exactly now it is possible to site this case and say anyone who runs your program by loading it into ram is violating copyright, and thus should pay you extra.
If I follow the judge's logic, then anybody looking at me on the street has created an unauthorized copy of me on their retina. They even have the gall to create additional unauthorized copies in other brain areas.
For it to go BSD, Nokia has to (1) screw us over in a way that actually violates the agreement, and not letting us use the GPL4 is not a case of that, and (2) lose in court, but given Nokia's financial resources - Nokia's revenues are larger than Microsoft's - that isn't likely.
If QT 4 actully really does use less memory and runs faster, why not do a test and port a small Gnome app or two over to QT 4?
This is not a possibility because of licensing reasons.
Qt doesn't allow you to write applications in your license of choice. You have a limited list (currently GPL2, 3, and most other FOSS licenses, or pay for a commercial one), whereas GTK is LGPL, which for example ensures GNOME will be able to write apps in GPL4 when it is conceived (and let's face it, with software patents and copyright law changing, we'll need a new GPL eventually). With Qt, you will only be able to write KDE apps in GPL4 if Nokia decides to let you.
Who knows what Nokia's commercial interests will be in a few years. Possibly helping out the FOSS community by letting them use GPL4 will not be aligned with those interests. It's too big a risk.
The GPL is due to Stallman. Without him, we would have BSD and so forth, but it's doubtful whether something equivalent to the GPL would have been invented. Maybe yes, maybe no, we'll never know.
Let's assume something equivalent wouldn't have been invented without Stallman. Then, for example, the Linux kernel would probably be BSD or Apache or something like that. Would it have succeeded to the same extent?
I strongly believe it wouldn't have. There are two type of FOSS projects, ones based on collaboration, e.g., Linux, and ones made primarily by a single entity, e.g., Firefox. For Firefox, almost any license would do, given that the software is so compelling. For the Linux kernel, collaboration was critical both at its emergence and still is today. Yet, if in a collaborative project like it there aren't safeguards against 'hoarding', then collaboration is stunted. The GPL does that: Everyone working on Linux knows that they will receive everybody else's work on it as well. Without the GPL, that isn't true; we need the GPL to 'keep us honest'. And therefore we have Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Google, etc. etc. all working together on Linux, and it has become very successful.
Now, again, this is speculation, so we can't be sure. But it's my belief that Linux's success is in large part due to the correct choice of license, and not just to Torvald's technical genius (which was also critical). And without Linux, the FOSS ecosystem as we know it might not have come into existence.
Calling it a review is stretching it...in short, he installed it and noticed that it ran slow, which is probably because it is alpha software.
Actually, alpha software is frequently buggy and prone to crashing, but not necessarily slow. Sometimes its faster than the final, actually (and sometimes not).
Which makes me concerned about what performance this is going to have. If it isn't much faster than OpenOffice, there is really not much chance for it to see wide adoption.
I am still stunned that any company can make money on a desktop linux product. [...]
Now maybe this is because I am using it in a private capacity and maybe it changes the moment I put it into a commercial workspace - maybe someone can enlighten me.
Yes, it's because of that.
If all you want is to download a desktop Linux distro and run it at home, you don't need anything else, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE etc. are great for that.
However, if you're doing anything else, then things are different. If you're installing 100,000 desktops in your company, you might want to pay for support. Sure, your in-house tech guys might figure out any hitches you run into, but it might take less time and cost less to get quick answers from the people making the product.
Another case is where you want some customization. You might want to install a distro, but with non-standard menus/applications/security settings, or something even more complex. Again, you can have your in-house programmers do it, but it might be cheaper and faster to outsource to the people who make the product (this was mentioned as a significant source of revenue for Ubuntu, for example, in an interview with Shuttleworth).
You don't need to, because it isn't true. The research is (shock!) misrepresented.
In a particular type of task, they could predict with 70% accuracy which hand would be used 10 seconds ahead of time. That's the evidence for the summary.
