Nokia calls OGG proprietary and talks about a "percption of OGG being free" (slightly paraphrased by me to fit this sentence), but completely fails to address how a codec that is released under GPL can be proprietary.
OGG isn't under the GPL. The specification is under public domain. The utility software (recording and playback, I assume) is licensed under the GPL. The libraries and SDK's are under a BSD-like license.
This is significant because if OGG were GPL'd, it couldn't be incorporated into proprietary products (something Nokia likely wants to do). Since the libraries and SDK's are under BSD style licenses, they can take the code directly and incorporate it into their products with minimal extra work.
I certainly have no idea how Nokia can spin OGG as being proprietary, but it's not GPL'd either.
Use This Product When You Want To
* Securely access and edit your files on any computer.
* Get files from home while at the office.
* Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while you're on vacation.
* Securely share photos with your friends anywhere in the world without uploading them to the web.
* Back up your laptop data to your home computer while you're traveling.
* Offer your clients an easy way to access business documents, designs, and artwork. Eliminates the need for a separate FTP server.
* Back up critical files to a remote drive for the ultimate protection from loss.
* Simplify your home network and access data from any computer or external hard drive in the house.
* Automatically back up all your PCs to one central location.
* Gain peace of mind with a mirrored back up of important documents and images.
What It Holds:
Up to 571,000 digital photos
Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 100 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 800 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 200 hours of HD video
Now, granted these limitations only extend to "Anywhere Access", so you could still presumably use the device on a local network or plugged in to a specific machine, but it seems like blatant false advertising to say that you could listen to your music while on vacation when it doesn't let you use that service on the vast majority of music files.
I think it's reasonable for a company to have a contract that is a non-compete if the employee decides to leave and a non-compete + compensation if the employer dismisses them. It isn't reasonable that an employee should be able to get a job for a few months, then quit and have the employer pay them for years because of the non-compete agreement. If an employee in a non-compete decides to leave, presumably they have something else in mind.
On the other hand if the employer dismisses the employee, they can't reasonably tell you that the non-compete resigns you to unskilled labor for the next several years.
That would give way too much power to the employer. It could become "You have to work 20 hours a week more for the same amount of pay, but if you leave you'll be lucky to find $10/hr," or "We're doing away with health benefits, but since you signed a non-compete, it's more affordable to pay for your own health insurance than take a lower paying job with health insurance."
I can see a 6 month non-compete, but anything longer than that and the employer should have to pay employees not to work for a competitor unless they employee left on their own terms.
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards.
If Microsoft were willing to make their standards more open, you'd see a lot fewer objections. The thing is, Microsoft has released thousands of pages on their specifications with numerous ambiguities such that a third party couldn't actually implement it from the specification. If they did implement it to the specification, there's a good chance it still wouldn't work with files from MS Office, as it doesn't seem to follow the standard particularly well. And rather than address the concerns people raised about the poor specifications, Microsoft tried to stuff the ballot box to force it through ISO, rather than actually make an open standard.
If Microsoft wants to make a genuinely open standard, I'll object a little bit on the grounds that we already have one (ODF), but so long as Microsoft's standard can actually be implemented by third parties, I'll keep my complaints to a minimum.
I have a $2000 ($4k retail equiv) gaming rig right now, and I can't run Crysis at max settings because I'm running windows XP. (and, in all honesty, the reason I bought Crysis is so I could show people what a good PC can do)
Am I supposed to wait for WINE to try to translate DX10, when they haven't even been able to do DX8 properly? Or am I just going to have to buy vista?
Are you agreeing with me? I can't tell.
I wasn't suggesting at all that people wait for Wine to try to translate DX10. I said that a Wine solution wasn't going to kill Vista in favor of XP, and that the only thing it might accomplish was to keep a few people adamantly opposed to Vista from switching.
You think you pay that much just for privacy? Hell, pay me $350/hr and I will keep your secrets. Nah brother, what we need are techs who are honest and ethics because that is right.
