Cue the obligatory lets set so double the killer delete select all.:) Speaking of Microsoft, according to HTK's FAQ:
HTK was originally developed at the Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED). In 1993 Entropic Research Laboratory Inc. acquired the rights to sell HTK and the development of HTK was fully transferred to Entropic in 1995 when the Entropic Cambridge Research Laboratory Ltd was established. HTK was sold by Entropic until 1999 when Microsoft bought Entropic. Microsoft has now licensed HTK back to CUED and is providing support so that CUED can redistribute HTK and provide development support via the HTK3 web site. [...] Microsoft retains the copyright to the existing HTK code
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you are not allowed to redistribute (parts of) HTK3 In other words, HTK - a critical part of the 'Simon' project - is owned by Microsoft. It is also not under a FOSS license: you can look at the code and use it for your own purposes, but you can't redistribute it. In fact, reading this, I wonder if Simon is not in violation of the license.
Technically speaking, the GPL does only come into play when you distribute, which confuses some people here. So you can write GPL code for as long as you want before distributing it. But the restriction of applying only at distribution time does not apply to Trolltech's commercial license. Trolltech specifically state that a license won't be given if you didn't start paying for it when you started development.
Of course, the Trolltech people are completely in control here: if you offer them more money, they might let you use their commercial license despite starting to pay for it late in the game. But this is completely up to them, and they can charge you whatever they want. It might be all back payments for the entire period of development plus a 50% late fee, or it might be one billion dollars, or your first born's kidney - their choice.
Actually, the LGPL gives you somewhat more "freedom" than the GPL does.
LGPL allows you to integrate code into commercial products, without putting your "derivative" application under the LGPL too. It isn't just for commercial products. For example, until this latest development you couldn't write Qt apps that were GPL3, and KDE was having problems with using GPL3 code. The same problem will occur if you want to write using any FOSS license that isn't compatible with Trolltech's licensing for Qt.
The LGPL lets you use the platform to write whatever you want: free software under any license, proprietary software, etc. etc. Qt being under the control of Trolltech means that they decide what licenses you can use, free or otherwise. Now, Trolltech has been going in the direction of openness recently, and this announcement is more proof of that, but its product is still not as flexible as GTK, or the Linux kernel for that matter - you can write apps to run on Linux that use any license, just like GTK, and unlike Qt. I've posted it before, I'll post it again - would Linux be as successful today if it were licensed like Qt is, i.e., that you need to pay if you aren't GPLed (or on a shortlist of other FOSS licenses)?
I'm not going to install it myself unless I have to, but I fully accept that almost everyone else is going to have Vista in the next few months. Such is the current way things work. (Emphasis mine.)
Months? Surely you meant 'years'. No one, even in Microsoft, thinks almost everyone is going to have Vista in a matter of months.
And even regarding 'years', I'm not so sure. Perhaps demand will force Microsoft to extend sales of XP for another few years, as they have done already; perhaps Apple will rise to 15% market share; perhaps a lot of things will happen. Vista dominating the OS scene like previous Microsoft OSes did is not a given.
I'd like to see google services fix the computer that "Joe in accounting" just "updated"
seriously though... There is something to be said for physical presence. Of course there is something to be said for physical presence. There is also something to be said for running your own on-location power plant (to use his example). The question is, is it worth it. For 99% of corporations it doesn't make sense to run their own power plant. Likewise, I think he's right about it not making sense for 99% of corporations to have their own IT department - the costs are high, centralized computing as a utility is getting cheap and effective. Only a matter of time.
Of course, when you use utility computing and your network connection goes down, you're screwed. Likewise when the power goes down you're screwed - it's really no different (actually losing power is worse). So there might be backup systems for some corporations - generators for power, on-site servers and personnel for IT. In fact the capability to have such backup systems is a requirement for utility computing to take off, and I am sure the big players are either working hard on developing such a thing or will soon start to do so.
Note that these backup systems will be far smaller than the size they would be if they were meant for constant use, as they currently are with IT. So this won't save run-of-the-mill IT as a career path.
Here's a news flash for you people...stock holders mostly don't give squat about good will. Good will does not increase the bottom line of their stock portfolio or give them a fat dividend check. Of course good will increases their bottom line. Any marketing person will tell you that a person's subjective impression of a product influences the chance of them buying it. The question is one of degree - how much is a certain level of goodwill worth?
Intel are coming out pretty bad, PR-wise, in this matter. Yes, only us geeks are aware of it. But we do account for a significant amount of sales. We are also the people Intel wants to hire to work for it. Pissing us off will hurt Intel's bottom line. Again the question is, how much. Perhaps Intel believes it is worth pissing us off in order to destroy the OLPC project, if OLPC is some sort of strategic threat. This seems horribly misguided to me (this is what Microsoft should think, not Intel - Intel chips can always replace AMD ones in the future), but perhaps it's their motivation here.
In any case, this isn't a matter of being naive and needing to be reminded that 'for profits don't care about goodwill!' They do care about goodwill - they quantify it. Of course it's all about money, but goodwill can lead to money, or to less of it.
No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.
That is correct. However it isn't just commercial licenses that have a problem, it is any non-approved FOSS license. Trolltech accept quite a lot of them, but not all (witness recent GPL3 issues with Samba). Whereas GNOME sees the desktop as a foundation, just like the Linux kernel - you can run whatever you want on it. Only if you change the foundation do you need to comply with its license.
The other important reason is that GNOME has a regular, consistent release schedule - every 6 months. KDE, on the other hand, is more erratic, and the KDE 4 switch is a good example. Ubuntu can't make its next KDE release a Long Term Service one, which would have 3 years of support, because KDE isn't allowing that: KDE 4 is too new, and KDE 3 won't be supported by KDE devs for long enough (they are all focusing on KDE 4 now, unsurprisingly).
Since both GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE are excellent platforms, distros have a choice between them, and consequently all major ones have gone GNOME.
I wouldn't consider one open-source project to be a danger to another... That's a good point.
Also, TFA has absolutely no content on which to base its claims. It mentions 4 things, PulseAudio, CodecBuddy, Spins, and the Fedora theme. Ubuntu 8.04 will have PulseAudio; in fact, this is just another example of the usual relationship of Fedora and Ubuntu - Fedora is slightly more 'on the edge', Ubuntu is a little more stable - but still, at least in non-LTS versions, quite risk-taking. Regarding CodecBuddy, Ubuntu has this, and in fact had it before Fedora. Spins are fairly meaningless - a nice idea, but let's see some compelling implementation. And anyhow both Ubuntu and Fedora welcome 'spins' aka derivative versions; Ubuntu has its own Kubuntu/Edubuntu/etc. as well as the non-official Mint, etc.
Finally, the theme. Well, he's got me there, Fedora does win in that respect. I don't mind the Ubuntu brown, but they aren't doing something nice enough with it so far. However Ubuntu 8.04 will have a brand new theme with a lot of effort put into it, so here's hoping.
Returning to your point, in fact most of these examples prove it. Fedora led the way with PulseAudio; Ubuntu saw it was possible, and will now do it as well. They might even benefit from the code. Similarly, Ubuntu led the way with CodecBuddy-type things, which Fedora wisely adopted. Hopefully Fedora's nice theme will encourage Ubuntu to focus more on that. Thus, we have in effect excellent examples of how FOSS project spur each other to better and greater things.
"cheap foreign knockoff souvenirs"
Ironic thing is the souvenirs probably cost more than the original to build. Sweatshops may be cheap, but good ole fashioned slave labor wins hands down.
Hey, it's all a big joke! I get the joke, but I'm in the mood to answer anyhow (feel free to ignore).
As my history prof used to say, that slave labor was used to make something does not mean that it was free. Slaves must be bought, and after that initial expense they require food, lodgings, etc. In addition, depending on the historic time, there might be a responsibility of the slaveowner to the slave, say, to not just kill him/her when they fall ill but to ensure minimal treatment (rest, food). Another common cost is to pay guards to keep the slaves in check.
In fact, sweatshops may be cheaper than slave labor, for the employer. Workers get sick? Fire 'em. No need to spend money on guards. Workers are on their own to ensure they get enough food to survive, you can pay them less than what is sufficient for that - some might get weak, just fire 'em with the sick ones, and hire new desperate workers, etc. etc.
I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving. Well, the GP is probably basing that claim on that Tkinter is included in Python. Which has made it a sort of default for quick-and-dirty GUI hacking, especially cross-platform.
However, you are correct about GTK. While there are other alternatives - WxWidgets and Qt both have nice Python bindings - PyGtk seems to be the nicest and most popular, and for good reason, it is an excellent platform. In fact GObject in C (or even C++, via gtkmm) seems clunky after you see how nicely GObject maps into Python classes in PyGtk. Add to that the fact that all major Linux distros include GNOME by default, and that Ubuntu in particular favors GNOME and Python, and you have quite a lot of people coding in PyGtk.
OK, so in the world of corporate euphemisms, that means what? The board isn't happy with him why? Seeing as he plans to remain chairman of the board, that seems doubtful Mod parent up.
Indeed, if 'family health reasons' was a euphemism for something, he wouldn't be left on the board, especially not as chairman. No, it looks like this is exactly what it appears to be: Szulik has a family member with health issues that require Szulik's full attention. This is presumably a very sad and difficult situation, one that we wouldn't wish on anyone.
The only consolation, and a very partial one at that, is that Szulik has the financial means to indeed leave his job and devote himself to doing his best for his family.
The guy works for Microsoft, what do you expect? Actually I would expect serious Microsoft employees to not write amateurish fanboy articles. That someone works for a company, uses their products, and appreciates them, doesn't necessarily lead to fanboyism (unless one is 13 years old, which I presume he isn't).
We all make mistakes, but surgeons today should have enough skill to ensure that objects are not left in the body in the first place. It seems like another scenario where use of advanced technology replaces basic skills that a human should have in these situations. Meanwhile, in other tubes on the internet, doctors were heard saying "We all make mistakes, but programmers today should have enough skill to ensure that there are no unreferenced objects left unallocated in the first place. These new languages with automatic reference counting sound like another scenario where use of advanced technology replaces basic skills that a human should have in these situations."
story is complete bull.
go check amazon, as of today, 1:30 EST, apple mp3 players are at places 1,2,4,5,6,7,8. the zune is number 9.
(apple continues at places 11, 12, 13, 18...)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/172630/ref=pd_ts_e_nav Indeed, complete bull. I immediately went to the list of top MP3 players on Amazon, just like you, and it is just as you said - Apple's iPod dominates the chart taking 8 out of the top ten; the first Zune is at #9, doing more poorly than even the SanDisk Sansa at #3. The iPod Touch seems to be doing very well at #5 and #6, contradicting TFA. This is basically the same picture I've seen every other time I checked Amazon's rankings, with minor changes.
The issue is probably the heading on Amazon's page, "Updated hourly." Perhaps if you wait long enough, you will see a fluke hour in which the Zune outsells the iPod. Now, surely the Yahoo tech reporter knew this was an unrepresentative oddity? If so, then this is deception; if not, then this is incompetence.
This is precisely the dual-license model used for QT, and it works pretty well. Free software gets to use the technology for free. Proprietary software pays for a proprietary license, but they're charging their customers anyway. Everybody's happy. Well, I'm not sure Qt is such a good example. In fact many (including me) believe that the reason GTK+ has been popular in recent years (used on all major desktop distros - Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE; Nokia devices; etc.) is precisely the licensing issue. Imagine if Linux itself (the kernel) used that licensing model - GPL for free, pay up otherwise. Would Linux be as popular today? I doubt it.
