if you don't like Big Brother, don't compile him..
Likely SuSE, RH et al will play the PlaySafe card in order to meet hw vendor obligations, and so will likely ship with the kind of DRM that prevents use of restrictively copyrighted media. Similarly, they will be fighting to be the first distro to support biometrics for laptops. If you don't like this sort of carry on, grab the kernel sources, RTFM and ensure the offending 'Y' is not in your/usr/src/kernel-source-$(uname -r)/.config, make clean && make. If you can't do it, and it's enough of a problem, pay someone to do it for you.
DRM is largely misunderstood anyway, while I don't support DRM as a model for protected media, DRM can be a valuable tool for securing a machine by specifiying what a user can and cannot do on that box.
"Linux is an operating system, not a political movement, and people should ultimately be able to do what they want with it, he said.. This is why I refuse to disallow even the 'bad' kinds of uses--because not allowing them would automatically also mean that 'good' uses aren't allowed."
The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic. When we asked Apple for a reaction, they told us that some database vendors, Sybase and Oracle, have found a way around the threading problems. We'll try Sybase later, but frankly, we are very sceptical. The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance.
.
We'll talk when MacIntel ships, in the meantime, I wouldn't go near the mess. It makes an OK workstation, that said even in my own benchmarks (3D Rendering and video encoding largely), Debian PPC sporting a 2.6.* kernel gives OSX Tiger a right spanking. I guess that's why Disney, Hollywood, Weta et al choose it for the same purpose.
They should have got into the graphics card market
on
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.
Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.
Well done, an astoundingly shortsighted comment there.
Any measure of thought reveals that F/OSS enriches education far more than that of their proprietary counterparts: god forbid should there ever be a time that a student does become inquisitive as to how the machine called a 'personal computer' actually works, they can browse source, read manpages and learn how they might adapt the system to their (shock) individual needs. Kids are innately inquisitive - give them a chance and they will never cease to debunk assumptions on their enthusiasm and capacity.
Even the Apple Platinum II and Amiga I poked around on years ago were infinitely more inpsiring in this regard than the god awful "f*ck off" binary ironically entitled Windows eXPerience. Frankly it's horrible that for so many new minds, this is the 'face' of computing.
The very values of Microsoft products propogate an impoverished relationship with technology, something otherwise offering a powerful cultural impetus capable of user defined extension, use and expression.
Ironically, 'software patents' do not protect software, they seek to protect ideas expressed in the software. With minor changes to the subject of software patent law, music or literature could easily fall under similar duress.
Copyright, however, protects what has is actually made and so serves software very well; copyright, (eg. the GPL) can be placed in the very code itself whereas a patent is a legal abstraction held in patent office archives and is expensive and timely to research. Secondly patents can only be contested in court. Copyright however tends toward user/developer transparency and breaches happen when the protected artifact in question is misused.
Remember also that though prior art is required to grant a patent, this 'art' need not include a product or a work. 'Prior Art' requires a dated expression of an idea and can even discuss what a product derived or based around that idea might constitute.
With copyright you own what you make not what you haven't yet made (or may not ever make).
don't confuse copyright with patenting. they are absolutely different. can you guess which one has served literature, music and science since around 1710?
If you don't see how ugly all of this stuff is, you don't understand why Linux -- an excellent concept -- hasn't taken off.
What? I really think you should get out more.
The combined worldwide market for desktops, servers, and packaged software running on Linux is forecast to grow at a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 25.9 percent worldwide, reaching $35.7 billion by 2008.
New and redeployed PCs running Linux is a market forecast to grow to $10 billion and 17 million units by 2008 with an installed base of over 42.6 million units.
The Patent Office does not set the conditions for patentability. Those are set by congress and the courts.
Not strictly true, at least here in the EU. The EPO has lobbied hard for widest possible patentability and have an active marketing division producing pamphlets and giving seminars all around the EU.
You ought to read this case history.. The EPO has been granting patents within unqualified (not legally valid) contexts of 'patentability' (ie. software patents) for several years and have actively pushed for widest patentability.