Paying more means you can attract more highly qualified applicants. If you're paying someone $13/hr to do tech support, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel as computer technicians go.
Suppose you were a $13/hr tech, and the computer you're repairing has 3,500 songs on it. Presently, that's about $3,465, or 267 hours of work. There's probably not much chance you'll get caught if you just copy those files over to your external drive, and it's more music than you could buy with 7 weeks of work.
Sure, you and I might say it's not worth it, but I could likely find a job for at least $30/hr, and I've not yet finished my degree. If you're paying $350/hr for your technical work, 3,500 songs can be bought on a week's worth of work, so the risk probably out weighs the benefit.
Valuable personal information is probably a better example than music. If a low paid tech runs across some financial information or a file full of passwords that they could sell or abuse for a big chunk of change, their job can be damned - they've got a quicker source of income. If you want to keep people honest, they need to have a lot to lose if they get caught, and a $13/hr job probably isn't a huge incentive.
Point is, if you want people who will "act like professionals," you need to find skilled people and pay them like professionals. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
6. Lindows was renamed due to a trademark violation. Refer to #4 above.
That's not really accurate. Microsoft brought a suit against Lindows for trademark violation. After several court decisions made it look like they might lose their claim on the Windows trademark (because it was too generic), Microsoft bought the Lindows trademark from the company that is now Linspire for $24 Million.
Can you give an example of a real emulator then? Where do you draw the line between emulators and other compatibility layers?
Off the top of my head, zsnes is an emulator. It emulates the hardware of an SNES and allows you to run SNES games on hardware that the games weren't intended for.
Virtual PC for the old G4/G5 Macs emulated an x86 processor on PPC hardware, allowing Windows to run on hardware it wasn't intended for.
Emulation is slow. It requires translating machine level instructions from one hardware set to instructions for another hardware set, and often one-to-one translations aren't possible. Compatibility layers, on the other hand, provide a set of libraries that run on the same hardware as the original libraries. Compatibility layers could run just as quickly as the original libraries if the new libraries were written as well as the old ones.
So the reason it's significant that Wine Is Not an Emulator is that with emulation, performance loss is unavoidable, with a compatibility layer it comes down to how well the code is written.
That said, I don't think Wine is a viable replacement for DX10 that's going to kill Vista and keep XP around for another 10 years unless the product vendors ship the product with the libraries needed for the translations. I don't anticipate that the average windows user, even the average gamer, would be able or willing to spend their time installing these libraries just to avoid upgrading their OS. Some nerds who are adamantly opposed to switching away from XP may extend there stay a while because of such a solution, but it's not going to kill vista.
Your proposal assumes that enough honest people would be interested enough in the process to make it work. Get real. How many times have you got interested in the elections where you have voted? Have you ever tried to know how many votes for your candidate there were in the polling station where you voted? How many people you know have ever done that?
Several. My dad once ran for Governor on the Libertarian ballot. I don't have to tell you that the libertarian party is a small one, and he barely got 2% of the vote, but he was able to have volunteers at the majority of voting stations throughout the state.
From another standpoint, suppose you have some municipal bill that has very vocal support from a relatively small group. Perhaps 90% of the population is indifferent towards the bill, 8% really wants the bill to pass and 2% really wants the bill to fail. That 2% will almost always be enough to stand around the election center and keep vote counters honest.
In the event that 92% is indifferent, 8% really want the bill to pass, and nobody strongly opposes, the 8% wins. Perhaps that's not the way it should have turned out, but if nobody cares enough to show up and help audit, then it's not likely that anyone will complain when the vote goes the wrong way.
That said, I've seen some interesting cryptographically verifiable voting systems, that I'd like to see developed further. None of the ones I've seen are simple enough at this point to use with the general public, but I think the ideal voting system is one in which you don't have to trust the election officials in the slightest.
Not only that, but goog411 is a good research platform for voice recognition. They may not be making money directly from each call, but if they can use it to fine tune voice recognition, they may have future products that profit from what they learn with goog411.
The only missing feature would be a "time machine" file browser in konqueror.