The general model of GPL for apps, LGPL for frameworks that apps run on top of, makes sense. You want to extend the kernel? Write in GPL. You want to run some app of yours on top of it? No problem, you are free to do so. This is precisely what the LGPL is for.
Just to clarify, the submitter is not the real Miguel de Icaza. The real one uses the Slashdot ID miguel. This is pretty disrespectful, to steal his identity like that. Now I don't expect Slashdot to police things like that in comments, but in submitted stories, I feel that perhaps something should have been done by the editors.
I can also see why other countries, like China and India, would have reason to be positively delighted at this mess. After all, while the US is circling the IT drain and losing impetus on innovation due to the all singing all dancing patent, they can get on with actually doing new stuff. Non-US countries like China and India might have many reasons to be happy about their economies vs. the US, but you may be under a misconception regarding patents. It isn't as if those countries are anti-patent. Look e.g. at the 2007 WIPO patent report, specifically, the chart I linked you to about patent filings by country by year.
First thing that pops out is that Japan has the most patents filings, not the US. Another is that the EU and China are rapidly climbing, and may achieve parity with the US in the not-so-far-future.
What might be true is that these are different types of patents - perhaps less software patents are filed outside the US. I don't know (but software patents are in fact legal in e.g. Japan). It is also possible that there are fewer lawsuits despite large amounts of patents in non-US countries; again, I don't know. But a casual look at the figures indicates that non-US countries seem avid to generate patent mills of their own, emulating the US, instead of looking at things from the side and scoffing at US foolishness as you seem to indicate.
Why is this so? Well, perhaps the entire world is stupid about patents, not just the US. Big corporations like patents, and they hold quite a lot of power not just in the US, after all.
Re:I'm having problems with GNOME.
on
Fedora 8 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I installed it earlier today, but I'm having all sorts of problems with GNOME. Right after I first started using it, a bunch of different programs starting dumping core. I don't think it's my PC, since it was working fine with Ubuntu for the past 8 months. I switched to KDE, and all of the programs there work. None have crashed. So I'm thinking that the version of GNOME bundled with FC8 is just unstable. GNOME is the default on Fedora, so that would be a catastrophe for them. Before we jump to conclusions, we should check one thing: did you verify the checksums on your CD after you burned it? Perhaps there were errors; this can mess up an installation.
...anyone can connect to a tracker, anyone can get the list of peers from the tracker... In your opinion, is there any greater "protection" from authorities if the tracker you're connecting to requires some kind of authentication based on membership at their website? Do such trackers really have a good way to keep out the bad guys? No, not much. Perhaps just a tiny bit. If anyone can sign up for membership, then it just makes the ***AA's job a little harder - 2 minutes harder. If membership is invite-only, then perhaps that might work, but you will have a very small amount of people and therefore slow torrents. So there is really no good way to do this, that I am aware of at least.
the purpose is to make the traffic not recognizable (to a degree) as torrent traffic so it can bypass the mindless traffic shaping of torrent traffic by some ISPs. Exactly. People see 'encrypted bittorrent' and they presume it is meant to be hidden from the RIAA. But in fact bittorrent is, and always was, a public protocol: anyone can connect to a tracker, anyone can get the list of peers from the tracker, and anyone can connect to anyone else running that torrent. Everyone in the swarm sees everything else: IPs, what pieces everyone else has, etc. All the **AA need to do is connect to the swarm and download from your IP (at least to incriminate the IP, if not you personally).
The reason for encryption was to prevent people outside the swarm from easily seeing that certain packets were bittorrent traffic. ISPs wanted to do that to throttle bandwidth. Now, the ISPs can connect to all the torrents and figure out what to block, but that is a hassle, so they mostly don't. In that respect encryption was a success; it made bandwidth throttling much harder and people got faster download speeds. But it has nothing to do with the **AA.
There have been some attempts at 'private' trackers - registered users only can connect to the tracker. This might be useful in recording upload ratios, but isn't really useful against the **AA, who can register like anyone else. Some sites try to be 'invitation only', and presumably the **AA won't be invited to the party. I am unaware of any large-scale useful network of this sort (but I might be uninformed).
