"Many companies refuse to use GPL code because of its viral nature."
This would explain why BSD is so much more popular than Linux then.
"I know TCP/IP is a standardized protocol"
OK
"which was my point."
No, you compared a protocol to code.
"If it had been GPL software . . "
See you did it again.
Just to put a finer point on it, please let me rephrase your comment.
Many companies refuse to use other peoples proprietary code (in their own projects) because of the legal ramifications. That cripples adoption of proprietary software.
GPL is not about promoting "software adoption", it is about promoting collaborative development.
Lots of people currently enjoy that collaborative development model, as can bee seen by the rising popularity of many open source projects.
Anyway, I'm not sure what alternative licence you are promoting. Proprietary? Fully free as in BSD? Some other fantasy licence that nobody has heard of outside of your febrile imagination?
"The GPL is viral, and this prevents many commercial companies from adopting and using GPL code, crippling the movement."
Umm, how exactly does the GPL "cripple the movement"?
"If TCP/IP had been GPL, the Internet would be a different place today."
See, this is where you demonstrate your astounding lack of comprehension on this issue.
TCP/IP is a standardised protocol not a software product. There are closed source implementations of TCP/IP, GPL implementations and even completely free implementations today. The licence they are issued under makes no practical difference to anyone.
OTOH, if the TCP/IP standard was "owned" (ie patented) by a commercial company there would be NO internet today.
That might be OK if you could manage to release significant version upgrades regularly, but if MS had have stuck with that from 2000 onwards most people would be still using Windows 2001 (XP) and wondering why they didn't have something a lot newer.
On second thoughts, maybe they would be more inclined to upgrade to Windows 2007 (vista) today in that case so, yeah, good work Stevie B!
Try using outlook web access using ff3 on linux. It mostly of works, but you simply can't login without clicking thru a huge fucking screen telling you to upgrade your browser.
Good grief, I am aware that banks around the world have been affected by this problem, albeit mostly indirectly.
Banks all around the world lend each other lots of money all the time. The sub-prime problem is so huge that often these banks have been hit by holding loans that are two or more levels higher than the underlying sub-prime credit they can be traced to.
So, Bank A has a whole lot of poor loans based on the ridiculous idea that home prices will forever rise and that if their loser "ninja" customers default on their loans (which they will) they can swoop in and sell the house at a profit anyway. This is a great, if somewhat morally bereft plan until the prices of houses stop rocketing up.
But Bank A needs the cash to provide these loans so they turn to Bank B.
Bank B also sells access to this credit in the form of investments to other banks or firms who are not even aware that the investment they have is ultimately underwritten by Bank A and based on inherently bad loans.
Eventually the housing market collapses and Bank A follows and the flow on goes right out to the fringes.
Any falls on Asian banks pale into nothingness when compared to the US banking sector. Their falls are in sympathy with what is happening in the US, not as a result of their own bad practices.
If the banking and trading sectors weren't generally operated by 30 something whiz-kids who have no memory of past economics downturns then they wouldn't have fallen for the sucker idea that markets go constantly up in order to service their bottomless greed.
I say let them fall. The whole damn lot of them. Then we'll at least have a few more years before the next generation of whiz-kids come along to make the same mistakes again.
It seems to have escaped most peoples notice that Asian banks are not participating in the current financial meltdown extravaganza and there is a reason for that.
The US banks have been behaving very very badly and have already been bailed out a couple of times in the past.
The "bubbles" you've had in the last two decades were the results of government bailouts designed to stave of a recession, and they worked. Sort of.
The problem is, if you keep bailing out these numbnuts they will just continue carrying on as before and you will continue having to bail them out and each rescue will be more flamboyantly extravagant than the last.
At some point you will HAVE to take your medicine and let things collapse. Economics is cyclical, you have periods of growth and periods of stagnation. You can't change that, no matter how much you might want to. The US government has been postponing the down cycle for years but all they have done is ensure that when the down cycle inevitably happens it will be a monster one.
If they get bailed out again this time, the next time will be even worse.
Australia has very little cable internet (compared to the US).
We didn't even have cable TV until about 10 years ago and even now it reaches a pitiful percent of homes. I will pull a figure out of my arse and say "less than ten percent" but don't quote me. It might be more than that but I do know it sure ain't much. Cable roll outs stopped years ago, most pay tv is done via satellite here.
This is why Telstra (BigPond) is so dominant, there are no cable networks to compete with their adsl so we poor users have to play by their rules.
"The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps."
Mr Nail, meet Mr Hammer
I am an unfortunate user of BigPond. While their service is generally reliable it is expensive, and capped.
What they do is arbitrarily provide some of their own sites that don't count towards your downloads which is great if you only want to visit their crappy sites but sucks for everything else.