The EPO actively went out of it's way to gain governmental commitment for it's plans to entirely rewrite the European patent system.
Perhaps they play differently than in the U.S, though I would sincerely doubt it. It's big business - the last thing a patent office can afford, is to be purely subject to the whims of the State.
Patent offices are hardly champions of justice, reason or let alone invention. They are paper pushing businesses in whose best interest it is to relax the conditions for what is considered patentable.
Sure, the problem begins with patents themselves (esp software and pharmaceutical patents) but this can be stemmed at the level of the State even allowing Patent Offices to operate as enterprises (with marketing divisions, lobbyists, investment incentives) in their own right.
And further down, at the level of the patent holder - if we are to live with these absurd monopolies on ideas called sofware patents, then lets ensure that those granted patents have licenses to drive them without hurting other humans. At is stands patents are actually killing people (pharmacs), and when they are not doing that, they are truncating innovation through discouraging improvement upon existing technologies, ideas, bodies and things.
It costs alot to register a patent but it costs alot more to research potential breaches. This is the slow but psychological violence of patent monopolies.
You know, on second thought, the better idea is just get a Mac. The average PC user will find it safer and they can do 99% of what they were going to do anyways.
except 99% of users aren't going to throw away their existing machine and buy another. so, no this isn't an option.
a real, sensible and popular option is downloading a desktop distro like Mepis or Ubuntu, you'll be up and running in about the time it takes to patch a windows machine. and yes, 99% of what most people use computers for is well satisfied with either.
many seem to forget that for most, a computer is a utility item like a washing machine or car; 99% or the population expect to have the machine for several years.
to these ends win32 platforms are 'geek' OS's requiring alot of maintenance and generally high level of technical ability (why should Jane Sixpack have to know what a 'firewall', or a 'patch' is?). for most, and where apple machines are concerned, the option of buying a whole new machine and learning a entirely new system is both tedious and economically risky prospect. linux is a sensible alternative.
my sister after using linux exclusively on her compaq machine for close to a year - she installed it herself - recently asked, "What is the command line?"
.. it's Redhat's little experiment to see if the community can sustain development of a distribution whose parts or whose sum may become useful in their enterprise editions later. it has no primary project of maintaining an easy to use desktop platform. their own site makes this quite clear.
and so i wasn't suprised that all my encounters with Fedora prove it's far more suited to very interested enthusiasts than new users. this seems due to the Redhat association; as though being tagged with such a name brand it has proven itself to be ready for widest distribution.
Fedora needs alot of work to be a sensible productivity platform for Jane Sixpack. Ubuntu or Mepis are far more suitable for new users, out-of-the-box. given the choice of all three, nearly all of my students dropped Fedora for the Debian-based Mepis and Ubuntu distributions.
administrators shouldn't be so easily swayed either. Fedora is difficult to maintain and install compared to that of Mepis or Ubuntu. it took 2 of us 4.5 hours to install Mepis on 30 dell workstations, all just worked with absolutely *no* after-the-fact configuration. Fedora Core 4 took 3 people 2 full days to get to that state on the same number of machines.
Fedora, as a would-be flagship of Desktop Linux for so many, gives a bad first impression. Fedora users promoting the project should read the distribution home page before reccommending it to uncle Keith.
hehe precisely, proving how apple truly is a Cult of Fabricated Benevolence. it's no wonder so many of their products are white..
i remember (back in the day) how terribly upset apple enthusiasts were to discover that motorola (that altruistic competitor to intel) made most of it's money selling chips to the military for use in missile guidance systems.
now that apple will be selling pretty much the same spec asus intel laptop i have in front of me (Asus already manufacture the PPC iBooks and will continue doing so), intel will be rigorously defended to the same absurd extents as motorola.
if only this same blind faith could be somehow channelled to, i don't know, rehydrate africa or something.
The 'Asian market', taken with just China or all together is many many times larger than the US. the US is comparitively tiny. Second largest is the EU, which is also larger than the US. There will be distribution branching, but likely they want to collect revenue and analyse market performance before exploring smaller additional markets and (most of all) language ports.
