Not all patents can be worked around without removing functionality, because some of the patents are either defined in such a way or simply cover such functionality that it can't be done in any other ways than the ones the patent covers.
Actually, I think the only semi-real point that Hilf is trying to make is that the free software movement is dead, not that F/OSS itself is. Likewise, by Linux he probably means the "spirit of Linux", whatever he thinks that means. He takes the movement to mean those who are in favour of free software due to ideological rather than commercial or technical reasons. He says that the movement is thus dead because F/OSS is nowadays run by companies for commercial benefit and less so by people who do it for the philosophical reasons.
Of course, we've all known for a long time that F/OSS is largely ran by companies -- or at least many of the most visible projects are, which of course isn't the whole picture -- and that companies tend to do stuff for profit, not good feeling. That, of course, doesn't mean that the movement is nonexistent (like he claims) or that it has absolutely no influence. This is just another case of turning a well-known fact into "OMG Linux isn't safe!11" FUD.
The rest of the article is mostly bullshit, of course, but I think realising that he probably means some kind of a spirit rather than the software itself -- a distinction he isn't at all clear about -- is the key to understanding what the point of the article tries to be.
Finally, the argument that the company should do what's best for the consumer is bullshit. Profits drive business, everything dealing with the software should boost the bottom line somehow.
While that's obvious, it's equally obvious that in commercial software development, like in any other commerce, both parties involved try to maximise their benefit -- and probably should, lest the other party take benefit of it. Quite clearly from a customer's point of view the best policy in the other company is the one that does what's best for the consumer, so it's completely reasonable that someone writing from a customer's point of view demands that.
Not to mention that it's not only revolutionary but also revolving.
I have to say that I'm a little disappointed at Microsoft Wheel. I was expecting something really fresh and innovative, but it really just recycles the ideas found in previous Microsoft products. After all, a Windows CD will do about the same thing if you place an axis in the central whole.
Considering that earlier in the thread an AC commented on someone called "Lunis", it's hard to take the "Lunix" in GP (posted possibly, but not necessarily, by a different AC) as a generic reference to *nix systems rather than a trollish "looney" reference.
The rest of your post isn't worth touching with a ten-foot pole.
I mean, there's a thing called information, but I don't think false information counts in this case. The parent post is 99% opinions, and where they could be counted as "information", they're mostly false. (You need to have quite interesting a perspective to say that Linux, conveniently misspelled for trolling purposes, is "chasing Windows 95's tail lights" (emphasis mine))
Gentlemen, this is a genuine troll, not something that's supposed to be modded "informative". AC clearly knows too much about OSes to have the opinion he expresses.
Most people may not need a command-line shell, and power users may survive without one, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valuable part of a toolkit.
In particular, a good command-line interface (such as those found in many unix variants) is much more flexible than any GUI I've seen so far. Its strength comes from the ability to combine several simple tools together to build up a more complex and powerful one. I often reach for the command-line when I want to do something to a number of different files, for example mass renaming, adding ReplayGain tags to audio files, or any number of other such things. Of course any one of these things can be done through a GUI, but the point to notice is that the command-line shell needn't be specifically designed for any such task -- it offers the possibility not through a specific feature implemented explicitly for that task but by offering a flexible collection of tools to be freely used and combined. Usually GUIs will do mostly just those things they were designed for.
Of course, the things I use the command-line for could probably be done with a GUI even without a specific feature for the task, but it might well mean more manual work -- and power users don't like that.
If the mass of the planet is (supposedly) about five times that of Earth, how much would that affect gravity, and how would that in turn affect life there?
Of course by the time we'd be able to move anything alive to such a distant location (if ever) we might well have the technological means to support our life there just fine, but we may be bound to the conditions of Earth much tighter than just by the existence of liquid water.
The biggest problem with supplying the decoders with the distro is probably that of officially (and commercially) supporting them.
The holders of many such patents (e.g. Thomson and Fraunhofer for most MP3-related patents) don't demand the acquisition of a patent license for non-commercial use, so a home user installing an MP3 decoder for playback probably isn't doing anything even theoretically risky. However, I imagine it wouldn't be possible to commercially provide and support such software without a license.