What this shows is that, in this sort of task, some 'unconscious impulse' precedes the action. In this particular task the impulse predicted correctly 70% of the time (note that even that isn't amazingly high, since 50% you get by random choice). Now, this might be very different with other decisions. For example, the impulse might be right only 55% of the time in other areas, perhaps because the conscious brain overrides it ("I shouldn't eat that; I'll order a salad instead.").
That said, it's very nice research (when not misrepresented), and important. We're only starting to figure out how the brain works, we'll probably change our theories about it several times before we hit it right.
A final note: The article is a little populist in treating it as 'surprising' that the unconscious is so important. But this was well-known in academia for a long time. The basic finding is that we are conscious of the products of thought, not the processes. That is, when you play Doom, you don't directly see what makes you decide to use a particular weapon at a particular time. What you do directly sense is that this is a good thing to do, and you do it. Now, sometimes you can make explicit the underlying process - e.g., "I should go over there because it's safer, and a weapon should spawn nearby also" - but this elaboration was not fully present before. There are few cases in which thought processes are entirely explicit, logic and mathematics perhaps the best examples (and even they are not 'purely' conscious).
The pendulum's swung, and we have to get some sanity back into sentencing.
No sentencing has taken place as of yet.
56 is the theoretical maximum, if all charges are upheld and if they are consecutive. Neither is likely. It's far more probable that in the end he will be convicted of only part of the 69 offenses, and that the sentences will run concurrently, in other words he'll face a few years in jail.
Well first GPL2 already had the clause that when you extend a GPL2 app, you must also be GPL. That's the idea of the GPL, it isn't new to GPL3. But maybe I didn't understand you and you didn't mean to say otherwise.
It isn't that hard to develop for Windows, Linux and Mac at the same time, if you use the right tools. For example, if you write an entire app in Python and use something like TKinter for GUI, you get cross-platformability 'for free'. Of course few games are written in Python, though. But even there things are much better now than several years ago, for example, both Crystal Space 3D and OGRE 3D (the main FOSS 3D engines) are inherently cross-platform.
But enough [Windows and Mac users] are willing to pay to make PC gaming a billion dollar industry. If you design a game for both PCs and Macs, then adding Linux as a third platform shouldn't be that hard, since hopefully you're already writing using a cross-platform toolkit (in fact I am in the process of doing so myself). Note that if you're not doing so, but rather writing specifically for PCs and specifically for Macs, then you're already wasting a lot of effort over what it would take to use a cross-platform toolkit from the beginning.
So the main reason not to support Linux is if you are PC-only, which is making less and less sense with Apple's rising success.
A further issue is that of consoles. In fact PC (/Mac) gaming is somewhat declining in comparison to consoles, where game publishers make much more money. So it makes sense to write your game in a manner that allows it to be ported to the three major consoles (even if you don't intend to do so immediately, it makes sense to keep your options open, which they are not if you write something very specific to Windows and DirectX). So if you make room for such future portability, you should be using a cross-platform toolkit, hence again adding Linux support shouldn't be too hard.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In addition to those factors, I'd say the problem is also a lack of interest.
On the one hand we have things like GNOME and KDE, Firefox, Blender, etc. etc. - software that the user knows by name and interacts with directly. People happily join such projects and contribute code to them.
On the other hand you have software that the typical user might not not even know exists, like the Linux kernel. However, for geeks the kernel is perhaps the pinnacle of programming, and furthermore by lucky coincidence (or unhappy, if you are GNU) the name of the kernel has become synonymous with the entire OS, making it high-profile just like the more obvious software projects mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Whereas the X server is somewhere in the middle. It isn't well known, even geeks might not know exactly what it does (i.e., where the separation is between X, the window manager, and so forth), and for some reason it lacks the 'coolness' factor of the Linux kernel.
All of this is unjustified, and a shame. Perhaps more stories on Slashdot like this one will raise awareness? Maybe we should also motivate people, by e.g. telling them that hacking X is even harder than hacking the kernel;)
So what does this mean for Native Americans? They were aggressive immigrants who displaced the original population? Essentially all human populations are/were aggressive invaders at some point. See Jared Diamond's writings, for example, about how the Bantu came to occupy most of Africa, how the Han Chinese did the same for China, etc., etc.
