KOffice has it already. Abiword doesn't, because the spec is too ambiguous - something the koffice devs complained about. Not sure about Hancom Office. But it looks like the spec needs work at least as much as the word processors do.
You are not allowed to change the license. You may add restrictions, such as the GPL, to the code, but the original license stays.
Yes, but the original license terms are so minimal as to be almost irrelevant. So you can effectively use almost any license. There is BSD code under GPL (yes, the BSD terms still apply, but they would be there under GPL anyway, so it is in effect a straight GPL license), there is bsd code under the windows and OSX licenses, there is doubtless BSD code under many more.
I think I have read that in the U.S. it is safer to have an AS-IS license (MIT-style) since people will have an easier time suing you if it is public domain.:(
Entirely true, however, it's still the case that you're restricting some things by putting it under BSD license - as a stupid example, you don't allow others to falsely claim authorship of your program.
In this case they are not since the BSD definition of use (almost any development or running the program) is different than the GPL definition (GPL development or running the program).
If you're taking "use" to mean "develop with", a lot of licenses break. There are plenty of perfectly good terms to use for that, such as "modify". Use means to run the program.
A BSD license does this by allowing anyone to do almost anything with the code. You are not bound by more restrictions. Which is freer for you? More restrictions or less restrictions?
How free am I with the copy of bsd ftp included with MS windows? Answer, not many; amongst other things I am not allowed to decompile, disassemble, modify, reverse engineer, or redistribute it, IIRC I can't use it to defame people, etc. I have a lot more restrictions than I would with a GPL program. BSD may have less immediate restrictions but it results in less restrictions in the long run.
You are not allowed to sell GPL'd software unless all authors of the software are in agreement with the action. You may charge for the distribution of the software as long as the fee applies solely to the distribution . This is according to the license.
Utter bollocks. Term 1: "1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program."
As long as someone receives the software, they may request the source by which you, the author(s), must comply.
Nope. If you distribute the software in binary form with an offer to send the source on request, then you must give the source to anyone who requests it, which is to prevent the following loophole: A sells B a copy of the program in binary form and offers B the source on request, B sells this copy under first sale doctrine to C, who then has a binary copy and no access to source. However, if you sell the program with source (or in source form) your involvement is ended, and you are well within your rights to tell anyone who comes around asking for the source to sod off.
Yes, you may. You may add a warranty to BSD (or GPL?) software as long as it applies to you. You cannot add a warranty on anything that makes others responsible for what you warranty.
But the BSD license says I have to keep the notice saying that all warranties are disclaimed. GPL explicitly states that I can sell warranty protection.
Ok, swear words, while highly colorfull and fun to use, are not necessary for this discussion.
They are when you miss the point that badly. You claim changing the license on a project other people have contributed to would be unethical. And yet you prefer BSD to GPL because...it allowes you to change the license on a project other people have contributed to?
While others can distirbute their enhancements under modified terms the original authors code remains under BSD terms regardless of the actions of others. This power comes from Copyright law.
Sure, openssh 4.2p1 is and always will be BSD. But there's no reason on earth Theo can't simply announce that official releases from the Openssh project will now be GPL. They have the right to distribute all the code they currently have under GPL - the BSD license allows you to do this - and they could also add code from other GPL projects, which would be useful. New submissions could either be BSD or GPL licensed. Anyone who wanted it to stay BSD could fork the last BSD-licensed version, like with the xorg fork of xfree86 (which forked the first beta of 4.4 because the license changed happened with the second beta, at least iirc)
While the GPL provides a few "freedoms" it does so at a tremendous expense: the authors rights using the mechanisms of many restrictions; this is what many, including I, object to.
What restrictions? There are restrictions on the terms under which you can redistribute. That is all.
BSD style licensed projects have been very successful with no anarchy present and notably with no need to enforce people's natural desire to contribute with rules as the GPL does.
They have. On the other hand, they have also meant e.g. Apple has a superior OS to anything in the free software world, because they can take anything they want from the BSDs, add their own stuff to it, and no-one else is able to use the stuff they've added. There are plenty of generous people, but there are also people and businesses who are not generous - and those are more of a threat, and more to be concerned about.
