The lawsuit after all would not have happened if the companies were not worried about the illegal usage of the product.
You know, I don't agree. That makes a nice cover story, but I really think they want to destroy fair use entirely and reduce the population to intellectual serfdom. Seriously.
The 'piracy' argument holds no water, and I can't believe companies these big could stay in business without someone in the top levels being smart enough to figure that out. If they really wanted to stop copyright infringement they'd be going after the real infringers - the commercial operations that make a profit selling illegal copies by the truck and boat load. Not going after products like this, which are useless to the bootleggers but helpful to Joe Schmoe that just wants to backup his game.
It's like that whole Al Gore invented the internet versus helped create the internet thing. He said the latter, but the former, which is only subtly different, sounds much worse
Actually, I watched him say it, and as I recall the exact words were 'I took the initiative in creating the Internet.' Which isn't quite as bad as 1, but certainly more grandiose sounding than 2. If it got exagerrated, that's surely in part because his choice of words encouraged that.
This comment only shows that you don't understand how to use a 'browser-type' file manager. You use two instances of it, with the target in one and the source in the other.
Or better yet, you right click and select 'open terminal here' and issue a mv or cp command.
There are some good arguments for using a 'spatial' approach on certain systems - particularly those designed for very limited usage, one or two purposes only, by someone who doesn't know and shouldn't need to know how to use a general-purpose computer. But that approach dead-ends very quickly when those conditions aren't true. The path the GNOME folks have taken seems to be one of assuming that either all of their users fit that profile, or that those who don't are readily expendable and, in fact, unwanted. If they keep up with this they're just going to succeed in driving everyone who is even slightly computer-literate away from their products. I find it hard to believe they genuinely want that, but their actions speak much louder than words here.
You're correct, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this case. If you read the article it seems the issue was that the Jurors didn't understand that US law protects freedom of speech. In this case the Judge seems to have simply been doing his duty to inform them, rather than trying to bamboozle them into accepting his instructions as a trump over law and decency (which, unfortunately, does happen in plenty of other cases.)
We're talking about HTML, and extensions that are often superfulous because they can usually be done with HTML anyway. In the case where they can't, it makes more sense to use standard extensions than proprietary platform-exclusive and hideously insecure ones, so the point stands, at every level.
I downloaded and installed Firefox.9 and I am quite impressed. All of my settings, bookmarks, popup exceptions, etc. ported over perfectly and automatically.
From an earlier version of firefox, or from Mozilla?
I use Mozilla, I only use the browser and am quite annoyed with having to install a bunch of other crap I don't need, and I would love to give firefox a try. But the download sites are obviously going to be overwhelmed for a bit, and 1.6 is doing me quite well, so I'll wait a bit and hope some of the real moz heads will answer this while I sleep, then think about it again. Moz is working for me now, v1.6, on a Mac although I have a 98lite and a Gnu (Slack) System also that aren't used interactively so much to think about also. I'd be happy to ditch Moz with all the baggage I don't use or want, but only if there's a foolproof way to set up firefox to pick up where it left off without a major hassle. Links? Pointers? I know I'm not the only one.
It is much easier to support proper HTML. Do that and any time you have a problem with a browser other than IE you can send a polite email and have the browser fixed any time you have a problem. And when someone complains that IE isn't interpreting something correctly, you can just request that the luser acquire a proper browser. Several of them will run on every OS in common usage.
It is very stupid to use such a system. A small one-time investment converting the affected system to something sensible would easily be recouped within a year in most cases. There's absolutely no excuse for this kind of horseshit.
It's still idle a lot, when the data it needs to perform the next operation is being fetched from wherever in the memory hierarchy it happens to reside. When you quit using it for other things, the SETI program doubtless has it concentrate on running a section of code and data that all fits in your cache, so idle cycles are minimised. But don't kid yourself there are no idle cycles - there are plenty.
Clock speed has never been the main factor in the performance of your computer - it's just been a number that works well for marketing. Your typical modern cpu is idle most of the time anyway. When you increase the clock speed, it does increase performance, but not linearly - doubling the clock speed on your chip might only give you a 10% boost or so in terms of real world performance.
I remember back when the Pentium first came out, having two systems with P60s to compare, the only difference between them being that one had 4 times the cache memory onboard and, I believe, a better cache-logic implementation on board. The system with the superior motherboard was in a whole higher class, performance wise, in regards to every task we threw at it, although the effect was much more pronounced on some tasks than others, it was striking in every case.
