The only problem with a pure free market is that it acts under the assumption that what makes the best business sense will be inherently good for everyone. Just because the average consumer want to pay less for goods in exchange for more environmental damage, that doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Actually, there's lots of evidence that consumers will pay more if they feel they are buying 'virtuous' goods. E.g. organic food, or environmentally friendly electricity. Or hybrid cars. I've even met people who reckon that Starbucks coffee is more expensive because the workers have more rights. You can think of environmental friendliness being a sort of added value.
And it general, most free markets don't end up with all producers competing to occupy the bottom of the cost/quality curve, because that's a very dangerous place to be.
1 Germany 1,133,000 2 United States 1,024,000 3 China 974,000 -- Hong Kong 611,600 4 Japan 590,300 5 France 490,000 6 United Kingdom 468,800
Look at China - if you knock of Hong Kong which China includes, they'd do pretty badly. Incidentally, all the best exporters tend to be small countries, which makes me wonder if using exports as a measure is bogus. Maybe if you looked at US states individually and counted inter state 'import' and 'export', the US would do much better. I.e. the US's low score is essentially because exports are defined to not include most trade.
They still beat the EU average narrowly. But they beat Mainland China by an enormous amount, they export 5x as much.
I think the slashdot perception that the US is finished as an exporter is partly for ideological reasons - they dislike the current government and therefore expect it to have trashed the economy. But it's partly because if you're in IT, China seems to be good at manufacturing anecdotally. Most PC equipment seems to be manufactured in China for example.
So the US doesn't do as well as it did when it was the only country with an advanced economy. But it doesn't do too badly either. And look on the brightside, not being dependent on exports makes the US less sensitive to economic shocks elsewhere in the world.
Actually, since they consequently lacked anything to domesticate, they stayed at the hunter-gatherer tribal state for the next 20 000 years and were eventually driven off their land and killed into near-extinction by foreign invaders and their domestication-originated diseases.
But the only possible foreign invaders now are aliens, and if there's one thing I learned from science fiction it is that alien invaders come from dying worlds. They don't invade them. Obviously to offset the vast cost of interstellar travel the world you invade has to be pretty damn healthy environmentally. So by destroying the environment we are actually making ourselves safe from the aliens.
But just because driving fast is fun doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for the environment. From the link
A spokesman for the German transport ministry, Dirk Inger, said an overall Autobahn limit of 100km/h (62mph) would reduce CO2 emissions by only 0.6%. The ministry also said 98% of German roads already had speed limits
The EU is like the Thals, a peaceful people who are sadly hostile to modern science. Whereas the US is like the Kaleds, a proud warlike people unafraid of facing their natural evolution into hideous mutants.
MOUNTAIN DEW AND BAWLS ALL ROUND! MOUNTAIN DEW AND BAWLS ALL ROUND!
They gave me a nice list of events: First the thugs bought something small, then tried something big.
Whoa there. Calling them thugs and thieves is wrong. Here at slashdot we like to keep those terms for people that steal something physical. E.g. if I steal your car, I gain a car and you lose one. That's theft.
But if I *copy* your credit card number, you *still have it*. So it's not theft. More like unauthorized copying. It's as inaccurate as calling them pirates, unless they stole your credit card by boarding your ship with grappling irons and muskets. Remember your credit card number is just a number i.e. information and information wants to be free. They probably got it off a website, and the AACS fiasco shows how futile it is to try to keep 'magic' numbers off the internet. Hell the website owner was exercising hius free speech rights by displaying that number - it's not like it's copyrighted or anything. Someone else probably broke the law, but that's not their problem, and they were just exercising Their Rights Online by browsing it.
And remember that you probably have more money than people in Turkey, just like the MPAA has more money than the pirates. So it's not like you can't afford to lose it. Seriously, it's far more important that the internet stay free, than we erect unconstitutional laws to protect your obsolete business model of security through credit card number obscurity.
Try to google the last eight digits of your credit card, and see what comes up. You should try using netstat or setting up a proxy and seeing what happens at the HTTP level.
To me, this just goes to show what a bad standard/interface DX10 really is.