At the expense of the original authors, thus the GPL compromises (in the dark sense) the rights of the original authors.
How? The original author has all the rights they would, and can relicense under any terms they choose - look at trolltech, mysql, or plenty of others. The only people whose rights it restricts are the redistributors. Yes, GPL puts the rights of the user above the rights of the redistributor they bought the software from. I think this is the right way around for things to be.
You made my point for me - you give up your rights with the GPL. With a GPL'd licensed program you are not free to add your own code and distribute it without also giving your modifications.
But this isn't the author giving up the rights, this is someone else, and the only rights they lose are some of distribution. With BSD it is the author who gives up rights - someone else can take your code, change it, or just pretend to even, distribute the binaries around, even back to you, but not let you see what's happened with your code. And it is the users of this redistributed version who lose rights. GPL gives rights to the author, and it gives rights to the end user - the only people who don't have as many rights are the middlemen.
You may sell a warranteed version of a BSD program if you so choose. However it's you making the warrantee and not the original authors. They'd allowed you and others to freely use the code without any warrantee. If you sell it with a warrantee then you are taking on that legal obligation. Could be risky. Could be lucrative. Good luck in that business.
That's certainly the situation with the GPL - but it explicitly states that you can sell it with warranty protection. The BSD says you have to include their disclaimer of warranty on any redistributed version, and doesn't say anything about selling your own warranty for it. It's probably ok, but it's certainly less clear - which is the price of its brevity. A lot of the length of the GPL is from being clear about things.
Good reason for the forks not to die out: I cannot use cdrecord on my system. Cdrdao works fine. I have both installed, and can simply choose to use cdrdao instead of cdrecord in K3B.
I'm amazed, because they're both using the same library to access the devices - Schilling's library.
Why should I care about all this politics? And why do you think people like me will start to realise that they're wrong and somehow switch back to cdrecord?
You shouldn't and you won't. The developers will realise it is actually bloody hard to keep up with what's the kernel devs' favourite API this month, and give up their fork. Or you'll notice that cdrecord is working better than the fork and switch back.
It's never got to the point of complete unusability - though Schilling deserves all the credit for that. There's always been some way to use your cd burner. Wheras with BSD the drivers for my stuff simply don't exist. But you're right.
Switching would also be in violation of the rights of those who contributed code under the assumption of BSD; switching thus isn't legally viable.
Erm, the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of being BSD rather than GPL licensed is that you CAN change the license. Go read the BSD license. You're permitted to redistribute the software under pretty much any terms you want.
The GPL isn't free software - it's communal software as in communistic communes or hippie communes.
The only way to be truly free is to put it in the public domain. You have to pick a line where you feel software is "free enough" - Stallman's four freedoms seem a pretty good place.
The BSD style license enables true freedom for authors and users alike. Freedom to fork. Freedom to contribute. Freedome to use.
All those are freedoms you have with the GPL
The GPL is so complicated how many of you have actually taken the time to read it?
I have. It's only a page or so, less if you skip the preamble (which isn't part of teh license itself)
It bases is communistic society on rules that restrict your freedom by putting limits on what you can and can't do with it.
The only restrictions there are are there to preserve the freedom of others. Is the only free society a complete anarchy?
For example, you are not free to develop with it and sell your modified versions without contributing your source code back to the commune.
False. You have to give the source code to the people you sell the program to, and you have to give them permission to redistribute and modify it. That's all.
And if you're going to be picky, am I free to sell a warrantied version of BSD software? I don't see how I can.
There's fuse around for doing a filesystem in higher level code if you like (yes, I know if linux was designed properly we wouldn't need kludgy stuff like fuse, but that's another issue), but every use of it I've seen has performed pretty poorly, and that's on "feel" as well as benchmarks.
I would love to run one of the BSDs but none of them support all the hardware on any of my systems. The big open kernel does seem to be good for getting drivers contributed. It's just a shame that it leads to so much silly politiking.
The kernel devs actually accept it, as long as the bloody reiser devs fixes the obvious defiencies the code has. It has been more than one? two? years since reiser 4 "was ready to be merged" according to hans reiser and the haven't even tried to submit it in the 2.6.16 time frame - a sign that there is not a lot of work to do, for sure (they last time reiser tried it people pointed out him a list of things that haven't been fixed - yeah, reiser sure "was ready to be merged").