Granted, there might be some patent holders involved that, in theory, unconditionally require a license for any use of a patented technology. I don't know if there are. However, I don't think the risk -- even the theoretical one -- is very significant for private home users.
Easily doable without open source. They'd bundle it with their OS anyway.
Windows users could use it
Easily doable without open source. Just release a Windows binary package just like they do with Quicktime, iTunes and whatnot.
and as a bonus they'd even get the Linux crowd on the bandwagon (probably doing much of the work)
That doesn't seem to have interested Apple much in the past. In fact, Apple rarely even admits that Linux exists. There isn't much market share to be gained from Linux anyway.
Obviously Apple would release such an application also for Windows. It wouldn't be able to gain much market share otherwise. The motivation for making it open source or even releasing a Linux binary is still unclear.
Apple is largely open source in the parts of their software that isn't directly part of their core business, which often means "where open source alternatives already exist". That means low-level OS stuff etc. and using other projects' OSS components where it happens to suit them. How many of all those open source components in OS X are actually original Apple production? Using other people's OSS components in the OS is quite different from opening up their own stuff.
Apple is not largely open source when it comes to their own applications, libraries etc., and particularly not so when it comes to features and applications that originally came from Apple itself and that other platforms don't have yet.
In other words, Apple uses open source components when it is in their interests. I'm yet to hear any reason why it would be in Apple's interests to release such an application as open source were they to develop one.
Not to mention that they could well do a half-assed job of it in the first place. Since it's the same software, it should work the same, so hey, it's obviously Linux' fault if it has problems.
I'd also imagine that licensing could prevent distros from including it even if they accept proprietary software, and MS would probably do the minimum effort required for packaging it itself, possibly causing problems or at least a "software is hard to install on Linux" effect.
The best way of playing on two sides at the same time is to pretend to be cooperative while doing the actual job in such a way that the benefit the other parties in the game get is as small as possible.
Or they might actually be releasing something reasonable. I'm not holding my breath yet but I guess anything's possible.
You all nod like a bunch of stodgy bobbleheads and out of the other side of your face proclaim that Linux is a valid solution even if you do have to scrape around 14 websites that are ripe with Linux snobbery to find some obscure, unsupported "solution".
Funny, I see modern Linux distros (often totalling gigabytes in size in software provided by the distributor, albeit not necessarily in the default install) as much more centralized than Windows where you actually need to go find all kinds of random software to fill your needs because the OS doesn't provide for them. I'm not necessarily suggesting that it should, but it still doesn't sound very fair to claim that a Linux distro that offers a gazillion software titles -- yes, even a lot of that reverse-engineered stuff -- via the more or less official channels of the distro so you don't have to go through obscure websites to find an unsupported solution.
If I really need to get up, I'm usually somehow psychologically prepared for it and am actually quite alert immediately after waking up, and I can almost literally jump out of the bed.
It's those cases where getting up early would be a good thing but not absolutely necessary that tend to cause more of a problem for me. (Being a student, I have lots of those.)
Come again? If you're going to make a comment about open-source software, it tends to be helpful to know something about said software and its current state. Someone who thinks that by its "very nature" a Linux-based system can't be updated as easily as a Windows system clearly doesn't know very well how things work. That makes forming informed decisions and insightful comments a little tricky.
Furthermore, if you had read my comment a little more closely you might have noticed that nowhere did I call Windows a failure. Suggesting that I did does little in the way of argumentation.
Yes, yes, I know that was a troll and I shouldn't feed.
With Windows, it truly is Plug-And-Play. Every piece of hardware that I've bought from Bluetooth devices to HDTV video cards to a bunch of different USB devices (GPS, storage, etc.) just works. I plug it in, install the Windows drivers that came on the CD, and I'm done. At the bare minimum for Linux, I'd have to hope there was a Linux driver, find it, install it, etc. That takes precious time which a lot of people don't have.