Re:An interesting thing to watch
on
KOffice 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
(With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)
In that case, I have no choice but to be incorrect; I work in an academic institution currently, and yes OpenOffice2.0 does flawlessly open word and excel documents sent to me by MSWord using colleagues. Earlier iterations of OO however weren't so reliable with that format.
Sadly my MSWord using colleagues can't open my *.sxw or *.abi documents in MSWord, I guess Microsoft will have to work on this; the wide number of people using OO here is encouraging the department to consider default OO installs on all office systems.
In some goverments here in the EU, there is a move to make FOSS alternatives like OO mandatory.
Powerpoint, I don't know. I make my presentations in HTML.
What do you mean "most of today's applications rely and run on Windows only?
What applications?
Most of the 16300 applications I can install on this machine (in a matter of seconds) simply don't run on Windows, and with no ports in the pipeline. I'm reliant on many of these programs; hence totally cutting Windows out of being an option for me, as a core productivity system. Windows just doesn't have the software I need.
There are however many applications that do run across both platforms and more are being ported daily; and it's here that we see migration trajectories realistically. Do you perhaps mean most of the Windows applications people are already using on Windows? Or would that be too obvious.
Bill: Phan, can I take off a little economic load while ensuring long term technological dependence on my software and rendering you less competitive in Asia for decades?
Phan: I guess (sighs).
$$HICK $$HING
Bill: How does that feel?
Phan: Pretty weird really, I thought all that stuff you said at dinner last night was honest, y'know about empowering people and stuff.
Bill: Well, right now I need as many footholds in Asia as possible to help stay a unilateral exploration of alternatives to vendor lock-in, especially in this region. No hard feelings? I want to do this together Phan. You and me. It'll be like Bonnie and Clyde but with IntelliMice instead of guns.
Phan: I guess, no hard feelings.
Bill: I feel we really understand each other.
Phan: Me too, Americans have been really nasty to us in the past. Thanks Bill.. Can you call me "Phan The Man"?
SME's are the hardest hit here, but as the FFII organisers suggest, SME's need to make direct contact with MEP's, ideally in Brussels itself.
Fat yet hungry wolves like Apple and Microsoft et al http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=11 649&Page=1&pagePos=11 are working hard alongside EU nationals (eg Nokia, Siemens) to falsely lobby on behalf of SME's. The case needs to be made clear to MEP's that SME's have the least to gain from swpats, and the argument needs to be economically framed in the context of the EU's stake in a global IT market.
Statistics like these serve as good support material: http://wiki.ffii.org/Bsa050609En
It's not just that there is much to lose from unbridled software patenting, so much as there is arguably much to gain from disallowing them altogether.
Personally I would have thought the moment US mega-corps become involved, would be glaring reason for MEP's to become anxious over the interests of the directive, but as they say "follow the money".. in this case off a cliff.
true, you bet me to it. OSX will continue to be the 'rent-not-own' portability-crippled UNIX it already is, few changes there. their increasing investment in DRM will win them business, from a very different audience however.
the only way this would work is if it was legitimately released for generic Intel boxes, and not without a massive amount of effort on Apple's part. OSX would be entirely useless to most people without driver support for devices like soundcards, winmodems, gfx cards et al. OSX uers on generic Intel machines everywhere would complain "It doesn't Just Work afterall!".
solutions might include 1) hardware vendors writing drivers, (something they wouldn't do illegally. 2) the BSD community working flat-out to catch up to Linux's massive driver base albeit on a dubious premise (good luck).
it's more likely we'll see Darwin itself spreading (again years behind Linux where drivers are concerned), with an X11 DE like KDE or Gnome, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of people wanting to toy with OSX's proprietary Aqua UI.
With all the debate surrounding whether Dell/Lenovo/HP will provide the Intel range of Apple's, we should not forget the Apple portable range is already made by Taiwanese manufacturers, Asustek and Quanta Computing http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050114A7040.html.
