the logical next step is not just to brick the ipod but also to brick the computer used to charge it. maybe an encrypted message could be sent to a private security firm on apple's or the RIAA's payroll.
it ensures less restrictions on the user by imposing more restrictions on the person who's packaging and distributing the software. that's what the GPL is about: the user.
in a society, someone has to have the power. you'd rather a political ideology held by some of the population had more of the power. i'd rather knowledge of the facts of the universe, the world and how it works had more of the power.
in other words, pure democracy results in tyranny of the (in this case extremely slight if at all existent) majority. there need to be some checks on this.
scientists are reviewed by
a worldwide jury of peers.
the universe itself
seeing as we all live in this universe, i do like to see it having a hand in setting governmental policy.
...I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don't want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don't want publicity. The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won't settle for anything less than compliance, and that's all we want. (from the keynote address of the plone conference 2006 available here : http://www.geof.net/research/2006/moglen-notes )
au contraire, mon ami. i'd say that pages like this show the true strength of a format like wikipedia. sometimes knowledge isn't clear cut. sometimes x% believe one thing and y% something else. pages like this show how contested this is and allow wikipedia to rise above the black on white approach necessitated by traditional printed media.
i think this is a standard problem with knowledge. every reference work was written by people living at a certain time in a certain culture. wikipedia should be better than most when it comes to heated issues (politics, sex, emacs/vi) because of the base of editors being global. however, as you say, if the big chief editor of an article supports a certain ideology, it can be difficult to make headway.
this is however a standard caveat. one cannot read a version of the eb from colonial times without being painfully aware of the fact. the brockhaus of 193x is even worse.
it's not very efficient over dial-up (i should however mention a story about a friend of mine who has a windows pc with a umts card for the internet. his provider told him to update his software and offered a download to do so. 127MB. compared with that, the linux kernel is small). i'm not sure you'd say that ubuntu is targeted for users with broadband. it does however use a fast internet connection to provide a better user experience.
new versions of packages get created by the package maintainers. with ubuntu, a core team of maintainers compiles new versions of packages as soon as they see fit (for example, firefox 2.0.5 was ready about a day after it was announced (you must remember, no user has the rights to update firefox themselves, so this is best done using the package manager)). when it comes to drivers there are two distinct models. either the driver is part of the kernel tree, at which point the package maintainers for your distro will probably decide to include it in the standard kernel (at least as a module) because they like having kernels with the kitchen sink thrown in. the other possibility is that the driver isn't part of the standard kernel and has to be "linked to the kernel dynamically at runtime". this would be a standard driver with which you are familiar through windows. new versions of these get done whenever the developer sees fit. if you're using debian or ubuntu or one of the distributions with large online repositories, the maintainers of the distribution will probably also make a package available for your distribution, but maybe for the next full version and not for the current version.
ubuntu, just like all linux distributions supports exactly as much hardware as has been compiled for when the maintainers configured the kernel (plus some external modules). chances are, on a desktop computer pretty much everything will work, on a laptop you are more likely to have problems with some components. if you compile your own kernel, you can of course compile in support for everything from a digital watch up to big blue. the pc market does is however infested with NDAs and patents and copyrights which mean that some hardware can never be supported.
on ubuntu (for example), when you log in, if you are connected to the internet, an "apt-get update" will be carried out in the background. if there are new versions of installed packages, an icon will appear informing you of this. this goes for the kernel as well.
for a start, it's not "other people's", it belongs to a company.
secondly, there already exists a framework to protect intellectual property. we call it the law.
thirdly, i don't see how anything is being taken away from the company.
i suppose what i'm really against is technology being used to restrict the freedoms and capabilities of the individual when the safety of the individual is not at stake. by all means the law can be used, but the law always has to consider the freedom of the individual first.
no one wants the driver. what the developers what is documentation for the connectors to the motherboard. surely this should be a legal requirement for the manufacturer anyway. i would regard it as the minimal acceptable documentation for the product. it is, after all, my computer the hardware will be attached to.
i would personally like to see all pieces of hardware sold with schematics for the hardware. with other products, like cars, this is trivial anyway--anybody can open up the car and see what bit goes where. with computer hardware, because of things like microcode, this is impossible.
and as for intellectual property. what strikes me is how this phrase is always used to protect the financial interests of a company against the greater good for society and the individual. if someone would instead be honest and say "companies are allowed to require society to install software (which does what exactly?) and use a particular operating system if the user wants to use their hardware, so ensuring (at the least) that the product will soon be unusable" then i'd have less against the people who champion this position
in the best case, this is built-in obsolescence. one thing i find repugnant is the attitude that it is morally okay to force society into this position.
exactly. the fact that there aren't linux drivers for every piece of hardware does reflect very poorly on the hardware manufacturers. the kernel developers called their bluff on this a while back (as you allude to). it soon became clear that "we only have so many programmers working for us" and "why should we support a niche operating system?" are totally bogus reasons used to spread fud. what the real reason is, i can only speculate, but i'd tip on it having something to do with microsoft.
