It would seem then that many didn't hear him. I hope he has changed his tact in this regard. That said, until he comes out with the same boycott and blacklisting rhetoric for Apple he does with other corporations it is difficult to take the guy seriously. Right now his hard-line seems negotiable where Apple is concerned yet EFF themselves are quite clear.
Worth noting how unfashionable it is to even consider Apple an evil hand in the context of user rights - yet they are avidly pro-patent (member of the BSA) and rapidly becoming a fat and hungry media mogul.
All said, the more vocal anti-DRM lobbying the better, and good on him for drawing the BBC case into public light.
I've seen Cory talk at a few forums/conference and while espousing the virtues of free software and damning DRM he never seems to be able to answer a question from the floor about how he can justify giving money to Apple, a pro DRM company in a ready position to radically monopolise our rights to the music we buy and listen to.
He will however suggest economic boycott of any other company that does support and invest in restricting the rights of users. He just doesn't seem prepared to see that every time he gets up on stage with his Powerbook and in casual chat, espousing the joys of iTunes, he's contradicting his own ethics.
Many questions came from the floor and in forums after a talk he gave in Spain that he was not able to answer to this end. In one forum he claimed that OSX was an open-source OS and he considers himself a BSD user. IMO Cory can be a bit of a margin fudger at times.
I don't think it's a mistake. What is sounds like he's saying is that he wants Google to change how philanthropy is done.
Misquote, error or intentional - giving is very simple. It doesn't need an overhaul of method or technique and has worked perfectly well as long as weaker or less fortunate members of our species have benefitted from the strength or fortune of another.
While simple it is a rare act these days, especially in an economy, which is a system of 'strategic scarcity' whereby the distribution of resources is managed by a few.
The way it is being written Google is being semantic about their proposed 'philanthropy'. It sounds like they are trying to add "Charity" to their metadata tag in light of recent bad press. We'll see.
In 10 years, I'd like people to say Google changed the world less for its search engine than for the way in which it changed philanthropy to make the world a better place.
What a strange quest, to make a contribution to Philanthropy itself.
But again, I fine Linux feels heavy, even on an AMD 2800+ Sempron processor with 512MB of RAM. On the other OS, it's all a snap.
What distro and DE are you using? I found performance much better with Ubuntu on the G5 than OSX Tiger where mencoder/mplayer (encoding and playback) is concerned. Also why not just use VLC on Linux? It's a stock interface common to all major operating systems and supports a wide variety of codecs (theora included) out-of-the-box.
FYI Apple machines are assembled by Taiwanese companies Asustek and Quanta Computing. The hardware is assembled to spec and badged "Apple" as it comes off the shelf. The MacIntels are nearly identical to some offerings from Asus directly (which sell many times more laptops under their brand BTW).
In this way, Apple is as much a "hardware company" as Kentucky Fried Chicken is a poultry farmer.
They were responsible for the OpenGL spec itself, had a ton of influence on directions taken in the CG market generally, and instead sang endlessly about something called "Virtual Reality" while the rest of the world realised that unless it could be affordably domesticated, there would be no market for it. While NVIDIA and ATI said "Hey, mind if I check out this 'gaming' thing while you're out?" they were selling Caves with Dolby and a few O2's to CEOs of mining companies and a few UNI's once or twice a year.
I know, I worked in one. SGI reps would come over with "THE FUTURE" written all over their face even when we were openly replacing their boxes with white PC's running GeForce cards.
Snobbery or stupidity (they often converge), it is utterly their fault.
Thanks, but this shareware doesn't cut it either, I wanted a full contextual menu for applications running or not, and right under my cursor wherever it was.
Having tried Tiger I realised I've been spoiled with Linux desktops over the years; I set up a desktop once just how I like it and take that with me to whatever machine I'm using. KDE in particular offers a wide range of sensible customisations without hunting around and reading endless HOWTO's. OSX just doesn't seem to offer what I need to be productive out of the box - it takes far too much work tweaking and hunting around online to make it a personalised experience. While it was fun to try OSX for a sustained period, the G5 now runs Ubuntu.
No thanks. I don't want to search for my programs.
