Society is based on a single, unwavering principle: the rules are the same for everybody.
hahahahahaha. bullshit.
The point of half of the rules everyone makes is so that things aren't the same for everybody. Maternity leave, for example, is essential to ensure that women get that time off instead of other employees. If women didn't get maternity leave, then women with children would be at a serious disadvantage. Try telling a strong Christian that he has to work Sunday - or try telling a Jew she can't get time off to go to her daughters Bat Mitzvah. It's the same in Islam - some will want Fridays to themselves.
It's only be appreciating that everyone wants to be treated differently that we can achieve a good society.
Either way, if making U-turns in empty streets is keeping you up at night, I think it's time to re-evaluate your morality.
They provide a service - why the hell shouldn't they profit from it?
Should pirate bay not make a profit simply because you think what they're doing is wrong? Commercial businesses are still able to make good ethical decisions, and I think TPB is a prime example of a profit making business making positive political change. Red Hat is another company.
Besides, I have a feeling a good deal of the money made by that site goes into political projects, such as the Pirate Party.
That's gotta be one of the largest trolls I've ever heard in my entire life. Remember the whole "Anti-Trust" thing we went through years ago? Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL.
Firstly, people aren't trolls just because they disagree with you. Trolls are people who intentionally disrupt the flow of communication. Look up the GNAA before you start screaming that people are trolls.
Originally, the big reasons for MS beating Apple to the computer market was because Windows could support any hardware than the Apple machines could. This isn't Free Software or Open Source, but it is a more open strategy than Apple have ever persued. Apple OS's don't run on commodity hardware, and (these days especially) most computer sales are based on price. This is a market where people go for the lowest priced hardware they can find, and Apple have never competed on that front.
In my opinion, as an armchair general in the war of software companies, is that Apple would really benefit by creating a line of low-cost machines. This would allow them access to the market that has traditionally been an MS stronghold - cheap, commodity machines. Macbooks currently start at circa $1100. Dells currently start at around half that - under $500. That's a big difference, and is one of the reasons why Windows has such a high userbase. (The Mac Mini doesn't really compete in this market because it doesn't ship as a complete machine.)
It's probably important to note that "highbrow" in videogames is somewhat different from what it is in films.
Final Fantasy 7 is a story with battles. It's great, but Civ4 is a very different game. It doesn't have a story. Conflict is not always an important part. Neither is story telling.
You make a valid point - Civ4 is not a story-driven game. But your conclusion - that Civ4 isn't highbrow - isn't proven by the point you made (rather, the conclusion is entirely irrelevant to the statement you made).
You mean, like you're actually paid for what you do? Like the rest of us? Like everyone on slashdot? Like most people would consider as a prior requirement for voicing an opinion on the subject?
Your credentials of being paid for what you do are almost as hilarious as your insight - which basically boils down to "run a competing product".
Linus is becoming less and less relevant as time goes by.
What utter bullshit. I disagree with him, but that doesn't make him any less relevant. If everytime RMS said something I disagreed with, and I called him "irrelevant" that would be stupid along the same lines.
It's akin to saying Jefferson isn't relevant anymore, because he's dead. So obviously we should ignore his views on the constitution.
Now there are companies involved, all of a sudden the original volunteers that built the community from the ground up "aren't relevant". Disagree if you will (I do) but quit mouthing shit. Thankyou.
Ugh...MS can't "steal" it if Apple use the GPL, as they have done in the past. But nevermind that! Better get some FUD out! Fuck the facts! Go with fear!
Maybe it's time to stop thinking that MS are evil and have to be beaten, and start thinking that our house needs to be put in order.
I couldn't give a shit about illogical, irrational claims that Apple are good and need to beat MS. The fact of the matter is both of them have shitty business practices, and both try to screw over the Free and Open Source Community.
The fact that the have been two critical vulnerabilities (JPEG and WMF issues were unrelated) in relatively simply 2D decompression code means it is reasonable to expect the may be vulnerabilities in 3D code as well.
The critical problem wasn't that a buffer overflow could caused, the critical problem was that the image files contained executable code at all. I think it hightlights an lack of review - originally, this was a reasonable (though possibly naive) idea (windows wasn't designed to be connected to the internet) but it has since become a poor state of affairs.
You've pretty much used the logic of "well, if it's in image code, then it's probably in more-complex-code". Well yeah, if that were true, it's worth extending that logic to every part of the Operating System. If you're getting issues with images, then you're likely to be getting issues everywhere else.
