The government likes to use the "National security" excuse to cover up things that it shouldn't be doing, like abuse of power. If someone from the press uncovers these documents, than I see it as nothing more but another check against the three branches of government. If all three are controlled by the same interest, it defeats the purpose of having three branches at all, since hardly no one is going to vote across party lines. The press acts as almost a fourth branch of government, one actually made up of "the people." When it reports on things the government is doing but shouldn't be, than the people have a right to know. It's not like a journalist is going to report planned military strikes against the enemy in advance.
"I work in film." Translation: I was an extra in a movie once, and now I am a coffee bitch for the set of 7th heaven
The quality of music and film HAS gone down, you know why? It's because movies are more about glittery special effects than a good story. There are some great newer movies: Count of Monte Cristo, Spiderman, X-Men, War of the Worlds, etc. The problem is that the movie and music industry has alienated their customer base by treating them like criminals. If the MPAA and RIAA had their way, you'd have to pay a fee each time you watched a DVD movie, for each person watching the movie. This is already happening, just look at Napster, Urge, Rhapsody, etc. You have to pay a monthly fee, PLUS another fee to actually download the song and make it yours. I broke it down once and you'd have to buy over 60 songs a month on Napster to make it cheaper than buying CDs or from iTunes. The industry aren't giving us a fair price, and that is why we aren't buying anymore. The cost of living is skyrocketing too, way faster than wages. So when someone has to choose between taking their family to the movies or putting gas in their car, guess which one they pick.
AT&T is neither a rape nor a molestation victim. They are not even a victim at all. I'd say it's a tad difference when a court keeps documents a secret to spare the pain to a child than to help a monolithic corporation conceal it's blatant attack on privacy and it's assistance in setting up the infrastructure of an Orwellian police state.
This is what happens when you have non-technically-oriented lawmakers trying to regulate technology. They'll fall for the first line of BS anyone with a lot of money and something to gain will throw at them, especially if something is "danger" to the "children."
Totally ignore China's human rights record, increasing business dealings with them. But Oh? a computer by a Chinese company? we can't allow that in our system. I mean, no other computer component in the world is EVER made in China, EVER. I mean, what would the state department think if Dell's components were mostly-if-not-all Chinese-made. I bet they'd march right up to Michael Dell and accuse him of treason.
You have to look at it from a hardware company's point of view. This GPL thing is exactly why hardware vendors rarely support Linux. Their drivers are their work and their intellectual property. The GPL is like a schoolyard bully, "I won't play with you (allow binary drivers to be distributed with distributions) until you give me your lunch money (their intellectual property)." No company should have to just hand-over their hard work to everyone.
I use nVidia's binary drivers. Why? Because the open-source "nv" driver provides no hardware 3D acceleration. I love the concept of open-source, and if the open-source community were to actually write an open-source driver that made my card work just as well as the proprietary driver, while making the installation process just as easy, I'd be all over it. You can criticize proprietary drivers all you want, but unless you can come up with a better solution, no one on a large scale is going to adopt Linux. It's time the Linux community start thinking more about usability, coming up with solutions and giving users what they want instead of bickering and arguing over programming "morality" and the finer details of the GPL./rant
Will the hydrogen station have a tiny little methanol pump, so I can fill my cell phone? What kind of exhaust pipe will the phone have? Will we start seeing 17-year-olds holding cell phones with wacky paint jobs, spoilers, and coffee-can mufflers?
There is also some debate about that. According to nVidia, the driver only references the functions in the Linux kernel and builds a layer so that the platform-independent driver will work. Some are claiming that this means no GPLed code technically exists in the driver.
My thoughts go right along with the other posters that replied to this, but no the PC isn't going anywhere. There are still a lot of DIYers that will prevent that from happening. For those of us who aren't, the PC will still fill it's role, it just may get smaller, as evidenced by the Mac Mini. More people nowadays are buying laptops than desktops, but that's because laptops have finally caught up to the same level of functionality as desktops, thanks to USB and larger displays.