Last time I saw it come up, the only remaining objections were coding style (to which Reiser responded that his style was better, and another flamewar started) and Hans' attitude. Sure, Hans was being an arrogant asshole, but so were many of the kernel devs. There really didn't seem to be any real, non-cosmetic problems with reiser4 - sure, there were a bunch when it was first submitted, but it was a huge chunk of code, and they were all fixed pretty quickly. And given that it was still rejected, what would be the point in submitting it again for 2.6.16?
Maybe we should accept low-quality code in linux just because it's...reiser and it's c00l? Hey, that's the Microsoft Way, and it works for them! Apparently some people thinks that just because reiser 4 has plugins and plugins sound cool it mean it has zero bugs and all the design mistakes are magically fixed by some sort of magic.
Not at all. But the reasons it was rejected seem far more political than technical.
Are you aware that lots of "cool features" were rejected in the past in linux?. Being able to use 1 GB of memory, 64-bit processors, SMP, rmap-based memory management: Those features that sound "natural" today were rejected by Linus because the implementation was HORRIBLE and they weren't merged until someone implemented them in a cleaner way. Why reiser should be different? Linux developers are not going to allow people to fuck up everything because something is "great". It has taken a lot of hard work to take linux where it's now and make it work in 512-cpu SGI beasts, lowering the bar is not going to make linux any better.
The attitude has changed so much in other respects with 2.6 though. Look at the time any of the new additions took to be accepted - and look at the code quality - and compare it with reiser4. And tell me they're being judged equally.
Re:Linus' new philosophy of development in main tr
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My experience is exactly the same. 2.6 sucks, quite frankly, and doesn't deserve the even version number. It should have remained 2.5 until it was stable, which it certainly isn't at the moment.
In this case, Schilling wants something that 1) is consistently *bad*, and 2) in general makes life difficult for anyone *not* using a SCSI drive, which 3) is 90%+ of the population. An "elegant" solution that doesn't work isn't a solution.
It worked. Under 2.4.20 my cd burner worked flawlessly. In fact, it still doesn't perform as well as it did then (since I can't have cdrecord setuid root now, I have to burn a bit slower so I don't get buffer underruns). It was fine from the hardware perspective - any atapi drive worked, any scsi drive worked, the clunky 2x parallel port drive I was able to dig out worked. It was fine from the application's perspective - atapi drives support the scsi commandset, so all you had to do is send scsi commands, much like how you send ip packets and don't care what kind of networking hardware is underneath. The only people who didn't like it were kernel people who seemed to have some grudge against ide-scsi - though the only real criticism I've ever seen offered was that it was "ugly". The people going for an elegant solution that doesn't work are the kernel devs.
Have you ever tried to hack someone else's filesystem code? It's no fun. Most of them are small-team efforts, and the code is so low-level they have to be - anything else kills performance, so it's at the stage where you need to be deeply into the filesystem before you can do anything with it.
I would go on about how reiser4's plugin system makes it much easier for people to contribute their own small parts to the filesystem and means we could have the best of everything if only the bloody kernel devs would accept it, but that's a rant for another day.
Nope. The kernel no longer has a stable release. 2.6 is unstable despite the even number, 2.4 is deep maintenance don't touch it, and anyone wanting to release a distribution has to stabilise the kernel themselves, ruling out the hobbyists. I suppose linus' corporate masters are happy.
The problem is that Schilling wants linux to behave exactly like Solaris' incomprehensable s,b,l format
He wants something consistent, is all. Remember how towards the end of the 2.4 lifespan linux people were saying "ide-scsi is obsolete, move to the new ATAPI: method"? And then in a few months that was old and deprecated and it was all "move to the ATA: method"? And then it was changed around again around 2.6.9 for no discernible reason at all?
It's at the point that if cdrecord accidentally supports something that doesn't look like the solaris way Schilling will add code to disable it.
I haven't seen that. I have seen Linus adding code that looks to be there solely to break cdrecord.
Combine that with the fact that the DVD tools from Schilling are no longer open source and requires a License key The project has been forked.