Luckily, it's not true (though, somehow WinXP manages to have problems everywhere else anyway). There's nothing especially dangerous about video code, aside from it's complexity. The issue with the jpeg and wmf issues was stupid design not stupid programming. Back in the day, this was a feature - not a bug. But it's a feature that was naive, and no one thought to remove the feature (being able to run small piece of code from images was probably useful at some point).
Final point: There are a few different MPEG4 codecs. The point is, because it's a open standard (aside from patenting issues - which can be ignored outside the US) there is more variety in the pool of users. This is most likely going to mean that when a bug arises, not everyone is gonna fall down the same hole. Either way, MPEG4 is an order of magnitude better than.wm* (and most piracy groups know it btw. You don't often see.wm* files on swedish bittorrent trackers).
This is one of the good aspects of bittorrent; because users can comment, they can talk about the files. I've seen a couple of attempts at doing this on gnutella apps, but without the great success of the comments that happen on, say pirate bay. If a file is a fake, it's normally noted by someone pretty quickly, and in capital letters.
It does also help that the bittorrent community (especially on private trackers, even more on invite-only) is really awesome.
if it can be done for one two dimensional image, surely it can be embedded in a single frame of a video file.
Not necessarily. The problem with the WMF issue was the method of reading the file. It doesn't get exponentially worse with video files because "there are more pictures". In fact, due to delta compression in most video codecs, there normally aren't an "single frames" stored as such.
It depends on whether the programs used on Windows Media files allow them to execute code or not.
If only the people spreading movies around were smart and would use MPEG4, this might not be an issue, due to the huge number of players and increased options for users. Either way, the windows media formats are uniformly poor at pretty much everything.
Bullshit. It has everything to do with source code. Why has OpenBSD had one hole in 8-10 years?
The whole point of the FOSS method is that there's a huge ammount of peer review. The multi-month wait time is put to good use. The vast majority of third party driver code is utter shit. Many people have seen, first hand the poor quality of third party drivers. In fact, they're a largeish factor in why Windows crashes so much. You notice with home users that aren't fussy about what they install on their Windows machines that they end up having large ammounts of drivers installed, and this is one of the things that leads to the short working life of a Windows OS for the average user.
You also forget why we're hot on FOSS software - not only is it the Right Thing (tm) but it's also the better option from a pragmatic point of view. How do you fix a bug in an unsupported binary? Case in point: I've been on an amd64 arch for two years. It's probably going to be another year before MS manages to release a half-decent amd64 port. This is mainly due to having to get everyone to rewrite their binary drivers, and most hardware companies won't do it.
Linux kernel developers don't insist that people use offical kernels either. Every single distribution bar slackware uses a custom kernel. I'd say somewhere in the area of 95%-99% of people using a Linux kernel are using a kernel that's different from the vanilla releases. There is no standard binary either - every release is source only.
There are other Operating Systems which run with very similar development setups (Plan 9, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc). They all manage to be stable and of high quality even when there aren't many developers (all of the mentioned OS's except FreeBSD). They all manage to do it mostly without corporate support, and they all manage to give it away for free. It's everything to do with source code.
You're just running from bullshit generalisation to bullshit generalisation. You clearly don't know what people want, else people wouldn't be here telling you what they do.
Next time, perhaps you ought to consider that other people don't like the same things as you.
uTorrent isn't the fastest torrent program around either, and neither does it have the most features. It probably doesn't strike the best balance either.
Next time you get the "uTorrent is b3tt4r!" bull from the #footorrents channel, read the "only 6mb memory requirement" or the "170KB binary size statistics: consider the fact that uTorrent is missing lots of features, isn't FOSS, depends on an OS with a circa 256mb base requirement, and isn't as fast or as nice with IO as some other clients.
Then perhaps later, consider that the hallmarks of a good program aren't good benchmarks, but good design. The fact that Debian comes on seven cdroms and with 18,000 programs doesn't mean that WinXP is faster because it only comes on one.
Honestly, though. Apple aren't particulary good to the Free Software community. They do just enough so that we don't totally hate their guts, but never enough to redeem their value to us.
In what alternate universe did Slashdot react badly to reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering meaning what FOSS groups do every day...meaning WINE, Gaim, Samba etc...? I am actually shocked. This is a very good thing - I'm not sure if the Chinese group plan to release source code, but hopefully if they can, then others can, and we'll end up with FOSS Skype programs.
