the ability to have more stuff mapped in one process makes things a lot simpler for some types of app.
for example a web server that wants to mmap the files it is serving (generally regarded as faster than taking them through a buffer using read/write calls), wants to serve multiple large files from one process and doesn't wan't to mess arround with partial mappings will be feasible with a 64 bit os.
also i386 is a very register starved architecture, amd64 improves this considerablly speeding up at least some types of app.
thing is most people consider 128K stereo MP3 (or for a lot of pop even 64K mono) to be good enough and 320K stereo mp3 to be indistinguishable from CD.
There are people with high end systems and well trained ears who can tell the difference between the higher bitrate MP3 files and CDs but i do not belive they represent the majority of listners.
supporting oss you are not undermining other software businesses, but America itself. truer than you might think, rich countries generally like copyright and similar laws because (when combined with copyright harmonisation treaties) they allow them to get money from poorer countries without actually exporting anything to them.
on the other hand we europeans have a definite interest in stopping the money flow from us to the USA caused by the big american software companies who dominate certain markets. Opensource is currently the most feasible way of doing that.
You can make a law for something that is forbidden, can you? Otherwise they should also tax transactions on drugs, laundered money, etc. governments have found a clever trick, if you have money and won't say where it came from they can get you for tax evasion, if you admit to making it illegally they can get you for the original crime.
either way you lose, that is why you have money laundering in the first place to try and get money into the legit system (and quite possiblly pay tax on it) while hiding its true origin.
I have a strong suspicion almost all GPL coders are mainly programming to satisfy their own needs. Why else would they do it? Altruism? No. They're scratching an itch. fine but those who code to scratch thier own itches should remember that is what they are doing and not complain when other people don't wan't to use thier code.
but most people running the binary nvidia driver will have explicitly gone out looking for it. That probablly means they are using it because they wan't/need decent performance in 3D applications.
so just as the windows applications you use are often a major barrier to switching away from linux the 3D applications you use are often a major barrier to getting rid of the binary graphics drivers. In both cases the "workaround: switch" advice is really not very helpfull.
Note: electrical signals do *not* propagate at the speed of light through copper. i will assume by "speed of light" you mean "speed of light in a vacum" aka "c"
neither optical fiber or copper cable propogates at anything like "c", not sure of the actual figures but i think fiber is actually slightly slower in propogation.
however on short links with both fiber and copper the delays in other places will swamp the delays in the cable itself.
trouble is at least here in the uk nearly all the broadband providers are in the buisness of lieing
they advertise unlimited bandwidth, the price structure of bt wholesale and of the upstream ISPs means that they can't really deliver it.
but telling by how much each of them will actually let you have or what tricks they will use to keep bandwidth use down without caps is very very difficult.
so most people just give up and go for an "unlimited" deal with a high headline speed at a low price.
How is reading paper easier on the eyes than reading a TFT LCD? LCDs are certainly easier on the eyes than CRTS (at least when running at thier native resoloution) but there are still a number of issues with replacing paper.
1: visible area, flicking between windows is a pain and when using an app on a PC i tend to wan't all the availible screen real estate for what i'm actually doing on the PC. having it on paper means i can look at it while the app i'm mainly working with is covering the screen. Multiple monitors are a possible soloution but its rare to get these when away from your primary computer.
2: illumination, sure laptops may be portable but they need the right light, too dark and you can't see the keyboard, too bright and you can't see the screen.
3: scribleability, i have never found any software that compares to the ease and flexibility of using a pen on a printed document. you can easilly and quickly write and draw small notes about the information onto the printed text and keep it absoloutely clear what stuff you noted on and what stuff is original.
which is kind of reenforing the parents point, when the lawmakers are no longer the people from before the internet age that kind of thing will start to change.
is they know their core market (windows/office) is at risk* and in any case it is no longer really a growth market (once your a virtual monopoly your sales are capped by the overall size of the market). They have been desperately trying to diversify but often not doing a very good job of it (partly because they can't do anything that jeapodises windows/office).
*yes its slow but it will crumble eventually, when some of the european governments go through with there anti MS plans then EU corps will surely start to follow at least for the government facing parts of thier staff team. Linux is ready for the desktop of the corporate peon and MS knows it.
an attack can be a countries best option to protect its interests without having to drain the countries rescourses to the point of "total war".
whether you call a conflict where one side clearly crushes the other a war is up to you but it seems it has certainly historically been used for such conflicts.
the problem in both iraq and afghanistan is after we achived an occupation and some other major objectives we didn't have a clear plan for cleaning up the aftermath. Estabilishing new governements that are both strong enough to hold the countries and western friendly will at best take a long time and at worst be impossible.
yes if the ads are an integrated part of your software and don't bother anything else thats fine by me. I may avoid using your software when i can find an ad free alternative or block it from reaching the internet to fetch its ads and i hope you'd agree that was fine too.
however if something you install pops up a window of advertising when i'm not trying to use your app, runs in the background slowing down my machine, possiblly messes with the TCP/IP stack and generally making a pita of itself all the time then i don't find it acceptable. This is true regardless of if its spying or not (which is always a difficult question to determine for sure).