It was forked before (dvdrtools), and will doubtless be forked again. The forks will die out once the maintainers realise that it's not Schilling being awkward, it's the kernel people. Last I knew, the fork you mention was depending on ide-scsi, which had a witch hunt against it towards the end of 2.4, was declared obsolete a few times as the latest poorly-thought-out replacement arose, and when this didn't get people to abandon it, was intentionally crippled around 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 time. Whoops. CD writing on linux is bloody hard - the only other project which has lasted any amount of time is cdrdao, and that uses Schilling's libscg for drive access. The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
People are only human, and they make mistakes. It's all well and good to say "don't make the mistakes", but it's better to have a setup where a typical mistake doesn't compromise the system.
I wasn't counting software, because if you're switching to winxp all the software you get will be wasted. Also there is no way that, to me at least, the software is worth what they charge for it. If you think the bundled software is worth what apple would charge you for it then the pricing is comparable to a similar quality non-apple product, though still slightly worse from what I've seen.
Apple makes good hardware. Horrendously overpriced, but top quality. If you wanted to run windows, particularly, on a laptop, and wanted the best money-no-object hardware, I can see this being somewhat useful.
Re:I'd rather have some NICs, soundcards, etc.
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Recording and editing, sure, and I imagine for video capture perhaps. But the typical user has no reason at all to want audio at that kind of quality. There will always be specialised uses, but the only thing most people will want to do which takes advantage of PCIe is gaming graphics cards.
Yes it is. They're doing precisely that. And they're *still here*. And they're showing everyone you can do this and still be there. The MPAA would very much like people to think that what they were doing was illegal, but it isn't, and by being very blatant about what they're doing, they make more people aware of this fact.
Re:I'd rather have some NICs, soundcards, etc.
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What do you need PCIe for there? Quite frankly ISA is more than good enough to do as good a nic and as good sound as I've ever found I could use. The graphics cards are all that's using the new tech, but really, they're the only things that need it.
In any case, surfing with other browsers besides Opera or IE will give you any number of examples of pages that were obviously designed with only IE in mind.
I'm not thinking just of opera. Back in the IE-only days I never met a site that would actively block links. Plenty would render horribly, some would have lots of brokenness from their javascript, and I occasionally saw a "your browser is not supported" banner. But I'd never get actually blocked from a site and have to spoof the UA. Now I come across sites where I do that quite often.
What extra stuff? They implement some pieces of W3C standards that other browsers haven't implemented yet, but Opera is ahead of the curve on other pieces of the standards. All browsers should be trying to improve their implementation of W3C standards.
Yes, but Mozilla/FF have their own extensions which are very much nonstandard (they quite often don't even work in multiple versions of the same browser), and I think you can also do the XUL stuff from on the webpage? It's cool technology, but it's heading straight for lockin.
Slashdot Mirror
KOffice has it already. Abiword doesn't, because the spec is too ambiguous - something the koffice devs complained about. Not sure about Hancom Office. But it looks like the spec needs work at least as much as the word processors do.
Yes, but the original license terms are so minimal as to be almost irrelevant. So you can effectively use almost any license. There is BSD code under GPL (yes, the BSD terms still apply, but they would be there under GPL anyway, so it is in effect a straight GPL license), there is bsd code under the windows and OSX licenses, there is doubtless BSD code under many more.
I think I have read that in the U.S. it is safer to have an AS-IS license (MIT-style) since people will have an easier time suing you if it is public domain. :(
Entirely true, however, it's still the case that you're restricting some things by putting it under BSD license - as a stupid example, you don't allow others to falsely claim authorship of your program.
In this case they are not since the BSD definition of use (almost any development or running the program) is different than the GPL definition (GPL development or running the program).
If you're taking "use" to mean "develop with", a lot of licenses break. There are plenty of perfectly good terms to use for that, such as "modify". Use means to run the program.
A BSD license does this by allowing anyone to do almost anything with the code. You are not bound by more restrictions. Which is freer for you? More restrictions or less restrictions?
How free am I with the copy of bsd ftp included with MS windows? Answer, not many; amongst other things I am not allowed to decompile, disassemble, modify, reverse engineer, or redistribute it, IIRC I can't use it to defame people, etc. I have a lot more restrictions than I would with a GPL program. BSD may have less immediate restrictions but it results in less restrictions in the long run.