Another issue here are blocklists, which any filesharer should use: PeerGuardian, SafePeer, lists from BlueTack, etc. These are constantly-updated lists of **AA and other malicious IPs that you can automatically block. This might be a partial solution to hiding a client from the **AA, but an unreliable one. It does, however, improve download speeds, if it blocks anti-p2p agents that attempt to 'poison' swarms.
In the end, bittorrent was never meant to let people share data covertly. Attempts to make it do so are cumbersome and impractical. Yet, despite this shortcoming for file-sharers, it is still highly popular, simply because it is easy to use and fast, and at this point has basically every type of recent content you could want - movies, TV shows (on the day after, if not the same day), music, etc.
The rest of your comment seems to work on the assumption that kids will gravitate to the house of the friend with the least strict parents, and therefore nobody will want to play Xbox any more. The hot news on that is that this happened long before consoles were mainstream, and depends on the parents not the console. A parent can easily manage their child's time on a Playstation 3 by taking the power cord away. All Microsoft have done is provide a tool to make it easier for them. Of course, this is nothing new. But as you say, this makes it easier for them, in other words, they will be more effective at limiting their children. A matter of degree. But to that degree, children will prefer to play at houses where there is less such effectiveness. This matter of degree might be minor, it might cancel out by other factors, who knows. But my point is simple: Parents can now be more effective in policing their children's usage of XBOXes, and this might make children dislike XBOXes due to that. Nothing deep here.
Since most profit from XBOXes comes not from the initial device purchase but later on from games, etc., this doesn't seem very wise. This isn't correct either. The well-established norm is that device manufacturers will take a hit on each console sold. They make the difference up in licensing. Well, that is basically what I said: the profit isn't from the initial units, but later charges (licensing for games, accessories, subscriptions to online services, etc.). I guess the word 'most' in my post was misleading, if so then apologies for that. Anyhow, the point was that if Microsoft's strategy will cut down on those later charges, there might be a problem for them. Just a theory of course.
If you're thirteen, and you aren't doing your schoolwork, then bully on Microsoft for giving parents the tools they need to create fine distinctions about your playtime without having to just wholesale ban games. ...ok, maybe. But I doubt it. Based on TFA, this was the reasoning for the new feature:
Microsoft says that more than 90 percent of parents placed restrictions on gaming, and over half the parents surveyed said they would use a timer if it was available.
Sure, survey the parents and they love it. But if they had surveyed the kids, they would find that 99% will get totally pissed off by the new feature. If a parent tells you to stop playing, you can at least reason with them, perhaps for '5 more minutes', and if you're lucky the parent forgets about it for 15. But the machine shutting itself off?
It is hard to see how this plays out, but in a house with an XBOX and Wii, I predict the Wii will suddenly become the more popular device. Get annoyed enough times by the XBOX shutting off, and as a learned response you will dislike the device itself. Similarly, play XBOX at one friend's house and get annoyed, play Playstation at another's and not get annoyed - in time, the XBOX house will be less visited.
Microsoft see the parents as liking this feature just by its description, and buying a device for it. Sure, there might be some short-term gain. But in the long run, this seems a very dangerous strategy, one that might tarnish the XBOX's reputation with the people actually playing it, as opposed to those buying it for others. Since most profit from XBOXes comes not from the initial device purchase but later on from games, etc., this doesn't seem very wise.
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you are not allowed to redistribute (parts of) HTK3 In other words, HTK - a critical part of the 'Simon' project - is owned by Microsoft. It is also not under a FOSS license: you can look at the code and use it for your own purposes, but you can't redistribute it. In fact, reading this, I wonder if Simon is not in violation of the license.
You are 100% accurate.
Technically speaking, the GPL does only come into play when you distribute, which confuses some people here. So you can write GPL code for as long as you want before distributing it. But the restriction of applying only at distribution time does not apply to Trolltech's commercial license. Trolltech specifically state that a license won't be given if you didn't start paying for it when you started development.