Slashdot Mirror
if you don't like Big Brother, don't compile him..
Likely SuSE, RH et al will play the PlaySafe card in order to meet hw vendor obligations, and so will likely ship with the kind of DRM that prevents use of restrictively copyrighted media. Similarly, they will be fighting to be the first distro to support biometrics for laptops. If you don't like this sort of carry on, grab the kernel sources, RTFM and ensure the offending 'Y' is not in your
DRM is largely misunderstood anyway, while I don't support DRM as a model for protected media, DRM can be a valuable tool for securing a machine by specifiying what a user can and cannot do on that box.
Torvalds on this polemic matter said:
"Linux is an operating system, not a political movement, and people should ultimately be able to do what they want with it, he said.. This is why I refuse to disallow even the 'bad' kinds of uses--because not allowing them would automatically also mean that 'good' uses aren't allowed."
No one in their right mind goes near OSX for high load, mission critical jobs. OSX (Tiger on G5) has a crippled design of user-level thread management, poor memory latency, and is plum pudding as a MySQL server.
To summarise this particular review: .
We'll talk when MacIntel ships, in the meantime, I wouldn't go near the mess. It makes an OK workstation, that said even in my own benchmarks (3D Rendering and video encoding largely), Debian PPC sporting a 2.6.* kernel gives OSX Tiger a right spanking. I guess that's why Disney, Hollywood, Weta et al choose it for the same purpose.
I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.
NVIDIA were becoming a big player, yet SGI was responsible for the extremely popular 3D library we were using.
Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.
Well done, an astoundingly shortsighted comment there.
Any measure of thought reveals that F/OSS enriches education far more than that of their proprietary counterparts: god forbid should there ever be a time that a student does become inquisitive as to how the machine called a 'personal computer' actually works, they can browse source, read manpages and learn how they might adapt the system to their (shock) individual needs. Kids are innately inquisitive - give them a chance and they will never cease to debunk assumptions on their enthusiasm and capacity.
Even the Apple Platinum II and Amiga I poked around on years ago were infinitely more inpsiring in this regard than the god awful "f*ck off" binary ironically entitled Windows eXPerience. Frankly it's horrible that for so many new minds, this is the 'face' of computing.
The very values of Microsoft products propogate an impoverished relationship with technology, something otherwise offering a powerful cultural impetus capable of user defined extension, use and expression.
Ironically, 'software patents' do not protect software, they seek to protect ideas expressed in the software. With minor changes to the subject of software patent law, music or literature could easily fall under similar duress.
Copyright, however, protects what has is actually made and so serves software very well; copyright, (eg. the GPL) can be placed in the very code itself whereas a patent is a legal abstraction held in patent office archives and is expensive and timely to research. Secondly patents can only be contested in court. Copyright however tends toward user/developer transparency and breaches happen when the protected artifact in question is misused.
Remember also that though prior art is required to grant a patent, this 'art' need not include a product or a work. 'Prior Art' requires a dated expression of an idea and can even discuss what a product derived or based around that idea might constitute.
With copyright you own what you make not what you haven't yet made (or may not ever make).
don't confuse copyright with patenting. they are absolutely different. can you guess which one has served literature, music and science since around 1710?
The combined worldwide market for desktops, servers, and packaged software running on Linux is forecast to grow at a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 25.9 percent worldwide, reaching $35.7 billion by 2008.
New and redeployed PCs running Linux is a market forecast to grow to $10 billion and 17 million units by 2008 with an installed base of over 42.6 million units.
The Apple Implant.
Customer: Why not?
Rep: We're sorry sir, we can't afford to have our product in any kind of body. You must be white, trim and fabulously photogenic.
The Patent Office does not set the conditions for patentability. Those are set by congress and the courts.
Not strictly true, at least here in the EU. The EPO has lobbied hard for widest possible patentability and have an active marketing division producing pamphlets and giving seminars all around the EU.
You ought to read this case history.. The EPO has been granting patents within unqualified (not legally valid) contexts of 'patentability' (ie. software patents) for several years and have actively pushed for widest patentability.
