Like when? Few (at least semi-professional) Windows programs behave that way. (Visual Studio is a pretty notable exception; it demands to install a couple hundred megs of stuff on your system drive.)
The difference is in Windows, each program usually has it's own specific directory that can be put just about anywhere, but the executable usually has to be started with a specific working directory, or the executable itself has to be in it, etc.
Linux, and Unix in general, has a strong, historical file system structure that places binaries in specific places, configuration in specific places, and everything else in it's own place. There's even hierarchies for system, user, and computer-local files. Binaries are expected to run with any active directory, from a location that houses all the binaries on the system, and nothing else. A hardcoded path to, say,/etc/awesomed.conf is required!
For trivial cases (applications with no external data) the binary can be moved willy-nilly and still work. You can even move libraries, and update your ldconfig search path. However, often programs expect their data to be in one specific place, determined at compile time, or determined by a fixed-location configuration file. Sometimes you can get around this with small hacks, but not in any way it would be easy for a package manager to do.
Of course, the advantage to this strict structure is that hardcoded paths are almost always correct. Apart from that, it's up to individual preference as to whether Windows or Linux handles this better.
(Now when I say hardcoded, I of course mean compiled-in. I'm not trying to suggest there's just some unchanging string literal in the source, just that there's probably some generated string that gets compiled in after configuration.)
Emerge has a ROOT variable you can set; presumably this gets passed to configure --prefix. However, I don't know of any way to run Portage without root, and can't find anything about running it on systems that aren't Gentoo.
It's been a while since I've worked with Gentoo, but I vaguely remember it's possible to run emerge as non-root, and I definitely remember something about a Cygwin port of it, so that's definitely possible.
Most programs I know of will let you install packages to any root directory you want, to facilitate hand-installation of the operating system and whatnot. You could do that, but it'd also install all the dependencies, too, which is clearly not what you want.
The problem with installing the packages, individually, to different directories, is that sometimes (a lot of the time) installed files have hard-coded paths. I know that, technically, hard-coded paths are bad style, but I can see how sometimes they just can't be avoided. Besides, usually any path changes can be taken care of at configure/compile time.
When you do the compilation by hand, the package knows exactly where you want to put it, and it works. However, when you install a binary package (say from apt) it expects to be in the root, and could (and usually does) fail if it isn't. Package managers don't support this for exactly this reason.
I bet Gentoo's portage has an option, though, seeing as it compiles everything from scratch anyways. If it doesn't, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to hack into it, being Gentoo and all. Of course, you'd also have to put up with Gentoo...
I promised myself I wouldn't be a quote-quoter, but really, you guys make it too easy. The quote above from Hall most likely references this, from one Edsger Dijkstra:
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
Unfortunately, you'll find a lot of people that think he meant "Submarines don't swim, you retard! So computers don't think!" It seems pretty clear to me that he means making computers think like organisms would be an inefficient and pointless gesture, as they are capable of something far less primitive.
(I found this quote in Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and loved it. It's Creative Commons, so you have no excuse not to read a little.)
I'm not one to post quotes willy-nilly, but this one is particularly relevant to the free internet:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. (H. L. Mencken)
Each numbered part of a version number is supposed to be taken on it's own as an integer. The jump from 0.2 to 0.3 is the same as 0.21 to 0.22. And yes, this means that version 0.2 is much earlier than 0.20, whether or not that makes intuitive sense.
I'm not saying that these scheme makes any sense, or really helps at all for people new to open source. I'm just saying that's how this particular tradition works, and given time most people pick it up easily enough.
(While on the topic of versioning traditions, a lot of projects go by major.minor.revision, with revision changed for each packaged release, minor with new features / binary changes, and major for complete rewrites. Gnome 2.26.n? OGRE? Often, if minor is odd, the software is a development release. This tends to happen a lot with GNU software, too.)
Err, the GIMP is GNU software... (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
I agree mostly with what you have to say, especially that Ubuntu is the best way to refer to the OS that Ubuntu installs, et cetera. An additional reason why GNU/Linux proponents want you to call it that, is that most everything in the system that is non-GNU (and non-kernel-specific) builds heavily on GNU work, either with glibc, readline, GTK, GNOME,.... The GNU project wrote so much software, so many good libraries, that it's hard not to. Not to mention GCC...
Though I'm sure you know this, I want to stress it for those who don't seem to know this. GNOME is part of the GNU project. Yes, GNOME, that bar, desktop program, file browser, text editor, system settings manager, login manager,..., that you see every time you start Ubuntu (or a ton of other distros). That's a large portion of the user-visible operating system right there. When most people talk about Windows, they think of the Windows desktop. When most people think about Linux (if they don't have the old command-line notion), they think about GNOME. That doesn't seem right...
I'm fairly certain that you'll be labeled troll by trying to use Linux as a Windows emulator. It looks rather like a troll, but if you're telling the truth here than you have been misled.
The great thing about Ubuntu is, when you need software, fire up Synaptic and search for it. One click installation!
You don't run Internet Explorer in Ubuntu, you run Firefox (installed by default), or Konqueror, or another of the many web browsers available.
The ISP software thing is unfortunate, but there should be documentation with the software that tells you how to set up your connection manually. Besides, that sort of software usually just adds bloat to your system.
In the version of Ubuntu that I'm running right now (9.04), I can select a bunch of songs, right click them and open them, and get a playlist. Maybe you used an earlier version? Things are changing all the time, for the better. It moves much quicker than in the windows world.
StellaX is a windows application, again. Interestingly, StellaX is the windows port of the multi-platform Stella, which Ubuntu has a package for. Look it up in Synaptic and install it.
As for the screen resolution thing, that has been a problem in the past. I can't say it's fixed for 9.04 (I don't have the time to test it), but they put low-resolution compatibility as a goal for this release. I will suggest if you ever have the same problem again, use tab-navigation and enter.
When most people ask "Will it do everything Windows does?", they mean word processing, internet browsing, IM, music playing, and other basic things like that. Ubuntu will do all of that, out of the box, with OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgen, Totem/Rythmbox, and the slew of other useful things installed by default.
It sounds like you had a bad experience, but to be fair, you weren't using Ubuntu correctly. I have no doubt your windows experience would suck if you tried to run only Cygwin applications.
If you can find the time and effort to try ubuntu again, I would urge you to do so. This time, find Linux native applications to do what you want instead of running Windows applications through wine.
I consider the shell part of the operating system, though it is a userland application, because it is essential to the proper functioning of the operating system familiar to us as linux. If the shell wasn't there, the system would fail.
I consider anything essential to the system, including the kernel and the primary userland components, as the operating system. Calling it the GNU operating system is just as correct as calling it Linux, as they are both essential parts of the system, and I'm fine with either.
Just as that beige box is a hard drive, memory, motherboard, cpu, etc., an operating system is the kernel and essential userland.
And yes, I consider GNOME as part of the operating system, as much as X, because it is essential for most people these days. I consider the graphical part of Windows part of the Windows operating system, too.
Unfortunately, you are arguing against calling it a GNU operating system just because it includes some GNU tools, by saying it's not just because there are some tools that aren't GNU.
For tools like modprobe, those are always going to be different for each kernel. It wouldn't make any sense for GNU to write these, unless it's for HURD.
And yes, I consider the kernel and the operating system to be different things, here, as they have separate code bases in almost all systems. Also, I consider the operating system to be the system of software, separate from the kernel, that the kernel runs, which then runs end-user applications. You can swap out the kernel with a radically different one, and still have a system that is nearly identical. This is not an unreasonable position.
Linux is heavily shell based. Even if the system's primary shell isn't GNU (and it probably is, or was at some point in it's history), almost every command line tool is. Init is itself usually a collection of shell scripts. I dare you to try to launch something on a modern Linux distro without going through at least 3 GNU utilities.
My point is, much of the essential software in a distro is GNU. After the kernel boots, it executes init, which then runs a crapton of shell scripts. All these scripts will use coreutils, not to mention glibc. Everything was certainly compiled with GCC. It will probably launch GNOME, at some point. Almost every part of a basic linux installation that isn't linux, is GNU, and the majority of it is GNU.
I don't think it's unreasonable to call it a GNU operating system.
(now, I don't generally correct people when they say just "linux". I think that GNU deserves a ton of credit, and I will say "GNU/linux" unless I'm in a hurry, but I don't think it's unreasonable to call it just "linux" either.)
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
We're still aerobic, we still transmit information as glyphs on a page (or screen), what's your point? The future won't revolutionize everything ever immediately. As pointed out elsewhere, the biggest change is the Internet. Not many would have predicted such a thing 50 years ago, and no one even 20 years ago would have predicted it's ubiquity. It's even available on mobile phones, now, which were themselves revolutionary.
