i'm not sure that something being difficult to write is a reason for it only being developed in companies which sell copies of it. particularly when you consider that the most refined programms on the planet are free software.
i suppose the question is, what do you want your computer to do? if you want to use your computer to play games written for the windows operating system, play movies or songs in propriatery formats only available for the windows operating system or share files with other computers using the windows operating system, then changing to linux may not be the best idea.
if however you wish to use your computer for playing games, playing movies or songs or sharing files then you can do these things under linux.
as far as i know, microsoft hasn't made any standards for a long time now. that's the whole point. their protocols and file-types are often non-standard.
don't get me started on manufacturers offering blatently stupid configurations for usb devices. you'd think they could manage to set the usb-port so the phone is recognised as a mass storage device (on the motorola a780 it works if the solar wind is in the right direction).
i recently got stuck helping a friend with a dictation device with a built in usb slave port. anyway, she'd installed the software (windows) to her machine, and the software just kept crashing and losing her data. so i thought, well surely it will be recognised as a mass storage device, so who needs to install the software?.
oh, the naivity of youth...
and there was no fucking way to export the audio from the software either...
i'd like to say you're right, but whoever programmed the gprs functionality on the motorola a780 needs to be taken out and shot. fortunately, having installed a shell on the phone, i can restart the daemon manually, whenever i want to go into the net. i don't know how the normal user would be able to do this without restarting the whole phone.
motorola appears to have absolutely no interest in fixing this bug, btw. the way i see it, gnu/linux and other *nix operating systems are more stable than most products from redmond, but this is because they are capable of being more stable. to get this stability, you have to open up the code, something motorola didn't want to do (so finding themselves in violation of the gpl).
in total, the behaviour of this company is enough to really annoy me. they have benefited so much from free software, getting an operating system and (arguably) a gui for nothing (and they run linux on their servers too). then they write (rather shoddily, if i may add) two small libraries for the gui and don't release any information on how they work. then they complain, that nobody's interested in developing software for their phones.
so all in all when it comes to mobile phones, gnu-linux is in the situation it was in on the desktop about 5 years ago. nowadays you can at least buy a desktop computer from a major company with gnu-linux installed where the manufacturer has thought about compatibility and ease of use as a development platform, so showing that they at least realise what the gpl means. motorola just wants a cheap, stable way to implement a jvm, so reducing all the benefits of the gnu-linux platform to nought.
no, if somebody wants to get a gnu-linux installation running on their mobile phone which obeys the letter of the law and the spirit, they have to do it themselves (see openezx). maybe the other mobile phone vendors are different. please correct me if i'm wrong.
summing up, gnu-linux on a mobile phone will not be the panacea it ought to be, until the mobile phone vendors wake up and smell the coffee.
you know what i think? i know, i'm way off topic here, but it suddenly hit me. there you are saying, 'it can't be a memory leak fix because i have 1.5gigs...', and i thought 'ooo, 1.5gigs...', cos i'm suffering in the dark ages here with 256 mb. but then i thought, in the year 2016, people are gonna read posts like yours and think 'how the hell did he open a web browser with just 1.5gigs? i mean don't you need like a brazillion bytes to do that?'
no, you're talking companies supplying binary only modules for the linux kernel. historically, linux modules have been updated and modified by the linux kernel team to allow for improvements in the kernel. why should linus commit to a change in this procedure? gnu/linux isn't a lowest common denominator operating system like others one could mention.
personally i regard rms's views on the matter somewhat more highly than yours. in the time of drm et al. one should not be taking steps towards giving up our freedom.
you see, that's one of the main advantages of open source: you can theoretically know what it's doing. therefore it is impossible for someone else to change what it on your computer without your knowledge. with closed source the situation is very different. if you activate automatic updates to fix alleged security holes, you don't know what the computer is doing and you aren't allowed to know.
the eula attached to most closed source products makes it clear that you can't hold anybody accountable for mistakes.
basically, both of your points were diametrically opposed to reality.
the point of the gpl is to protect the end-user from monopolies and restrictive licensing. the bsd license does not do this. the gpl says 'if you want to play with us, you have to agree to this one rule: you don't fuck us over'. nvidia and ati are trying to fuck us over.
think of the gpl as a way to save you work. you probably just want an easy life, where you can install what you want and have it work without having to bother about the morality of your actions. the gpl allows you to do this. anything that's released under the gpl or similar is morally okay.
howie
the maker of a distro sort of decides what hardware is to be supported when they compile the kernel. if you have unusual hardware, you may have to compile the kernel yourself (or manually load modules into the kernel). there is a trade-off of speed against support here. knoppix as a live cd is probably designed to run slowly, but on almost all hardware.
i know windows comes with DHCP client and server capability, because a friend of mine who networks windows computers doesn't know what an ip-address ist. how does xp handle routing? can i make my own routing tables? it's not out of idle curiosity that i ask. i'm living in a large, old house without a telephone connection and go into the net using a umts-card. i have a download limit of 5GB per month. atm i have a small programm which counts the amount of internet traffic and warns me if i'm getting close (the webpage of my internet provider also offers this service, but they lag about 2 days behind). this can be a pain for the other people using my connection in the LAN, as i tend to have to shut it off at some stage during the month. a friend of mine in the house has also got the same card and the same tarif. he however refuses to change to linux for his server (he has an old computer to attach to the net and a second to play network games on). he also gets close to his download limit. my idea was that we help each other out. if he's close to his limit in this month, he can switch his server to use my connection and vice versa. how difficult could that be under windows?
the skill set one needs for gnu/linux is just different
for example, i recently spent more than 2 hours with a windows xp machine trying to work out how to set the ip-address for the network-card. fortunately i didn't have to try to change the mtu. i don't know how long that would have taken.
on a linux machine, this would have been a case for apropos and would have been solved in 5 minutes, assuming i didn't already know how to do it.
then in order to change the name of the network i had to reboot the system. strange.
question to the windows users. does windows xp come with an ftp server and client? i haven't found it yet.
1/ the colour information on a computer screen, the colour stream from a scanner etc. etc. are in rgb, while as the colour stream going to a printer is in cmyk.
2/ in order to generate the cmyk stream, a transversion matrix has to be used.
3/ colour information in cmyk is narrower than colour information in rgb. one can show more colours in rgb than in cmyk.
4/ the transformation matrix is best found in the software you use to produce pictures. this matrix has to be weighted according to the demands of the particular printer. this is called 'robust support for cmyk'. when the programmers for the software don't know how to weight the transformation matrix for a particular printer, then the software is said to not support cmyk.
5/ the transformation of rgb to cmyk is actually unimportant because there's another level beneath this (called pantone) where something much more important takes place (although nobody seems to know what). this level is however patented (which would explain why nobody knows what it dows) and therefore not free to be supported in open source software.
so basically a working method has been constructed and heavily patented and people complain that an open source software can't do the same thing as this working method.
one reason why newbie software (whatever that may be) is proprietary is because newbies in general want to 'spend money to get something good'
specialised user groups sometimes use proprietary software, sometimes almost only open-source. you have to be more specific here.
software for corporations tends to be constructed in house, if the corporation is large enough. this software is not commercially available.
games are not one off applications. a long time ago this used to be the case, but now games tend to have add-ons and bug-fixes just like other software types. open source tax software is difficult because of the attitude 'if we didn't pay for it, it can't be any good'
the trouble with mmorpgs is partly the large amount of proprietary technology needed before it works, starting with graphic drivers and moving through proprietary graphic engines and patented algorithms.
having said that, i do not expect the next version of doom to have been developed by a few hackers on a couple of rainy weekends. game development requires an enormous expenditure of time and a lot of tedious work. i can't see a major linux-distribution supporting game development either. this is because games are 'wegwerfartikel'- you play them once (or maybe twice) and then they get relegated to a shelf (or ebay). this is not the case with an apache webserver, for example.
all in all i see an immense confusion in your post. things like '...i don't see OSS developing things like this anytime soon..'
OSS isn't a company, it's not even a group of people.
what does this sentence mean?
people who write programms to help them do their work/learn about programming, or
people who get together with their friends and work on a small project, or
a university producing scientific software and opening it under the GPL, or
a multinational company specialising in server software or workstation operating systems, or
Guess what? I moved 90% of my network and application services to Linux and since then haven't got a page yet from NAGIOS at 2AM in the morning. (Still get some though as the Thunderstorms tend to knock out my network in the summer, which sucks but I can't do anything about it.)
a-ha, and there you have your problem! it's purely philosophical. you have been regarding windows as an operating system and trying to judge it as such, while all along, if you had regarded windows as a force of nature, you would have nothing against its temper tantrums:)
But there is more happening here. Software itself, the way it is produced, is changing and at some point it will be as common for the general user to produce code or instruct the machine to, as general use math is today common place, and the use of a calculator.
i seem to remember glenn gould saying something similar about everybody having a tone studio in their house so they can splice together their perfect version of beethoven's fifth. ten years later he had to do a lot of back-pedalling. he thought, the reason why his prediction hadn't come true is that most people don't know how they want beethoven's fifth to sound and they trust musicians to do a good job, much like gould himself trusted his car mechanic to do a good job.
of course the first fix is free. and you think that you're getting something better than open source products because you're (avoiding) paying money for them.
but what happens when you start a company?
more importantly, to the best of my knowledge, neither xine or mplayer are affiliated with suse or red hat. xine and mplayer are both open source companies, and they are also the best available products. they also support a number of different file types while not introducing new, proprietary file types. if either xine or mplayer did design a new file type, it would be trivial for other players to support this. they do not have any 'inside information' as to how gnu/linux works.
also there is, to the best of my knowledge, not a single company which sells a proprietary media player for the gnu/linux operating system (though maybe i'm wrong here). consequently, nobody is loosing sales because of the bundling.
it really depends on who the developer expects to use the software. when i'm writing software for mek, it's usually horribly badly documented and sometimes illogically constructed, just so i get the answer i need. if i expect the software will be used by friends then i start putting more elaborate notes into the code and explanations as to what i'm doing and why. at some stage i tend to get bored of doing so and let them figure it out for themselves. if someone came up to me however and said 'i'll give you 1000$ if you provide good documentation for your software' i'm sure i'd get very good at it, very quickly.
and to help you do that, i've just written a handy 'hello world' program in c. i'll sell you the binary for 1000$.
don't worry, you don't have to decide now, just get back to me as soon as you're ready.
Slashdot Mirror
well, that's got more to do with the reporting than with the eu.
i'm not sure that something being difficult to write is a reason for it only being developed in companies which sell copies of it. particularly when you consider that the most refined programms on the planet are free software.
one should not help microsoft make products better by giving them feedback. that would just give the customer one less incentive to leave.
i suppose the question is, what do you want your computer to do? if you want to use your computer to play games written for the windows operating system, play movies or songs in propriatery formats only available for the windows operating system or share files with other computers using the windows operating system, then changing to linux may not be the best idea.
if however you wish to use your computer for playing games, playing movies or songs or sharing files then you can do these things under linux.
it's worse.
as far as i know, microsoft hasn't made any standards for a long time now. that's the whole point. their protocols and file-types are often non-standard.
don't get me started on manufacturers offering blatently stupid configurations for usb devices. you'd think they could manage to set the usb-port so the phone is recognised as a mass storage device (on the motorola a780 it works if the solar wind is in the right direction).
i recently got stuck helping a friend with a dictation device with a built in usb slave port. anyway, she'd installed the software (windows) to her machine, and the software just kept crashing and losing her data. so i thought, well surely it will be recognised as a mass storage device, so who needs to install the software?.
oh, the naivity of youth...
and there was no fucking way to export the audio from the software either...
i'd like to say you're right, but whoever programmed the gprs functionality on the motorola a780 needs to be taken out and shot. fortunately, having installed a shell on the phone, i can restart the daemon manually, whenever i want to go into the net. i don't know how the normal user would be able to do this without restarting the whole phone.
motorola appears to have absolutely no interest in fixing this bug, btw. the way i see it, gnu/linux and other *nix operating systems are more stable than most products from redmond, but this is because they are capable of being more stable. to get this stability, you have to open up the code, something motorola didn't want to do (so finding themselves in violation of the gpl).
in total, the behaviour of this company is enough to really annoy me. they have benefited so much from free software, getting an operating system and (arguably) a gui for nothing (and they run linux on their servers too). then they write (rather shoddily, if i may add) two small libraries for the gui and don't release any information on how they work. then they complain, that nobody's interested in developing software for their phones.