Precisely. After giving OSX Tiger a try for several weeks, and even with a virtual desktop extension (that should be installed by default - KDE/Gnome have had this for 10 years or so) and reading HOWTO's in blogs and the like, I found it sluggish and domineering to use compared to that of KDE on the same machine under Linux. This bizarre 'Finder' program assumes my applications are somehow lost already and I feel like I'm constantly managing my Windows instead of using them. After turning off all the special effects any further attempts to configure the environment to suit me were thwarted - as though manipulating the environment was somehow a bad thing and really shouldn't be attempted. Why can't I have an applications menu or panel under RMB instead of all the way down at the bottom of the screen? Why can't I save window layouts by name for the next time I log into the machine? Why can't I group windows to one-another?
I'm sure OSX is a revolution for Windows users making the switch but from a useability perspective it does seem a few years behind Linux offerings - eye candy aside.
Let's hope incorporation of Xgl does compromise the configurability of Linux DE's that support it, or hit the GPU so hard it slows performance.
So he's trying to make a living on discovering security holes and getting paid not to make them public? I'm okay with this practice, I suppose, but I get the feeling that he's trying to up the ante by generating some bad press for Apple.
There is no such thing as "bad press" when it concerns notifying the public of various vulnerabilities and the relative latency involved in getting them patched. At least if it were Linux, kernel developers would immediately rise up to the challenge, resulting in a code audit.
Be a little more generous. He's helping to make your OS more secure. If there's any badness here it's in the fact Apple treats third party vulnerability disclosure like a self-conscious teenager being told it's having a bad hair day:
"A spokesperson for Apple told ZDNet Australia that the company is "not going to comment on what other people say about Mac OS X".
If I can have a BSD based operating system with vendor supported device drivers, why would I want Red Hat?
Performance. OSX is simply sluggish by comparison.
The work I do in the educational sector is focussed on training in 3D applications (Maya, Blender). If students of mine can turn more polygons and render faster on Apple hardware running Linux (albeit using proprietary drivers), then Linux it will be. The same rationale exists for the animated feature-film industry, one where Linux is now the industry standard platform for animation and rendering (Shrek, LOTR, King Kong, FF..). Art departments in universities often house Apple machines - one doesn't always have the luxury of working with high-end IBM or Dell workstations.
For personal use, reasons for running Linux over OSX on Apple hardware includes the fact I can bend a machine to suit my needs, as opposed to those of use-cases projected along the homogenous ideals of Apple's 'usability experts'. This said, with the switch to Intel Apple's hardware doesn't have the exotic appeal it once did. Where portables are concerned battery life, build quality and relative noise emission are really no better than offerings by Asus and Lenovo these days.
Just a shame it doesn't appear to work. Having spent quite a bit of time with a G5 recently I can't help getting the feeling that what is left of BSD is twiddling it's thumbs while top is running hot and the process table is loaded.
Even a young Linux distribution, with a generic PPC kernel, seems to breathe new life into the Apple PPC offerings, albeit I've only actively compared 3D performance and video encoding.
According to this article Apple is in the habit of compiling for size, not for performance (the -0s switch). This was with the G5 - a very capable chip.
Of course they're going to throttle their machines a little to drive hardware sales. Is that so surprising? They're an aggressive corporation hell-bent on dominating the market in volume sales. They will treat customers like idiots, and as well trained idiots most will give money to that charismatic older man in the Armani suit.
The performance of stock (barely affordable) Apple boxes has always been a joke - I don't see that changing too soon.
Only the kernel, Darwin, is opensource, but what about the application layer?
It's here we're likely to see as many vulnerabilities as we do at the kernel layer. In fact that's probably even an exagerration; reading about exploits more generally, how many of them are at the kernel level? By most estimates 30% of OSX, in the scope of what is shipped, is distributed with the rights to view distribute and modify source code.
If, by your standards, this concern is still 'distorted', I would say yes, Apple users are far too relaxed about the relative security of their systems.
Also of note is that Apple, like Microsoft, reserves the right to refrain from public distribution of information on vulnerabilities and known exploits. Both companies pursue that old-fashioned model of closing their codebases and asking developers to sign NDA's.
If there is no opening for the wider developer community to find and report vulnerabilities then how can a user of either platform feel confident in their machine's relative security? Are we supposed to trust these companies to keep us informed, companies whose very share prices rise and fall with criticism (particularly on the level of security)?
Personally, this is reason enough to shy away from either platform - and perhaps explains why both platforms are very rarely found in mission critical applications.
I savour every dewdrop of news I can find on Google aquisitions, and especially their bold plans to bring more contextually relevant advertisting to both my desktop, car stereo, and hopefully soon TV.
In just 10 years, if I'm lucky, I'll never have to think about a purchase again, as some 10 hectare cluster of Linux boxes buried under the Siberian tundra already has that stitched up. Perhaps we'll even have Meteorological Adsense! What do people buy on rainy days anyway? Why does your spleen hurt, just subscribe your spleen to the NHS Endorsed Google Body Bank and enter your query.
Making decisions is so hard these days, what, with all the options and all. Clean it all up for us Google, get rid of all those unsettling surprises, questions and dissonant irrelevancies. Give us a Google Earth.
No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
software capable of accessing the same data.
This is not a clause you want misunderstood.
I would say "of other
software capable of accessing the same data" needs expansion and or definition in a footer or otherwise. What is this "other software" you're talking about? External, third-party, binary software perhaps?
The sentence itself, while parted with a colon, also feels grammatically unweildy. Should the "of" in "of other software [...]" not be "for"?
From a design perspective, both Windows and OSX have an innate design flaw that can quickly render a system vulnerable - they encourage and support the wanton installation of thirdparty software downloaded from un-quarantined, un checked internet addresses.
We have millions of users taking websites on strictly surface appearances, if lucky by reccomendation from a friend or external corporation. Phishing proves this to be totally foolish, yet the culture of seeking and installing applications has not yet wisened up.
A key reason why I'd be very reluctant to use either OSX or Windows on machines that host data I care about, is precisely because they don't offer useable package management (while trying OSX for a few months I attempted to make a go of Fink, but frankly it's unuseable).
When I install software on a Debian (Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire) system (for instance), there's a key exchange, I can check md5sums and I know a large number of people have signed off the package, approving it for download and installation to the best of their knowledge.* This application will also dynamically resource existing Libraries on my machine, as opposed to scattering duplicates all over the place (as is the case with *.dmg and (IIRC).app installation methods on OSX and patching core DLL's on Windows).
The day OSX and Windows application developers 'subscribe' their applications to a core pool of packages that is gone over with a fine-tooth comb, is the day that both OS's will be on the road to being safe for general public use.
*Ironic perhaps, that package-management is often cited as an impediment to the uptake of the platform despite being brainlessly easy to use (as is the case with Debian systems). Go figure
the people at Cygwin [cygwin.com] have put together a great version of Linux for the average user to use
Cygwin is not a "version of Linux". Cygwin provides a fairly miserly bash implementation and a bunch of common UNIX programs (cp,mv,ls,ssh,ln,du,rm [...]).
'Linux' is a kernel development project. The GNU/Linux operating system is the combination of this Linux kernel, and a bunch of Unix-like tools, a few of which are available to you in Cygwin. A "Distribution of Linux" (as they're commonly referred to) includes all this plus a suite of applications and a package-management system for easily un/installing applications and maintaining a clean machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes he was asked those questions, after the talk and in the thread relating to the festival I posted. Que tal es tu español?
It would seem then that many didn't hear him. I hope he has changed his tact in this regard. That said, until he comes out with the same boycott and blacklisting rhetoric for Apple he does with other corporations it is difficult to take the guy seriously. Right now his hard-line seems negotiable where Apple is concerned yet EFF themselves are quite clear.
Worth noting how unfashionable it is to even consider Apple an evil hand in the context of user rights - yet they are avidly pro-patent (member of the BSA) and rapidly becoming a fat and hungry media mogul.
All said, the more vocal anti-DRM lobbying the better, and good on him for drawing the BBC case into public light.
I've seen Cory talk at a few forums/conference and while espousing the virtues of free software and damning DRM he never seems to be able to answer a question from the floor about how he can justify giving money to Apple, a pro DRM company in a ready position to radically monopolise our rights to the music we buy and listen to.