I can tell you right now that surfing the net on a phone or PDA sucks ass. The displays are small and the input devices are inadequate. Even if the desktop PC were to die out, it would be far outlived by input and output devices: keyboards, monitors, mice, printers, etc. A computing device is useless without these devices, and it's undesirable if the devices available suck and are barely usable. We'll always have a need for a do-everything device. No one wants to walk around wearing a Batman-like utility belt holding dozens of devices, each for a specific purpose.
"What happens when mp3 files no longer play on the next gen iPod (which u will need to play your online purchases)... many people will lose a large portion of their music library. "
This would be a fatal mistake on Apple's part. I fail to understand what the deal is with so many companies adopting an entice, lock-in, then racketeer policy. It's happening to Best Buy right now. At first, they were great, they gave the customer what he/she wanted, a laid-back pressure-free shopping experience. Then, they expanded too fast and adopted a new, high-pressure/annoying approach and now their salesman lie, cheat, and pressure customers right along with the best of used car salesmen. What happened? Seemingly nothing, except that even though BBuy is still making the same profits, it takes 300 new stores a year to keep it up to the same level. A company that needs 1,000 stores to make the same amount of money they did with 300 a few years ago is not doing very well. In fact, there was a huge layoff in all levels recently (although they never make this stuff public, their method of "firing" is writing someone off the schedule and letting nature take its course).
The point? Screwing over customers will never work out on the long run, as long as there is an up-and-coming knight-in-shining-armor company ready to steal them from you, and there always is.
I'm not sure if this was mentioned yet, but doesn't claiming OSS as your own violate the GPL? I thought the GPL exists to keep Open Source software Open Source. Isn't Apple going against it by taking something the was Open Source (Darwin) and now closing it? Are they going to pull a SCO and try to sue or collect liscense fees for source code that they already released publicly?
Is this new Darwin version COMPLETELY new, with no trace of GPL-protected code?
This is exactly what makes the video game market so great...competition.
I don't think, however, that Nintendo is solely going after the kids market, though. Sure, they have kiddie-looking games, but the trend for most is that they're social. Games like Mario Party or Super Smash Bros. are meant for you and three of your friends to have fun with. Mature titles like GTA or Resident Evil completely envelope you into its environment and by definition is quite anti-social. Nintendo is banking on the fact that people are tired of games that make them feel afraid, angry, and anxious and are ready to have fun with their friends again.
The problem with Linux being so non-intuitive is also a blessing in disguise. Back in the day, you had to be a programmer to even use a computer. There were no real operating systems to speak of, just a built-in programming language. One would sit down, write the programs they would need to use, and then use them. It was time-consuming and cumbersome, so only really "smart" people had computers and the numbers were few. The whole idea of the Apple was something that every person could use, wrestling control of the computer away from the geeks and nerds, and giving it to normal, everyday people to help out with their daily lives. There are two schools of thought as to what a computer is. The first school of thought is the Apple camp, that a computer is an appliance, it should "just work" out of the box. The other side holds the PC users, who hold that the Personal Computer is a tinkerer's tool, and every owner should be able to know how to fix it/configure it to do what they want it to do.
Then Windows came along and Microsoft said "Look everybody! Now a PC can do all the same things a Mac can do! Plus it's cheaper!" Enough people believed it, but for a while most PC users had to have some knowledge of DOS commands and configuration files (Remember autoexec.bat and config.sys?). With the advent of XP, this has gone away. The only problem is, the hardware architecture that was designed to process spreadsheets and databases now has images and video thrown at it. The Windows operating system has become more and more bloated and unstable over the years and people are getting sick of it.