We see things as they are right now, and just presume that the clock was frozen before the last few centuries. So, we see black people in Africa and Chinese people in China and assume they were always there. They weren't, they displaced someone to get there. It's just been forgotten.
Not that this makes any of it 'right' or 'justified', nor does it make it 'wrong' or 'unjustified'. These are the facts. Make of them what you will.
Glad to see more and more companies moving away from GPL, understanding that it will only limit the potential adoption. As a highly respected registered member of the Slashdot community, I'm posting as AC as this post will very likely be modded troll. Don't exaggerate.
Sometimes the GPL is the right license, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it increases adoption (Linux kernel), sometimes it doesn't.
In this case, a messaging protocol, the natural license is indeed not the GPL. Better ideas are Apache, BSD, LGPL, etc.
How many of these machines were scanned only *because* an infection was already suspected or known?
I don't think self-selection is relevant here. They compared Vista to XP, so unless you think there is more self-selection in one of them, the comparison is valid. That is, the absolute numbers are suspect, but relative differences are fine.
Also, people might want to check out the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. They're really very good.
Tolkien is truly the father of modern fantasy, but the 'other' major fantasy novelist of the 20th centiry is Howard, and he was damn good as well. Even Tolkien said about the Conan stories, "I actually liked them".
Re:Looks like they've made some improvements.
on
Blender 2.46 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And yet, not too many people have heard of the very intuitive software package Art of Illusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Illusion Which, I'd just like to add, is open-source, just like Blender.
Oh, I agree with you, I highly doubt that even if they did modify the kernel, that there is any significant reason not to release the source. Skype itself is in userspace, presumably. But, perhaps having to release source of any kind is too frightening for them (they wouldn't be the first company with that irrational fear).
Why is eBay asleep at the switch while some rogue laywer at Skype pulls this? They have nothing to lose from releasing the kernel, and both reputation and money to lose while they balk.
Bruce
Just a random theory: Perhaps they modified the kernel in some way, for example, adding device drivers for their particular hardware, or something else. Which means that if they supply the source code, they need to supply their own kernel-residing code as well, and not just the vanilla kernel.
It's not bad for business when the shareholders force Yahoo to go back and take the offer. If Yahoo does that. For the reasons I mentioned, this is a big gamble, and over a few paltry billion $.
A quarter year's profit is not pocket change, to any company. Ballmer played this well, the pressure will be on Yahoo to come back and accept the deal, he can just sit back and eat popcorn watching Yahoo's bosses being sued by their shareholders. It's pocket change compared to how important Ballmer said Yahoo was. That is, you shouldn't care about a few measly month's profit if you're thinking about a way to compete in the big picture vs. Google.
Sure, Ballmer can wait and hope Yahoo comes back and takes a lower offer. But meanwhile Google continues to press its advantage, and Yahoo has a chance at either (1) making changes that make it unattractive to Microsoft, or (2) hitting on something successful and raising its value significantly. So a later deal is very risky, and if Ballmer is betting on that, he's being foolish.
The only advantage to waiting is the 'eating popcorn while Yahoo shareholders sue' bit, i.e., to gloat. That might be fun from a personal perspective, but it's bad for business.
That Microsoft did not get Yahoo is not something that Ballmer or Microsoft will not be blamed for. He set a price and when it was not accepted tried various negoiations and when that failed he walked away. Smart business. Actually, no, not that smart IMHO. First he makes the case the Yahoo! is extremely important. Then he doesn't follow through because of a few
billion $ (which is all the disparity between the sides amounted to). A few billion $ is what Microsoft makes in a few months (profit, not revenue). It's what Microsoft pays for monopolistic actions in the EU. In other words, pocket change. This amount of money is of no significance to Microsoft financially.
But it is of significance to Ballmer's personal self-esteem: seems like he didn't want to look like he was a bad negotiator. So, financially he should have made the deal (according to his own arguments), but didn't in order to save face. That's bad business.