You are not allowed to sell GPL'd software unless all authors of the software are in agreement with the action. You may charge for the distribution of the software as long as the fee applies solely to the distribution . This is according to the license.
Utter bollocks. Term 1: "1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program."
As long as someone receives the software, they may request the source by which you, the author(s), must comply.
Nope. If you distribute the software in binary form with an offer to send the source on request, then you must give the source to anyone who requests it, which is to prevent the following loophole: A sells B a copy of the program in binary form and offers B the source on request, B sells this copy under first sale doctrine to C, who then has a binary copy and no access to source. However, if you sell the program with source (or in source form) your involvement is ended, and you are well within your rights to tell anyone who comes around asking for the source to sod off.
Yes, you may. You may add a warranty to BSD (or GPL?) software as long as it applies to you. You cannot add a warranty on anything that makes others responsible for what you warranty.
But the BSD license says I have to keep the notice saying that all warranties are disclaimed. GPL explicitly states that I can sell warranty protection.
They are when you miss the point that badly. You claim changing the license on a project other people have contributed to would be unethical. And yet you prefer BSD to GPL because...it allowes you to change the license on a project other people have contributed to?
While others can distirbute their enhancements under modified terms the original authors code remains under BSD terms regardless of the actions of others. This power comes from Copyright law.
Sure, openssh 4.2p1 is and always will be BSD. But there's no reason on earth Theo can't simply announce that official releases from the Openssh project will now be GPL. They have the right to distribute all the code they currently have under GPL - the BSD license allows you to do this - and they could also add code from other GPL projects, which would be useful. New submissions could either be BSD or GPL licensed. Anyone who wanted it to stay BSD could fork the last BSD-licensed version, like with the xorg fork of xfree86 (which forked the first beta of 4.4 because the license changed happened with the second beta, at least iirc)
While the GPL provides a few "freedoms" it does so at a tremendous expense: the authors rights using the mechanisms of many restrictions; this is what many, including I, object to.
What restrictions? There are restrictions on the terms under which you can redistribute. That is all.
BSD style licensed projects have been very successful with no anarchy present and notably with no need to enforce people's natural desire to contribute with rules as the GPL does.
They have. On the other hand, they have also meant e.g. Apple has a superior OS to anything in the free software world, because they can take anything they want from the BSDs, add their own stuff to it, and no-one else is able to use the stuff they've added. There are plenty of generous people, but there are also people and businesses who are not generous - and those are more of a threat, and more to be concerned about.
At the expense of the original authors, thus the GPL compromises (in the dark sense) the rights of the original authors.
How? The original author has all the rights they would, and can relicense under any terms they choose - look at trolltech, mysql, or plenty of others. The only people whose rights it restricts are the redistributors. Yes, GPL puts the rights of the user above the rights of the redistributor they bought the software from. I think this is the right way around for things to be.
You made my point for me - you give up your rights with the GPL. With a GPL'd licensed program you are not free to add your own code and distribute it without also giving your modifications.
But this isn't the author giving up the rights, this is someone else, and the only rights they lose are some of distribution. With BSD it is the author who gives up rights - someone else can take your code, change it, or just pretend to even, distribute the binaries around, even back to you, but not let you see what's happened with your code. And it is the users of this redistributed version who lose rights. GPL gives rights to the author, and it gives rights to the end user - the only people who don't have as many rights are the middlemen.
You may sell a warranteed version of a BSD program if you so choose. However it's you making the warrantee and not the original authors. They'd allowed you and others to freely use the code without any warrantee. If you sell it with a warrantee then you are taking on that legal obligation. Could be risky. Could be lucrative. Good luck in that business.
That's certainly the situation with the GPL - but it explicitly states that you can sell it with warranty protection. The BSD says you have to include their disclaimer of warranty on any redistributed version, and doesn't say anything about selling your own warranty for it. It's probably ok, but it's certainly less clear - which is the price of its brevity. A lot of the length of the GPL is from being clear about things.
I'm amazed, because they're both using the same library to access the devices - Schilling's library.
Why should I care about all this politics? And why do you think people like me will start to realise that they're wrong and somehow switch back to cdrecord?