Meet Archfs. It's a FUSE file system that takes your rdiff-backup mirror and mounts it so that you can view a snapshot of exactly what your file system looked like after any snapshot was taken.
What rdiff-backup is really missing is an easy configuration utility. (And, if you're comparing it to Time Machine, some fancy effects while you search through old files).
For anyone who doesn't know, the first time rdiff-backup is run, it does a full backup of your file system. The next time, it uses rsync libraries to efficiently copy over any files that have changed. Then it diverges from standard backups - rather than keeping a complete copy of the old version of the file, it stores a (compressed) diff so that the old version of the file can be re-created from the current version. Consequently, you always have a snapshot of your file system in case a drive fails and you need to restore quickly, but minimal space is needed to keep older versions of files. Old versions of files can be recreated by applying one diff after another to reach the state of the file when it was first backed up. It creates a hybrid of a mirrored backup system and a differential backup system, while keeping disk usage low.
As I say, there's no easy configuration tool for it at this point, but I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is comfortable with the command line and wants to be able to access any snapshot of their file system.
The UK Government already have this covered, by making it a criminal offence not to hand over your keys. Don't worry, I'm sure the US will catch up soon, as obviously only criminals have something to hide...
I'm sure you can be subpoenaed for the keys in the US now, but the NSA can't just show up at your door and demand them, they'd need a court order first. Let's hope it stays that way.
I can also drop my total access movies off at the local LackLuster and trade them for free in-store rentals. And they ship my next online rentals the next day.
This is the key for me. I've not used Netflix, but I haven't run across many (if any) movies that I wanted that I couldn't find on Blockbuster online. But honestly, the movie I want to watch tends to depend on my mood, so if I've got a couple of DVD's from blockbuster lying around, and don't feel like watching either of them, I can go to blockbuster, trade them in for something that fits my mood, add it back to the top of my queue and watch it another time. A strictly online store can't compete with that.
I've never had any problem getting movies from the top of my queue. Sometimes they'll send me something three or four items down the queue, but I've never had it more than that. I would guess that's largely a function of locale though, (for Netflix or Blockbuster).
From what I've seen, Apple avoids anything that will give Linux the least bit of legitimacy. No iTunes, no Quicktime, attempts at breaking iPod support. I'd be afraid that if Apple acquired Adobe, Flash and Adobe Reader would quit being ported to Linux in an attempt to re-enforce Apple's position as the alternative to Microsoft.
Why spend $50k (assuming you have 2 software developers and it takes them 6 months to finish and test the application so they both used up $25k of the companies money) developing an application when only 1% of your user base is going to use the application.
For something where the wheel has to be re-invented that's true, but this is a video site. There are dozens of examples of cross platform sites that do video, and there are several tools that are readily available to make it happen easy. Unless you're doing something decidedly non-standard, you should be able to write a website target at Windows and have Linux more or less fall into place.
This is a troll. If you'd read the article (or even the entire summary), you'd know that this is caused by one of three things.
1) A bios setting
2) A hard drive firmware setting
3) An ACPI setting that is turned off by default.
So unless PCLinuxOS overrides bios and firmware settings, and prohibits users from turning on the ACPI aggressive power save option, it in no way solves this problem.
I understand pimping your OS/distro of choice when other people are having a problem that can be solved by using your OS, but at least make sure your distro doesn't have the exact same problems before making a jackass of yourself.
I know there are some places where speed traps are a major source of income for municipalities (particularly small towns along highways), but I think it's disingenuous to say that speed traps exist solely for profiteering.
In my hometown (a suburban area of reasonably big city), I can think of four or five stretches where I frequently see cops with radar guns or people pulled over. There's one intersection that has someone pulled over nearly every time I pass by. The thing is, everywhere I go that I frequently see speed traps is somewhere that I've also personally seen an accident - some times more than one accident at the same location. I'm not out driving too often, and I figure if I've seen multiple accidents in a particular location, they're probably quite a bit more frequent than I've observed.