the second option seems to be more popular because it 1: avoids the lusers associating the adverts with your app 2: generates more potential advert impressions and 3: is basically no work to implement (just copy the scumwares installer somewhere and run it).
default web browsers on both platforms either point directly at advert laden sites or to pages that are only a click or so away from them but don't appear to contain any features specifically intended as advertising in the browser itself. So on that score windows and linux are approximately equal.
from what i've read (i'd already abandoned using the official clients before i moved to XP) the client for the msn messenger network that shipped with XP (known as "windows messenger") doesn't actually contain advertising even though most other clients provided by MS for that service do. The IM clients that ship with linux distros are typically ad free.
the version of windows media player that ships with XP is actually pretty clean, the "media guide" link loads a page with links to various providers MS like but there doesn't seem to be any ad banners or anything, i belive this may have got worse in later versions of media player though.
So MS software in general is often adware, but the stuff they shipped with windows XP seems pretty clean really.
Your critcism addresses only issues of purity. You are thinking in terms of quantity of potable water, not water. OP addressed issues of total water in the environment, which is stable if you take the planet as a whole as your environment then this is correct yes.
in reality the way it works is that the bulk of the worlds water is locked up in forms from which it is difficult/expensive to extract water that is usable for drinking, washing stuff without heavy rust promotion etc. (chiefly the oceans, also the atnosphere).
in most places there is either a finite anual (rain) or finite total (deep aquifers) ammount of water that is in a fit state for use with minimal processing. Go beyond that level of water use and your costs (in both financial and energy terms) skyrocket and if you are too poor to afford those costs then your water supply will be no more.
getting water out of air thats damper than humans consider desirable is done all the time yes.
getting water out of air thats already pretty dry AND doing it using sufficiantly little supplies of fuel/chemicals/whatever that its not less trouble just to ship the water in AND making it sufficiantly free of contamination that its suitable for giving to your troops on a long term basis is the challanging part.
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the ability to have more stuff mapped in one process makes things a lot simpler for some types of app.
for example a web server that wants to mmap the files it is serving (generally regarded as faster than taking them through a buffer using read/write calls), wants to serve multiple large files from one process and doesn't wan't to mess arround with partial mappings will be feasible with a 64 bit os.
also i386 is a very register starved architecture, amd64 improves this considerablly speeding up at least some types of app.
and the users will keep going for the higher bitrate illegal versions.
thing is most people consider 128K stereo MP3 (or for a lot of pop even 64K mono) to be good enough and 320K stereo mp3 to be indistinguishable from CD.
There are people with high end systems and well trained ears who can tell the difference between the higher bitrate MP3 files and CDs but i do not belive they represent the majority of listners.
supporting oss you are not undermining other software businesses, but America itself.
truer than you might think, rich countries generally like copyright and similar laws because (when combined with copyright harmonisation treaties) they allow them to get money from poorer countries without actually exporting anything to them.
on the other hand we europeans have a definite interest in stopping the money flow from us to the USA caused by the big american software companies who dominate certain markets. Opensource is currently the most feasible way of doing that.
You can make a law for something that is forbidden, can you? Otherwise they should also tax transactions on drugs, laundered money, etc.
governments have found a clever trick, if you have money and won't say where it came from they can get you for tax evasion, if you admit to making it illegally they can get you for the original crime.
either way you lose, that is why you have money laundering in the first place to try and get money into the legit system (and quite possiblly pay tax on it) while hiding its true origin.
I have a strong suspicion almost all GPL coders are mainly programming to satisfy their own needs. Why else would they do it? Altruism? No. They're scratching an itch.
fine but those who code to scratch thier own itches should remember that is what they are doing and not complain when other people don't wan't to use thier code.
he lost more money than it would have cost him to pay up
and he was a buisness that was making a lot of money off the internet, smaller operations just don't stand a chance.
he may have won a battle but the war was lost ages ago, all but the biggest sites live in constant fear of a script kiddie deciding to aim at them.
remember though there is nothing stopping a memory stick identifying itself as a hard drive or CD drive rather than a removable media drive.
where it says switching away from linux that should have been switching away from windows.
but most people running the binary nvidia driver will have explicitly gone out looking for it. That probablly means they are using it because they wan't/need decent performance in 3D applications.
so just as the windows applications you use are often a major barrier to switching away from linux the 3D applications you use are often a major barrier to getting rid of the binary graphics drivers. In both cases the "workaround: switch" advice is really not very helpfull.
the other possible outcome is the entire gnu toolchain will be forked creating a massive split in the community.
if you replace "invariant sections" with "method for forcing redistributors to keep your propoganda peices" then it makes perfect sense.
there is an upgrade in the standard boilerplate but not in the license itsself and many big projects contain at least some V2 only code.
Note: electrical signals do *not* propagate at the speed of light through copper.
i will assume by "speed of light" you mean "speed of light in a vacum" aka "c"
neither optical fiber or copper cable propogates at anything like "c", not sure of the actual figures but i think fiber is actually slightly slower in propogation.
however on short links with both fiber and copper the delays in other places will swamp the delays in the cable itself.
trouble is at least here in the uk nearly all the broadband providers are in the buisness of lieing
they advertise unlimited bandwidth, the price structure of bt wholesale and of the upstream ISPs means that they can't really deliver it.
but telling by how much each of them will actually let you have or what tricks they will use to keep bandwidth use down without caps is very very difficult.
so most people just give up and go for an "unlimited" deal with a high headline speed at a low price.
How is reading paper easier on the eyes than reading a TFT LCD?
LCDs are certainly easier on the eyes than CRTS (at least when running at thier native resoloution) but there are still a number of issues with replacing paper.
1: visible area, flicking between windows is a pain and when using an app on a PC i tend to wan't all the availible screen real estate for what i'm actually doing on the PC. having it on paper means i can look at it while the app i'm mainly working with is covering the screen. Multiple monitors are a possible soloution but its rare to get these when away from your primary computer.
2: illumination, sure laptops may be portable but they need the right light, too dark and you can't see the keyboard, too bright and you can't see the screen.
3: scribleability, i have never found any software that compares to the ease and flexibility of using a pen on a printed document. you can easilly and quickly write and draw small notes about the information onto the printed text and keep it absoloutely clear what stuff you noted on and what stuff is original.
which is kind of reenforing the parents point, when the lawmakers are no longer the people from before the internet age that kind of thing will start to change.
but iirc in the US criminal cases can only be brought by the state, not by the victims.
is they know their core market (windows/office) is at risk* and in any case it is no longer really a growth market (once your a virtual monopoly your sales are capped by the overall size of the market). They have been desperately trying to diversify but often not doing a very good job of it (partly because they can't do anything that jeapodises windows/office).
*yes its slow but it will crumble eventually, when some of the european governments go through with there anti MS plans then EU corps will surely start to follow at least for the government facing parts of thier staff team. Linux is ready for the desktop of the corporate peon and MS knows it.
an attack can be a countries best option to protect its interests without having to drain the countries rescourses to the point of "total war".
whether you call a conflict where one side clearly crushes the other a war is up to you but it seems it has certainly historically been used for such conflicts.
the problem in both iraq and afghanistan is after we achived an occupation and some other major objectives we didn't have a clear plan for cleaning up the aftermath. Estabilishing new governements that are both strong enough to hold the countries and western friendly will at best take a long time and at worst be impossible.
unplugging a first world countries tld would probablly result in ICANN very rapidly losing its control over the root of the DNS.
yes if the ads are an integrated part of your software and don't bother anything else thats fine by me. I may avoid using your software when i can find an ad free alternative or block it from reaching the internet to fetch its ads and i hope you'd agree that was fine too.
however if something you install pops up a window of advertising when i'm not trying to use your app, runs in the background slowing down my machine, possiblly messes with the TCP/IP stack and generally making a pita of itself all the time then i don't find it acceptable. This is true regardless of if its spying or not (which is always a difficult question to determine for sure).
the second option seems to be more popular because it 1: avoids the lusers associating the adverts with your app 2: generates more potential advert impressions and 3: is basically no work to implement (just copy the scumwares installer somewhere and run it).
default web browsers on both platforms either point directly at advert laden sites or to pages that are only a click or so away from them but don't appear to contain any features specifically intended as advertising in the browser itself. So on that score windows and linux are approximately equal.
from what i've read (i'd already abandoned using the official clients before i moved to XP) the client for the msn messenger network that shipped with XP (known as "windows messenger") doesn't actually contain advertising even though most other clients provided by MS for that service do. The IM clients that ship with linux distros are typically ad free.
the version of windows media player that ships with XP is actually pretty clean, the "media guide" link loads a page with links to various providers MS like but there doesn't seem to be any ad banners or anything, i belive this may have got worse in later versions of media player though.
So MS software in general is often adware, but the stuff they shipped with windows XP seems pretty clean really.
Your critcism addresses only issues of purity. You are thinking in terms of quantity of potable water, not water. OP addressed issues of total water in the environment, which is stable
if you take the planet as a whole as your environment then this is correct yes.
in reality the way it works is that the bulk of the worlds water is locked up in forms from which it is difficult/expensive to extract water that is usable for drinking, washing stuff without heavy rust promotion etc. (chiefly the oceans, also the atnosphere).
in most places there is either a finite anual (rain) or finite total (deep aquifers) ammount of water that is in a fit state for use with minimal processing. Go beyond that level of water use and your costs (in both financial and energy terms) skyrocket and if you are too poor to afford those costs then your water supply will be no more.
getting water out of air thats damper than humans consider desirable is done all the time yes.
getting water out of air thats already pretty dry AND doing it using sufficiantly little supplies of fuel/chemicals/whatever that its not less trouble just to ship the water in AND making it sufficiantly free of contamination that its suitable for giving to your troops on a long term basis is the challanging part.