With the rise of computer owners in the world, the average intelligence in this group is plummetting. A lot of the reason PCs are plagued by viruses, adware, spyware and phishing is because the users are so stupid they just hit "yes" to every prompt they see. With Linux, the user has to be fairly intelligent in order to get the computer to do what he wants. It fills the "tinkerer" niche of people that dominated the PC userbase 25 years ago. I sense a lot of worry that if people stop working on their PCs and use an OS that doesn't work as well, but caters to their lazy behavior, then computer programming will be reduced to a select few who control everything we do, giving everyone no choice. It's already happened, something called Microsoft. Just look at how often they change their API's and constantly blame 3rd-party programs for any instabilities. Open Source is a way for users to stay in control, do things that big brother corporations don't want them to do.
So that's the real reasoning behind the "difficulty" of Linux. If it didn't exist, there quite probably wouldn't be anyone smart enough to stand up and compete with Microsoft, even on a small level.
I actually was able to use OS X very easily for the first time. Maybe it's because I was all too eager to unlearn "the windows way" and use a computer logically. Interface-wise, GNOME is closer to OS X in a lot of ways functionally, just without all the eye-candy.
Like Steve Jobs said: "Microsoft...they have no taste."
This could be a fair use issue. Perhaps the creator of Kororaa could claim that his distro is a parody, or criticism, pointing out how useful Linux could be if it weren't for elitist nerds who need to compensate for their lack of female attention.:-P
I've read the message the creator of Kororaa received and all the comments on his post (TFA). Apparently, the e-mail was anonymous and the method for reporting a GPL violation was not followed. Only the copyright holders of the video drivers and Linux (ATI, nVidia, the kernel developers) have an interest and if they all give him the go-ahead, then he's golden. A random e-mail from some jackass claiming he "knows the law" is not a legally valid C&D order. If he receives a letter from a legal entity, then this is an issue. Apparently he's taken the high road and removed his distro entirely until things are sorted out.
Everybody's running around like Chicken Little. It's just a driver folks, it's not going to destroy OSS and it's not going to destroy Linux.
What you call "taint" is the manufacturer's driver. You know, the piece of software that makes the card more than just an expensive non-working IC board taking up space in your machine.
I agree that Kororaa was probably out of line including the actual driver binary in the installer. Windows doesn't even do that (it is of course, much easier to install the windows driver than the linux version).
This is what is keeping Open Source software and the GPL from wide acceptance. It is so blindly and religiously anti-closed-source that it presents a legal nightmare. Putting closed-source binary drivers in the installation won't "taint" the kernel. It is Torvalds and his group that decide what goes in the kernel.
"If every distro could just use the nvidia binary drivers, maybe the people working on the free "nv" driver just wouldn't bother."
Maybe if the free "nv" driver wasn't utterly useless (no hardware-accelerated 3D) i'd use it. I love it when Fedora's FAQ tells me "consider using a video card with FOSS drivers, like Intel." That's bullshit! I'm not giving up my nVidia for some shitty, integrated chipset. I want to have 3D acceleration with the card I have NOW, on the machine I have NOW. Nvidia's Linux driver can do that, and that's why I use it. If every distro came with the Nvidia driver, more people would use it. Would the nv people work on a foss driver? probably not, but if nvidia did decide to be evil, then the legality of making your own driver for their hardware would come into question anyway. It'd be like the DeCSS legal battle.
If you want to taint your kernel by adding proprietary modules, more power to you, but you can't redistribute the result. Every user has to add the tainted bits in themselves.
I think your bias is apparent here. What you call "taint" is what I call adding essential functionality to my machine. I want to USE my computer, not spend three hours trying to figure out why my driver won't compile. Believe it or not, the time factor in learning computers is important, especially in the business world. Proprietary closed-source operating systems are far superior in this aspect. Maybe this would be different if there were more "Intro to Linux" classes in community colleges, but there aren't.
What I think it is is that the collective Linux community in general wants Linux to stay the same, and wants all users and hardware companies to bend to ITS way of doing things.
The Linux way of doing things is typically inefficient, and OS X has proven that it doesn't have to be. What stops linux from reaching this level is a community of people who have no clue about usability and no clue how to write programs that common people can use/install/configure.
Yes, I see your point. How do you really define a new "version" anyway? My point is that Microsoft's updates are for the most part just bug fixes and upgrades of current software. Sure, things like Windows Firewall were added in SP2, but that's about it. I mean ooooo, windows movie maker upgrades to 2.0 in this service pack, wow!
On the other hand, look at Apple's features compared to XP. Does Windows have anything like spotlight? Expose? Automator? Dashboard? Sure, those could be considered "Fancy bells and whistles" but does Windows doesn't even have a calendar program. There's nothing like moving videos around your desktop while playing and having them not skip a beat because of Quartz Extreme. Now, you can get a lot of these features in Windows, but they're through third parties and not part of the OS.
I think that this is inevitable. Mac OS X is a desktop OS, desktop customers demand shiny new features and Apple needs to compete with Microsoft in adding such features, otherwise it will fall behind in market share.
I don't think Apple has much to worry about in the features department. It's Microsoft that has been playing a long, slow game of catch-up-to-apple for the last 20 years. Windows came out a year after Mac OS and it wasn't as good (couldn't have overlapping Windows, etc). It took ten years for Windows users to get a trash can, another six to get desktop icons that snap to a predifined "grid."
Apple's operating systems are consistently 5-10 years ahead of Microsoft in the feature category. I used to laugh at all the Windows/PC fanboys that would make fun of Apple, labelling their solutions as something for children. In 2001, the joke was on them, when Windows XP, the most kiddie, fisher-price-y looking OS that has ever existed came out. The color scheme is horrible, the OS itself is plagued with security holes which revealed that XP is merely a new, colorful dress on the same old skank.
Apple has released 4 distinct versions of OS X, Microsoft has released 1, and it looks like the next one is going to be another year still. Apple keeping up with Microsoft? What a joke.
Every time someone proposes something in congress, news agencies and bloggers run around Chicken Little panicking and presenting it as an attack on freedom. I would like to see the figures on exactly how many bills are proposed to congress every day, and how many of those bills are completely rediculous.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that there are elected officials that think this way is quite alarming. But, a proposal is a VERY LONG way from an actual law, and most of these bills are shut down before they can go anywhere.
The sad thing is, the US government is destroying American freedom and stealing our liberty right from under our noses. They can do this because the American people are too lazy to overthrow their government. When you have a two-party-only system where they are equally bent on freedom-hating, something is wrong. When you have votes in congress going to the highest bidding lobbyist, something is wrong. When the head of the Federal Disaster relief organization is unqualified for his job but was put there by corrupt officials as a personal favor (read: bribe), then SOMETHING IS WRONG! If the founding fathers were alive today they would be the leaders of the revolution to overthrow the government, the founding fathers WOULD BE CONSIDERED TERRORISTS TODAY!
Your credit rating has very little to do with the way you manage your finances. For example, I was recently denied a car loan over $5000. There was nothing bad on my credit report and I pay all my bills on time. I even had a $6000 car loan that I paid off last year. So why was I denied? Because I had too little credit. The loan officer told me that utility bills and student loans don't count. My car loan didn't count either because it was too old (the credit union only counts the loan by the start date, so even though I paid my car off a year ago, they considered my loan to be 4 years old, since that's when it started).
The reason I don't have enough credit (which is almost as bad as having bad credit) is because I don't feed the credit industry their rediculously high interest rates. I was punished because I only borrow money when I absolutely have to. So a joe-blow that maxes out his three credit cards on frivolous junk is less of a credit risk than me if he pays the minimum payments every month, according to the credit industry.
Credit ratings have their place for weeding out people that are bad with money and buy things they can't afford. Having good credit is walking a tight-rope, one minor slip and you're buried forever.