You shouldn't and you won't. The developers will realise it is actually bloody hard to keep up with what's the kernel devs' favourite API this month, and give up their fork. Or you'll notice that cdrecord is working better than the fork and switch back.
It's never got to the point of complete unusability - though Schilling deserves all the credit for that. There's always been some way to use your cd burner. Wheras with BSD the drivers for my stuff simply don't exist. But you're right.
Erm, the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of being BSD rather than GPL licensed is that you CAN change the license. Go read the BSD license. You're permitted to redistribute the software under pretty much any terms you want.
The GPL isn't free software - it's communal software as in communistic communes or hippie communes.
The only way to be truly free is to put it in the public domain. You have to pick a line where you feel software is "free enough" - Stallman's four freedoms seem a pretty good place.
The BSD style license enables true freedom for authors and users alike. Freedom to fork. Freedom to contribute. Freedome to use.
All those are freedoms you have with the GPL
The GPL is so complicated how many of you have actually taken the time to read it?
I have. It's only a page or so, less if you skip the preamble (which isn't part of teh license itself)
It bases is communistic society on rules that restrict your freedom by putting limits on what you can and can't do with it.
The only restrictions there are are there to preserve the freedom of others. Is the only free society a complete anarchy?
For example, you are not free to develop with it and sell your modified versions without contributing your source code back to the commune.
False. You have to give the source code to the people you sell the program to, and you have to give them permission to redistribute and modify it. That's all.
And if you're going to be picky, am I free to sell a warrantied version of BSD software? I don't see how I can.
How is that superior? It makes about as much sense as a separate math coprocessor.
There's fuse around for doing a filesystem in higher level code if you like (yes, I know if linux was designed properly we wouldn't need kludgy stuff like fuse, but that's another issue), but every use of it I've seen has performed pretty poorly, and that's on "feel" as well as benchmarks.
It's not from lack of trying on my part that it hasn't worked as well under any other.
I would love to run one of the BSDs but none of them support all the hardware on any of my systems. The big open kernel does seem to be good for getting drivers contributed. It's just a shame that it leads to so much silly politiking.
Last time I saw it come up, the only remaining objections were coding style (to which Reiser responded that his style was better, and another flamewar started) and Hans' attitude. Sure, Hans was being an arrogant asshole, but so were many of the kernel devs. There really didn't seem to be any real, non-cosmetic problems with reiser4 - sure, there were a bunch when it was first submitted, but it was a huge chunk of code, and they were all fixed pretty quickly. And given that it was still rejected, what would be the point in submitting it again for 2.6.16?
Maybe we should accept low-quality code in linux just because it's...reiser and it's c00l? Hey, that's the Microsoft Way, and it works for them! Apparently some people thinks that just because reiser 4 has plugins and plugins sound cool it mean it has zero bugs and all the design mistakes are magically fixed by some sort of magic.
Not at all. But the reasons it was rejected seem far more political than technical.
Are you aware that lots of "cool features" were rejected in the past in linux?. Being able to use 1 GB of memory, 64-bit processors, SMP, rmap-based memory management: Those features that sound "natural" today were rejected by Linus because the implementation was HORRIBLE and they weren't merged until someone implemented them in a cleaner way. Why reiser should be different? Linux developers are not going to allow people to fuck up everything because something is "great". It has taken a lot of hard work to take linux where it's now and make it work in 512-cpu SGI beasts, lowering the bar is not going to make linux any better.
The attitude has changed so much in other respects with 2.6 though. Look at the time any of the new additions took to be accepted - and look at the code quality - and compare it with reiser4. And tell me they're being judged equally.
My experience is exactly the same. 2.6 sucks, quite frankly, and doesn't deserve the even version number. It should have remained 2.5 until it was stable, which it certainly isn't at the moment.
It worked. Under 2.4.20 my cd burner worked flawlessly. In fact, it still doesn't perform as well as it did then (since I can't have cdrecord setuid root now, I have to burn a bit slower so I don't get buffer underruns). It was fine from the hardware perspective - any atapi drive worked, any scsi drive worked, the clunky 2x parallel port drive I was able to dig out worked. It was fine from the application's perspective - atapi drives support the scsi commandset, so all you had to do is send scsi commands, much like how you send ip packets and don't care what kind of networking hardware is underneath. The only people who didn't like it were kernel people who seemed to have some grudge against ide-scsi - though the only real criticism I've ever seen offered was that it was "ugly". The people going for an elegant solution that doesn't work are the kernel devs.