Eh?. DirectX is a thin wrapper over the hardware. The orignal DirectX gave you access to the physical frame buffer and blitter (DirectDraw), the 3d hardware (Direct3d). Most of the time, Direct3D was used to blast polygons from a buffer in the game straight to the hardware in the card which rendered them. These days, it's much more complex and different hardware does better at different things, because the designers concentrated on optimising different things. It's the same with OpenGL actually - look at the Doom3 performance tweak some guy released for ATI cards. The shader just wasn't optimized for ATI hardware.
The standards defines a bunch of primitives, some which the hardware must implement and some which are optional. The chip designers can implement them with a lot of hardware or let software do it, or anything in between. If they're lucky, they spend hardware on bits of DirectX which turn out to be important.
It sounds like trying to compare floating point benchmarks on AMD Athlon versus Intel Core 2. Depending on how you arrange the numbers and call the various floating point extensions can make all the difference.
In a funny kind of way, you can think of the x86 instruction set as being another thin abstraction layer over the actual hardware. And so a Core2 which is a more recent and more complex design does better than an Athlon on average. But you can still find some instruction sequences where Core 2 is worse than Athlon, I'm sure. Ones that depend on memory latency for one.
The point of abstraction layers like the x86 instruction set, or DirectX or OpenGL is to allow developers to develop common code which runs on a bunch of hardware. Then the end users can choose to buy hardware that can implement the abstraction layer by working out how much cash they want to spend, what applications' performance they care about, and which vendor has the best product for their needs. The alternative is that you buy a bunch of software written for AMD processors and ATI graphics hardware and if they slipped behind for a generation you'd be stuck.
The point of the abstraction layer is not to make a $20 graphics card perform the same as a $200 one, or even to make $200 cards from different vendors perform the same. It's so that they both look the same to software.
Actually, the reason a little village is safer, is because there are more police per 1000 people than in a city
How do you know? Have you been there?
I've never seen any police in the village. They arrive within minutes if someone tips them off no doubt, but that reinforces my point about surveillance.
Saw lots of them patrolling in the city, but not in the high crime areas.
If the city would maintain the same relative size police force as a country town, there would be no unemployment (since all able bodied people would be in the police force) and there would be no crime either, since there would be a bobby on every block
And how much would that cost? The people who tip them off in the village do it for free. So do cameras. Why is it OMG Fascism when there's a camera on every block, but a 'bobby' is ok? Maybe we should use a cute term for cameras too, like eBobby so you'd stop worrying.
You only need to watch the footage if a crime has been committed. Personally, I don't see a problem. My parents just moved from a large, anonymous city which was dirty and had a high crime rate to a small village which was clean and didn't. But the thing is, in a village you have no privacy at all. Everyone knows everyone else, and they report strangers to the police. But a watched society is a polite, clean one with no crime whatsoever. Seems to me that adding a load of cameras and making sure people that commit crime are fined or imprisoned will clean up the cities too.
You'd know all this if you'd ever tried to write a driver for Windows.
I've written several drivers for Windows. Incidentally, Windows isn't completely back compatible for drivers - they don't guarantee an XP driver will work on Vista for example. E.g. Win2k introduced WDM and plug and play to NT kernels which forced most drivers to be completely rewritten. The API for display drivers is very dependent on OS. Vista and later have a kernel mode framework which doesn't work on earlier OSs. NDIS has changed enormously, mostly for performance reasons.
Having said that it's not too hard to make a driver which works on two to three revisions of the OS, and usually with one binary. Probably you could do a driver which does Win2k, XP and Vista for example spending a couple of weeks coding and testing when the betas come out or bugs get reported, and that's 90% of the OS market. I.e. a few man months of effort over five years gives you a driver which supports the vast majority of computer users. Most companies only care about the last two revisions of the OS anyway.
But this is completely different from Linux where the interfaces inside the kernel change between minor kernel revisions without changing performance at all, and the kernel maintainers go out of their way to make it impossible to use binary drivers. So you spend endless effort supporting a platform with 0% of the market.