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The government likes to use the "National security" excuse to cover up things that it shouldn't be doing, like abuse of power. If someone from the press uncovers these documents, than I see it as nothing more but another check against the three branches of government. If all three are controlled by the same interest, it defeats the purpose of having three branches at all, since hardly no one is going to vote across party lines. The press acts as almost a fourth branch of government, one actually made up of "the people." When it reports on things the government is doing but shouldn't be, than the people have a right to know. It's not like a journalist is going to report planned military strikes against the enemy in advance.
"I work in film."
Translation: I was an extra in a movie once, and now I am a coffee bitch for the set of 7th heaven
The quality of music and film HAS gone down, you know why? It's because movies are more about glittery special effects than a good story. There are some great newer movies: Count of Monte Cristo, Spiderman, X-Men, War of the Worlds, etc. The problem is that the movie and music industry has alienated their customer base by treating them like criminals. If the MPAA and RIAA had their way, you'd have to pay a fee each time you watched a DVD movie, for each person watching the movie. This is already happening, just look at Napster, Urge, Rhapsody, etc. You have to pay a monthly fee, PLUS another fee to actually download the song and make it yours. I broke it down once and you'd have to buy over 60 songs a month on Napster to make it cheaper than buying CDs or from iTunes. The industry aren't giving us a fair price, and that is why we aren't buying anymore. The cost of living is skyrocketing too, way faster than wages. So when someone has to choose between taking their family to the movies or putting gas in their car, guess which one they pick.
"Treason is all a matter of dates." - Clarion, Count of Monte Cristo
AT&T is neither a rape nor a molestation victim. They are not even a victim at all. I'd say it's a tad difference when a court keeps documents a secret to spare the pain to a child than to help a monolithic corporation conceal it's blatant attack on privacy and it's assistance in setting up the infrastructure of an Orwellian police state.
This is what happens when you have non-technically-oriented lawmakers trying to regulate technology. They'll fall for the first line of BS anyone with a lot of money and something to gain will throw at them, especially if something is "danger" to the "children."
Totally ignore China's human rights record, increasing business dealings with them. But Oh? a computer by a Chinese company? we can't allow that in our system. I mean, no other computer component in the world is EVER made in China, EVER. I mean, what would the state department think if Dell's components were mostly-if-not-all Chinese-made. I bet they'd march right up to Michael Dell and accuse him of treason.
You have to look at it from a hardware company's point of view. This GPL thing is exactly why hardware vendors rarely support Linux. Their drivers are their work and their intellectual property. The GPL is like a schoolyard bully, "I won't play with you (allow binary drivers to be distributed with distributions) until you give me your lunch money (their intellectual property)." No company should have to just hand-over their hard work to everyone.
/rant
I use nVidia's binary drivers. Why? Because the open-source "nv" driver provides no hardware 3D acceleration. I love the concept of open-source, and if the open-source community were to actually write an open-source driver that made my card work just as well as the proprietary driver, while making the installation process just as easy, I'd be all over it. You can criticize proprietary drivers all you want, but unless you can come up with a better solution, no one on a large scale is going to adopt Linux. It's time the Linux community start thinking more about usability, coming up with solutions and giving users what they want instead of bickering and arguing over programming "morality" and the finer details of the GPL.
Will the hydrogen station have a tiny little methanol pump, so I can fill my cell phone? What kind of exhaust pipe will the phone have? Will we start seeing 17-year-olds holding cell phones with wacky paint jobs, spoilers, and coffee-can mufflers?
That is quite obvious brother. I'm afraid these scientists were victims of his noodly appendage.
There is also some debate about that. According to nVidia, the driver only references the functions in the Linux kernel and builds a layer so that the platform-independent driver will work. Some are claiming that this means no GPLed code technically exists in the driver.
My thoughts go right along with the other posters that replied to this, but no the PC isn't going anywhere. There are still a lot of DIYers that will prevent that from happening. For those of us who aren't, the PC will still fill it's role, it just may get smaller, as evidenced by the Mac Mini. More people nowadays are buying laptops than desktops, but that's because laptops have finally caught up to the same level of functionality as desktops, thanks to USB and larger displays.