Something is very very wrong with the world when honest law-abiding citizens live in fear and/or contempt of the law.
Speeding is not law-abiding. It may be a generally benign violation, but it's still a violation and (with a few exceptions) it's fairly easy to avoid doing. Believe me, I'd be pissed if cops were pulling innocent people over, handing out speeding tickets and leaving no recourse, but that's not the case.
True, this is but 1 user but every little helps as we say in the UK.
It's not just one user. It's a legal precedent. Now Italian Linux users may be more likely to request refunds for Windows licenses that come with computers, and since there's a legal precedent, the vendors may be more likely to comply.
Hell Linux you can do something similar most of the time.
I'm not aware of anything quite as straightforward as copying files to an external hard drive and copying them back, but with Ubuntu it goes something like this:
As sibling posts have stated, gases don't stop at state borders. If one state wants clean air, but is surrounded by states that don't have such laws, they're pretty much out of luck. Additionally, if one state tries to have harsher laws than neighboring states, those industries will simply move to the next state, so the state trying to have clean air loses business to its immediate neighbors, and continues to get the pollution from its neighbors.
I agree. I was born in the late 80's, and there are only a handful of songs I care for that have been released since I was born (and the majority of those came from artists that were around well before I was born).
...just like Amazon, if you want to be able to buy albums.
True, but Amazon does allow downloading individual tracks, which is a step up from iTunes, and Amazon is promising a Linux client in the near future, which is more than we can say for iTunes.
I commend both iTunes Plus and Amazon's Music service for stepping away from DRM, but Amazon's service is much more promising for Linux users.
Slashdot Mirror
OGG isn't under the GPL. The specification is under public domain. The utility software (recording and playback, I assume) is licensed under the GPL. The libraries and SDK's are under a BSD-like license.
This is significant because if OGG were GPL'd, it couldn't be incorporated into proprietary products (something Nokia likely wants to do). Since the libraries and SDK's are under BSD style licenses, they can take the code directly and incorporate it into their products with minimal extra work.
I certainly have no idea how Nokia can spin OGG as being proprietary, but it's not GPL'd either.
On the other hand if the employer dismisses the employee, they can't reasonably tell you that the non-compete resigns you to unskilled labor for the next several years.
That would give way too much power to the employer. It could become "You have to work 20 hours a week more for the same amount of pay, but if you leave you'll be lucky to find $10/hr," or "We're doing away with health benefits, but since you signed a non-compete, it's more affordable to pay for your own health insurance than take a lower paying job with health insurance."
I can see a 6 month non-compete, but anything longer than that and the employer should have to pay employees not to work for a competitor unless they employee left on their own terms.
If Microsoft were willing to make their standards more open, you'd see a lot fewer objections. The thing is, Microsoft has released thousands of pages on their specifications with numerous ambiguities such that a third party couldn't actually implement it from the specification. If they did implement it to the specification, there's a good chance it still wouldn't work with files from MS Office, as it doesn't seem to follow the standard particularly well. And rather than address the concerns people raised about the poor specifications, Microsoft tried to stuff the ballot box to force it through ISO, rather than actually make an open standard.
If Microsoft wants to make a genuinely open standard, I'll object a little bit on the grounds that we already have one (ODF), but so long as Microsoft's standard can actually be implemented by third parties, I'll keep my complaints to a minimum.
Are you agreeing with me? I can't tell.
I wasn't suggesting at all that people wait for Wine to try to translate DX10. I said that a Wine solution wasn't going to kill Vista in favor of XP, and that the only thing it might accomplish was to keep a few people adamantly opposed to Vista from switching.
Paying more means you can attract more highly qualified applicants. If you're paying someone $13/hr to do tech support, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel as computer technicians go.
Suppose you were a $13/hr tech, and the computer you're repairing has 3,500 songs on it. Presently, that's about $3,465, or 267 hours of work. There's probably not much chance you'll get caught if you just copy those files over to your external drive, and it's more music than you could buy with 7 weeks of work.