The cost/benefit ratio is enormously worse for Linux and even if you do it a people will just call you a leech because you didn't release the source code. Given that there's no commercial reason to do it, why bother?
The unit test really should include sufficient emulation of the hardware to test the driver. If the hardware vendor supplied such a unit test, you could run it after a refactoring without access to the hardware. If the driver which passed the unit tests turns out not to work, somebody with enough knowledge of the hardware should improve the unit tests.
You've never written any code which deals with hardware that actually works, have you? This is the kind of thing people say until they actually do it, and find that the hardware does things like randomly drop interrupts, or corrupt memory by bus mastering, or miss register accesses, and it only does it under obscure circumstances. And there can be bugs in the OS kernel or other drivers might corrupt memory. And the hard ones are ones that only happen 0.0001% of the time. The only way you can tell if a driver really works in a real system is to test it with the real hardware which has all the bugs, not some idealised model which only has the ones you can know about.
Philips decided to use the compression because they make the camera. Nemosoft wrote the driver. From what I can tell, you need compression to get a decent frame rate/resolution on USB 1.0. Philips worked out a way to compress efficiently in hardware. Since this the only part of the webcam which is non obvious, Philips wanted to make money out of it by licensing, or maybe they licensed it from someone else. For whatever reason, they didn't want to release source code to the decompressor. They did let Nemosoft get the details under NDA and write a binary only plugin for the driver.
But that link is completely disengenuous. Lots of other OSs have stable API (source level) between drivers and the kernel. Unix type OSs have a relatively simple driver API, so it's not very hard to keep it stable. And in fact every processor has an ABI document describing how the parameters in his "Binary Kernel Interface" section should be set, so it's not hard too get a stable binary interface too.
Even in the Windows world which has a much more complex driver API, it's not too hard to write a driver to support a couple of OS revisions (E.g. Win2k, XP and Vista) and distribute it as a binary, I know because I've done it. Other driver classes are even better - SCSI miniports can run from Win98 and Me,to NT,2k,XP and Vista. They can also run in NTLDR's weird pre OS environment and on Risc NT workstations or 64 bit Vista boxes. You need to build a binary per architecture, but that's probably for the best.
Sure it's extra work for the kernel maintainer to keep interfaces stable, but Microsoft do it because they want OEMs to write Windows drivers for their hardware.
Greg doesn't want to do this because he wants to make things so hard for NVidia and all the other binary blob companies that they decide to GPL and release the source code to their drivers. And he wants to be able to refactor things without having to discuss it with anyone else. That document doesn't mention all that though, he just tries to raise a bunch of technically hard sounding problems, announce they are unsolvable and leave it at that.
The same old problems constantly get revisited when someone looks at something semi-widely accepted and decides the code is too ugly and makes a rewrite that doesn't add anything from the user's point of view but forces them to relearn another system.
Nemosoft wrote a GPL driver which called out to a binary decompressor module. All was OK for a couple of years. Then Greg decided to rip out the callback. So suddenly the camera would only work in 160*120. Nemosoft then asked for the crippled driver to be removed. Greg did. Then Saillard forked the driver and decompiled the decompressor and put it back in the kernel. Nemosoft then complained that the decompiled code was illegal and got it removed from the kernel again.
Each step sounds like a perfect example of what the original poster was complaining about - people keep making changes that cause things to stop working.
So the only approved way to get support for a driver is to GPL the code and get it included there. Then, if one of the kernel maintainers feels like doing some refactoring it's their responsibility to make sure your code builds after the change is made.
Now the next question is who's responsible for running the unit test to make sure the code is really OK after the kernel was refactored. Is it the guy that wrote the code originally, has hardware samples and knows how to run the test, or the kernel maintainer who knows about the change but doesn't have hardware or the time/knowledge to test it?
The thing is, things don't stay fixed. The same old problems constantly get revisited when someone looks at something semi-widely accepted and decides the code is too ugly and makes a rewrite that doesn't add anything from the user's point of view but forces them to relearn another system.
Nonsense, competition is good anywhere. Particularly when some non profit / government scheme is being competed against. Am I the only one that sees a danger in getting kleptocratic third world governments to buy something in bulk designed by academics in the first world? The UK government has a long inglorious history of well meaning projects like this failing spectacularly. And if central planning by academics worked so well, why did the Soviet Union fall?