I don't think that the Unix desktop applications are in any way devoid of functionality. Functionality is the massive redeeming feature of current Free Software gui programs. There's no way the interfaces offered by Apple or MS can in any way compete on a functionality or flexibility level with almost any of the stuff coming from the Free Software movement. We have gui programs, window-managers, web browsers to which there are no proprietory alternatives.
"Ease-of-use" issues are a valid complaint however. I often see programs with strong feature sets, but which are handicapped by interfaces normal users probably wouldn't like (that said, most hackers rather like them). Take for example the average KDE program - more functionality than offered anywhere else, and yet defaults which are often poor, option pages which are worse, and so on.
You also need to bear in mind that GIMP is not intended to be alike to other photoshopping programs. It's based off a very different set of design rules. I personally think it has a well designed interface, but I know that many people who come from "Single Window Interfaces" (ala Photoshop) find it hard to use. This is not because it is a bad system - you are simply not used to it. There is a vast amount of tutorials for GIMP (though I concede there are more for Photoshop) and high quality documentation. While it does lack a couple of important make or break features that professionals see as "make-or-break", for the vast majority of users, the functionality is more than sufficient.
I find the idea that the only place for "Linux" is on servers as a very unenlightened one. If you're using Free Software by only interacting with the GUI-based programs, then you are severly limiting yourself. You'll find that "Ease-of-use" is only relative to your knowledge. Take a month on a Unix system and learn only command line methods. You'll find that the CLI method is often far quicker and easier than a GUI once you know the ropes.
Case-in-point: installing a binary on windows is many clicks of the mouse, and many man-minutes involved. On my system, the interaction is complete within less than a second. Then I move onto whatever I feel like doing until it is done. Try it this way, I'm sure you'll like it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny. I click to install my linux apps. You must be talking about those debian people.
Nope, we like clicking too.
If you want music on Linux, I'd recommend something like iTunes or Winamp over WINE or a VM, because the native apps aren't done cooking yet.
If you're a particular inept person, failure is a feature of life!
I think the parents was refering to "Apple's iTunes music", which, it would stand to reason, would be the music Apple circulates.
I don't think he was lying, I do think you were just overreacting.
Also, aac does have a "Linux codec".
He's not a hereditary peer. He's a life peer. In American, think "Supreme Court".
Might be an idea to read up on something before you comment on it, else you might look a fool.
Society is based on a single, unwavering principle: the rules are the same for everybody.
hahahahahaha. bullshit.
The point of half of the rules everyone makes is so that things aren't the same for everybody. Maternity leave, for example, is essential to ensure that women get that time off instead of other employees. If women didn't get maternity leave, then women with children would be at a serious disadvantage. Try telling a strong Christian that he has to work Sunday - or try telling a Jew she can't get time off to go to her daughters Bat Mitzvah. It's the same in Islam - some will want Fridays to themselves.
It's only be appreciating that everyone wants to be treated differently that we can achieve a good society.
Either way, if making U-turns in empty streets is keeping you up at night, I think it's time to re-evaluate your morality.
They provide a service - why the hell shouldn't they profit from it?
Should pirate bay not make a profit simply because you think what they're doing is wrong? Commercial businesses are still able to make good ethical decisions, and I think TPB is a prime example of a profit making business making positive political change. Red Hat is another company.
Besides, I have a feeling a good deal of the money made by that site goes into political projects, such as the Pirate Party.
That's gotta be one of the largest trolls I've ever heard in my entire life. Remember the whole "Anti-Trust" thing we went through years ago? Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL.
Firstly, people aren't trolls just because they disagree with you. Trolls are people who intentionally disrupt the flow of communication. Look up the GNAA before you start screaming that people are trolls.
Originally, the big reasons for MS beating Apple to the computer market was because Windows could support any hardware than the Apple machines could. This isn't Free Software or Open Source, but it is a more open strategy than Apple have ever persued. Apple OS's don't run on commodity hardware, and (these days especially) most computer sales are based on price. This is a market where people go for the lowest priced hardware they can find, and Apple have never competed on that front.
In my opinion, as an armchair general in the war of software companies, is that Apple would really benefit by creating a line of low-cost machines. This would allow them access to the market that has traditionally been an MS stronghold - cheap, commodity machines. Macbooks currently start at circa $1100. Dells currently start at around half that - under $500. That's a big difference, and is one of the reasons why Windows has such a high userbase. (The Mac Mini doesn't really compete in this market because it doesn't ship as a complete machine.)
It's probably important to note that "highbrow" in videogames is somewhat different from what it is in films.