Sure enough, if you only use common hardware that has quality drivers, and the rest of the puzzle (such as other software) is also quite simple, it works. (It doesn't "just work" in the sense that you actually have to install drivers, but I guess it's close enough.) With Linux the simple scenario would be quite similar except that you wouldn't have to install the drivers -- they'd be provided with the OS.
You speak of the real world (and mostly correctly), but you neglect to mention one part of it: Windows isn't plug-and-play in a complex scenario. It wouldn't require much support if it were. Things require support because 1) in the real world organizations appreciate the possibility of getting possible problems and responsibility into someone else's hand rather and 2) real-world scenarios aren't always simple. The latter case is particularly true for organizations; most home users' needs are more or less simple and may well fall into the simple scenario.
Of course in a complex scenario with an exotic configuration you'd easily run into a problem with Linux if you aren't careful with your choice of hardware and software. But then, in a complex scenario Windows isn't really plug-and-play and "it just works" either. Some half-way complex scenarios may be simpler in Windows (e.g. if you have to separately install drivers in the first place, it's probably easier in Windows) but truely exotic configurations aren't always plug-and-play.
I don't like to spend time on things I'm not interested in either. I don't like to tweak for the sake of tweaking. The only reason why my system does take some tweaking and why things get complex at times is that I'm actually interested in the development of the software itself: I use development versions of some applications because I'm following their development and perhaps trying to understand enough about them myself to lend a hand some day. I do some tweaking sometimes to investigate a bug I've noticed in this or that application. These things are pretty much complex by nature. If I only wanted basic things to work, I wouldn't want to tweak anything for that and, indeed, wouldn't have to. The basic things, well, pretty much just work.
In case you hadn't figured it out yet, I do use Linux most of the time -- and one reason is exactly that most of it just works for me. I can't be bothered to hunt down and install drivers and worry about their compatibility so I'm just happy that all hardware I have has at least somewhat decent drivers that come with the system. No tweaking. Plug-and-play. I can't be bothered to worry about patching and updating every damn application in my system individually and manually (save for those that I use development versions of and that doesn't happen for the sake of tweaking either) -- thank $divine_force for system-wide updates that also include most applications.
I appreciate your real-world approach but it sounds like your information isn't very broad, up-to-date, or unbiased. Judging by this and particularly by your other response, it sounds like you aren't very familiar with the open-source world.
With this technology it can use any file that has chunks with the exact same hash as the file being downloaded by the user.
That makes one wonder, though, if the downloader might occasionally get chunks that have the same hash but where the actual data is still different. It's rare, I know, but if this were in common use, would it occasionally happen?
Hashes work fine against data corruption and intentional poisoning of a certain file because it's very rare for random corruption to happen so that the hash remains the same, and with that comes the fact that it's also very difficult (or at least laborious) to intentionally find another piece of data that has the same hash but isn't the same. However, if the comparison is done to all possible chunks in a P2P network, would the large mass of all possible chunks wield at least some that just happen to have the same hash?
It may not work in intentional poisoning because you'd have to generate the masses to find out which ones have a hash that matches the original but here you have the masses given and some just might match.
However, I don't know enough about the properties of MD5 or other hash algorithms to know whether that possibility would be significant if a hash is also computed for the entire file, not just all smaller chunks. After that it doesn't intuitively sound very likely anymore.
Finally, many Linux distributions seem to distribute a patched version of FreeType 2 with the bytecode interpreter activated, unlike to the sources we distribute.
However, I've previously been under the impression that most distributions would ship at least without some features covered by patents. On the other hand, it's not only MS who owns patents that concern subpixel rendering, and I don't know who owns what, so that's why I'm left wondering if someone else actually knows.
People don't play games if get consistently beaten. They want to win.
That's exactly why "good AI" in video games doesn't mean the same thing it means (or usually thought to mean) in chess or in some other theoretical senses.
A good game AI is something that is beatable but offers a good enough challenge and supports a believable game experience. In other words, being human-like is more important than playing the best game possible (from the AI, or anti-player, point of view).