Seems like having a commercial project competing is providing a backup plan, should OLPC fail.
Re:easy distribution get you market shares
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
it is sad to see that your experiences with
windows 9x
have left you so
traumatised that you are incapable
of writing in simple
prose
would you like to act
them out with dolls
as a form of
therapy
?
In case you don't know this, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where this article came from, is very much a pro business and capitalism libertarian organization and they don't generally like theft, infringment, or other crimes robbing people. There is no way in which they would justify piracy. In this particular case they are simply arguing small scale piracy may help a business that is seeing it's product(s) pirated.
Yeah, and you can read the same sort of stuff in The Economist too. Even though it sounds good and makes me feel less guilty about torrenting, that doesn't mean it is economically valid or morally justified. They know that the creators of IP are a tiny minority, but there's a huge number of people pirating so articles like this will be popular.
In this case, the problem is that they're conflating free samples, where a business decides to voluntarily give away a limited number of tangible things with piracy, where an unlimited number of people can choose not to pay for something intangible like software or a movie. That seems bogus to me.
Torvalds had originally called it freax, for "`free' + `freak' + the obligatory `-x'. The operator of the FTP server where Linus' new kernel made its debut didn't like the name and simply called it Linux (Linus + Unix). People seemed to like the name so it stuck.
That's not true. Originally he uploaded it as Linux(tm) but the FTP operator renamed it to Freakz. Linus thought he was being disrespected and went round to his house and beat the piss out of him with a IBM keyboard. Now everyone calls it Linux, except for the FTP operator who can't speak because he's on life support.
Linus still has the IBM keyboard - it works perfectly, but is still covered in specs of blood. Linus uses takes great pleasure in showing it to people when the join his coding commune.
Yeah, exactly. Mouthing off about it in public is the best way to give them other complaints to add to the existing ones. And behaviour is important. I've heard of court cases where the 'Goliath' side's case seemed pretty weak, but the 'David' party lost money because they seemed a bit nutty. Basically the Goliath party managed to convince the jury that their reputation had been damaged by the crazy person.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem with a pure free market is that it acts under the assumption that what makes the best business sense will be inherently good for everyone. Just because the average consumer want to pay less for goods in exchange for more environmental damage, that doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Actually, there's lots of evidence that consumers will pay more if they feel they are buying 'virtuous' goods. E.g. organic food, or environmentally friendly electricity. Or hybrid cars. I've even met people who reckon that Starbucks coffee is more expensive because the workers have more rights. You can think of environmental friendliness being a sort of added value.
And it general, most free markets don't end up with all producers competing to occupy the bottom of the cost/quality curve, because that's a very dangerous place to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
Even looking at it by Capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
They still beat the EU average narrowly. But they beat Mainland China by an enormous amount, they export 5x as much.
I think the slashdot perception that the US is finished as an exporter is partly for ideological reasons - they dislike the current government and therefore expect it to have trashed the economy. But it's partly because if you're in IT, China seems to be good at manufacturing anecdotally. Most PC equipment seems to be manufactured in China for example.
So the US doesn't do as well as it did when it was the only country with an advanced economy. But it doesn't do too badly either. And look on the brightside, not being dependent on exports makes the US less sensitive to economic shocks elsewhere in the world.
Actually, since they consequently lacked anything to domesticate, they stayed at the hunter-gatherer tribal state for the next 20 000 years and were eventually driven off their land and killed into near-extinction by foreign invaders and their domestication-originated diseases.
But the only possible foreign invaders now are aliens, and if there's one thing I learned from science fiction it is that alien invaders come from dying worlds. They don't invade them. Obviously to offset the vast cost of interstellar travel the world you invade has to be pretty damn healthy environmentally. So by destroying the environment we are actually making ourselves safe from the aliens.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6441391.stm
But just because driving fast is fun doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for the environment. From the link
The EU is like the Thals, a peaceful people who are sadly hostile to modern science. Whereas the US is like the Kaleds, a proud warlike people unafraid of facing their natural evolution into hideous mutants.