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
If for example I have a friend who is also a bigpond user and we decide to connect up for whatever reason, online gaming, voip, file transfers whatever, any bandwidth you use is still counted.
It also applies to other large commercial sites that are hosted on their servers. The site has to be "deemed" a free site by some bigpond marketing wonk or it counts as a download.
*If* they only charged you for downloads outside of their own network it would still suck, but at least it would be understandable.
*If* they made some peering agreements with large sites such as youtube et al which enabled them to host transparent mirrors of high bandwidth sites it would still suck, but suck less.
As things stand they are just ripping off their customers on the basis that they really have little alternative. Optus are totally fricking hopeless, the most incompetent bunch of retards ever to step into a data centre and everyone else pretty much just resells BigPonds bandwidth or operpriced frickin 3G crap with caps even lower than BP adsl
I got an ipod because of the 80gb capacity as well as the ubiquity of accessories like car docks etc. I looked at the iRiver but they maxxed out at about 30gb and didn't seem to have much in the way of accessories either. All of my stuff was in MP3 format at the time anyway (still is of course) so lack of ogg support was not a show stopper. I would have liked it because it appeals to my open source tendencies but it wasn't enough to tip the scales.
I plug my ipod into my car deck and listen while driving.
With all the ambient noise in cars I don't see the fricking point in spending thousands of dollars on a uber-wanker hifi system. Unless you drive a fucking Bentley you'll never hear any subtle nuances anyway.
You obviously do. Well bully for you dickwad.
Go back to Kanye West, monster cables and expensive cassette decks arsehole.
I'd rather have the convenience of having the majority of my collection in my car at all times even if there might be a TINY reduction in perceivable "quality".
Hmmm, this is interesting. Are we talking about an "official" upgrade or the open source disaster known as "Rockbox"
And before you flame me, I say "disaster" as a fully fledged linux zealot*.
Having said that, after trying Rockbox I felt nothing other than an overwhelming urge to remove it and put(the unduly limited and dumbed down OS that is) the official ipod OS back on.
Rockbox is;
1) fucking ugly 2) fucking slow
So, if your ogg support comes with the price of installing Rockbox, then you can forget it.
All I need is to be able to slot my pod into its cradle in my car and press play. The official OS does this without any hassle, even if it won't do some small things I would like it to do.
Rockbox was just too damn annoying.
End of story.
* Post written using firefox 3 0n Ubuntu Hardy 8.04
You know, I'm in my mid forties and I grew up with scratchy LP's and compact cassettes. I recall buying LP's and "ripping" them to tapes so that I didn't have to keep handling and playing the LP in an attempt to maintain them in "pristine condition". I've still got those LP's too.
The trouble was that compact cassettes sounded like crap, even when you lashed out and bought the "metal" ones. But we had no choice. You couldn't use LP's in the car so cassettes it was (8-Tracks never caught on in Australia so please refrain from telling me about how they were much better than CC)
Fast forward 30 years and my main problem with music these days is that IT IS MOSTLY CRAP!
To my aging ears, MP3's sound way better than cassette tapes ever did even at 128Kbs. Most of my 120Gb collection is ripped in 128-192K MP3 and I don't care. Most of the music I like was recorded in the analog days anyway, and besides, I'm sure my old ears aren't what they used to be.
128K MP3s still sound better than any cassette tape ever did so I'm happy.
Listening to 50 fucking cent pose and preen in 5.1 lossless audio? All I can say is not in my lifetime buddy.
I'll take an antique recording of Canned Heat, Peter Green or Alvin Lee @ 128Mb any day thanks.
Now, get off my damn lawn you goddamn whippersnappers!
You are of course assuming that Middle East insurgents want to see non hardliner in charge of the USA.
Most of them are quite pleased to have a whackjob like GWB in charge because without him they wouldn't be able to drum up large numbers of the faithful for their many Jihads
Slashdot Mirror
"Many companies refuse to use GPL code because of its viral nature."
This would explain why BSD is so much more popular than Linux then.
"I know TCP/IP is a standardized protocol"
OK
"which was my point."
No, you compared a protocol to code.
"If it had been GPL software . . "
See you did it again.
Just to put a finer point on it, please let me rephrase your comment.
Many companies refuse to use other peoples proprietary code (in their own projects) because of the legal ramifications. That cripples adoption of proprietary software.
GPL is not about promoting "software adoption", it is about promoting collaborative development.
Lots of people currently enjoy that collaborative development model, as can bee seen by the rising popularity of many open source projects.
Anyway, I'm not sure what alternative licence you are promoting. Proprietary? Fully free as in BSD? Some other fantasy licence that nobody has heard of outside of your febrile imagination?