if you are dealing with an (embarrassingly) parralelisable problem, clusters are the way to go. take for an example all those pictures in the late 90s of the mandelbrot set. the maths for each location does not rely on any other location, so you can divide the problem up on any number of processors/computers. if you have 1000 processors working on it, you will get the result a thousand times as fast as if you have one processor working on it (plus a fixed cost for initialisation and saving of the result). other problems are not parallelisable.
it's dodgy, because the car dealer doesn't already have 95% of the market. there is a reasonable chance that a competitor will be able to sell cars and offer discounts themselves if necessary to keep on an even footing. with software, sun is giving star office away for free (in the guise of open office), so they can't discount any further. microsoft is buying up boards of directors and CEOs to stop adoption of competitors products. it is ridiculously corrupt and without a doubt illegal.
well, maybe not 'wow', more like 'the same crap again'.
businesses are run by people. since when do we allow individual people to fuck over other people without finding it morally questionable? but call it a business and it's perfectly okay. this moral free pass given to businesses all over the globe is creating a society in which i at times no longer want to live. businesses must be made morally accountable for their actions. the alternative is either pure capitalism without the necessary social underpinning to make a society or dictatorship through monopoly.
what pisses me off about microsoft is not that the people who work there are trying to make money. what pisses me off is that no one there seems to care what they're doing to the world, how they are forcing the third world slowly but surely into the same dependency into which we have let ourselves be manoeuvered. isn't there one guilty conscience on the board of directors? just one person who feels bad about the untold lost jobs in the software industry or the destruction of perfectly adequate pc hardware because of vista's requirements?
the interesting thing is, office is dying. the whole paradigm of writing stuff out in documents is dying quickly. it's useful for information storage, so it'll stay around a lot longer for hard copies for legal firms and the like, but it's not suitable for collaboration, or even really for sharing. if someone wants me to write something, i write it in html with css and throw it on a mysql-database, where it can be called up all over the world at a click of a button. if i want people to be able to edit it, i'll put it on a wiki. the power of the internet is quickly destroying office software for a lot of people.
the trouble is, we're not talking about motivated and somewhat-competent users. unfortunately, every idiot seems to believe nowadays that they should be able to use a computer productively. what you did is rocket science compared with what 99% of Office users do with the software.
Slashdot Mirror
the logical next step is not just to brick the ipod but also to brick the computer used to charge it. maybe an encrypted message could be sent to a private security firm on apple's or the RIAA's payroll.
it ensures less restrictions on the user by imposing more restrictions on the person who's packaging and distributing the software. that's what the GPL is about: the user.
i read 'asconced'. which reminded me of drinking a yard of ale at ocford university. though i can't imagine theo being against that.
in other words, pure democracy results in tyranny of the (in this case extremely slight if at all existent) majority. there need to be some checks on this.
scientists are reviewed by
- a worldwide jury of peers.
- the universe itself
seeing as we all live in this universe, i do like to see it having a hand in setting governmental policy.a propos being zapped in the face by cheney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggecq52sbR0 (in case you don't already know it)
...I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don't want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don't want publicity. The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won't settle for anything less than compliance, and that's all we want. (from the keynote address of the plone conference 2006 available here : http://www.geof.net/research/2006/moglen-notes )au contraire, mon ami. i'd say that pages like this show the true strength of a format like wikipedia. sometimes knowledge isn't clear cut. sometimes x% believe one thing and y% something else. pages like this show how contested this is and allow wikipedia to rise above the black on white approach necessitated by traditional printed media.
i think this is a standard problem with knowledge. every reference work was written by people living at a certain time in a certain culture. wikipedia should be better than most when it comes to heated issues (politics, sex, emacs/vi) because of the base of editors being global. however, as you say, if the big chief editor of an article supports a certain ideology, it can be difficult to make headway.
this is however a standard caveat. one cannot read a version of the eb from colonial times without being painfully aware of the fact. the brockhaus of 193x is even worse.
an excellent comment. you really have cut through all the fud with that one :)
bad example.
you probably already have the ov511 driver installed on your system. in other words, just plug the eyetoy in and see if it's recognised.
it's not very efficient over dial-up (i should however mention a story about a friend of mine who has a windows pc with a umts card for the internet. his provider told him to update his software and offered a download to do so. 127MB. compared with that, the linux kernel is small). i'm not sure you'd say that ubuntu is targeted for users with broadband. it does however use a fast internet connection to provide a better user experience.
new versions of packages get created by the package maintainers. with ubuntu, a core team of maintainers compiles new versions of packages as soon as they see fit (for example, firefox 2.0.5 was ready about a day after it was announced (you must remember, no user has the rights to update firefox themselves, so this is best done using the package manager)). when it comes to drivers there are two distinct models. either the driver is part of the kernel tree, at which point the package maintainers for your distro will probably decide to include it in the standard kernel (at least as a module) because they like having kernels with the kitchen sink thrown in. the other possibility is that the driver isn't part of the standard kernel and has to be "linked to the kernel dynamically at runtime". this would be a standard driver with which you are familiar through windows. new versions of these get done whenever the developer sees fit. if you're using debian or ubuntu or one of the distributions with large online repositories, the maintainers of the distribution will probably also make a package available for your distribution, but maybe for the next full version and not for the current version.