so all in all when it comes to mobile phones, gnu-linux is in the situation it was in on the desktop about 5 years ago. nowadays you can at least buy a desktop computer from a major company with gnu-linux installed where the manufacturer has thought about compatibility and ease of use as a development platform, so showing that they at least realise what the gpl means. motorola just wants a cheap, stable way to implement a jvm, so reducing all the benefits of the gnu-linux platform to nought.
no, if somebody wants to get a gnu-linux installation running on their mobile phone which obeys the letter of the law and the spirit, they have to do it themselves (see openezx). maybe the other mobile phone vendors are different. please correct me if i'm wrong.
summing up, gnu-linux on a mobile phone will not be the panacea it ought to be, until the mobile phone vendors wake up and smell the coffee.
you know what i think? i know, i'm way off topic here, but it suddenly hit me. there you are saying, 'it can't be a memory leak fix because i have 1.5gigs...', and i thought 'ooo, 1.5gigs...', cos i'm suffering in the dark ages here with 256 mb. but then i thought, in the year 2016, people are gonna read posts like yours and think 'how the hell did he open a web browser with just 1.5gigs? i mean don't you need like a brazillion bytes to do that?'
whatever, i'd best be getting on...
no, you're talking companies supplying binary only modules for the linux kernel. historically, linux modules have been updated and modified by the linux kernel team to allow for improvements in the kernel. why should linus commit to a change in this procedure? gnu/linux isn't a lowest common denominator operating system like others one could mention.
mah-jongg (the game of four winds) is actually a recent game developed at the end of the 19th century
personally i regard rms's views on the matter somewhat more highly than yours. in the time of drm et al. one should not be taking steps towards giving up our freedom.
because it would be illegal to do so.
as it is a fact i'm sure you can come up with an example.
you see, that's one of the main advantages of open source: you can theoretically know what it's doing. therefore it is impossible for someone else to change what it on your computer without your knowledge. with closed source the situation is very different. if you activate automatic updates to fix alleged security holes, you don't know what the computer is doing and you aren't allowed to know.
the eula attached to most closed source products makes it clear that you can't hold anybody accountable for mistakes.
basically, both of your points were diametrically opposed to reality.
the point of the gpl is to protect the end-user from monopolies and restrictive licensing. the bsd license does not do this. the gpl says 'if you want to play with us, you have to agree to this one rule: you don't fuck us over'. nvidia and ati are trying to fuck us over. think of the gpl as a way to save you work. you probably just want an easy life, where you can install what you want and have it work without having to bother about the morality of your actions. the gpl allows you to do this. anything that's released under the gpl or similar is morally okay. howie
the maker of a distro sort of decides what hardware is to be supported when they compile the kernel. if you have unusual hardware, you may have to compile the kernel yourself (or manually load modules into the kernel). there is a trade-off of speed against support here. knoppix as a live cd is probably designed to run slowly, but on almost all hardware. i know windows comes with DHCP client and server capability, because a friend of mine who networks windows computers doesn't know what an ip-address ist. how does xp handle routing? can i make my own routing tables? it's not out of idle curiosity that i ask. i'm living in a large, old house without a telephone connection and go into the net using a umts-card. i have a download limit of 5GB per month. atm i have a small programm which counts the amount of internet traffic and warns me if i'm getting close (the webpage of my internet provider also offers this service, but they lag about 2 days behind). this can be a pain for the other people using my connection in the LAN, as i tend to have to shut it off at some stage during the month. a friend of mine in the house has also got the same card and the same tarif. he however refuses to change to linux for his server (he has an old computer to attach to the net and a second to play network games on). he also gets close to his download limit. my idea was that we help each other out. if he's close to his limit in this month, he can switch his server to use my connection and vice versa. how difficult could that be under windows?
the skill set one needs for gnu/linux is just different
for example, i recently spent more than 2 hours with a windows xp machine trying to work out how to set the ip-address for the network-card. fortunately i didn't have to try to change the mtu. i don't know how long that would have taken.
on a linux machine, this would have been a case for apropos and would have been solved in 5 minutes, assuming i didn't already know how to do it.
then in order to change the name of the network i had to reboot the system. strange.
question to the windows users. does windows xp come with an ftp server and client? i haven't found it yet.
let me see if i've understood this correctly.
1/ the colour information on a computer screen, the colour stream from a scanner etc. etc. are in rgb, while as the colour stream going to a printer is in cmyk.