The EPO actively went out of it's way to gain governmental commitment for it's plans to entirely rewrite the European patent system.
Perhaps they play differently than in the U.S, though I would sincerely doubt it. It's big business - the last thing a patent office can afford, is to be purely subject to the whims of the State.
Patent offices are hardly champions of justice, reason or let alone invention. They are paper pushing businesses in whose best interest it is to relax the conditions for what is considered patentable.
Sure, the problem begins with patents themselves (esp software and pharmaceutical patents) but this can be stemmed at the level of the State even allowing Patent Offices to operate as enterprises (with marketing divisions, lobbyists, investment incentives) in their own right.
And further down, at the level of the patent holder - if we are to live with these absurd monopolies on ideas called sofware patents, then lets ensure that those granted patents have licenses to drive them without hurting other humans. At is stands patents are actually killing people (pharmacs), and when they are not doing that, they are truncating innovation through discouraging improvement upon existing technologies, ideas, bodies and things.
It costs alot to register a patent but it costs alot more to research potential breaches. This is the slow but psychological violence of patent monopolies.
via Stephanie Klugg Aug 15 2003, 6:33 pm
Someone is obviously paid to do this.
a real, sensible and popular option is downloading a desktop distro like Mepis or Ubuntu, you'll be up and running in about the time it takes to patch a windows machine. and yes, 99% of what most people use computers for is well satisfied with either.
many seem to forget that for most, a computer is a utility item like a washing machine or car; 99% or the population expect to have the machine for several years.
to these ends win32 platforms are 'geek' OS's requiring alot of maintenance and generally high level of technical ability (why should Jane Sixpack have to know what a 'firewall', or a 'patch' is?). for most, and where apple machines are concerned, the option of buying a whole new machine and learning a entirely new system is both tedious and economically risky prospect. linux is a sensible alternative.
my sister after using linux exclusively on her compaq machine for close to a year - she installed it herself - recently asked, "What is the command line?"
.. it's Redhat's little experiment to see if the community can sustain development of a distribution whose parts or whose sum may become useful in their enterprise editions later. it has no primary project of maintaining an easy to use desktop platform. their own site makes this quite clear.
and so i wasn't suprised that all my encounters with Fedora prove it's far more suited to very interested enthusiasts than new users. this seems due to the Redhat association; as though being tagged with such a name brand it has proven itself to be ready for widest distribution.
Fedora needs alot of work to be a sensible productivity platform for Jane Sixpack. Ubuntu or Mepis are far more suitable for new users, out-of-the-box. given the choice of all three, nearly all of my students dropped Fedora for the Debian-based Mepis and Ubuntu distributions.
administrators shouldn't be so easily swayed either. Fedora is difficult to maintain and install compared to that of Mepis or Ubuntu. it took 2 of us 4.5 hours to install Mepis on 30 dell workstations, all just worked with absolutely *no* after-the-fact configuration. Fedora Core 4 took 3 people 2 full days to get to that state on the same number of machines.
Fedora, as a would-be flagship of Desktop Linux for so many, gives a bad first impression. Fedora users promoting the project should read the distribution home page before reccommending it to uncle Keith.
then again, it seems uncle Keith has already decided.
hehe precisely, proving how apple truly is a Cult of Fabricated Benevolence. it's no wonder so many of their products are white..
i remember (back in the day) how terribly upset apple enthusiasts were to discover that motorola (that altruistic competitor to intel) made most of it's money selling chips to the military for use in missile guidance systems.
now that apple will be selling pretty much the same spec asus intel laptop i have in front of me (Asus already manufacture the PPC iBooks and will continue doing so), intel will be rigorously defended to the same absurd extents as motorola.
if only this same blind faith could be somehow channelled to, i don't know, rehydrate africa or something.
/me notes conspicuous redundancy in parent "which is also larger than the US". s/also larger/also larger in population
The 'Asian market', taken with just China or all together is many many times larger than the US. the US is comparitively tiny. Second largest is the EU, which is also larger than the US. There will be distribution branching, but likely they want to collect revenue and analyse market performance before exploring smaller additional markets and (most of all) language ports.