ubuntu, just like all linux distributions supports exactly as much hardware as has been compiled for when the maintainers configured the kernel (plus some external modules). chances are, on a desktop computer pretty much everything will work, on a laptop you are more likely to have problems with some components. if you compile your own kernel, you can of course compile in support for everything from a digital watch up to big blue. the pc market does is however infested with NDAs and patents and copyrights which mean that some hardware can never be supported.
i hope this clarifies things a bit.
on ubuntu (for example), when you log in, if you are connected to the internet, an "apt-get update" will be carried out in the background. if there are new versions of installed packages, an icon will appear informing you of this. this goes for the kernel as well.
on linux, getting updated drivers means clicking "update" when the GUI informs you that an update is available.
for a start, it's not "other people's", it belongs to a company.
secondly, there already exists a framework to protect intellectual property. we call it the law.
thirdly, i don't see how anything is being taken away from the company.
i suppose what i'm really against is technology being used to restrict the freedoms and capabilities of the individual when the safety of the individual is not at stake. by all means the law can be used, but the law always has to consider the freedom of the individual first.
no, the major blocker is "it's not windows"
no one wants the driver. what the developers what is documentation for the connectors to the motherboard. surely this should be a legal requirement for the manufacturer anyway. i would regard it as the minimal acceptable documentation for the product. it is, after all, my computer the hardware will be attached to.
i would personally like to see all pieces of hardware sold with schematics for the hardware. with other products, like cars, this is trivial anyway--anybody can open up the car and see what bit goes where. with computer hardware, because of things like microcode, this is impossible.
and as for intellectual property. what strikes me is how this phrase is always used to protect the financial interests of a company against the greater good for society and the individual. if someone would instead be honest and say "companies are allowed to require society to install software (which does what exactly?) and use a particular operating system if the user wants to use their hardware, so ensuring (at the least) that the product will soon be unusable" then i'd have less against the people who champion this position
in the best case, this is built-in obsolescence. one thing i find repugnant is the attitude that it is morally okay to force society into this position.
exactly. the fact that there aren't linux drivers for every piece of hardware does reflect very poorly on the hardware manufacturers. the kernel developers called their bluff on this a while back (as you allude to). it soon became clear that "we only have so many programmers working for us" and "why should we support a niche operating system?" are totally bogus reasons used to spread fud. what the real reason is, i can only speculate, but i'd tip on it having something to do with microsoft.
no no no.
if you are dealing with an (embarrassingly) parralelisable problem, clusters are the way to go. take for an example all those pictures in the late 90s of the mandelbrot set. the maths for each location does not rely on any other location, so you can divide the problem up on any number of processors/computers. if you have 1000 processors working on it, you will get the result a thousand times as fast as if you have one processor working on it (plus a fixed cost for initialisation and saving of the result). other problems are not parallelisable.
it's dodgy, because the car dealer doesn't already have 95% of the market. there is a reasonable chance that a competitor will be able to sell cars and offer discounts themselves if necessary to keep on an even footing. with software, sun is giving star office away for free (in the guise of open office), so they can't discount any further. microsoft is buying up boards of directors and CEOs to stop adoption of competitors products. it is ridiculously corrupt and without a doubt illegal.
you forget to mention the thousands of other minor (and probably irrelevant) holes you can pick in the training offered if you search for them
yes wow.
well, maybe not 'wow', more like 'the same crap again'.
businesses are run by people. since when do we allow individual people to fuck over other people without finding it morally questionable? but call it a business and it's perfectly okay. this moral free pass given to businesses all over the globe is creating a society in which i at times no longer want to live. businesses must be made morally accountable for their actions. the alternative is either pure capitalism without the necessary social underpinning to make a society or dictatorship through monopoly.
what pisses me off about microsoft is not that the people who work there are trying to make money. what pisses me off is that no one there seems to care what they're doing to the world, how they are forcing the third world slowly but surely into the same dependency into which we have let ourselves be manoeuvered. isn't there one guilty conscience on the board of directors? just one person who feels bad about the untold lost jobs in the software industry or the destruction of perfectly adequate pc hardware because of vista's requirements?
the interesting thing is, office is dying. the whole paradigm of writing stuff out in documents is dying quickly. it's useful for information storage, so it'll stay around a lot longer for hard copies for legal firms and the like, but it's not suitable for collaboration, or even really for sharing. if someone wants me to write something, i write it in html with css and throw it on a mysql-database, where it can be called up all over the world at a click of a button. if i want people to be able to edit it, i'll put it on a wiki. the power of the internet is quickly destroying office software for a lot of people.
the trouble is, we're not talking about motivated and somewhat-competent users. unfortunately, every idiot seems to believe nowadays that they should be able to use a computer productively. what you did is rocket science compared with what 99% of Office users do with the software.
voila! in view a vaudivillian veteran cast vicariously as victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate...