If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.
Here's a list of the worst problems:
-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind souldid get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.
-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.
-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two.:-P
So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?
Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.
That may have been true 6-7 years ago, but after the legendary Barracuda IV and (even better - if very short-lived) V-series, Seagate has gone badly downhill when it comes to silence. If you check out www.silentpcreview.com you'll see that Seagate hasn't been on top for years - Samsung has, and Western Digital has also been a good choice for the last two years, or so. My own experience also supports this assessment.
( ) The approximately 1.5 billion Christians in the world might not want to have something implanted in their right hand or forehead... And they may not be the only ones
(*) Feelgood measure that does little to solve the problem - and does in fact not even feel good
Furthermore the following philosophical arguments may apply:
( ) Censorship is almost invariably a greater evil than whatever it's supposed to prevent
(*) Fascism is invariably a greater evil than whatever it's supposed to prevent
(*) He who would trade an essential liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security
( ) Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is generally not a good idea
(*) Who will watch the watchers?
(*) People should not fear their government, the government should fear its people
(*) When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, for I was not a Jew. When they came for the co[NO CARRIER]
So does that mean TiVo can continue to sell their products because their deal was made before GPL3 was drafted?
The patent-deal issue, and the Tivoization issue are completely different topics. Furthermore TiVo can continue to sell their products for as long as they like, as long as they use GPLv2-licenced software - and the stuff that's already GPLv2 won't magically become v3 just because a new version is released. Only future releases will be affected for those projects that decide to go v3.
...I'm going to try it out by putting some sugar in my gas tank. If it works well I'll increase the amount. With a little luck I'll be able to save lots of money on gas.:-)
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
Yes.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.) I think you could do it with BSD & LGPL:ed code, but not GPL:ed code. Not 100% sure on this one - someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)? Sure, but why would you want to, if it's going to be closed source anyway?
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party? Only if you used other people's code in a manner that violates the licence. E.g. you used GPL:ed code in your software. Linux is however designed in such a fashion that it's quite possible to run both free and proprietary software on it side by side. (Proprietary kernel drivers are a different matter, but that's not what you're doing, right?)
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems? I don't think you'll run into problems in Linux either - but if you thought that the Linux-free-software-fanboys are bad, wait 'till you meet the BSD-ones...;-)
Where's the hole I'm missing?
Would that be the ***hole(s) into which the state legislators, bureaucrats and law-enforcement have firmly stuck their heads?
Re:The next "One major danger"...
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm getting tired of hearing this same argument ("The GPL is supposed to be about freedom, but look at all the restrictions it imposes!!!") in various different incarnations pop up every time the GPL is discussed. Everyone try to understand this simple fact, so that we can stop having this pointless discussion every time:
Freedom is a limited resource, because one man's freedom is another man's restriction.
Don't believe me? Let's take some examples: If I'm to be free to do anything* I want in my own home, that means you're not free to do anything you want in my home. Now that's a perfectly reasonable freedom for me, and restriction for you to have, which is why society generally supports this freedom/restriction.
*) Within reason. I.e. stuff I do in my own home that has major impact outside of isn't included.
Let's take another example. The first amendment of the US Constitution starts with the words "Congress shall make no law..." In other words, the freedom of the individual comes at the price of the freedom of government.
I've said it before, and I've said it again: RMS & FSF have been perfectly open about what they want to achieve with the GPL, and why. Stop treating them like hypocrites. There are plenty of hypocrites in the IT world, but RMS isn't (AFAIK) one - and he's definitely not one because of the restrictions of the GPL. If you don't support the view of the FSF, then that's fine, but don't back up your standpoint with flawed logic
Stallman and the FSF have always been perfectly open about what the GNU project and the GPL are about. They're about "The four freedoms of the user". This means that when TiVO decided to use GPL-licenced software, yet lock their hardware in a manner that denied the user some of these freedoms, they knew they were using a loophole, and thus acting in bad faith. They can try to play the victim all they want now that the loophole is being closed, but informed people will have no sympathy for them. They should have seen this coming from day 1.
Microsoft has realized that Linux has a killer feature they can't compete with - it's free (as in both freedom and gratis). Since they can't rise up to Linux' level, the whole idea behind all of this saber-rattling and FUD is to bring Linux down to their level (or at least closer to it). They're trying to scare everyone into doing one of the following:
1) Stay far away from Linux. (And continue to pay the MS-tax directly.)
2) Enter into some kind of licensing agreement, which will either undermine the freedom-part of Linux, the gratis-part or both. (And continue to pay the MS-tax indirectly.)
From TFA:
"Microsoft is trying to play nice with the open-source community, but it has to do the Republican stance for its shareholders. There's a massive tension between the two positions." What an enormous load of BS! It's never been a question about playing nice (or even wanting to). It's always been a question about how to f*** F/LOSS over horribly, (preferably) without invoking another anti-trust lawsuit.
2) Wine at Adobe until they release 64 bit flash for linux. I think this will be a while, considering they completely skipped version 8 for Linux, and I'm pretty sure version 9 is still in beta.
First a slight correction: Adobe flash v9 came out of beta in January this year.
Then an addition of a third available option:
3) You can install the Netscape plugin wrapper http://www.gibix.net/projects/nspluginwrapper/ which allows you to use 32-bit plugins on a 64-bit browser. It works with Netscape and Mozilla browsers.
...shouldn't be school teachers. I remember the time when a good friend of mine was supposed to write an essay. The essay should have something to do with kids, but otherwise he was free to pick the subject. I knew from his stories that the teachers at his school were touchy-feely humanistic crybabies, and when I heard of this I was struck by an evil idea... and wrote an 8-page essay on how to achieve world domination through clever utilization of child labor. My friend thought the essay was hilarious, and turned it in as his own. So, like I said. People who have no backbone should not be teachers.:-)
Oh, How did the whole thing turn out? Well, my friend almost got expelled, but pinned the blame on me (which was perfectly fine, because I didn't attend that school, and didn't know anyone there but him) and was allowed to graduate after turning in a serious essay.
45. Red Hat Linux (1994)
Picking a watershed Linux distribution is tough. Literally hundreds have existed over the years, though only a few have advanced the state of the art. Red Hat was critically important for beginning the move (however tentative) toward making Linux beginner-friendly and easier to install. While development of Red Hat was discontinued in 2003, it directly spawned successors like Ubuntu, which aim to make desktop use of Linux commonplace.
WTF!? Ubuntu is based on Debian, not Red Hat. Also, development of Red Hat didn't stop in 2003 - it was just split into RHEL & Fedora. Pretty har to take an article that flawed seriously.
Maybe nobody feels bad for Tony, but think about what will eventually happen to the genuine distributors and consequently developers. If Tony couldn't even sell pirate software any more then how will anyone sell software?
If nobody is able to sell software, that's a very, very good thing. If the incentive to make proprietary software goes away FLOSS will have won, liberty will be restored, the Dilbertization of IT http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/17/175 256 will stop and Microsoft will die. Party like it's 1999.
"The universe was built from SOMETHING. Since time is seemingly infinite in both directions, I'll never be able to prove it, but I know I'm right".
While it may seem that time is infinite in both directions, the past can't be infinite - if it were "today" would never arrive, since the arrival of today would mean that we would have passed an infinity with a number of finite steps, which is impossible. This may be a bit hard to comprehend (Both the concept of time, and the concept of infinity, tend to mess with the human brain.) so I'll try to clarify: If we assume that the future is infinite, and ask ourselves the question: "When will it end?", the answer of course is "Never." With this in mind it becomes more obvious that an infinity can't be passed, and if we consider "today" to be day number 0, then we can see that it's equally impossible to pass the infinity that lies between -INFINITY and 0, as it is to pass the infinity between 0 and +INFINITY.
I do agree with the old wisdom "Ex nihilo, nihil fit." (Out of nothing, comes nothing.) As someone already pointed out - if nothing had ever existed, there wouldn't be anything that could cause this state to change, ergo nothing would ever exist.
Besides helium-3 mining and lunar hotels, do you have any good ideas for a moon base startup? It has been suggested that the moon could be used to mine for elements that are rare here on Earth but common on the moon, such as samarium. Samarium is used in (among other things) extremely powerful magnets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium-Cobalt_magne t, which in turn can be used for maglev trains. Of course it's not certain that such an operation would be economically feasible, but the are people who are seriously looking into it - and if nothing else, from what I've understood it could at least be a decent side-business if we do go to the moon.
My (previous) ISP did this several years ago. I found out when I was making a computer for a friend. At the time (this was a few years ago) I didn't yet know just how quickly an unprotected windows-box is owned by viruses. I thought I'd be okay for the time it takes to download a firewall. 20 seconds later I got a popup that I recognized as an infection, so I shut down the machine, and tried to get the firewall / AV-software with my other machine instead - only to be greeted by a screen where my ISP informs me that "By the look of your outgoing traffic, it would seem that your machine has been turned into a spam-bot by a virus, and your account will be automatically unblocked 1 hour after the suspicious traffic stops." This was followed by some generic instructions for virus removal.
The only mention of lasers in TFA is about an incident several months ago, that involved the alleged illumination (not destruction) of a US military spacecraft.
This satellite was destroyed by "a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile." Could we have some more descriptive and less sensationalist headlines, please?
On a completely different note, I just bought a guitar, but I'm going to return it because I think it should just produce the music I want to hear when I hammer at it like a retarded orangutang. Someone told me that I'd have to take the time to learn stuff like "notes" and "rhythm" and who-knows-what. That person obviously just doesn't know how to make a guitar. [/sarcasm]
Now, if it was a green laser, with a visible beam, that would be cool!
I think that "laser" and "visible beam" pretty much contradict each other, unless you either look straight into the beam, or set your room on fire to fill it with smoke, neither of which can really be recommended.
Slashdot Mirror
But let's start spreading those conspiracy theories anyway!
Yes, let's. Business has been slow lately.
If you buy a netbook and the OEM Linux distro, customized by the manufacturer, doesn't run the hardware properly, please let us know.
Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.
Here's a list of the worst problems:
-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.
-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.
-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two. :-P
So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?
Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.
Seagates are quieter than almost all others
That may have been true 6-7 years ago, but after the legendary Barracuda IV and (even better - if very short-lived) V-series, Seagate has gone badly downhill when it comes to silence. If you check out www.silentpcreview.com you'll see that Seagate hasn't been on top for years - Samsung has, and Western Digital has also been a good choice for the last two years, or so. My own experience also supports this assessment.
( ) The approximately 1.5 billion Christians in the world might not want to have something implanted in their right hand or forehead... And they may not be the only ones (*) Feelgood measure that does little to solve the problem - and does in fact not even feel good Furthermore the following philosophical arguments may apply: ( ) Censorship is almost invariably a greater evil than whatever it's supposed to prevent (*) Fascism is invariably a greater evil than whatever it's supposed to prevent (*) He who would trade an essential liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security ( ) Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is generally not a good idea (*) Who will watch the watchers? (*) People should not fear their government, the government should fear its people (*) When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, for I was not a Jew. When they came for the co[NO CARRIER]
Here's a link to Google's cache of the article.
...I'm going to try it out by putting some sugar in my gas tank. If it works well I'll increase the amount. With a little luck I'll be able to save lots of money on gas. :-)
I'm getting tired of hearing this same argument ("The GPL is supposed to be about freedom, but look at all the restrictions it imposes!!!") in various different incarnations pop up every time the GPL is discussed. Everyone try to understand this simple fact, so that we can stop having this pointless discussion every time:
Freedom is a limited resource, because one man's freedom is another man's restriction.
Don't believe me? Let's take some examples: If I'm to be free to do anything* I want in my own home, that means you're not free to do anything you want in my home. Now that's a perfectly reasonable freedom for me, and restriction for you to have, which is why society generally supports this freedom/restriction.
*) Within reason. I.e. stuff I do in my own home that has major impact outside of isn't included.
Let's take another example. The first amendment of the US Constitution starts with the words "Congress shall make no law..." In other words, the freedom of the individual comes at the price of the freedom of government.
I've said it before, and I've said it again: RMS & FSF have been perfectly open about what they want to achieve with the GPL, and why. Stop treating them like hypocrites. There are plenty of hypocrites in the IT world, but RMS isn't (AFAIK) one - and he's definitely not one because of the restrictions of the GPL. If you don't support the view of the FSF, then that's fine, but don't back up your standpoint with flawed logic
Stallman and the FSF have always been perfectly open about what the GNU project and the GPL are about. They're about "The four freedoms of the user". This means that when TiVO decided to use GPL-licenced software, yet lock their hardware in a manner that denied the user some of these freedoms, they knew they were using a loophole, and thus acting in bad faith. They can try to play the victim all they want now that the loophole is being closed, but informed people will have no sympathy for them. They should have seen this coming from day 1.
Microsoft has realized that Linux has a killer feature they can't compete with - it's free (as in both freedom and gratis). Since they can't rise up to Linux' level, the whole idea behind all of this saber-rattling and FUD is to bring Linux down to their level (or at least closer to it). They're trying to scare everyone into doing one of the following:
1) Stay far away from Linux. (And continue to pay the MS-tax directly.)
2) Enter into some kind of licensing agreement, which will either undermine the freedom-part of Linux, the gratis-part or both. (And continue to pay the MS-tax indirectly.)
From TFA:
"Microsoft is trying to play nice with the open-source community, but it has to do the Republican stance for its shareholders. There's a massive tension between the two positions." What an enormous load of BS! It's never been a question about playing nice (or even wanting to). It's always been a question about how to f*** F/LOSS over horribly, (preferably) without invoking another anti-trust lawsuit.First a slight correction: Adobe flash v9 came out of beta in January this year.
3) You can install the Netscape plugin wrapper http://www.gibix.net/projects/nspluginwrapper/ which allows you to use 32-bit plugins on a 64-bit browser. It works with Netscape and Mozilla browsers.Then an addition of a third available option:
...shouldn't be school teachers. I remember the time when a good friend of mine was supposed to write an essay. The essay should have something to do with kids, but otherwise he was free to pick the subject. I knew from his stories that the teachers at his school were touchy-feely humanistic crybabies, and when I heard of this I was struck by an evil idea... and wrote an 8-page essay on how to achieve world domination through clever utilization of child labor. My friend thought the essay was hilarious, and turned it in as his own. So, like I said. People who have no backbone should not be teachers. :-)
Oh, How did the whole thing turn out? Well, my friend almost got expelled, but pinned the blame on me (which was perfectly fine, because I didn't attend that school, and didn't know anyone there but him) and was allowed to graduate after turning in a serious essay.
45. Red Hat Linux (1994)
Picking a watershed Linux distribution is tough. Literally hundreds have existed over the years, though only a few have advanced the state of the art. Red Hat was critically important for beginning the move (however tentative) toward making Linux beginner-friendly and easier to install. While development of Red Hat was discontinued in 2003, it directly spawned successors like Ubuntu, which aim to make desktop use of Linux commonplace.
WTF!? Ubuntu is based on Debian, not Red Hat. Also, development of Red Hat didn't stop in 2003 - it was just split into RHEL & Fedora. Pretty har to take an article that flawed seriously.
If nobody is able to sell software, that's a very, very good thing. If the incentive to make proprietary software goes away FLOSS will have won, liberty will be restored, the Dilbertization of IT http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/17/175 256 will stop and Microsoft will die. Party like it's 1999.
While it may seem that time is infinite in both directions, the past can't be infinite - if it were "today" would never arrive, since the arrival of today would mean that we would have passed an infinity with a number of finite steps, which is impossible. This may be a bit hard to comprehend (Both the concept of time, and the concept of infinity, tend to mess with the human brain.) so I'll try to clarify:
If we assume that the future is infinite, and ask ourselves the question: "When will it end?", the answer of course is "Never." With this in mind it becomes more obvious that an infinity can't be passed, and if we consider "today" to be day number 0, then we can see that it's equally impossible to pass the infinity that lies between -INFINITY and 0, as it is to pass the infinity between 0 and +INFINITY.
I do agree with the old wisdom "Ex nihilo, nihil fit." (Out of nothing, comes nothing.) As someone already pointed out - if nothing had ever existed, there wouldn't be anything that could cause this state to change, ergo nothing would ever exist.
My (previous) ISP did this several years ago. I found out when I was making a computer for a friend. At the time (this was a few years ago) I didn't yet know just how quickly an unprotected windows-box is owned by viruses. I thought I'd be okay for the time it takes to download a firewall. 20 seconds later I got a popup that I recognized as an infection, so I shut down the machine, and tried to get the firewall / AV-software with my other machine instead - only to be greeted by a screen where my ISP informs me that "By the look of your outgoing traffic, it would seem that your machine has been turned into a spam-bot by a virus, and your account will be automatically unblocked 1 hour after the suspicious traffic stops." This was followed by some generic instructions for virus removal.
The only mention of lasers in TFA is about an incident several months ago, that involved the alleged illumination (not destruction) of a US military spacecraft.
This satellite was destroyed by "a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile." Could we have some more descriptive and less sensationalist headlines, please?
On a completely different note, I just bought a guitar, but I'm going to return it because I think it should just produce the music I want to hear when I hammer at it like a retarded orangutang. Someone told me that I'd have to take the time to learn stuff like "notes" and "rhythm" and who-knows-what. That person obviously just doesn't know how to make a guitar. [/sarcasm]
IIRC, they have a couple of rocket-powered supersonic torpedos that panicked the US Navy when first demonstrated...
You're probably referring to the "Shkval" torpedo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_ShkvalWhile certainly fast it's nowhere near supersonic, and furthermore it utilizes supercavitation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation
which is someting quite different from this technology.
So Gaddafi is no longer the boss in Lybia?
Not only that, but Libya is no longer spelled "Libya" either.
Now, if it was a green laser, with a visible beam, that would be cool!
I think that "laser" and "visible beam" pretty much contradict each other, unless you either look straight into the beam, or set your room on fire to fill it with smoke, neither of which can really be recommended.