Of course, the Trolltech people are completely in control here: if you offer them more money, they might let you use their commercial license despite starting to pay for it late in the game. But this is completely up to them, and they can charge you whatever they want. It might be all back payments for the entire period of development plus a 50% late fee, or it might be one billion dollars, or your first born's kidney - their choice.
The LGPL lets you use the platform to write whatever you want: free software under any license, proprietary software, etc. etc. Qt being under the control of Trolltech means that they decide what licenses you can use, free or otherwise. Now, Trolltech has been going in the direction of openness recently, and this announcement is more proof of that, but its product is still not as flexible as GTK, or the Linux kernel for that matter - you can write apps to run on Linux that use any license, just like GTK, and unlike Qt. I've posted it before, I'll post it again - would Linux be as successful today if it were licensed like Qt is, i.e., that you need to pay if you aren't GPLed (or on a shortlist of other FOSS licenses)?
Months? Surely you meant 'years'. No one, even in Microsoft, thinks almost everyone is going to have Vista in a matter of months.
And even regarding 'years', I'm not so sure. Perhaps demand will force Microsoft to extend sales of XP for another few years, as they have done already; perhaps Apple will rise to 15% market share; perhaps a lot of things will happen. Vista dominating the OS scene like previous Microsoft OSes did is not a given.
seriously though... There is something to be said for physical presence. Of course there is something to be said for physical presence. There is also something to be said for running your own on-location power plant (to use his example). The question is, is it worth it. For 99% of corporations it doesn't make sense to run their own power plant. Likewise, I think he's right about it not making sense for 99% of corporations to have their own IT department - the costs are high, centralized computing as a utility is getting cheap and effective. Only a matter of time.
Of course, when you use utility computing and your network connection goes down, you're screwed. Likewise when the power goes down you're screwed - it's really no different (actually losing power is worse). So there might be backup systems for some corporations - generators for power, on-site servers and personnel for IT. In fact the capability to have such backup systems is a requirement for utility computing to take off, and I am sure the big players are either working hard on developing such a thing or will soon start to do so.
Note that these backup systems will be far smaller than the size they would be if they were meant for constant use, as they currently are with IT. So this won't save run-of-the-mill IT as a career path.
Of course good will increases their bottom line. Any marketing person will tell you that a person's subjective impression of a product influences the chance of them buying it. The question is one of degree - how much is a certain level of goodwill worth?
Intel are coming out pretty bad, PR-wise, in this matter. Yes, only us geeks are aware of it. But we do account for a significant amount of sales. We are also the people Intel wants to hire to work for it. Pissing us off will hurt Intel's bottom line. Again the question is, how much. Perhaps Intel believes it is worth pissing us off in order to destroy the OLPC project, if OLPC is some sort of strategic threat. This seems horribly misguided to me (this is what Microsoft should think, not Intel - Intel chips can always replace AMD ones in the future), but perhaps it's their motivation here.
In any case, this isn't a matter of being naive and needing to be reminded that 'for profits don't care about goodwill!' They do care about goodwill - they quantify it. Of course it's all about money, but goodwill can lead to money, or to less of it.
No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.
That is correct. However it isn't just commercial licenses that have a problem, it is any non-approved FOSS license. Trolltech accept quite a lot of them, but not all (witness recent GPL3 issues with Samba). Whereas GNOME sees the desktop as a foundation, just like the Linux kernel - you can run whatever you want on it. Only if you change the foundation do you need to comply with its license.The other important reason is that GNOME has a regular, consistent release schedule - every 6 months. KDE, on the other hand, is more erratic, and the KDE 4 switch is a good example. Ubuntu can't make its next KDE release a Long Term Service one, which would have 3 years of support, because KDE isn't allowing that: KDE 4 is too new, and KDE 3 won't be supported by KDE devs for long enough (they are all focusing on KDE 4 now, unsurprisingly).