2/ in order to generate the cmyk stream, a transversion matrix has to be used.
3/ colour information in cmyk is narrower than colour information in rgb. one can show more colours in rgb than in cmyk.
4/ the transformation matrix is best found in the software you use to produce pictures. this matrix has to be weighted according to the demands of the particular printer. this is called 'robust support for cmyk'. when the programmers for the software don't know how to weight the transformation matrix for a particular printer, then the software is said to not support cmyk.
5/ the transformation of rgb to cmyk is actually unimportant because there's another level beneath this (called pantone) where something much more important takes place (although nobody seems to know what). this level is however patented (which would explain why nobody knows what it dows) and therefore not free to be supported in open source software.
so basically a working method has been constructed and heavily patented and people complain that an open source software can't do the same thing as this working method.
(best dr. evil voice) riiiiight.
specialised user groups sometimes use proprietary software, sometimes almost only open-source. you have to be more specific here.
software for corporations tends to be constructed in house, if the corporation is large enough. this software is not commercially available.
games are not one off applications. a long time ago this used to be the case, but now games tend to have add-ons and bug-fixes just like other software types. open source tax software is difficult because of the attitude 'if we didn't pay for it, it can't be any good'
the trouble with mmorpgs is partly the large amount of proprietary technology needed before it works, starting with graphic drivers and moving through proprietary graphic engines and patented algorithms.
having said that, i do not expect the next version of doom to have been developed by a few hackers on a couple of rainy weekends. game development requires an enormous expenditure of time and a lot of tedious work. i can't see a major linux-distribution supporting game development either. this is because games are 'wegwerfartikel'- you play them once (or maybe twice) and then they get relegated to a shelf (or ebay). this is not the case with an apache webserver, for example.
all in all i see an immense confusion in your post. things like '...i don't see OSS developing things like this anytime soon..'
OSS isn't a company, it's not even a group of people.
what does this sentence mean?
Guess what? I moved 90% of my network and application services to Linux and since then haven't got a page yet from NAGIOS at 2AM in the morning. (Still get some though as the Thunderstorms tend to knock out my network in the summer, which sucks but I can't do anything about it.)
:)
a-ha, and there you have your problem! it's purely philosophical. you have been regarding windows as an operating system and trying to judge it as such, while all along, if you had regarded windows as a force of nature, you would have nothing against its temper tantrums
howie
But there is more happening here. Software itself, the way it is produced, is changing and at some point it will be as common for the general user to produce code or instruct the machine to, as general use math is today common place, and the use of a calculator.
i seem to remember glenn gould saying something similar about everybody having a tone studio in their house so they can splice together their perfect version of beethoven's fifth. ten years later he had to do a lot of back-pedalling. he thought, the reason why his prediction hadn't come true is that most people don't know how they want beethoven's fifth to sound and they trust musicians to do a good job, much like gould himself trusted his car mechanic to do a good job.
just thought i'd share.
howie
of course the first fix is free. and you think that you're getting something better than open source products because you're (avoiding) paying money for them.
but what happens when you start a company?
howie
more importantly, to the best of my knowledge, neither xine or mplayer are affiliated with suse or red hat. xine and mplayer are both open source companies, and they are also the best available products. they also support a number of different file types while not introducing new, proprietary file types. if either xine or mplayer did design a new file type, it would be trivial for other players to support this. they do not have any 'inside information' as to how gnu/linux works.
also there is, to the best of my knowledge, not a single company which sells a proprietary media player for the gnu/linux operating system (though maybe i'm wrong here). consequently, nobody is loosing sales because of the bundling.
howie
it really depends on who the developer expects to use the software. when i'm writing software for mek, it's usually horribly badly documented and sometimes illogically constructed, just so i get the answer i need. if i expect the software will be used by friends then i start putting more elaborate notes into the code and explanations as to what i'm doing and why. at some stage i tend to get bored of doing so and let them figure it out for themselves. if someone came up to me however and said 'i'll give you 1000$ if you provide good documentation for your software' i'm sure i'd get very good at it, very quickly.
howie
and to help you do that, i've just written a handy 'hello world' program in c. i'll sell you the binary for 1000$.
don't worry, you don't have to decide now, just get back to me as soon as you're ready.
howie