MOUNTAIN DEW AND BAWLS ALL ROUND! MOUNTAIN DEW AND BAWLS ALL ROUND!
Tell that to Hitler. He was Catholic.
No the Pope was Catholic. Hitler shat in the woods.
They gave me a nice list of events: First the thugs bought something small, then tried something big.
Whoa there. Calling them thugs and thieves is wrong. Here at slashdot we like to keep those terms for people that steal something physical. E.g. if I steal your car, I gain a car and you lose one. That's theft.
But if I *copy* your credit card number, you *still have it*. So it's not theft. More like unauthorized copying. It's as inaccurate as calling them pirates, unless they stole your credit card by boarding your ship with grappling irons and muskets. Remember your credit card number is just a number i.e. information and information wants to be free. They probably got it off a website, and the AACS fiasco shows how futile it is to try to keep 'magic' numbers off the internet. Hell the website owner was exercising hius free speech rights by displaying that number - it's not like it's copyrighted or anything. Someone else probably broke the law, but that's not their problem, and they were just exercising Their Rights Online by browsing it.
And remember that you probably have more money than people in Turkey, just like the MPAA has more money than the pirates. So it's not like you can't afford to lose it. Seriously, it's far more important that the internet stay free, than we erect unconstitutional laws to protect your obsolete business model of security through credit card number obscurity.
Try to google the last eight digits of your credit card, and see what comes up. You should try using netstat or setting up a proxy and seeing what happens at the HTTP level.
To me, this just goes to show what a bad standard/interface DX10 really is.
Eh?. DirectX is a thin wrapper over the hardware. The orignal DirectX gave you access to the physical frame buffer and blitter (DirectDraw), the 3d hardware (Direct3d). Most of the time, Direct3D was used to blast polygons from a buffer in the game straight to the hardware in the card which rendered them. These days, it's much more complex and different hardware does better at different things, because the designers concentrated on optimising different things. It's the same with OpenGL actually - look at the Doom3 performance tweak some guy released for ATI cards. The shader just wasn't optimized for ATI hardware.
The standards defines a bunch of primitives, some which the hardware must implement and some which are optional. The chip designers can implement them with a lot of hardware or let software do it, or anything in between. If they're lucky, they spend hardware on bits of DirectX which turn out to be important.
It sounds like trying to compare floating point benchmarks on AMD Athlon versus Intel Core 2. Depending on how you arrange the numbers and call the various floating point extensions can make all the difference.
In a funny kind of way, you can think of the x86 instruction set as being another thin abstraction layer over the actual hardware. And so a Core2 which is a more recent and more complex design does better than an Athlon on average. But you can still find some instruction sequences where Core 2 is worse than Athlon, I'm sure. Ones that depend on memory latency for one.
The point of abstraction layers like the x86 instruction set, or DirectX or OpenGL is to allow developers to develop common code which runs on a bunch of hardware. Then the end users can choose to buy hardware that can implement the abstraction layer by working out how much cash they want to spend, what applications' performance they care about, and which vendor has the best product for their needs. The alternative is that you buy a bunch of software written for AMD processors and ATI graphics hardware and if they slipped behind for a generation you'd be stuck.
The point of the abstraction layer is not to make a $20 graphics card perform the same as a $200 one, or even to make $200 cards from different vendors perform the same. It's so that they both look the same to software.
Actually, the reason a little village is safer, is because there are more police per 1000 people than in a city
How do you know? Have you been there?
I've never seen any police in the village. They arrive within minutes if someone tips them off no doubt, but that reinforces my point about surveillance.
Saw lots of them patrolling in the city, but not in the high crime areas.
If the city would maintain the same relative size police force as a country town, there would be no unemployment (since all able bodied people would be in the police force) and there would be no crime either, since there would be a bobby on every block
And how much would that cost? The people who tip them off in the village do it for free. So do cameras. Why is it OMG Fascism when there's a camera on every block, but a 'bobby' is ok? Maybe we should use a cute term for cameras too, like eBobby so you'd stop worrying.