I can tell you right now that surfing the net on a phone or PDA sucks ass. The displays are small and the input devices are inadequate. Even if the desktop PC were to die out, it would be far outlived by input and output devices: keyboards, monitors, mice, printers, etc. A computing device is useless without these devices, and it's undesirable if the devices available suck and are barely usable. We'll always have a need for a do-everything device. No one wants to walk around wearing a Batman-like utility belt holding dozens of devices, each for a specific purpose.
"What happens when mp3 files no longer play on the next gen iPod (which u will need to play your online purchases)... many people will lose a large portion of their music library. "
This would be a fatal mistake on Apple's part. I fail to understand what the deal is with so many companies adopting an entice, lock-in, then racketeer policy. It's happening to Best Buy right now. At first, they were great, they gave the customer what he/she wanted, a laid-back pressure-free shopping experience. Then, they expanded too fast and adopted a new, high-pressure/annoying approach and now their salesman lie, cheat, and pressure customers right along with the best of used car salesmen. What happened? Seemingly nothing, except that even though BBuy is still making the same profits, it takes 300 new stores a year to keep it up to the same level. A company that needs 1,000 stores to make the same amount of money they did with 300 a few years ago is not doing very well. In fact, there was a huge layoff in all levels recently (although they never make this stuff public, their method of "firing" is writing someone off the schedule and letting nature take its course).
The point? Screwing over customers will never work out on the long run, as long as there is an up-and-coming knight-in-shining-armor company ready to steal them from you, and there always is.
I'm not sure if this was mentioned yet, but doesn't claiming OSS as your own violate the GPL? I thought the GPL exists to keep Open Source software Open Source. Isn't Apple going against it by taking something the was Open Source (Darwin) and now closing it? Are they going to pull a SCO and try to sue or collect liscense fees for source code that they already released publicly?
Is this new Darwin version COMPLETELY new, with no trace of GPL-protected code?
*obligatory comment about Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, etc. etc. and how they failed miserable and Blu-Ray is no different*
This is exactly what makes the video game market so great...competition.
I don't think, however, that Nintendo is solely going after the kids market, though. Sure, they have kiddie-looking games, but the trend for most is that they're social. Games like Mario Party or Super Smash Bros. are meant for you and three of your friends to have fun with. Mature titles like GTA or Resident Evil completely envelope you into its environment and by definition is quite anti-social. Nintendo is banking on the fact that people are tired of games that make them feel afraid, angry, and anxious and are ready to have fun with their friends again.
The problem with Linux being so non-intuitive is also a blessing in disguise. Back in the day, you had to be a programmer to even use a computer. There were no real operating systems to speak of, just a built-in programming language. One would sit down, write the programs they would need to use, and then use them. It was time-consuming and cumbersome, so only really "smart" people had computers and the numbers were few. The whole idea of the Apple was something that every person could use, wrestling control of the computer away from the geeks and nerds, and giving it to normal, everyday people to help out with their daily lives. There are two schools of thought as to what a computer is. The first school of thought is the Apple camp, that a computer is an appliance, it should "just work" out of the box. The other side holds the PC users, who hold that the Personal Computer is a tinkerer's tool, and every owner should be able to know how to fix it/configure it to do what they want it to do.
Then Windows came along and Microsoft said "Look everybody! Now a PC can do all the same things a Mac can do! Plus it's cheaper!" Enough people believed it, but for a while most PC users had to have some knowledge of DOS commands and configuration files (Remember autoexec.bat and config.sys?). With the advent of XP, this has gone away. The only problem is, the hardware architecture that was designed to process spreadsheets and databases now has images and video thrown at it. The Windows operating system has become more and more bloated and unstable over the years and people are getting sick of it.