Perhaps it's not so much that they'd be great in combat AI, but they play rather well with regard to going for the actual goal of the game (which isn't always to kill as much as possible).
Slashdot Mirror
Not all patents can be worked around without removing functionality, because some of the patents are either defined in such a way or simply cover such functionality that it can't be done in any other ways than the ones the patent covers.
Actually, I think the only semi-real point that Hilf is trying to make is that the free software movement is dead, not that F/OSS itself is. Likewise, by Linux he probably means the "spirit of Linux", whatever he thinks that means. He takes the movement to mean those who are in favour of free software due to ideological rather than commercial or technical reasons. He says that the movement is thus dead because F/OSS is nowadays run by companies for commercial benefit and less so by people who do it for the philosophical reasons.
Of course, we've all known for a long time that F/OSS is largely ran by companies -- or at least many of the most visible projects are, which of course isn't the whole picture -- and that companies tend to do stuff for profit, not good feeling. That, of course, doesn't mean that the movement is nonexistent (like he claims) or that it has absolutely no influence. This is just another case of turning a well-known fact into "OMG Linux isn't safe!11" FUD.
The rest of the article is mostly bullshit, of course, but I think realising that he probably means some kind of a spirit rather than the software itself -- a distinction he isn't at all clear about -- is the key to understanding what the point of the article tries to be.
I didn't say what was best for the customer. That's up for the customer to judge. Whatever it is, it makes sense for him to demand that.
While that's obvious, it's equally obvious that in commercial software development, like in any other commerce, both parties involved try to maximise their benefit -- and probably should, lest the other party take benefit of it. Quite clearly from a customer's point of view the best policy in the other company is the one that does what's best for the consumer, so it's completely reasonable that someone writing from a customer's point of view demands that.
Not to mention that it's not only revolutionary but also revolving.
I have to say that I'm a little disappointed at Microsoft Wheel. I was expecting something really fresh and innovative, but it really just recycles the ideas found in previous Microsoft products. After all, a Windows CD will do about the same thing if you place an axis in the central whole.
Considering that earlier in the thread an AC commented on someone called "Lunis", it's hard to take the "Lunix" in GP (posted possibly, but not necessarily, by a different AC) as a generic reference to *nix systems rather than a trollish "looney" reference.
The rest of your post isn't worth touching with a ten-foot pole.
Who's modding this up as informative?
I mean, there's a thing called information, but I don't think false information counts in this case. The parent post is 99% opinions, and where they could be counted as "information", they're mostly false. (You need to have quite interesting a perspective to say that Linux, conveniently misspelled for trolling purposes, is "chasing Windows 95's tail lights" (emphasis mine))
Gentlemen, this is a genuine troll, not something that's supposed to be modded "informative". AC clearly knows too much about OSes to have the opinion he expresses.
Most people may not need a command-line shell, and power users may survive without one, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valuable part of a toolkit.
In particular, a good command-line interface (such as those found in many unix variants) is much more flexible than any GUI I've seen so far. Its strength comes from the ability to combine several simple tools together to build up a more complex and powerful one. I often reach for the command-line when I want to do something to a number of different files, for example mass renaming, adding ReplayGain tags to audio files, or any number of other such things. Of course any one of these things can be done through a GUI, but the point to notice is that the command-line shell needn't be specifically designed for any such task -- it offers the possibility not through a specific feature implemented explicitly for that task but by offering a flexible collection of tools to be freely used and combined. Usually GUIs will do mostly just those things they were designed for.
Of course, the things I use the command-line for could probably be done with a GUI even without a specific feature for the task, but it might well mean more manual work -- and power users don't like that.
How about middle-clicking on the link? I don't know about Macs or how Firefox works on them but that works at least in the Linux version.
If the mass of the planet is (supposedly) about five times that of Earth, how much would that affect gravity, and how would that in turn affect life there?
Of course by the time we'd be able to move anything alive to such a distant location (if ever) we might well have the technological means to support our life there just fine, but we may be bound to the conditions of Earth much tighter than just by the existence of liquid water.
Because it's patent-encumbered.