You only need to watch the footage if a crime has been committed. Personally, I don't see a problem. My parents just moved from a large, anonymous city which was dirty and had a high crime rate to a small village which was clean and didn't. But the thing is, in a village you have no privacy at all. Everyone knows everyone else, and they report strangers to the police. But a watched society is a polite, clean one with no crime whatsoever. Seems to me that adding a load of cameras and making sure people that commit crime are fined or imprisoned will clean up the cities too.
You'd know all this if you'd ever tried to write a driver for Windows.
I've written several drivers for Windows. Incidentally, Windows isn't completely back compatible for drivers - they don't guarantee an XP driver will work on Vista for example. E.g. Win2k introduced WDM and plug and play to NT kernels which forced most drivers to be completely rewritten. The API for display drivers is very dependent on OS. Vista and later have a kernel mode framework which doesn't work on earlier OSs. NDIS has changed enormously, mostly for performance reasons.
Having said that it's not too hard to make a driver which works on two to three revisions of the OS, and usually with one binary. Probably you could do a driver which does Win2k, XP and Vista for example spending a couple of weeks coding and testing when the betas come out or bugs get reported, and that's 90% of the OS market. I.e. a few man months of effort over five years gives you a driver which supports the vast majority of computer users. Most companies only care about the last two revisions of the OS anyway.
But this is completely different from Linux where the interfaces inside the kernel change between minor kernel revisions without changing performance at all, and the kernel maintainers go out of their way to make it impossible to use binary drivers. So you spend endless effort supporting a platform with 0% of the market.
The cost/benefit ratio is enormously worse for Linux and even if you do it a people will just call you a leech because you didn't release the source code. Given that there's no commercial reason to do it, why bother?
The unit test really should include sufficient emulation of the hardware to test the driver. If the hardware vendor supplied such a unit test, you could run it after a refactoring without access to the hardware. If the driver which passed the unit tests turns out not to work, somebody with enough knowledge of the hardware should improve the unit tests.
You've never written any code which deals with hardware that actually works, have you? This is the kind of thing people say until they actually do it, and find that the hardware does things like randomly drop interrupts, or corrupt memory by bus mastering, or miss register accesses, and it only does it under obscure circumstances. And there can be bugs in the OS kernel or other drivers might corrupt memory. And the hard ones are ones that only happen 0.0001% of the time. The only way you can tell if a driver really works in a real system is to test it with the real hardware which has all the bugs, not some idealised model which only has the ones you can know about.
Philips decided to use the compression because they make the camera. Nemosoft wrote the driver. From what I can tell, you need compression to get a decent frame rate/resolution on USB 1.0. Philips worked out a way to compress efficiently in hardware. Since this the only part of the webcam which is non obvious, Philips wanted to make money out of it by licensing, or maybe they licensed it from someone else. For whatever reason, they didn't want to release source code to the decompressor. They did let Nemosoft get the details under NDA and write a binary only plugin for the driver.
But that link is completely disengenuous. Lots of other OSs have stable API (source level) between drivers and the kernel. Unix type OSs have a relatively simple driver API, so it's not very hard to keep it stable. And in fact every processor has an ABI document describing how the parameters in his "Binary Kernel Interface" section should be set, so it's not hard too get a stable binary interface too.
Even in the Windows world which has a much more complex driver API, it's not too hard to write a driver to support a couple of OS revisions (E.g. Win2k, XP and Vista) and distribute it as a binary, I know because I've done it. Other driver classes are even better - SCSI miniports can run from Win98 and Me,to NT,2k,XP and Vista. They can also run in NTLDR's weird pre OS environment and on Risc NT workstations or 64 bit Vista boxes. You need to build a binary per architecture, but that's probably for the best.
Sure it's extra work for the kernel maintainer to keep interfaces stable, but Microsoft do it because they want OEMs to write Windows drivers for their hardware.
Greg doesn't want to do this because he wants to make things so hard for NVidia and all the other binary blob companies that they decide to GPL and release the source code to their drivers. And he wants to be able to refactor things without having to discuss it with anyone else. That document doesn't mention all that though, he just tries to raise a bunch of technically hard sounding problems, announce they are unsolvable and leave it at that.