With the rise of computer owners in the world, the average intelligence in this group is plummetting. A lot of the reason PCs are plagued by viruses, adware, spyware and phishing is because the users are so stupid they just hit "yes" to every prompt they see. With Linux, the user has to be fairly intelligent in order to get the computer to do what he wants. It fills the "tinkerer" niche of people that dominated the PC userbase 25 years ago. I sense a lot of worry that if people stop working on their PCs and use an OS that doesn't work as well, but caters to their lazy behavior, then computer programming will be reduced to a select few who control everything we do, giving everyone no choice. It's already happened, something called Microsoft. Just look at how often they change their API's and constantly blame 3rd-party programs for any instabilities. Open Source is a way for users to stay in control, do things that big brother corporations don't want them to do.
So that's the real reasoning behind the "difficulty" of Linux. If it didn't exist, there quite probably wouldn't be anyone smart enough to stand up and compete with Microsoft, even on a small level.
I actually was able to use OS X very easily for the first time. Maybe it's because I was all too eager to unlearn "the windows way" and use a computer logically. Interface-wise, GNOME is closer to OS X in a lot of ways functionally, just without all the eye-candy.
Like Steve Jobs said: "Microsoft...they have no taste."
This is exactly why no one outside your club will want your POS irrelevant software.
This could be a fair use issue. Perhaps the creator of Kororaa could claim that his distro is a parody, or criticism, pointing out how useful Linux could be if it weren't for elitist nerds who need to compensate for their lack of female attention. :-P
I've read the message the creator of Kororaa received and all the comments on his post (TFA). Apparently, the e-mail was anonymous and the method for reporting a GPL violation was not followed. Only the copyright holders of the video drivers and Linux (ATI, nVidia, the kernel developers) have an interest and if they all give him the go-ahead, then he's golden. A random e-mail from some jackass claiming he "knows the law" is not a legally valid C&D order. If he receives a letter from a legal entity, then this is an issue. Apparently he's taken the high road and removed his distro entirely until things are sorted out.
Everybody's running around like Chicken Little. It's just a driver folks, it's not going to destroy OSS and it's not going to destroy Linux.
What you call "taint" is the manufacturer's driver. You know, the piece of software that makes the card more than just an expensive non-working IC board taking up space in your machine.
I agree that Kororaa was probably out of line including the actual driver binary in the installer. Windows doesn't even do that (it is of course, much easier to install the windows driver than the linux version).
This is what is keeping Open Source software and the GPL from wide acceptance. It is so blindly and religiously anti-closed-source that it presents a legal nightmare. Putting closed-source binary drivers in the installation won't "taint" the kernel. It is Torvalds and his group that decide what goes in the kernel.
"If every distro could just use the nvidia binary drivers, maybe the people working on the free "nv" driver just wouldn't bother."
Maybe if the free "nv" driver wasn't utterly useless (no hardware-accelerated 3D) i'd use it. I love it when Fedora's FAQ tells me "consider using a video card with FOSS drivers, like Intel." That's bullshit! I'm not giving up my nVidia for some shitty, integrated chipset. I want to have 3D acceleration with the card I have NOW, on the machine I have NOW. Nvidia's Linux driver can do that, and that's why I use it. If every distro came with the Nvidia driver, more people would use it. Would the nv people work on a foss driver? probably not, but if nvidia did decide to be evil, then the legality of making your own driver for their hardware would come into question anyway. It'd be like the DeCSS legal battle.
If you want to taint your kernel by adding proprietary modules, more power to you, but you can't redistribute the result. Every user has to add the tainted bits in themselves.
I think your bias is apparent here. What you call "taint" is what I call adding essential functionality to my machine. I want to USE my computer, not spend three hours trying to figure out why my driver won't compile. Believe it or not, the time factor in learning computers is important, especially in the business world. Proprietary closed-source operating systems are far superior in this aspect. Maybe this would be different if there were more "Intro to Linux" classes in community colleges, but there aren't.
What I think it is is that the collective Linux community in general wants Linux to stay the same, and wants all users and hardware companies to bend to ITS way of doing things.