"The GPL is viral, and this prevents many commercial companies from adopting and using GPL code, crippling the movement."
Umm, how exactly does the GPL "cripple the movement"?
"If TCP/IP had been GPL, the Internet would be a different place today."
See, this is where you demonstrate your astounding lack of comprehension on this issue.
TCP/IP is a standardised protocol not a software product. There are closed source implementations of TCP/IP, GPL implementations and even completely free implementations today. The licence they are issued under makes no practical difference to anyone.
OTOH, if the TCP/IP standard was "owned" (ie patented) by a commercial company there would be NO internet today.
> Wow, a couple of networks may at some point be wrongly blocked by mistake for a short period of time till the mistake is identified.
Yes, like government blocking access to sites that have disagreeable political views to express
Things like that huh?
Well, I'm trying to convert my GF to linux and her work email does it. Maybe you've changed your user agent string or something?
That might be OK if you could manage to release significant version upgrades regularly, but if MS had have stuck with that from 2000 onwards most people would be still using Windows 2001 (XP) and wondering why they didn't have something a lot newer.
On second thoughts, maybe they would be more inclined to upgrade to Windows 2007 (vista) today in that case so, yeah, good work Stevie B!
"Why don't you just make 10 louder"
". . . . ?"
"This one goes to 11"
Try using outlook web access using ff3 on linux. It mostly of works, but you simply can't login without clicking thru a huge fucking screen telling you to upgrade your browser.
arseholes
I say we take off, and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure
That is what I was referring to. Perhaps I should have been clearer, thanks for doing that for me.
Good grief, I am aware that banks around the world have been affected by this problem, albeit mostly indirectly.
Banks all around the world lend each other lots of money all the time. The sub-prime problem is so huge that often these banks have been hit by holding loans that are two or more levels higher than the underlying sub-prime credit they can be traced to.
So, Bank A has a whole lot of poor loans based on the ridiculous idea that home prices will forever rise and that if their loser "ninja" customers default on their loans (which they will) they can swoop in and sell the house at a profit anyway. This is a great, if somewhat morally bereft plan until the prices of houses stop rocketing up.
But Bank A needs the cash to provide these loans so they turn to Bank B.
Bank B also sells access to this credit in the form of investments to other banks or firms who are not even aware that the investment they have is ultimately underwritten by Bank A and based on inherently bad loans.
Eventually the housing market collapses and Bank A follows and the flow on goes right out to the fringes.
Any falls on Asian banks pale into nothingness when compared to the US banking sector. Their falls are in sympathy with what is happening in the US, not as a result of their own bad practices.
If the banking and trading sectors weren't generally operated by 30 something whiz-kids who have no memory of past economics downturns then they wouldn't have fallen for the sucker idea that markets go constantly up in order to service their bottomless greed.
I say let them fall. The whole damn lot of them. Then we'll at least have a few more years before the next generation of whiz-kids come along to make the same mistakes again.
It seems to have escaped most peoples notice that Asian banks are not participating in the current financial meltdown extravaganza and there is a reason for that.
The US banks have been behaving very very badly and have already been bailed out a couple of times in the past.
The "bubbles" you've had in the last two decades were the results of government bailouts designed to stave of a recession, and they worked. Sort of.
The problem is, if you keep bailing out these numbnuts they will just continue carrying on as before and you will continue having to bail them out and each rescue will be more flamboyantly extravagant than the last.
At some point you will HAVE to take your medicine and let things collapse. Economics is cyclical, you have periods of growth and periods of stagnation. You can't change that, no matter how much you might want to. The US government has been postponing the down cycle for years but all they have done is ensure that when the down cycle inevitably happens it will be a monster one.
If they get bailed out again this time, the next time will be even worse.
Australia has very little cable internet (compared to the US).
We didn't even have cable TV until about 10 years ago and even now it reaches a pitiful percent of homes. I will pull a figure out of my arse and say "less than ten percent" but don't quote me. It might be more than that but I do know it sure ain't much. Cable roll outs stopped years ago, most pay tv is done via satellite here.
This is why Telstra (BigPond) is so dominant, there are no cable networks to compete with their adsl so we poor users have to play by their rules.
Don't laugh, it is trivially easy for an ISP to fubar their system accidentally to do this.
I remember when the company I worked for was on the optus network. If we traced a site in Melbourne from Sydney packets would go via Los Angeles.
Optus really are a bunch of clowns.
Their GSM network has had broken SMS for ten years now and they still haven't fixed it.
"The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps."
Mr Nail, meet Mr Hammer
I am an unfortunate user of BigPond. While their service is generally reliable it is expensive, and capped.