As CPU power has been growing far faster than IO capabilities, I would expect the same sort of testing with new systems today would show even more dramatic effects.
Better IO handling is very important for many different applications. Just look at the difference between running an application that will fit in cache against one that requires constant work with your main RAM bank. It's huge. So is the difference between a program that will fit in main RAM and one that requires page swapping with VM. Massive difference. Increasing clock speed shaves a microsecond off here or there, but it does nothing about all the wasted cycles while the CPU waits on IO.
CPU speed over the past 20 years has increased incredibly, but IO capabilities in the PC haven't improved at anything like the same rate. Making CPUs smarter (not necessarily faster, but more efficient at using the speed they already have,) using bigger better designed caches and improving IO systems are likely to be much more efficient ways of increasing real world performance than cranking up the clock speed.
First - if it could all be sorted out there's every reason to believe that Sun has copyrights to as much or more of the SysV code than whoever is actually heir to AT&Ts interest (more likely Novell than SCaldera.)
Second, you can't say what rights Sun has to do with Solaris under the contract unless you've read it. Have you?
That wasn't free beer you had. The free beer was probably across town at a college keg party. But it does exist, believe me, I've drunk quite a bit of it.
In some cases it can be, but this is because the telephone companies often throw out deals they lose money on in the hopes to get you hooked on their service and make the money back later. This seems to be happening less often, however, as it doesn't work so well - lots of people have figured out that they get the best price by switching every year or two when their special deal runs out - to another such special deal.
What Sun wants to do, however, would work a lot better from their perspective (if they can get people to buy it) because changing computer systems is a lot tougher than switching out the card in your phone, and there's a lot of important data that can essentially be held hostage.
They're completely twisting the language here, which is nothing new. They don't mean free as in speech, or free as in beer (gratis) what they mean is the price will be hidden in the software price. You'll be paying as much or more, they just won't itemise it or offer the hardware for honest sale.
So you'll get a software 'subscription' and the hardware to run it on in a single package, totally locked in.
No one in their right mind would sign up for this without huge, unsustainable bribes and/or being taken in by confusing double-talk and deception. I expect they'll be trying to use both in spades to get a stranglehold on the market, then make it back in rent once they have that. But it seems unlikely they'll succeed, thankfully. One more desperate attempt to try and lock competition out of the market.
That's an interesting theory, but if you read the parts that have been published so far, you'll see it's not true. This guy doesn't seem to have a clue what samizdat means, and uses it as a funny word for copyright infringement. He's a putz.
Honestly, the thing is, the poster is demonstrably wrong on that. Brown had spent quite a bit of time on several mailing lists, not to mention interviewing Stallman himself, and this distinction was explained to him slowly, clearly, and repeatedly. So he does know the difference, he just pretends not to because that's convenient for his FUD.
Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD?
on
Stallman vs Ken Brown
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· Score: 1
Of course it's not part of the GNU project, that's why when you run a GNU system using Linux for the kernel, it's appropriate to call it GNU/Linux. If Linux was part of the GNU project, we'd just call it GNU.
Of course there are. One of the many strengths of the distribution has long been that it has great X packages. Always fast and stable, and they don't try to shove 'desktops' down your throat with it. Want GNOME? Fine, there's a great package. But if you'd rather run twm or WindowMaker or something and skip that crap, you can. Of course you can with other distros too, but sometimes it can be a lot of work. Not so with slack.
And the packages really are top quality - I remember back when all the major distros were shipping KDE libraries with debugging info compiled in, which made it take like 10 times the memory it should have - but slack had it right. As always.
I really don't know why folk think it's somehow a difficult or 'unfriendly' distro. Friendliest I've ever seen, and I've tried most of them.
BASIC is really horrible. The only way to do anything useful is to use peek and poke and you wind up with a wrapper around some machine code. How the heck is that easy?
Python is great for beginners, you can do useful stuff without hacking machine code, and it doesn't teach you bad habits like BASIC.
But frankly I'd have to say Delphi would be the best place to start. All of the above advantages, plus plenty of RAD capabilities so she could stand a decent chance of making something she would find useful before she throws her hands up in disgust.
And maybe your knowledge of history is a little less than you like to believe. Watching some hollywood propoganda for a couple of hours doesn't make you an expert on the subject, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I don't agree. That makes a nice cover story, but I really think they want to destroy fair use entirely and reduce the population to intellectual serfdom. Seriously.
The 'piracy' argument holds no water, and I can't believe companies these big could stay in business without someone in the top levels being smart enough to figure that out. If they really wanted to stop copyright infringement they'd be going after the real infringers - the commercial operations that make a profit selling illegal copies by the truck and boat load. Not going after products like this, which are useless to the bootleggers but helpful to Joe Schmoe that just wants to backup his game.
Actually, I watched him say it, and as I recall the exact words were 'I took the initiative in creating the Internet.' Which isn't quite as bad as 1, but certainly more grandiose sounding than 2. If it got exagerrated, that's surely in part because his choice of words encouraged that.
This comment only shows that you don't understand how to use a 'browser-type' file manager. You use two instances of it, with the target in one and the source in the other.
Or better yet, you right click and select 'open terminal here' and issue a mv or cp command.
There are some good arguments for using a 'spatial' approach on certain systems - particularly those designed for very limited usage, one or two purposes only, by someone who doesn't know and shouldn't need to know how to use a general-purpose computer. But that approach dead-ends very quickly when those conditions aren't true. The path the GNOME folks have taken seems to be one of assuming that either all of their users fit that profile, or that those who don't are readily expendable and, in fact, unwanted. If they keep up with this they're just going to succeed in driving everyone who is even slightly computer-literate away from their products. I find it hard to believe they genuinely want that, but their actions speak much louder than words here.
You're correct, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this case. If you read the article it seems the issue was that the Jurors didn't understand that US law protects freedom of speech. In this case the Judge seems to have simply been doing his duty to inform them, rather than trying to bamboozle them into accepting his instructions as a trump over law and decency (which, unfortunately, does happen in plenty of other cases.)
Konqueror?
Jackass indeed.
Emacs-w3 versus links versus lynx versus arachne.
Konqueror is for wimps.
We're talking about HTML, and extensions that are often superfulous because they can usually be done with HTML anyway. In the case where they can't, it makes more sense to use standard extensions than proprietary platform-exclusive and hideously insecure ones, so the point stands, at every level.
They lag, but they do get fixed, and the fixes propogate. IE will never be fixed. Quit trying to obscure that fact and face up to it.
From an earlier version of firefox, or from Mozilla?
I use Mozilla, I only use the browser and am quite annoyed with having to install a bunch of other crap I don't need, and I would love to give firefox a try. But the download sites are obviously going to be overwhelmed for a bit, and 1.6 is doing me quite well, so I'll wait a bit and hope some of the real moz heads will answer this while I sleep, then think about it again. Moz is working for me now, v1.6, on a Mac although I have a 98lite and a Gnu (Slack) System also that aren't used interactively so much to think about also. I'd be happy to ditch Moz with all the baggage I don't use or want, but only if there's a foolproof way to set up firefox to pick up where it left off without a major hassle. Links? Pointers? I know I'm not the only one.
The Mozilla bugs are sometimes worrisome, but they do seem to get fixed.
The IE bugs seem to be policy, not oversight, and are almost never fixed.
No software is perfectly secure. But few outside of MS have the outright chutzpah to claim that insecurity and bad design is a feature, not a bug.
Sorry, I think you're wrong. It's not a virus. It's a virus and general malware delivery toolkit.
It is much easier to support proper HTML. Do that and any time you have a problem with a browser other than IE you can send a polite email and have the browser fixed any time you have a problem. And when someone complains that IE isn't interpreting something correctly, you can just request that the luser acquire a proper browser. Several of them will run on every OS in common usage.
It is very stupid to use such a system. A small one-time investment converting the affected system to something sensible would easily be recouped within a year in most cases. There's absolutely no excuse for this kind of horseshit.
It's still idle a lot, when the data it needs to perform the next operation is being fetched from wherever in the memory hierarchy it happens to reside. When you quit using it for other things, the SETI program doubtless has it concentrate on running a section of code and data that all fits in your cache, so idle cycles are minimised. But don't kid yourself there are no idle cycles - there are plenty.
I think you grok this well.
Clock speed has never been the main factor in the performance of your computer - it's just been a number that works well for marketing. Your typical modern cpu is idle most of the time anyway. When you increase the clock speed, it does increase performance, but not linearly - doubling the clock speed on your chip might only give you a 10% boost or so in terms of real world performance.
I remember back when the Pentium first came out, having two systems with P60s to compare, the only difference between them being that one had 4 times the cache memory onboard and, I believe, a better cache-logic implementation on board. The system with the superior motherboard was in a whole higher class, performance wise, in regards to every task we threw at it, although the effect was much more pronounced on some tasks than others, it was striking in every case.