However, to be fair, there is never a perfect time when all distros have just recently come out. In fact, Fedora was supposed to be have been released by now, but was delayed by a few weeks, which led to an older version being tested here. Ubuntu released on time, and got it's latest version in the door for this review; sometimes making your deadlines is helpful. (This, btw, doesn't seem much of a coincidence - Ubuntu treats its deadlines very seriously, constantly states so, and in fact almost always makes them; much like a serious commercial product. Fedora is more laid back, a community effort. Which is fine for them, but unlucky for this review.)
Sure, the reviewers might have waited a few weeks for Fedora 9 after its delay, but at that point in time we might have 'just a few more weeks' for some other release, be it openSUSE, Mandriva, etc. etc. - release schedules just aren't coordinated well enough.
There was a decision to use the old scheduler on the Desktop version of Heron. It is causing problems. Try the Server version. Yes, the scheduler in the Server version may give better responsiveness, as well as fix some sound crackling and related issues. The relevant switch (CONFIG_FAIR_CGROUP_SCHED) will be coming to the Desktop kernel soon in 2.6.24-17, which is currently in the hardy-proposed repo (you can install it by enabling the 'proposed' repo, but note that in general stuff in proposed hasn't yet been 100% tested, so you might want to wait).
... they could trigger a nice little pandemic. I know! Because we've never had people from all across the world go to other places around the world. This is something totally new, a completely novel vector for disease!
Slashdot Mirror
exactly now it is possible to site this case and say anyone who runs your program by loading it into ram is violating copyright, and thus should pay you extra.
If I follow the judge's logic, then anybody looking at me on the street has created an unauthorized copy of me on their retina. They even have the gall to create additional unauthorized copies in other brain areas.
Lawsuits galore!
For it to go BSD, Nokia has to (1) screw us over in a way that actually violates the agreement, and not letting us use the GPL4 is not a case of that, and (2) lose in court, but given Nokia's financial resources - Nokia's revenues are larger than Microsoft's - that isn't likely.
If QT 4 actully really does use less memory and runs faster, why not do a test and port a small Gnome app or two over to QT 4?
This is not a possibility because of licensing reasons.
Qt doesn't allow you to write applications in your license of choice. You have a limited list (currently GPL2, 3, and most other FOSS licenses, or pay for a commercial one), whereas GTK is LGPL, which for example ensures GNOME will be able to write apps in GPL4 when it is conceived (and let's face it, with software patents and copyright law changing, we'll need a new GPL eventually). With Qt, you will only be able to write KDE apps in GPL4 if Nokia decides to let you.
Who knows what Nokia's commercial interests will be in a few years. Possibly helping out the FOSS community by letting them use GPL4 will not be aligned with those interests. It's too big a risk.
Free software existed fine without RMS.
I don't think so.
The GPL is due to Stallman. Without him, we would have BSD and so forth, but it's doubtful whether something equivalent to the GPL would have been invented. Maybe yes, maybe no, we'll never know.
Let's assume something equivalent wouldn't have been invented without Stallman. Then, for example, the Linux kernel would probably be BSD or Apache or something like that. Would it have succeeded to the same extent?
I strongly believe it wouldn't have. There are two type of FOSS projects, ones based on collaboration, e.g., Linux, and ones made primarily by a single entity, e.g., Firefox. For Firefox, almost any license would do, given that the software is so compelling. For the Linux kernel, collaboration was critical both at its emergence and still is today. Yet, if in a collaborative project like it there aren't safeguards against 'hoarding', then collaboration is stunted. The GPL does that: Everyone working on Linux knows that they will receive everybody else's work on it as well. Without the GPL, that isn't true; we need the GPL to 'keep us honest'. And therefore we have Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Google, etc. etc. all working together on Linux, and it has become very successful.
Now, again, this is speculation, so we can't be sure. But it's my belief that Linux's success is in large part due to the correct choice of license, and not just to Torvald's technical genius (which was also critical). And without Linux, the FOSS ecosystem as we know it might not have come into existence.