Final Fantasy 7 is a story with battles. It's great, but Civ4 is a very different game. It doesn't have a story. Conflict is not always an important part. Neither is story telling.
You make a valid point - Civ4 is not a story-driven game. But your conclusion - that Civ4 isn't highbrow - isn't proven by the point you made (rather, the conclusion is entirely irrelevant to the statement you made).
Functional programming has been around for a long time. A very long time. Lisp was invented in 1958.
he EU is very staunchly against software patents
Gee, that doesn't correlate at all with the massive fight we had to try and get them not to pass that stupid law.
WOAH! You're an IT professional!?!
You mean, like you're actually paid for what you do? Like the rest of us? Like everyone on slashdot? Like most people would consider as a prior requirement for voicing an opinion on the subject?
Your credentials of being paid for what you do are almost as hilarious as your insight - which basically boils down to "run a competing product".
Since Linus lives in Greenland with the GNOMES, we need a decent gtk mail client. There is no such thing.
Linus is becoming less and less relevant as time goes by.
What utter bullshit. I disagree with him, but that doesn't make him any less relevant. If everytime RMS said something I disagreed with, and I called him "irrelevant" that would be stupid along the same lines.
It's akin to saying Jefferson isn't relevant anymore, because he's dead. So obviously we should ignore his views on the constitution.
Now there are companies involved, all of a sudden the original volunteers that built the community from the ground up "aren't relevant". Disagree if you will (I do) but quit mouthing shit. Thankyou.
Ugh...MS can't "steal" it if Apple use the GPL, as they have done in the past. But nevermind that! Better get some FUD out! Fuck the facts! Go with fear!
Maybe it's time to stop thinking that MS are evil and have to be beaten, and start thinking that our house needs to be put in order.
I couldn't give a shit about illogical, irrational claims that Apple are good and need to beat MS. The fact of the matter is both of them have shitty business practices, and both try to screw over the Free and Open Source Community.
Ah, my mistake. ;)
The fact that the have been two critical vulnerabilities (JPEG and WMF issues were unrelated) in relatively simply 2D decompression code means it is reasonable to expect the may be vulnerabilities in 3D code as well.
.wm* (and most piracy groups know it btw. You don't often see .wm* files on swedish bittorrent trackers).
The critical problem wasn't that a buffer overflow could caused, the critical problem was that the image files contained executable code at all. I think it hightlights an lack of review - originally, this was a reasonable (though possibly naive) idea (windows wasn't designed to be connected to the internet) but it has since become a poor state of affairs.
You've pretty much used the logic of "well, if it's in image code, then it's probably in more-complex-code". Well yeah, if that were true, it's worth extending that logic to every part of the Operating System. If you're getting issues with images, then you're likely to be getting issues everywhere else.
Luckily, it's not true (though, somehow WinXP manages to have problems everywhere else anyway). There's nothing especially dangerous about video code, aside from it's complexity. The issue with the jpeg and wmf issues was stupid design not stupid programming. Back in the day, this was a feature - not a bug. But it's a feature that was naive, and no one thought to remove the feature (being able to run small piece of code from images was probably useful at some point).
Final point: There are a few different MPEG4 codecs. The point is, because it's a open standard (aside from patenting issues - which can be ignored outside the US) there is more variety in the pool of users. This is most likely going to mean that when a bug arises, not everyone is gonna fall down the same hole. Either way, MPEG4 is an order of magnitude better than
This is one of the good aspects of bittorrent; because users can comment, they can talk about the files. I've seen a couple of attempts at doing this on gnutella apps, but without the great success of the comments that happen on, say pirate bay. If a file is a fake, it's normally noted by someone pretty quickly, and in capital letters.
It does also help that the bittorrent community (especially on private trackers, even more on invite-only) is really awesome.
if it can be done for one two dimensional image, surely it can be embedded in a single frame of a video file.
Not necessarily. The problem with the WMF issue was the method of reading the file. It doesn't get exponentially worse with video files because "there are more pictures". In fact, due to delta compression in most video codecs, there normally aren't an "single frames" stored as such.
It depends on whether the programs used on Windows Media files allow them to execute code or not.
If only the people spreading movies around were smart and would use MPEG4, this might not be an issue, due to the huge number of players and increased options for users. Either way, the windows media formats are uniformly poor at pretty much everything.
Bullshit. It has everything to do with source code. Why has OpenBSD had one hole in 8-10 years?
