part of this". It opens up some alarming possibilities as well for things like the novell/others patent agreements (as in, are MS trying to get code into linux to do the same thing?).
While I seriously wouldn't doubt that ms are behind it all (in a bid to beet google at the ad game by leveraging their OS to force you to view better ads and hence give them a tremendous advantage), there is a little voice in the back of my head going "hey you know i wonder if the NSA, CIA, FBI,
Of course theres always the even more disturbing thought that MS were given an "open slather" by the US govt to "gather any and every piece of intel you possibly from your users and we dont care how you use it so long as we have access to it".
I know it sounds a bit far fetched and more than a bit tin-foily but i cant help but wonder in this post 9/11 world just how likely that is.
Now assume it is true for a second, would disabling all the things that collect this information get you marked as a terrorist? scary thought.
Very intersting... i made the logical assumption that it would be supported under 64bit, even more interesting to know microsoft don't even support the zune under their own 64bit os's..
altho someone saying "apple will support linux 64 bit before windows"... well, when did apple do anything linux related again?
Im not an apple user so my comments are possibly quite inaccurate but I do find it quite odd that apple seem more intent on supporting and getting support for microsoft products in their platforms that OSS. At least, thats my perception
Was either a comparison of windows vista security flaws as it ships from dell with all its third party software versus those distro's (given thats how alot of users are going to "get" vista - crammed with third party apps from the manufacturers they buy their pc's from). Or a comparison against and OS that followed the same business model (solaris 9 perhaps?, hp-ux? aix?). It's really hard to sit back and say "we're so secure" when the basis of comparison is moderately flawed in the first place.
In alot of ways, Mac OS X is perhaps the best thing to compare vista to in that regard, but even thats a little tough.
Lets give Jobs, et al time to produce their own twisted statistics to prove exactly the same thing for their own OS's.
just remember there are 3 types of lies, "lies, damn lies and statistics".
Not that im claiming he's wrong mind you, just that history has proven to be a battle of seemingly erroneous statistics stacked on top of one another that seem to claim totally different things.
Is it going to make me switch to vista? no... But i cant say i really care either, probably the most insecure part of my home server is the code i've written for it!
Why is it when i read about the space elevator i think of the episode on the Simpsons where Marge says: "And that was the only folly the people of Springfield ever embarked upon. Except for the popsicle stick skyscraper... etc"
Interesting read though...
Hmm... I find it hard to understand. I bought my laptop from Dell thru work via dell's site and the default was "no os", and that was only about 4 months ago now i think?
Do they not allow that anymore?
And i dont know if its the "right" way, but i was confused enought with gplv2 without throwing gplv3 into the mix. So i did is remove all external code (unless it was things like libc) and stopped depending on libraries (as such). Where i couldnt get away with this i simple deleted anything i'd used from my project that was in my code tree and made the install notes say things like "download version 2.1.15 of open=excelent=app, and place it here".
;)
As i said, i have no idea if thats fair or just but im beginning to get the feeling that i need a lawyer for coding oss
I understand what the contract means - regardless of the OS you run, your going to pay a windows license for the box (even if it is running mac osx).
What i dont understand is how that is legal ANYWHERE in the world. How many govt types must MS own in the USA in order to get away with that? Thats just criminal behavior - akin to a mafia protection racket.. ok, so im exaggerating but not by a long stretch.
Can you imagine bridgestone knocking on your door one day demanding a "car type license" for your dunlop-fitted motorbike? its absolutely insane.
On a side note though, one person said dell make alot their cash from the difference between what they pay for putting ms vista onto a machine and what grey-box retailers pay. Now thats definitely not true, quite a large chunk of dell's customers are enterprise class, and if your enterprise class you buy machines (including laptops) without the OS. In fact, you choose the OS as an option and the base is no-os or freedos or something, every other option is a +$ option (including windows). Add to that the fact enterprise guys pay less for boxes (even when only buying 1) and its certainly not where dell are making their cash.
its interesting how they paint the whole situation when you take into account my situation:
1) hadn't heard of google checkout until now
2) ran off to find out what it was
3) was interested cause i despise paypal with a pasion.
Perhaps it is true "there is no such thing as bad publicity".
I read this article and had to check my watch - i was wondering if i'd overslept this morning and it was the 1st of april all of sudden.
After realizing it wasn't I still wasn't sure if it was an improvement knowing i hadn't spent the last couple of months in a coma and that the law really is that insane after all..
I really dont know what to make of it all... MS is certainly "up to something", it's what they specialize in. I.e. "destroying any type of competition". What i certainly will try not to do is do anything that results in MS making money from linux, to me that is the ultimate blasphemy.
But on the other hand, i've got to wonder if it'll work in our favor.. i.e. gplv3 comes along and suddenly microsoft destroy's half its own patent's. Though, some of it reminds me of an article I cant find in slashdot anymore about "the top 10 things MS can do to kill linux" and im sure soem of this type of behavior was on the list.
Of course the thing that makes me bang my head against the wall from the very beginning is the stupidity of the US patent laws in the first place.
IANAL seems to rule my life, so much so i really dont often know whether to unleash something i do upon the general public because i dont know (even though everything i do is completely free and OSS):
a) who's feet i might tred on
b) if my project really is GPL'able
c) how i release it in such a way as to make it GPL'able.