He will however suggest economic boycott of any other company that does support and invest in restricting the rights of users. He just doesn't seem prepared to see that every time he gets up on stage with his Powerbook and in casual chat, espousing the joys of iTunes, he's contradicting his own ethics.
Many questions came from the floor and in forums after a talk he gave in Spain that he was not able to answer to this end. In one forum he claimed that OSX was an open-source OS and he considers himself a BSD user. IMO Cory can be a bit of a margin fudger at times.
While simple it is a rare act these days, especially in an economy, which is a system of 'strategic scarcity' whereby the distribution of resources is managed by a few.
The way it is being written Google is being semantic about their proposed 'philanthropy'. It sounds like they are trying to add "Charity" to their metadata tag in light of recent bad press. We'll see.
Works well for me
A wider breadth of supported languages would be nice however.
That said if Krugle doesn't have the ability to filter on a per license basis, it will not be practical (or safe) for many.
FYI Apple machines are assembled by Taiwanese companies Asustek and Quanta Computing. The hardware is assembled to spec and badged "Apple" as it comes off the shelf. The MacIntels are nearly identical to some offerings from Asus directly (which sell many times more laptops under their brand BTW).
In this way, Apple is as much a "hardware company" as Kentucky Fried Chicken is a poultry farmer.
More here and here.
They were responsible for the OpenGL spec itself, had a ton of influence on directions taken in the CG market generally, and instead sang endlessly about something called "Virtual Reality" while the rest of the world realised that unless it could be affordably domesticated, there would be no market for it. While NVIDIA and ATI said "Hey, mind if I check out this 'gaming' thing while you're out?" they were selling Caves with Dolby and a few O2's to CEOs of mining companies and a few UNI's once or twice a year.
I know, I worked in one. SGI reps would come over with "THE FUTURE" written all over their face even when we were openly replacing their boxes with white PC's running GeForce cards.
Snobbery or stupidity (they often converge), it is utterly their fault.
Thanks, but this shareware doesn't cut it either, I wanted a full contextual menu for applications running or not, and right under my cursor wherever it was.
Having tried Tiger I realised I've been spoiled with Linux desktops over the years; I set up a desktop once just how I like it and take that with me to whatever machine I'm using. KDE in particular offers a wide range of sensible customisations without hunting around and reading endless HOWTO's. OSX just doesn't seem to offer what I need to be productive out of the box - it takes far too much work tweaking and hunting around online to make it a personalised experience. While it was fun to try OSX for a sustained period, the G5 now runs Ubuntu.
.. I meant to say [...] "does not compromise configurability of Linux DE's that support it"!
I'm sure OSX is a revolution for Windows users making the switch but from a useability perspective it does seem a few years behind Linux offerings - eye candy aside.
Let's hope incorporation of Xgl does compromise the configurability of Linux DE's that support it, or hit the GPU so hard it slows performance.
Be a little more generous. He's helping to make your OS more secure. If there's any badness here it's in the fact Apple treats third party vulnerability disclosure like a self-conscious teenager being told it's having a bad hair day:
"A spokesperson for Apple told ZDNet Australia that the company is "not going to comment on what other people say about Mac OS X".
The work I do in the educational sector is focussed on training in 3D applications (Maya, Blender). If students of mine can turn more polygons and render faster on Apple hardware running Linux (albeit using proprietary drivers), then Linux it will be. The same rationale exists for the animated feature-film industry, one where Linux is now the industry standard platform for animation and rendering (Shrek, LOTR, King Kong, FF..). Art departments in universities often house Apple machines - one doesn't always have the luxury of working with high-end IBM or Dell workstations.
For personal use, reasons for running Linux over OSX on Apple hardware includes the fact I can bend a machine to suit my needs, as opposed to those of use-cases projected along the homogenous ideals of Apple's 'usability experts'. This said, with the switch to Intel Apple's hardware doesn't have the exotic appeal it once did. Where portables are concerned battery life, build quality and relative noise emission are really no better than offerings by Asus and Lenovo these days.
Support is very good.
Just a shame it doesn't appear to work. Having spent quite a bit of time with a G5 recently I can't help getting the feeling that what is left of BSD is twiddling it's thumbs while top is running hot and the process table is loaded.
Even a young Linux distribution, with a generic PPC kernel, seems to breathe new life into the Apple PPC offerings, albeit I've only actively compared 3D performance and video encoding.