Calling it a review is stretching it...in short, he installed it and noticed that it ran slow, which is probably because it is alpha software.
Actually, alpha software is frequently buggy and prone to crashing, but not necessarily slow. Sometimes its faster than the final, actually (and sometimes not).
Which makes me concerned about what performance this is going to have. If it isn't much faster than OpenOffice, there is really not much chance for it to see wide adoption.
I am still stunned that any company can make money on a desktop linux product. [...] Now maybe this is because I am using it in a private capacity and maybe it changes the moment I put it into a commercial workspace - maybe someone can enlighten me.
Yes, it's because of that.
If all you want is to download a desktop Linux distro and run it at home, you don't need anything else, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE etc. are great for that.
However, if you're doing anything else, then things are different. If you're installing 100,000 desktops in your company, you might want to pay for support. Sure, your in-house tech guys might figure out any hitches you run into, but it might take less time and cost less to get quick answers from the people making the product.
Another case is where you want some customization. You might want to install a distro, but with non-standard menus/applications/security settings, or something even more complex. Again, you can have your in-house programmers do it, but it might be cheaper and faster to outsource to the people who make the product (this was mentioned as a significant source of revenue for Ubuntu, for example, in an interview with Shuttleworth).
I'm not sure I can accept this...
You don't need to, because it isn't true. The research is (shock!) misrepresented.
In a particular type of task, they could predict with 70% accuracy which hand would be used 10 seconds ahead of time. That's the evidence for the summary.
What this shows is that, in this sort of task, some 'unconscious impulse' precedes the action. In this particular task the impulse predicted correctly 70% of the time (note that even that isn't amazingly high, since 50% you get by random choice). Now, this might be very different with other decisions. For example, the impulse might be right only 55% of the time in other areas, perhaps because the conscious brain overrides it ("I shouldn't eat that; I'll order a salad instead.").
That said, it's very nice research (when not misrepresented), and important. We're only starting to figure out how the brain works, we'll probably change our theories about it several times before we hit it right.
A final note: The article is a little populist in treating it as 'surprising' that the unconscious is so important. But this was well-known in academia for a long time. The basic finding is that we are conscious of the products of thought, not the processes. That is, when you play Doom, you don't directly see what makes you decide to use a particular weapon at a particular time. What you do directly sense is that this is a good thing to do, and you do it. Now, sometimes you can make explicit the underlying process - e.g., "I should go over there because it's safer, and a weapon should spawn nearby also" - but this elaboration was not fully present before. There are few cases in which thought processes are entirely explicit, logic and mathematics perhaps the best examples (and even they are not 'purely' conscious).
The pendulum's swung, and we have to get some sanity back into sentencing.
No sentencing has taken place as of yet.56 is the theoretical maximum, if all charges are upheld and if they are consecutive. Neither is likely. It's far more probable that in the end he will be convicted of only part of the 69 offenses, and that the sentences will run concurrently, in other words he'll face a few years in jail.
Sorry, I don't know.
Well first GPL2 already had the clause that when you extend a GPL2 app, you must also be GPL. That's the idea of the GPL, it isn't new to GPL3. But maybe I didn't understand you and you didn't mean to say otherwise.
It isn't that hard to develop for Windows, Linux and Mac at the same time, if you use the right tools. For example, if you write an entire app in Python and use something like TKinter for GUI, you get cross-platformability 'for free'. Of course few games are written in Python, though. But even there things are much better now than several years ago, for example, both Crystal Space 3D and OGRE 3D (the main FOSS 3D engines) are inherently cross-platform.
So the main reason not to support Linux is if you are PC-only, which is making less and less sense with Apple's rising success.
A further issue is that of consoles. In fact PC (/Mac) gaming is somewhat declining in comparison to consoles, where game publishers make much more money. So it makes sense to write your game in a manner that allows it to be ported to the three major consoles (even if you don't intend to do so immediately, it makes sense to keep your options open, which they are not if you write something very specific to Windows and DirectX). So if you make room for such future portability, you should be using a cross-platform toolkit, hence again adding Linux support shouldn't be too hard.