I actually think the biggest problem here is that most people don't see how much change has occurred because most recent technology is so complicated, it's impossible for any one person to fully understand any one device. Most people, even those here on slashdot, have a point of complexity beyond which any device is magic. When this device is better, or faster, or brighter, it's easier to accept it if the device was magic to begin with. Just think of how much effort went in to the design and production of every single chip and component of the new iPhone, and scale that up. Grand change has occured here, folks. We've just become more accepting.
For some reason, I thought it was talking about the Chrome OS, which was particularly interesting because that'd be a big thing for a new OS, and because we haven't really seen much of the OS so far.
Shame on Google for naming two different things Chrome. It only causes confusion.
I can mount the entire library at magnatune.com through FUSE, then run AudioSurf through wine (yes, not native, but try running native linux apps in windows, sucker!) and play all of that music without having to download each individually.
I can transform my windows arbitrarily on my multi-touch screen, such as scaling and rotating them, while the input still works seamlessly, even for hardware-accelerated 3D, even through WINE.
I can compile my own programs without having to muck about with a non-standardized development environment. LSB is great!
I can modify the operating system I run as much as I want, with the relative ease of C code instead of a binary mess.
I can run it on as many computers as I want, legally, for free.
(despite everyone bashing Pulse so much) I can play music, or a video, and have the audio come out, synchronized, from any speaker in the house.
I can have desktop effects that melt faces, and while they don't do anything functionally, they make me look way cooler in front of buddies. Even more if they're computer literate, and you're running hyper-optimized gentoo. "This entire operating system is locally compiled and optimized for my specific chip family... also wiggly windows OMG"
and, as demonstrated by my ability to install it at all, I don't need an internet license.
I fear for future historians, having to go through all these encrypted Blu-Ray movies as the only hard-format source of cinema from our culture. What will they do when the last licensed Blu-Ray player goes kaput? Hope there's a nice archive of keys just hanging around somewhere?
What immediately jumped out at me was not that the PCB was prefabricated, though I will have to disagree with a sibling comment and say that these can still be quite educational, though maybe not newsworthy. What really got to me was that there is clearly a Propeller Chip on the board! (look for the beanie hat icon)
I have nothing against the propeller chip, and I have used it before and it is great for concurrency and really high-level stuff that you still want a microcontroller for. But I was under the impression this was a historical recreation, and the Propeller was definitely not around when Woz built this thing. It's a really recent chip.
I looked on the site for what the Prop was used for. I could maybe excuse it for providing some auxiliary function that it would be too hard (or pointless) to reproduce with authentic silicon, but I sense it's being used for something central to the device, which is inexcusable.
I want to clarify this because I realize now I didn't in the original post. I know that the GPL doesn't do this. I'm trying to point out that the idea that the GPL would do this is as ridiculous as the claim that Wolfram Alpha's output is copyrighted. Also, I was trying to list what would be theoretically possible to claim if Wolfram's claim was upheld in court.
The post was hyperbole to show how ridiculous the idea that a program's output is copyrighted, by using the more interesting example of GPL instead of a more common copyright.
You missed the really fun part about all of this: GPL is based on copyright.
Everything anyone edited in the GIMP is now GPL'd.
Everything anyone made in Blender is now GPL'd.
Used Audacity? It's GPL'd.
Here's the real kicker: how many non-GPL programs out there do you think are compiled by GCC? Well, now, they're GPL'd too. Any game released on linux, for sure (World of Goo, UT200x, Quake 3 [oh wait]), and tons of other programs where people use GCC because they don't want to deal with/pay for anything else.
As much of a free software advocate I am, this would screw over everything. I hope some stupid judge doesn't uphold this without realizing the implications.
The difference here is that Apple is not actually removing the apps from the user's iPhone. (At least, I don't think so. They haven't in the past.) Apple is removing them from their store. To fit your analogy, it would be like if Microsoft hosted Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera on their website to download, then decided they shouldn't do that and took them down. No one would be nearly as mad about that as they are getting over this.
I'm not saying I like it, though. I'd rather have a freer platform. But I recognize Apple's right to do this, as the owner of the hosting and the application that actually does the downloading.
Interestingly, there's some language in the Apple developer license that specifically allows for 'duplicating functionality' when there is a significant improvement. Of course, it's kind of pointless when Apple (and AT&T) get to decide what a significant improvement is, but it seems that at least someone had their head on straight when they wrote it up.