Its really quite hard to comprehend. As an example, i had a project that i wrote that combined a nice firewall gui with a bunch of projects of various licenses. It had QOS, load balancing, routing and alot of other features with software provided by a tonne of other projects. I wanted to release a binary image (iso) of it, and then release the build code. This is where i got very lost. I eventually decided that i'd release the code i'd written without any of the code from the other OSS projects plus the binary iso and as part of the INSTALL for people who wanted to build the project they'd have to download the original source themselves, put them into the tree and hit make.
But i didnt cause i didnt know how right or proper it was to release any of this, and i wasnt in a position to take (or even want) money for it, which resulted in one thing - i abandoned the project. Even more frustrating, i didnt even know where i could turn to find out how to do it aside from "ask slashdot".
I've stopped being interested in music.
You would be hard pressed to find any music in my house thats less than 5 years old, and all of it i own legally. I still listen to music however, but i think my newest CD was pearl jam's binaural. Not really sure if thats just me getting older or sick of hearing about all the music fiasco and i cant say i really care either!
When it comes to hardware, i'll happily support any vendor that delivers something usable in the linux community.
ATI said they'll go OSS with their drivers and if they do i'll switch away from nvidia and be happy to do so given that article.
TBH, i really dont care that much. I dont use VS or VSEE and am unlikely to in the future.
The thing that kinda bugs me about all of this is that he managed to get the add-on to work in the express edition without "hacking it" in anyway. Now, sure he's in violation of the EULA, but translate that to the OSS world -
"We've implemented a new piece of software we call Mutt Express Edition, with Mutt express your not allowed to attach binary files". Only the mutt keys to attach the files still work so you dont even realise your doing something wrong. One day, a Mutt rep knock's on your door and says "hi, we hear you've been attaching files in emails with Mutt against our license".
Bizare.
Does anyone else find the name of the legal firm (or is it the laywer as well?) "Olswang" rather amusing? or is it just my immature sense of humor?
Someone a couple of RIAA articles back was asking when they'd get bitten back, its good to see the comunity banding together in OSS fashion for a very quick time to market with such a response! ;)
Seriously though, it would be good to see the RIAA taken to the wall with this. To see them loose 10 or 20 times the amount they've gained from every ligitation they've performed would seem like justice to me, and perhaps it would make them think about whether all the litigation and drm technology is worth it..
More then likely it result in two things (should they loose), 1) deciding a set of laws they can use to prosecute people without exposing themselve. 2) buying more govt types to change the law to help 1) (are govt types an off-the-shelf item in the USA or something? the way they seem purchasable certainly makes them sound very commodity-based)
When the iPhone was announced and later after i had a quick play with one, I had made the assumption that there would be a development env for it. I guess part of that stems from owning a palm pilot, etc you just make the assumption that you'll be able to write your own applications for it.
So to me the supprise factor of this article was more "oh, i didnt realise there was a question about that in the first place", but its good to know it'll be capable of it for sure.
Suprisingly, this article actually made me less excited about the iPhone and a little disappointed. The way the article reads, it makes it sound like apple will only throw an SDK at 3rd parties they choose and trust which is a bit of a shame really.
So, everyone who has any torrent program is responsible for 9/11 now... didn't see that one coming, which I think is the most amount of innovation i've seen from the IFPA/MPAA/RIAA/etc in quite some time.
I really loved the way they tout allofmp3.com as a site that was reposible for this and that and allofmp3 have attempted to pay the music industry on a number of occasions. Quite stupid really.
As some people have said, Hardware raid 5 will solve some of your problems. But at the low end of the market (and even the middle), hardware raid 5 can hurt (for eg, i've got 8 disks on sata using my gigabyte mb's raid controller, will it still work if my mb dies and i buy a new mb? and thats hard to answer).
/dev/md0 into the lvm (logical volume manager) vg (volume group) initially as a 1tb volume from which you'll probably create a 1tb logical volume... later on after replacing the 500's with 1tb drives you then create a second raid and have /dev/md1, which you can then add into the existing volume group, which can then be used to extend the original 1tb logical volume to 2tb. Assuming your using ext3, you can then online (and while mounted) extend the size of the volume in the box.
Lets say tho, you take your 3x500's, raid 5 them up (make sure you partition at least 1 partition on them), you'll end up with 1tb SWEET!
But, you replace them later with 1tb drives 1 at a time, and you can just partition the 1tb drive up and get the mdadm tool to rebuild your array on the fly (this takes time), you then partition the rest of the space on your 1tb drives for raid, (sda2, sdb2, sdc2) and wham, you have another 500gb... but its in 2 partitions which isnt entirely usefull from a disk-management annoyance.
Enter lvm. Essentially you do the same thing, but you add
That's a brief run down of how you'd do it, but the kind of commands you want to look at:
mdadm (for the raid5 encapsulation)
lvm (for the volume management)
As a suggestion, get (free) vmware server, install it somewhere, install fedora/ubuntu/whatever into it. Add 3 2gb disks into the system as virtual disks, create the array, add in lvm. Then remove 1 disk, replace it with a 4gb disk, etc etc. Its a cheap and easy way of learning how it works!