The Linux way of doing things is typically inefficient, and OS X has proven that it doesn't have to be. What stops linux from reaching this level is a community of people who have no clue about usability and no clue how to write programs that common people can use/install/configure.
Yes, I see your point. How do you really define a new "version" anyway? My point is that Microsoft's updates are for the most part just bug fixes and upgrades of current software. Sure, things like Windows Firewall were added in SP2, but that's about it. I mean ooooo, windows movie maker upgrades to 2.0 in this service pack, wow!
On the other hand, look at Apple's features compared to XP. Does Windows have anything like spotlight? Expose? Automator? Dashboard? Sure, those could be considered "Fancy bells and whistles" but does Windows doesn't even have a calendar program. There's nothing like moving videos around your desktop while playing and having them not skip a beat because of Quartz Extreme. Now, you can get a lot of these features in Windows, but they're through third parties and not part of the OS.
I think that this is inevitable. Mac OS X is a desktop OS, desktop customers demand shiny new features and Apple needs to compete with Microsoft in adding such features, otherwise it will fall behind in market share.
I don't think Apple has much to worry about in the features department. It's Microsoft that has been playing a long, slow game of catch-up-to-apple for the last 20 years. Windows came out a year after Mac OS and it wasn't as good (couldn't have overlapping Windows, etc). It took ten years for Windows users to get a trash can, another six to get desktop icons that snap to a predifined "grid."
Apple's operating systems are consistently 5-10 years ahead of Microsoft in the feature category. I used to laugh at all the Windows/PC fanboys that would make fun of Apple, labelling their solutions as something for children. In 2001, the joke was on them, when Windows XP, the most kiddie, fisher-price-y looking OS that has ever existed came out. The color scheme is horrible, the OS itself is plagued with security holes which revealed that XP is merely a new, colorful dress on the same old skank.
Apple has released 4 distinct versions of OS X, Microsoft has released 1, and it looks like the next one is going to be another year still. Apple keeping up with Microsoft? What a joke.
Every time someone proposes something in congress, news agencies and bloggers run around Chicken Little panicking and presenting it as an attack on freedom. I would like to see the figures on exactly how many bills are proposed to congress every day, and how many of those bills are completely rediculous.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that there are elected officials that think this way is quite alarming. But, a proposal is a VERY LONG way from an actual law, and most of these bills are shut down before they can go anywhere.
The sad thing is, the US government is destroying American freedom and stealing our liberty right from under our noses. They can do this because the American people are too lazy to overthrow their government. When you have a two-party-only system where they are equally bent on freedom-hating, something is wrong. When you have votes in congress going to the highest bidding lobbyist, something is wrong. When the head of the Federal Disaster relief organization is unqualified for his job but was put there by corrupt officials as a personal favor (read: bribe), then SOMETHING IS WRONG! If the founding fathers were alive today they would be the leaders of the revolution to overthrow the government, the founding fathers WOULD BE CONSIDERED TERRORISTS TODAY!
Your credit rating has very little to do with the way you manage your finances. For example, I was recently denied a car loan over $5000. There was nothing bad on my credit report and I pay all my bills on time. I even had a $6000 car loan that I paid off last year. So why was I denied? Because I had too little credit. The loan officer told me that utility bills and student loans don't count. My car loan didn't count either because it was too old (the credit union only counts the loan by the start date, so even though I paid my car off a year ago, they considered my loan to be 4 years old, since that's when it started).
The reason I don't have enough credit (which is almost as bad as having bad credit) is because I don't feed the credit industry their rediculously high interest rates. I was punished because I only borrow money when I absolutely have to. So a joe-blow that maxes out his three credit cards on frivolous junk is less of a credit risk than me if he pays the minimum payments every month, according to the credit industry.
Credit ratings have their place for weeding out people that are bad with money and buy things they can't afford. Having good credit is walking a tight-rope, one minor slip and you're buried forever.
The original films have been out on DVD for over a year now. This is just a new "Special special edition."