Sure, you and I might say it's not worth it, but I could likely find a job for at least $30/hr, and I've not yet finished my degree. If you're paying $350/hr for your technical work, 3,500 songs can be bought on a week's worth of work, so the risk probably out weighs the benefit.
Valuable personal information is probably a better example than music. If a low paid tech runs across some financial information or a file full of passwords that they could sell or abuse for a big chunk of change, their job can be damned - they've got a quicker source of income. If you want to keep people honest, they need to have a lot to lose if they get caught, and a $13/hr job probably isn't a huge incentive.
Point is, if you want people who will "act like professionals," you need to find skilled people and pay them like professionals. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
That's not really accurate. Microsoft brought a suit against Lindows for trademark violation. After several court decisions made it look like they might lose their claim on the Windows trademark (because it was too generic), Microsoft bought the Lindows trademark from the company that is now Linspire for $24 Million.
Off the top of my head, zsnes is an emulator. It emulates the hardware of an SNES and allows you to run SNES games on hardware that the games weren't intended for.
Virtual PC for the old G4/G5 Macs emulated an x86 processor on PPC hardware, allowing Windows to run on hardware it wasn't intended for.
Emulation is slow. It requires translating machine level instructions from one hardware set to instructions for another hardware set, and often one-to-one translations aren't possible. Compatibility layers, on the other hand, provide a set of libraries that run on the same hardware as the original libraries. Compatibility layers could run just as quickly as the original libraries if the new libraries were written as well as the old ones.
So the reason it's significant that Wine Is Not an Emulator is that with emulation, performance loss is unavoidable, with a compatibility layer it comes down to how well the code is written.
That said, I don't think Wine is a viable replacement for DX10 that's going to kill Vista and keep XP around for another 10 years unless the product vendors ship the product with the libraries needed for the translations. I don't anticipate that the average windows user, even the average gamer, would be able or willing to spend their time installing these libraries just to avoid upgrading their OS. Some nerds who are adamantly opposed to switching away from XP may extend there stay a while because of such a solution, but it's not going to kill vista.
The AGPL is not new. It's exited for the GPL v2 for quite some time, all this does is create an AGPL for GPL v3.
Several. My dad once ran for Governor on the Libertarian ballot. I don't have to tell you that the libertarian party is a small one, and he barely got 2% of the vote, but he was able to have volunteers at the majority of voting stations throughout the state.
From another standpoint, suppose you have some municipal bill that has very vocal support from a relatively small group. Perhaps 90% of the population is indifferent towards the bill, 8% really wants the bill to pass and 2% really wants the bill to fail. That 2% will almost always be enough to stand around the election center and keep vote counters honest.
In the event that 92% is indifferent, 8% really want the bill to pass, and nobody strongly opposes, the 8% wins. Perhaps that's not the way it should have turned out, but if nobody cares enough to show up and help audit, then it's not likely that anyone will complain when the vote goes the wrong way.
That said, I've seen some interesting cryptographically verifiable voting systems, that I'd like to see developed further. None of the ones I've seen are simple enough at this point to use with the general public, but I think the ideal voting system is one in which you don't have to trust the election officials in the slightest.
Not only that, but goog411 is a good research platform for voice recognition. They may not be making money directly from each call, but if they can use it to fine tune voice recognition, they may have future products that profit from what they learn with goog411.
Meet Archfs. It's a FUSE file system that takes your rdiff-backup mirror and mounts it so that you can view a snapshot of exactly what your file system looked like after any snapshot was taken.
What rdiff-backup is really missing is an easy configuration utility. (And, if you're comparing it to Time Machine, some fancy effects while you search through old files).
For anyone who doesn't know, the first time rdiff-backup is run, it does a full backup of your file system. The next time, it uses rsync libraries to efficiently copy over any files that have changed. Then it diverges from standard backups - rather than keeping a complete copy of the old version of the file, it stores a (compressed) diff so that the old version of the file can be re-created from the current version. Consequently, you always have a snapshot of your file system in case a drive fails and you need to restore quickly, but minimal space is needed to keep older versions of files. Old versions of files can be recreated by applying one diff after another to reach the state of the file when it was first backed up. It creates a hybrid of a mirrored backup system and a differential backup system, while keeping disk usage low.