The biggest problem with supplying the decoders with the distro is probably that of officially (and commercially) supporting them.
The holders of many such patents (e.g. Thomson and Fraunhofer for most MP3-related patents) don't demand the acquisition of a patent license for non-commercial use, so a home user installing an MP3 decoder for playback probably isn't doing anything even theoretically risky. However, I imagine it wouldn't be possible to commercially provide and support such software without a license.
Granted, there might be some patent holders involved that, in theory, unconditionally require a license for any use of a patented technology. I don't know if there are. However, I don't think the risk -- even the theoretical one -- is very significant for private home users.
Easily doable without open source. They'd bundle it with their OS anyway.
Windows users could use itEasily doable without open source. Just release a Windows binary package just like they do with Quicktime, iTunes and whatnot.
and as a bonus they'd even get the Linux crowd on the bandwagon (probably doing much of the work)That doesn't seem to have interested Apple much in the past. In fact, Apple rarely even admits that Linux exists. There isn't much market share to be gained from Linux anyway.
Obviously Apple would release such an application also for Windows. It wouldn't be able to gain much market share otherwise. The motivation for making it open source or even releasing a Linux binary is still unclear.
Apple is largely open source in the parts of their software that isn't directly part of their core business, which often means "where open source alternatives already exist". That means low-level OS stuff etc. and using other projects' OSS components where it happens to suit them. How many of all those open source components in OS X are actually original Apple production? Using other people's OSS components in the OS is quite different from opening up their own stuff.
Apple is not largely open source when it comes to their own applications, libraries etc., and particularly not so when it comes to features and applications that originally came from Apple itself and that other platforms don't have yet.
In other words, Apple uses open source components when it is in their interests. I'm yet to hear any reason why it would be in Apple's interests to release such an application as open source were they to develop one.
What would be Apple's motivation for making it open source?
Not to mention that they could well do a half-assed job of it in the first place. Since it's the same software, it should work the same, so hey, it's obviously Linux' fault if it has problems.
I'd also imagine that licensing could prevent distros from including it even if they accept proprietary software, and MS would probably do the minimum effort required for packaging it itself, possibly causing problems or at least a "software is hard to install on Linux" effect.
The best way of playing on two sides at the same time is to pretend to be cooperative while doing the actual job in such a way that the benefit the other parties in the game get is as small as possible.
Or they might actually be releasing something reasonable. I'm not holding my breath yet but I guess anything's possible.
Funny, I see modern Linux distros (often totalling gigabytes in size in software provided by the distributor, albeit not necessarily in the default install) as much more centralized than Windows where you actually need to go find all kinds of random software to fill your needs because the OS doesn't provide for them. I'm not necessarily suggesting that it should, but it still doesn't sound very fair to claim that a Linux distro that offers a gazillion software titles -- yes, even a lot of that reverse-engineered stuff -- via the more or less official channels of the distro so you don't have to go through obscure websites to find an unsupported solution.
If I really need to get up, I'm usually somehow psychologically prepared for it and am actually quite alert immediately after waking up, and I can almost literally jump out of the bed.
It's those cases where getting up early would be a good thing but not absolutely necessary that tend to cause more of a problem for me. (Being a student, I have lots of those.)
Come again? If you're going to make a comment about open-source software, it tends to be helpful to know something about said software and its current state. Someone who thinks that by its "very nature" a Linux-based system can't be updated as easily as a Windows system clearly doesn't know very well how things work. That makes forming informed decisions and insightful comments a little tricky.
Furthermore, if you had read my comment a little more closely you might have noticed that nowhere did I call Windows a failure. Suggesting that I did does little in the way of argumentation.
Yes, yes, I know that was a troll and I shouldn't feed.
Sure enough, if you only use common hardware that has quality drivers, and the rest of the puzzle (such as other software) is also quite simple, it works. (It doesn't "just work" in the sense that you actually have to install drivers, but I guess it's close enough.) With Linux the simple scenario would be quite similar except that you wouldn't have to install the drivers -- they'd be provided with the OS.