The whole point of the FOSS method is that there's a huge ammount of peer review. The multi-month wait time is put to good use. The vast majority of third party driver code is utter shit. Many people have seen, first hand the poor quality of third party drivers. In fact, they're a largeish factor in why Windows crashes so much. You notice with home users that aren't fussy about what they install on their Windows machines that they end up having large ammounts of drivers installed, and this is one of the things that leads to the short working life of a Windows OS for the average user.
You also forget why we're hot on FOSS software - not only is it the Right Thing (tm) but it's also the better option from a pragmatic point of view. How do you fix a bug in an unsupported binary? Case in point: I've been on an amd64 arch for two years. It's probably going to be another year before MS manages to release a half-decent amd64 port. This is mainly due to having to get everyone to rewrite their binary drivers, and most hardware companies won't do it.
Linux kernel developers don't insist that people use offical kernels either. Every single distribution bar slackware uses a custom kernel. I'd say somewhere in the area of 95%-99% of people using a Linux kernel are using a kernel that's different from the vanilla releases. There is no standard binary either - every release is source only.
There are other Operating Systems which run with very similar development setups (Plan 9, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc). They all manage to be stable and of high quality even when there aren't many developers (all of the mentioned OS's except FreeBSD). They all manage to do it mostly without corporate support, and they all manage to give it away for free. It's everything to do with source code.
What, you mean like we require source code?
Investigate the causes of the Free Unix kernels having the reputation for stability. This isn't fucking WinXP - it actually has to function properly.
You're just running from bullshit generalisation to bullshit generalisation. You clearly don't know what people want, else people wouldn't be here telling you what they do.
Next time, perhaps you ought to consider that other people don't like the same things as you.
Small binary size != Fast program
uTorrent != Open Source
uTorrent isn't the fastest torrent program around either, and neither does it have the most features. It probably doesn't strike the best balance either.
Next time you get the "uTorrent is b3tt4r!" bull from the #footorrents channel, read the "only 6mb memory requirement" or the "170KB binary size statistics: consider the fact that uTorrent is missing lots of features, isn't FOSS, depends on an OS with a circa 256mb base requirement, and isn't as fast or as nice with IO as some other clients.
Then perhaps later, consider that the hallmarks of a good program aren't good benchmarks, but good design. The fact that Debian comes on seven cdroms and with 18,000 programs doesn't mean that WinXP is faster because it only comes on one.
Honestly, though. Apple aren't particulary good to the Free Software community. They do just enough so that we don't totally hate their guts, but never enough to redeem their value to us.
In what alternate universe did Slashdot react badly to reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering meaning what FOSS groups do every day...meaning WINE, Gaim, Samba etc...? I am actually shocked. This is a very good thing - I'm not sure if the Chinese group plan to release source code, but hopefully if they can, then others can, and we'll end up with FOSS Skype programs.
I don't think that the Unix desktop applications are in any way devoid of functionality. Functionality is the massive redeeming feature of current Free Software gui programs. There's no way the interfaces offered by Apple or MS can in any way compete on a functionality or flexibility level with almost any of the stuff coming from the Free Software movement. We have gui programs, window-managers, web browsers to which there are no proprietory alternatives.
:)
"Ease-of-use" issues are a valid complaint however. I often see programs with strong feature sets, but which are handicapped by interfaces normal users probably wouldn't like (that said, most hackers rather like them). Take for example the average KDE program - more functionality than offered anywhere else, and yet defaults which are often poor, option pages which are worse, and so on.
You also need to bear in mind that GIMP is not intended to be alike to other photoshopping programs. It's based off a very different set of design rules. I personally think it has a well designed interface, but I know that many people who come from "Single Window Interfaces" (ala Photoshop) find it hard to use. This is not because it is a bad system - you are simply not used to it. There is a vast amount of tutorials for GIMP (though I concede there are more for Photoshop) and high quality documentation. While it does lack a couple of important make or break features that professionals see as "make-or-break", for the vast majority of users, the functionality is more than sufficient.
I find the idea that the only place for "Linux" is on servers as a very unenlightened one. If you're using Free Software by only interacting with the GUI-based programs, then you are severly limiting yourself. You'll find that "Ease-of-use" is only relative to your knowledge. Take a month on a Unix system and learn only command line methods. You'll find that the CLI method is often far quicker and easier than a GUI once you know the ropes.
Case-in-point: installing a binary on windows is many clicks of the mouse, and many man-minutes involved. On my system, the interaction is complete within less than a second. Then I move onto whatever I feel like doing until it is done. Try it this way, I'm sure you'll like it.