What they do is arbitrarily provide some of their own sites that don't count towards your downloads which is great if you only want to visit their crappy sites but sucks for everything else.
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
If for example I have a friend who is also a bigpond user and we decide to connect up for whatever reason, online gaming, voip, file transfers whatever, any bandwidth you use is still counted.
It also applies to other large commercial sites that are hosted on their servers. The site has to be "deemed" a free site by some bigpond marketing wonk or it counts as a download.
*If* they only charged you for downloads outside of their own network it would still suck, but at least it would be understandable.
*If* they made some peering agreements with large sites such as youtube et al which enabled them to host transparent mirrors of high bandwidth sites it would still suck, but suck less.
As things stand they are just ripping off their customers on the basis that they really have little alternative. Optus are totally fricking hopeless, the most incompetent bunch of retards ever to step into a data centre and everyone else pretty much just resells BigPonds bandwidth or operpriced frickin 3G crap with caps even lower than BP adsl
They all suck
Oh, ok.
I got an ipod because of the 80gb capacity as well as the ubiquity of accessories like car docks etc. I looked at the iRiver but they maxxed out at about 30gb and didn't seem to have much in the way of accessories either. All of my stuff was in MP3 format at the time anyway (still is of course) so lack of ogg support was not a show stopper. I would have liked it because it appeals to my open source tendencies but it wasn't enough to tip the scales.
Nope, don't use earbuds. Or headphones.
I plug my ipod into my car deck and listen while driving.
With all the ambient noise in cars I don't see the fricking point in spending thousands of dollars on a uber-wanker hifi system. Unless you drive a fucking Bentley you'll never hear any subtle nuances anyway.
You obviously do. Well bully for you dickwad.
Go back to Kanye West, monster cables and expensive cassette decks arsehole.
I'd rather have the convenience of having the majority of my collection in my car at all times even if there might be a TINY reduction in perceivable "quality".
Hmmm, this is interesting. Are we talking about an "official" upgrade or the open source disaster known as "Rockbox"
And before you flame me, I say "disaster" as a fully fledged linux zealot*.
Having said that, after trying Rockbox I felt nothing other than an overwhelming urge to remove it and put(the unduly limited and dumbed down OS that is) the official ipod OS back on.
Rockbox is;
1) fucking ugly
2) fucking slow
So, if your ogg support comes with the price of installing Rockbox, then you can forget it.
All I need is to be able to slot my pod into its cradle in my car and press play. The official OS does this without any hassle, even if it won't do some small things I would like it to do.
Rockbox was just too damn annoying.
End of story.
* Post written using firefox 3 0n Ubuntu Hardy 8.04
Ummm, because, like, the ipod doesn't do ogg?
Or something?
Like it or not, if ipod users can't buy your crap then you won't succeed.
It's as simple as that.
You must be new here.
Nobody on slashdot reads the article.
Well, in my case it's because MP3s sound OK to me and that I can't play ogg on my ipod.
You know, I'm in my mid forties and I grew up with scratchy LP's and compact cassettes. I recall buying LP's and "ripping" them to tapes so that I didn't have to keep handling and playing the LP in an attempt to maintain them in "pristine condition". I've still got those LP's too.
The trouble was that compact cassettes sounded like crap, even when you lashed out and bought the "metal" ones. But we had no choice. You couldn't use LP's in the car so cassettes it was (8-Tracks never caught on in Australia so please refrain from telling me about how they were much better than CC)
Fast forward 30 years and my main problem with music these days is that IT IS MOSTLY CRAP!
To my aging ears, MP3's sound way better than cassette tapes ever did even at 128Kbs. Most of my 120Gb collection is ripped in 128-192K MP3 and I don't care. Most of the music I like was recorded in the analog days anyway, and besides, I'm sure my old ears aren't what they used to be.
128K MP3s still sound better than any cassette tape ever did so I'm happy.
Listening to 50 fucking cent pose and preen in 5.1 lossless audio? All I can say is not in my lifetime buddy.
I'll take an antique recording of Canned Heat, Peter Green or Alvin Lee @ 128Mb any day thanks.
Now, get off my damn lawn you goddamn whippersnappers!
I have two apple II's in my garage that they can have for free.
"Because it's "all or nothing" doesn't make it digital"
Are you sure you should be posting to slashdot?
Maybe the AOL forums would be more suited to your particular, ah, talents?
pah, I've had several kernel changes in the last 18 months and my wireless nic has worked flawlessly every time.
Go spread your fud elsewhere shillboy.
You are of course assuming that Middle East insurgents want to see non hardliner in charge of the USA.
Most of them are quite pleased to have a whackjob like GWB in charge because without him they wouldn't be able to drum up large numbers of the faithful for their many Jihads