You speak of the real world (and mostly correctly), but you neglect to mention one part of it: Windows isn't plug-and-play in a complex scenario. It wouldn't require much support if it were. Things require support because 1) in the real world organizations appreciate the possibility of getting possible problems and responsibility into someone else's hand rather and 2) real-world scenarios aren't always simple. The latter case is particularly true for organizations; most home users' needs are more or less simple and may well fall into the simple scenario.
Of course in a complex scenario with an exotic configuration you'd easily run into a problem with Linux if you aren't careful with your choice of hardware and software. But then, in a complex scenario Windows isn't really plug-and-play and "it just works" either. Some half-way complex scenarios may be simpler in Windows (e.g. if you have to separately install drivers in the first place, it's probably easier in Windows) but truely exotic configurations aren't always plug-and-play.
I don't like to spend time on things I'm not interested in either. I don't like to tweak for the sake of tweaking. The only reason why my system does take some tweaking and why things get complex at times is that I'm actually interested in the development of the software itself: I use development versions of some applications because I'm following their development and perhaps trying to understand enough about them myself to lend a hand some day. I do some tweaking sometimes to investigate a bug I've noticed in this or that application. These things are pretty much complex by nature. If I only wanted basic things to work, I wouldn't want to tweak anything for that and, indeed, wouldn't have to. The basic things, well, pretty much just work.
In case you hadn't figured it out yet, I do use Linux most of the time -- and one reason is exactly that most of it just works for me. I can't be bothered to hunt down and install drivers and worry about their compatibility so I'm just happy that all hardware I have has at least somewhat decent drivers that come with the system. No tweaking. Plug-and-play. I can't be bothered to worry about patching and updating every damn application in my system individually and manually (save for those that I use development versions of and that doesn't happen for the sake of tweaking either) -- thank $divine_force for system-wide updates that also include most applications.
I appreciate your real-world approach but it sounds like your information isn't very broad, up-to-date, or unbiased. Judging by this and particularly by your other response, it sounds like you aren't very familiar with the open-source world.
That makes one wonder, though, if the downloader might occasionally get chunks that have the same hash but where the actual data is still different. It's rare, I know, but if this were in common use, would it occasionally happen?
Hashes work fine against data corruption and intentional poisoning of a certain file because it's very rare for random corruption to happen so that the hash remains the same, and with that comes the fact that it's also very difficult (or at least laborious) to intentionally find another piece of data that has the same hash but isn't the same. However, if the comparison is done to all possible chunks in a P2P network, would the large mass of all possible chunks wield at least some that just happen to have the same hash?
It may not work in intentional poisoning because you'd have to generate the masses to find out which ones have a hash that matches the original but here you have the masses given and some just might match.
However, I don't know enough about the properties of MD5 or other hash algorithms to know whether that possibility would be significant if a hash is also computed for the entire file, not just all smaller chunks. After that it doesn't intuitively sound very likely anymore.
Out of curiousity, do other major distributions enable this either? In other words, is this news at all?
A page on the FreeType project site says:
Finally, many Linux distributions seem to distribute a patched version of FreeType 2 with the bytecode interpreter activated, unlike to the sources we distribute.However, I've previously been under the impression that most distributions would ship at least without some features covered by patents. On the other hand, it's not only MS who owns patents that concern subpixel rendering, and I don't know who owns what, so that's why I'm left wondering if someone else actually knows.
No, but that doesn't seem to bear much practical significance with regard to who is actually granted a patent.
Of course that may well have an effect in a possible lawsuit regarding the patent, but in this case there really is no lawsuit, so...
People don't play games if get consistently beaten. They want to win.
That's exactly why "good AI" in video games doesn't mean the same thing it means (or usually thought to mean) in chess or in some other theoretical senses.
A good game AI is something that is beatable but offers a good enough challenge and supports a believable game experience. In other words, being human-like is more important than playing the best game possible (from the AI, or anti-player, point of view).
Perhaps it's not so much that they'd be great in combat AI, but they play rather well with regard to going for the actual goal of the game (which isn't always to kill as much as possible).