According to this article Apple is in the habit of compiling for size, not for performance (the -0s switch). This was with the G5 - a very capable chip.
Of course they're going to throttle their machines a little to drive hardware sales. Is that so surprising? They're an aggressive corporation hell-bent on dominating the market in volume sales. They will treat customers like idiots, and as well trained idiots most will give money to that charismatic older man in the Armani suit.
The performance of stock (barely affordable) Apple boxes has always been a joke - I don't see that changing too soon.
Only the kernel, Darwin, is opensource, but what about the application layer?
It's here we're likely to see as many vulnerabilities as we do at the kernel layer. In fact that's probably even an exagerration; reading about exploits more generally, how many of them are at the kernel level? By most estimates 30% of OSX, in the scope of what is shipped, is distributed with the rights to view distribute and modify source code.
If, by your standards, this concern is still 'distorted', I would say yes, Apple users are far too relaxed about the relative security of their systems.
Also of note is that Apple, like Microsoft, reserves the right to refrain from public distribution of information on vulnerabilities and known exploits. Both companies pursue that old-fashioned model of closing their codebases and asking developers to sign NDA's.
If there is no opening for the wider developer community to find and report vulnerabilities then how can a user of either platform feel confident in their machine's relative security? Are we supposed to trust these companies to keep us informed, companies whose very share prices rise and fall with criticism (particularly on the level of security)?
Personally, this is reason enough to shy away from either platform - and perhaps explains why both platforms are very rarely found in mission critical applications.
I savour every dewdrop of news I can find on Google aquisitions, and especially their bold plans to bring more contextually relevant advertisting to both my desktop, car stereo, and hopefully soon TV.
In just 10 years, if I'm lucky, I'll never have to think about a purchase again, as some 10 hectare cluster of Linux boxes buried under the Siberian tundra already has that stitched up. Perhaps we'll even have Meteorological Adsense! What do people buy on rainy days anyway? Why does your spleen hurt, just subscribe your spleen to the NHS Endorsed Google Body Bank and enter your query.
Making decisions is so hard these days, what, with all the options and all. Clean it all up for us Google, get rid of all those unsettling surprises, questions and dissonant irrelevancies. Give us a Google Earth.
I would say "of other software capable of accessing the same data" needs expansion and or definition in a footer or otherwise. What is this "other software" you're talking about? External, third-party, binary software perhaps?
The sentence itself, while parted with a colon, also feels grammatically unweildy. Should the "of" in "of other software [...]" not be "for"?
From a design perspective, both Windows and OSX have an innate design flaw that can quickly render a system vulnerable - they encourage and support the wanton installation of thirdparty software downloaded from un-quarantined, un checked internet addresses.
We have millions of users taking websites on strictly surface appearances, if lucky by reccomendation from a friend or external corporation. Phishing proves this to be totally foolish, yet the culture of seeking and installing applications has not yet wisened up.
A key reason why I'd be very reluctant to use either OSX or Windows on machines that host data I care about, is precisely because they don't offer useable package management (while trying OSX for a few months I attempted to make a go of Fink, but frankly it's unuseable).
When I install software on a Debian (Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire) system (for instance), there's a key exchange, I can check md5sums and I know a large number of people have signed off the package, approving it for download and installation to the best of their knowledge.* This application will also dynamically resource existing Libraries on my machine, as opposed to scattering duplicates all over the place (as is the case with *.dmg and (IIRC)
The day OSX and Windows application developers 'subscribe' their applications to a core pool of packages that is gone over with a fine-tooth comb, is the day that both OS's will be on the road to being safe for general public use. *Ironic perhaps, that package-management is often cited as an impediment to the uptake of the platform despite being brainlessly easy to use (as is the case with Debian systems). Go figure
'Linux' is a kernel development project. The GNU/Linux operating system is the combination of this Linux kernel, and a bunch of Unix-like tools, a few of which are available to you in Cygwin. A "Distribution of Linux" (as they're commonly referred to) includes all this plus a suite of applications and a package-management system for easily un/installing applications and maintaining a clean machine.
Examples of Linux distributions are Ubuntu, SuSE Linux and Xandros.