As CPU power has been growing far faster than IO capabilities, I would expect the same sort of testing with new systems today would show even more dramatic effects.
Better IO handling is very important for many different applications. Just look at the difference between running an application that will fit in cache against one that requires constant work with your main RAM bank. It's huge. So is the difference between a program that will fit in main RAM and one that requires page swapping with VM. Massive difference. Increasing clock speed shaves a microsecond off here or there, but it does nothing about all the wasted cycles while the CPU waits on IO.
CPU speed over the past 20 years has increased incredibly, but IO capabilities in the PC haven't improved at anything like the same rate. Making CPUs smarter (not necessarily faster, but more efficient at using the speed they already have,) using bigger better designed caches and improving IO systems are likely to be much more efficient ways of increasing real world performance than cranking up the clock speed.
First - if it could all be sorted out there's every reason to believe that Sun has copyrights to as much or more of the SysV code than whoever is actually heir to AT&Ts interest (more likely Novell than SCaldera.)
Second, you can't say what rights Sun has to do with Solaris under the contract unless you've read it. Have you?
That wasn't free beer you had. The free beer was probably across town at a college keg party. But it does exist, believe me, I've drunk quite a bit of it.
In some cases it can be, but this is because the telephone companies often throw out deals they lose money on in the hopes to get you hooked on their service and make the money back later. This seems to be happening less often, however, as it doesn't work so well - lots of people have figured out that they get the best price by switching every year or two when their special deal runs out - to another such special deal.
What Sun wants to do, however, would work a lot better from their perspective (if they can get people to buy it) because changing computer systems is a lot tougher than switching out the card in your phone, and there's a lot of important data that can essentially be held hostage.
They're completely twisting the language here, which is nothing new. They don't mean free as in speech, or free as in beer (gratis) what they mean is the price will be hidden in the software price. You'll be paying as much or more, they just won't itemise it or offer the hardware for honest sale.
So you'll get a software 'subscription' and the hardware to run it on in a single package, totally locked in.
No one in their right mind would sign up for this without huge, unsustainable bribes and/or being taken in by confusing double-talk and deception. I expect they'll be trying to use both in spades to get a stranglehold on the market, then make it back in rent once they have that. But it seems unlikely they'll succeed, thankfully. One more desperate attempt to try and lock competition out of the market.
That's an interesting theory, but if you read the parts that have been published so far, you'll see it's not true. This guy doesn't seem to have a clue what samizdat means, and uses it as a funny word for copyright infringement. He's a putz.
Honestly, the thing is, the poster is demonstrably wrong on that. Brown had spent quite a bit of time on several mailing lists, not to mention interviewing Stallman himself, and this distinction was explained to him slowly, clearly, and repeatedly. So he does know the difference, he just pretends not to because that's convenient for his FUD.
Of course it's not part of the GNU project, that's why when you run a GNU system using Linux for the kernel, it's appropriate to call it GNU/Linux. If Linux was part of the GNU project, we'd just call it GNU.
They're just being conservative, they don't like to change things that work without making sure the replacement works as well.
Of course there are. One of the many strengths of the distribution has long been that it has great X packages. Always fast and stable, and they don't try to shove 'desktops' down your throat with it. Want GNOME? Fine, there's a great package. But if you'd rather run twm or WindowMaker or something and skip that crap, you can. Of course you can with other distros too, but sometimes it can be a lot of work. Not so with slack.
And the packages really are top quality - I remember back when all the major distros were shipping KDE libraries with debugging info compiled in, which made it take like 10 times the memory it should have - but slack had it right. As always.
I really don't know why folk think it's somehow a difficult or 'unfriendly' distro. Friendliest I've ever seen, and I've tried most of them.
BASIC is really horrible. The only way to do anything useful is to use peek and poke and you wind up with a wrapper around some machine code. How the heck is that easy?
Python is great for beginners, you can do useful stuff without hacking machine code, and it doesn't teach you bad habits like BASIC.
But frankly I'd have to say Delphi would be the best place to start. All of the above advantages, plus plenty of RAD capabilities so she could stand a decent chance of making something she would find useful before she throws her hands up in disgust.
And maybe your knowledge of history is a little less than you like to believe. Watching some hollywood propoganda for a couple of hours doesn't make you an expert on the subject, you know.