It looks like this and is made by the company that already make the PB's and iBooks.
I jest, of course it doesn't have the monstrous OSX on it, well yet..
In that case, I have no choice but to be incorrect; I work in an academic institution currently, and yes OpenOffice2.0 does flawlessly open word and excel documents sent to me by MSWord using colleagues. Earlier iterations of OO however weren't so reliable with that format.
Sadly my MSWord using colleagues can't open my *.sxw or *.abi documents in MSWord, I guess Microsoft will have to work on this; the wide number of people using OO here is encouraging the department to consider default OO installs on all office systems.
In some goverments here in the EU, there is a move to make FOSS alternatives like OO mandatory.
Powerpoint, I don't know. I make my presentations in HTML.
What do you mean "most of today's applications rely and run on Windows only?
What applications?
Most of the 16300 applications I can install on this machine (in a matter of seconds) simply don't run on Windows, and with no ports in the pipeline. I'm reliant on many of these programs; hence totally cutting Windows out of being an option for me, as a core productivity system. Windows just doesn't have the software I need.
There are however many applications that do run across both platforms and more are being ported daily; and it's here that we see migration trajectories realistically. Do you perhaps mean most of the Windows applications people are already using on Windows? Or would that be too obvious.
Bill: Phan, can I take off a little economic load while ensuring long term technological dependence on my software and rendering you less competitive in Asia for decades?
Phan: I guess (sighs).
$$HICK $$HING
Bill: How does that feel?
Phan: Pretty weird really, I thought all that stuff you said at dinner last night was honest, y'know about empowering people and stuff.
Bill: Well, right now I need as many footholds in Asia as possible to help stay a unilateral exploration of alternatives to vendor lock-in, especially in this region. No hard feelings? I want to do this together Phan. You and me. It'll be like Bonnie and Clyde but with IntelliMice instead of guns.
Phan: I guess, no hard feelings.
Bill: I feel we really understand each other.
Phan: Me too, Americans have been really nasty to us in the past. Thanks Bill.. Can you call me "Phan The Man"?
Bill: It would be my pleasure.
Phan: Can I call you "Billy G"?
Bill: Absolutely not.
Phan: (sighs)
SME's are the hardest hit here, but as the FFII organisers suggest, SME's need to make direct contact with MEP's, ideally in Brussels itself.
Fat yet hungry wolves like Apple and Microsoft et al http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1
http://wiki.ffii.org/Bsa050609En
It's not just that there is much to lose from unbridled software patenting, so much as there is arguably much to gain from disallowing them altogether.
Personally I would have thought the moment US mega-corps become involved, would be glaring reason for MEP's to become anxious over the interests of the directive, but as they say "follow the money".. in this case off a cliff.
true, you bet me to it. OSX will continue to be the 'rent-not-own' portability-crippled UNIX it already is, few changes there. their increasing investment in DRM will win them business, from a very different audience however.
the only way this would work is if it was legitimately released for generic Intel boxes, and not without a massive amount of effort on Apple's part. OSX would be entirely useless to most people without driver support for devices like soundcards, winmodems, gfx cards et al. OSX uers on generic Intel machines everywhere would complain "It doesn't Just Work afterall!".
solutions might include 1) hardware vendors writing drivers, (something they wouldn't do illegally. 2) the BSD community working flat-out to catch up to Linux's massive driver base albeit on a dubious premise (good luck).
it's more likely we'll see Darwin itself spreading (again years behind Linux where drivers are concerned), with an X11 DE like KDE or Gnome, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of people wanting to toy with OSX's proprietary Aqua UI.
With all the debate surrounding whether Dell/Lenovo/HP will provide the Intel range of Apple's, we should not forget the Apple portable range is already made by Taiwanese manufacturers, Asustek and Quanta Computing http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050114A7040.html
Perhaps these snaps http://store.agearnotebooks.com/asuss5nphoto.html can be considered 'sketches' of what's to come..