As I say, there's no easy configuration tool for it at this point, but I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is comfortable with the command line and wants to be able to access any snapshot of their file system.
I know this is cliche, but you must be new here.
I'm sure you can be subpoenaed for the keys in the US now, but the NSA can't just show up at your door and demand them, they'd need a court order first. Let's hope it stays that way.
This is the key for me. I've not used Netflix, but I haven't run across many (if any) movies that I wanted that I couldn't find on Blockbuster online. But honestly, the movie I want to watch tends to depend on my mood, so if I've got a couple of DVD's from blockbuster lying around, and don't feel like watching either of them, I can go to blockbuster, trade them in for something that fits my mood, add it back to the top of my queue and watch it another time. A strictly online store can't compete with that.
I've never had any problem getting movies from the top of my queue. Sometimes they'll send me something three or four items down the queue, but I've never had it more than that. I would guess that's largely a function of locale though, (for Netflix or Blockbuster).
From what I've seen, Apple avoids anything that will give Linux the least bit of legitimacy. No iTunes, no Quicktime, attempts at breaking iPod support. I'd be afraid that if Apple acquired Adobe, Flash and Adobe Reader would quit being ported to Linux in an attempt to re-enforce Apple's position as the alternative to Microsoft.
For something where the wheel has to be re-invented that's true, but this is a video site. There are dozens of examples of cross platform sites that do video, and there are several tools that are readily available to make it happen easy. Unless you're doing something decidedly non-standard, you should be able to write a website target at Windows and have Linux more or less fall into place.
1) A bios setting
2) A hard drive firmware setting
3) An ACPI setting that is turned off by default.
So unless PCLinuxOS overrides bios and firmware settings, and prohibits users from turning on the ACPI aggressive power save option, it in no way solves this problem.
I understand pimping your OS/distro of choice when other people are having a problem that can be solved by using your OS, but at least make sure your distro doesn't have the exact same problems before making a jackass of yourself.
In my hometown (a suburban area of reasonably big city), I can think of four or five stretches where I frequently see cops with radar guns or people pulled over. There's one intersection that has someone pulled over nearly every time I pass by. The thing is, everywhere I go that I frequently see speed traps is somewhere that I've also personally seen an accident - some times more than one accident at the same location. I'm not out driving too often, and I figure if I've seen multiple accidents in a particular location, they're probably quite a bit more frequent than I've observed.
Speeding is not law-abiding. It may be a generally benign violation, but it's still a violation and (with a few exceptions) it's fairly easy to avoid doing. Believe me, I'd be pissed if cops were pulling innocent people over, handing out speeding tickets and leaving no recourse, but that's not the case.
It's not just one user. It's a legal precedent. Now Italian Linux users may be more likely to request refunds for Windows licenses that come with computers, and since there's a legal precedent, the vendors may be more likely to comply.
I'm not aware of anything quite as straightforward as copying files to an external hard drive and copying them back, but with Ubuntu it goes something like this:
Then on the new system: Then Ubuntu goes back to the repositories and grabs everything again.As sibling posts have stated, gases don't stop at state borders. If one state wants clean air, but is surrounded by states that don't have such laws, they're pretty much out of luck. Additionally, if one state tries to have harsher laws than neighboring states, those industries will simply move to the next state, so the state trying to have clean air loses business to its immediate neighbors, and continues to get the pollution from its neighbors.
I agree. I was born in the late 80's, and there are only a handful of songs I care for that have been released since I was born (and the majority of those came from artists that were around well before I was born).
True, but Amazon does allow downloading individual tracks, which is a step up from iTunes, and Amazon is promising a Linux client in the near future, which is more than we can say for iTunes.
I commend both iTunes Plus and Amazon's Music service for stepping away from DRM, but Amazon's service is much more promising for Linux users.