Nemosoft wrote a GPL driver which called out to a binary decompressor module. All was OK for a couple of years. Then Greg decided to rip out the callback. So suddenly the camera would only work in 160*120. Nemosoft then asked for the crippled driver to be removed. Greg did. Then Saillard forked the driver and decompiled the decompressor and put it back in the kernel. Nemosoft then complained that the decompiled code was illegal and got it removed from the kernel again.
Each step sounds like a perfect example of what the original poster was complaining about - people keep making changes that cause things to stop working.
People are only getting defensive because you're asking them difficult questions.
p i_nonsense.txt
Inside the kernel, the software interfaces are subject to change without notice.
http://lxr.linux.no/source/Documentation/stable_a
So the only approved way to get support for a driver is to GPL the code and get it included there. Then, if one of the kernel maintainers feels like doing some refactoring it's their responsibility to make sure your code builds after the change is made.
Now the next question is who's responsible for running the unit test to make sure the code is really OK after the kernel was refactored. Is it the guy that wrote the code originally, has hardware samples and knows how to run the test, or the kernel maintainer who knows about the change but doesn't have hardware or the time/knowledge to test it?
And the answer is I don't know.
The thing is, things don't stay fixed. The same old problems constantly get revisited when someone looks at something semi-widely accepted and decides the code is too ugly and makes a rewrite that doesn't add anything from the user's point of view but forces them to relearn another system.
Hmm, that reminds me of a sad story.
http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/
I tend to think this is all overhype
I think you mean hyperbole.
Incidentally, I've always thought a well marketed bug budget summer blockbuster remake of Rollerball should be called HyperBowl!
There is only One Kingdom! One Queen! One RACE!
Nonsense, competition is good anywhere. Particularly when some non profit / government scheme is being competed against. Am I the only one that sees a danger in getting kleptocratic third world governments to buy something in bulk designed by academics in the first world? The UK government has a long inglorious history of well meaning projects like this failing spectacularly. And if central planning by academics worked so well, why did the Soviet Union fall?
Seems like having a commercial project competing is providing a backup plan, should OLPC fail.
it is sad to see that
your experiences with
windows 9x
have left you so
traumatised
that you are incapable
of writing in simple
prose
would you like to act
them out with dolls
as a form of
therapy
?
In case you don't know this, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where this article came from, is very much a pro business and capitalism libertarian organization and they don't generally like theft, infringment, or other crimes robbing people. There is no way in which they would justify piracy. In this particular case they are simply arguing small scale piracy may help a business that is seeing it's product(s) pirated.
Yeah, and you can read the same sort of stuff in The Economist too. Even though it sounds good and makes me feel less guilty about torrenting, that doesn't mean it is economically valid or morally justified. They know that the creators of IP are a tiny minority, but there's a huge number of people pirating so articles like this will be popular.
In this case, the problem is that they're conflating free samples, where a business decides to voluntarily give away a limited number of tangible things with piracy, where an unlimited number of people can choose not to pay for something intangible like software or a movie. That seems bogus to me.
Torvalds had originally called it freax, for "`free' + `freak' + the obligatory `-x'. The operator of the FTP server where Linus' new kernel made its debut didn't like the name and simply called it Linux (Linus + Unix). People seemed to like the name so it stuck.
That's not true. Originally he uploaded it as Linux(tm) but the FTP operator renamed it to Freakz. Linus thought he was being disrespected and went round to his house and beat the piss out of him with a IBM keyboard. Now everyone calls it Linux, except for the FTP operator who can't speak because he's on life support.
Linus still has the IBM keyboard - it works perfectly, but is still covered in specs of blood. Linus uses takes great pleasure in showing it to people when the join his coding commune.
Yeah, exactly. Mouthing off about it in public is the best way to give them other complaints to add to the existing ones. And behaviour is important. I've heard of court cases where the 'Goliath' side's case seemed pretty weak, but the 'David' party lost money because they seemed a bit nutty. Basically the Goliath party managed to convince the jury that their reputation had been damaged by the crazy person.