Since both GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE are excellent platforms, distros have a choice between them, and consequently all major ones have gone GNOME.
Also, TFA has absolutely no content on which to base its claims. It mentions 4 things, PulseAudio, CodecBuddy, Spins, and the Fedora theme. Ubuntu 8.04 will have PulseAudio; in fact, this is just another example of the usual relationship of Fedora and Ubuntu - Fedora is slightly more 'on the edge', Ubuntu is a little more stable - but still, at least in non-LTS versions, quite risk-taking. Regarding CodecBuddy, Ubuntu has this, and in fact had it before Fedora. Spins are fairly meaningless - a nice idea, but let's see some compelling implementation. And anyhow both Ubuntu and Fedora welcome 'spins' aka derivative versions; Ubuntu has its own Kubuntu/Edubuntu/etc. as well as the non-official Mint, etc.
Finally, the theme. Well, he's got me there, Fedora does win in that respect. I don't mind the Ubuntu brown, but they aren't doing something nice enough with it so far. However Ubuntu 8.04 will have a brand new theme with a lot of effort put into it, so here's hoping.
Returning to your point, in fact most of these examples prove it. Fedora led the way with PulseAudio; Ubuntu saw it was possible, and will now do it as well. They might even benefit from the code. Similarly, Ubuntu led the way with CodecBuddy-type things, which Fedora wisely adopted. Hopefully Fedora's nice theme will encourage Ubuntu to focus more on that. Thus, we have in effect excellent examples of how FOSS project spur each other to better and greater things.
Ironic thing is the souvenirs probably cost more than the original to build. Sweatshops may be cheap, but good ole fashioned slave labor wins hands down.
Hey, it's all a big joke! I get the joke, but I'm in the mood to answer anyhow (feel free to ignore).
As my history prof used to say, that slave labor was used to make something does not mean that it was free. Slaves must be bought, and after that initial expense they require food, lodgings, etc. In addition, depending on the historic time, there might be a responsibility of the slaveowner to the slave, say, to not just kill him/her when they fall ill but to ensure minimal treatment (rest, food). Another common cost is to pay guards to keep the slaves in check.
In fact, sweatshops may be cheaper than slave labor, for the employer. Workers get sick? Fire 'em. No need to spend money on guards. Workers are on their own to ensure they get enough food to survive, you can pay them less than what is sufficient for that - some might get weak, just fire 'em with the sick ones, and hire new desperate workers, etc. etc.
I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving. Well, the GP is probably basing that claim on that Tkinter is included in Python. Which has made it a sort of default for quick-and-dirty GUI hacking, especially cross-platform.
However, you are correct about GTK. While there are other alternatives - WxWidgets and Qt both have nice Python bindings - PyGtk seems to be the nicest and most popular, and for good reason, it is an excellent platform. In fact GObject in C (or even C++, via gtkmm) seems clunky after you see how nicely GObject maps into Python classes in PyGtk. Add to that the fact that all major Linux distros include GNOME by default, and that Ubuntu in particular favors GNOME and Python, and you have quite a lot of people coding in PyGtk.
Indeed, if 'family health reasons' was a euphemism for something, he wouldn't be left on the board, especially not as chairman. No, it looks like this is exactly what it appears to be: Szulik has a family member with health issues that require Szulik's full attention. This is presumably a very sad and difficult situation, one that we wouldn't wish on anyone.
The only consolation, and a very partial one at that, is that Szulik has the financial means to indeed leave his job and devote himself to doing his best for his family.
The issue is probably the heading on Amazon's page, "Updated hourly." Perhaps if you wait long enough, you will see a fluke hour in which the Zune outsells the iPod. Now, surely the Yahoo tech reporter knew this was an unrepresentative oddity? If so, then this is deception; if not, then this is incompetence.
The general model of GPL for apps, LGPL for frameworks that apps run on top of, makes sense. You want to extend the kernel? Write in GPL. You want to run some app of yours on top of it? No problem, you are free to do so. This is precisely what the LGPL is for.