In addition to those factors, I'd say the problem is also a lack of interest.
;)
On the one hand we have things like GNOME and KDE, Firefox, Blender, etc. etc. - software that the user knows by name and interacts with directly. People happily join such projects and contribute code to them.
On the other hand you have software that the typical user might not not even know exists, like the Linux kernel. However, for geeks the kernel is perhaps the pinnacle of programming, and furthermore by lucky coincidence (or unhappy, if you are GNU) the name of the kernel has become synonymous with the entire OS, making it high-profile just like the more obvious software projects mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Whereas the X server is somewhere in the middle. It isn't well known, even geeks might not know exactly what it does (i.e., where the separation is between X, the window manager, and so forth), and for some reason it lacks the 'coolness' factor of the Linux kernel.
All of this is unjustified, and a shame. Perhaps more stories on Slashdot like this one will raise awareness? Maybe we should also motivate people, by e.g. telling them that hacking X is even harder than hacking the kernel
We see things as they are right now, and just presume that the clock was frozen before the last few centuries. So, we see black people in Africa and Chinese people in China and assume they were always there. They weren't, they displaced someone to get there. It's just been forgotten.
Not that this makes any of it 'right' or 'justified', nor does it make it 'wrong' or 'unjustified'. These are the facts. Make of them what you will.
Sometimes the GPL is the right license, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it increases adoption (Linux kernel), sometimes it doesn't.
In this case, a messaging protocol, the natural license is indeed not the GPL. Better ideas are Apache, BSD, LGPL, etc.
Self selection bias?
How many of these machines were scanned only *because* an infection was already suspected or known?
I don't think self-selection is relevant here. They compared Vista to XP, so unless you think there is more self-selection in one of them, the comparison is valid. That is, the absolute numbers are suspect, but relative differences are fine.Also, people might want to check out the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. They're really very good.
Tolkien is truly the father of modern fantasy, but the 'other' major fantasy novelist of the 20th centiry is Howard, and he was damn good as well. Even Tolkien said about the Conan stories, "I actually liked them".
Definitely worthy trying out.
Oh, I agree with you, I highly doubt that even if they did modify the kernel, that there is any significant reason not to release the source. Skype itself is in userspace, presumably. But, perhaps having to release source of any kind is too frightening for them (they wouldn't be the first company with that irrational fear).
Bruce
Just a random theory: Perhaps they modified the kernel in some way, for example, adding device drivers for their particular hardware, or something else. Which means that if they supply the source code, they need to supply their own kernel-residing code as well, and not just the vanilla kernel.Sure, Ballmer can wait and hope Yahoo comes back and takes a lower offer. But meanwhile Google continues to press its advantage, and Yahoo has a chance at either (1) making changes that make it unattractive to Microsoft, or (2) hitting on something successful and raising its value significantly. So a later deal is very risky, and if Ballmer is betting on that, he's being foolish.
The only advantage to waiting is the 'eating popcorn while Yahoo shareholders sue' bit, i.e., to gloat. That might be fun from a personal perspective, but it's bad for business.
But it is of significance to Ballmer's personal self-esteem: seems like he didn't want to look like he was a bad negotiator. So, financially he should have made the deal (according to his own arguments), but didn't in order to save face. That's bad business.
Yes, I was troubled by this as well.
However, to be fair, there is never a perfect time when all distros have just recently come out. In fact, Fedora was supposed to be have been released by now, but was delayed by a few weeks, which led to an older version being tested here. Ubuntu released on time, and got it's latest version in the door for this review; sometimes making your deadlines is helpful. (This, btw, doesn't seem much of a coincidence - Ubuntu treats its deadlines very seriously, constantly states so, and in fact almost always makes them; much like a serious commercial product. Fedora is more laid back, a community effort. Which is fine for them, but unlucky for this review.)
Sure, the reviewers might have waited a few weeks for Fedora 9 after its delay, but at that point in time we might have 'just a few more weeks' for some other release, be it openSUSE, Mandriva, etc. etc. - release schedules just aren't coordinated well enough.