I would go on about how reiser4's plugin system makes it much easier for people to contribute their own small parts to the filesystem and means we could have the best of everything if only the bloody kernel devs would accept it, but that's a rant for another day.
Nope. The kernel no longer has a stable release. 2.6 is unstable despite the even number, 2.4 is deep maintenance don't touch it, and anyone wanting to release a distribution has to stabilise the kernel themselves, ruling out the hobbyists. I suppose linus' corporate masters are happy.
He wants something consistent, is all. Remember how towards the end of the 2.4 lifespan linux people were saying "ide-scsi is obsolete, move to the new ATAPI: method"? And then in a few months that was old and deprecated and it was all "move to the ATA: method"? And then it was changed around again around 2.6.9 for no discernible reason at all?
It's at the point that if cdrecord accidentally supports something that doesn't look like the solaris way Schilling will add code to disable it.
I haven't seen that. I have seen Linus adding code that looks to be there solely to break cdrecord.
Combine that with the fact that the DVD tools from Schilling are no longer open source and requires a License key The project has been forked.
It was forked before (dvdrtools), and will doubtless be forked again. The forks will die out once the maintainers realise that it's not Schilling being awkward, it's the kernel people. Last I knew, the fork you mention was depending on ide-scsi, which had a witch hunt against it towards the end of 2.4, was declared obsolete a few times as the latest poorly-thought-out replacement arose, and when this didn't get people to abandon it, was intentionally crippled around 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 time. Whoops. CD writing on linux is bloody hard - the only other project which has lasted any amount of time is cdrdao, and that uses Schilling's libscg for drive access. The sooner people stop their hero-worship of Linus, stop the persecution of Schilling, and start looking at the facts, the sooner something can be done.
People are only human, and they make mistakes. It's all well and good to say "don't make the mistakes", but it's better to have a setup where a typical mistake doesn't compromise the system.
Recompile and run a binary diff. If it's not the same, something fishy's going on. We've been in exactly this situation with PGP for some time.
I wasn't counting software, because if you're switching to winxp all the software you get will be wasted. Also there is no way that, to me at least, the software is worth what they charge for it. If you think the bundled software is worth what apple would charge you for it then the pricing is comparable to a similar quality non-apple product, though still slightly worse from what I've seen.
Apple makes good hardware. Horrendously overpriced, but top quality. If you wanted to run windows, particularly, on a laptop, and wanted the best money-no-object hardware, I can see this being somewhat useful.
Recording and editing, sure, and I imagine for video capture perhaps. But the typical user has no reason at all to want audio at that kind of quality. There will always be specialised uses, but the only thing most people will want to do which takes advantage of PCIe is gaming graphics cards.
Yes it is. They're doing precisely that. And they're *still here*. And they're showing everyone you can do this and still be there. The MPAA would very much like people to think that what they were doing was illegal, but it isn't, and by being very blatant about what they're doing, they make more people aware of this fact.
What do you need PCIe for there? Quite frankly ISA is more than good enough to do as good a nic and as good sound as I've ever found I could use. The graphics cards are all that's using the new tech, but really, they're the only things that need it.
I'm not thinking just of opera. Back in the IE-only days I never met a site that would actively block links. Plenty would render horribly, some would have lots of brokenness from their javascript, and I occasionally saw a "your browser is not supported" banner. But I'd never get actually blocked from a site and have to spoof the UA. Now I come across sites where I do that quite often.
What extra stuff? They implement some pieces of W3C standards that other browsers haven't implemented yet, but Opera is ahead of the curve on other pieces of the standards. All browsers should be trying to improve their implementation of W3C standards.
Yes, but Mozilla/FF have their own extensions which are very much nonstandard (they quite often don't even work in multiple versions of the same browser), and I think you can also do the XUL stuff from on the webpage? It's cool technology, but it's heading straight for lockin.
AIUI it's a patch to overwrite the log file with a blank file.