First thing that pops out is that Japan has the most patents filings, not the US. Another is that the EU and China are rapidly climbing, and may achieve parity with the US in the not-so-far-future.
What might be true is that these are different types of patents - perhaps less software patents are filed outside the US. I don't know (but software patents are in fact legal in e.g. Japan). It is also possible that there are fewer lawsuits despite large amounts of patents in non-US countries; again, I don't know. But a casual look at the figures indicates that non-US countries seem avid to generate patent mills of their own, emulating the US, instead of looking at things from the side and scoffing at US foolishness as you seem to indicate.
Why is this so? Well, perhaps the entire world is stupid about patents, not just the US. Big corporations like patents, and they hold quite a lot of power not just in the US, after all.
...anyone can connect to a tracker, anyone can get the list of peers from the tracker... In your opinion, is there any greater "protection" from authorities if the tracker you're connecting to requires some kind of authentication based on membership at their website? Do such trackers really have a good way to keep out the bad guys? No, not much. Perhaps just a tiny bit. If anyone can sign up for membership, then it just makes the ***AA's job a little harder - 2 minutes harder. If membership is invite-only, then perhaps that might work, but you will have a very small amount of people and therefore slow torrents. So there is really no good way to do this, that I am aware of at least.the purpose is to make the traffic not recognizable (to a degree) as torrent traffic so it can bypass the mindless traffic shaping of torrent traffic by some ISPs. Exactly. People see 'encrypted bittorrent' and they presume it is meant to be hidden from the RIAA. But in fact bittorrent is, and always was, a public protocol: anyone can connect to a tracker, anyone can get the list of peers from the tracker, and anyone can connect to anyone else running that torrent. Everyone in the swarm sees everything else: IPs, what pieces everyone else has, etc. All the **AA need to do is connect to the swarm and download from your IP (at least to incriminate the IP, if not you personally).
The reason for encryption was to prevent people outside the swarm from easily seeing that certain packets were bittorrent traffic. ISPs wanted to do that to throttle bandwidth. Now, the ISPs can connect to all the torrents and figure out what to block, but that is a hassle, so they mostly don't. In that respect encryption was a success; it made bandwidth throttling much harder and people got faster download speeds. But it has nothing to do with the **AA.
There have been some attempts at 'private' trackers - registered users only can connect to the tracker. This might be useful in recording upload ratios, but isn't really useful against the **AA, who can register like anyone else. Some sites try to be 'invitation only', and presumably the **AA won't be invited to the party. I am unaware of any large-scale useful network of this sort (but I might be uninformed).
Another issue here are blocklists, which any filesharer should use: PeerGuardian, SafePeer, lists from BlueTack, etc. These are constantly-updated lists of **AA and other malicious IPs that you can automatically block. This might be a partial solution to hiding a client from the **AA, but an unreliable one. It does, however, improve download speeds, if it blocks anti-p2p agents that attempt to 'poison' swarms.
In the end, bittorrent was never meant to let people share data covertly. Attempts to make it do so are cumbersome and impractical. Yet, despite this shortcoming for file-sharers, it is still highly popular, simply because it is easy to use and fast, and at this point has basically every type of recent content you could want - movies, TV shows (on the day after, if not the same day), music, etc.
It is hard to see how this plays out, but in a house with an XBOX and Wii, I predict the Wii will suddenly become the more popular device. Get annoyed enough times by the XBOX shutting off, and as a learned response you will dislike the device itself. Similarly, play XBOX at one friend's house and get annoyed, play Playstation at another's and not get annoyed - in time, the XBOX house will be less visited.
Microsoft see the parents as liking this feature just by its description, and buying a device for it. Sure, there might be some short-term gain. But in the long run, this seems a very dangerous strategy, one that might tarnish the XBOX's reputation with the people actually playing it, as opposed to those buying it for others. Since most profit from XBOXes comes not from the initial device purchase but later on from games, etc., this doesn't seem very wise.