It is very unlikely that a jailbroken iPhone will brick during an update, at least as long as Apple keeps doing updates the way they have in the past. Updates are distributed as disk images, which overwrite the partition on the iPhone that does not hold music. It's hard to make the system inoperable when you replace the whole system at once.
In addition, if you do brick the iPhone, it has a really handy feature where holding down both buttons in a really precise but not particularly hard sequence will put it into a mode where the whole disk can be accessed by iTunes. Even the most dead iPhone can be restored this way. If this doesn't work, then chances are something happened to your iPhone at the hardware level, not the software level.
Where you'll really get in to trouble with bricked iPhones is unlocking, which is different from jailbreaking. An unlocked iPhone can be used with SIM cards from other carriers, so you could use your iPhone with Verizon, etc. To unlock the iPhone, you need to overwrite the firmware in the cellular modem, and if there's an update to that firmware in the future, or an update to the OS that expects different firmware, this can brick your iPhone pretty irretrievably.
(that trailer looks visually impressive, which is excellent considering even Mech 4 looked like crap)
What I really want, though, is a MechWarrior Mercenaries style MMO. You could form merc squads with friends, buy 'mechs with the money you earn, get in to duels, fight in a war... It really could be very fun. They could even add support classes, like aircraft. Or... have data available from satellites. Make it as open as possible, and try to let players plan the mission as much as possible.
The only problem with that is MechWarrior has a small fan base, compared to World of Warcraft, or others. It will probably never happen, or never happen as well as it should. Oh well, I can dream.
I think the biggest thing about Moon is that it is the first hard science fiction film in a long time that has gained even the meager attention it has. Hard Sci-Fi is a dying breed, as far as I can tell from the last decade or so.
Maybe Moon didn't introduce any new ideas. But it did present those ideas in a medium where it is easier to evoke an emotional response, if it's done correctly. Moon did it very well, at least in my opinion, and it reached a wider audience than most sci-fi.
If Moon is playing near you, I highly recommend you see it.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is in Windows, each program usually has it's own specific directory that can be put just about anywhere, but the executable usually has to be started with a specific working directory, or the executable itself has to be in it, etc.
Linux, and Unix in general, has a strong, historical file system structure that places binaries in specific places, configuration in specific places, and everything else in it's own place. There's even hierarchies for system, user, and computer-local files. Binaries are expected to run with any active directory, from a location that houses all the binaries on the system, and nothing else. A hardcoded path to, say, /etc/awesomed.conf is required!
For trivial cases (applications with no external data) the binary can be moved willy-nilly and still work. You can even move libraries, and update your ldconfig search path. However, often programs expect their data to be in one specific place, determined at compile time, or determined by a fixed-location configuration file. Sometimes you can get around this with small hacks, but not in any way it would be easy for a package manager to do.
Of course, the advantage to this strict structure is that hardcoded paths are almost always correct. Apart from that, it's up to individual preference as to whether Windows or Linux handles this better.
(Now when I say hardcoded, I of course mean compiled-in. I'm not trying to suggest there's just some unchanging string literal in the source, just that there's probably some generated string that gets compiled in after configuration.)
It's been a while since I've worked with Gentoo, but I vaguely remember it's possible to run emerge as non-root, and I definitely remember something about a Cygwin port of it, so that's definitely possible.
Most programs I know of will let you install packages to any root directory you want, to facilitate hand-installation of the operating system and whatnot. You could do that, but it'd also install all the dependencies, too, which is clearly not what you want.
The problem with installing the packages, individually, to different directories, is that sometimes (a lot of the time) installed files have hard-coded paths. I know that, technically, hard-coded paths are bad style, but I can see how sometimes they just can't be avoided. Besides, usually any path changes can be taken care of at configure/compile time.
When you do the compilation by hand, the package knows exactly where you want to put it, and it works. However, when you install a binary package (say from apt) it expects to be in the root, and could (and usually does) fail if it isn't. Package managers don't support this for exactly this reason.
I bet Gentoo's portage has an option, though, seeing as it compiles everything from scratch anyways. If it doesn't, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to hack into it, being Gentoo and all. Of course, you'd also have to put up with Gentoo...
I promised myself I wouldn't be a quote-quoter, but really, you guys make it too easy. The quote above from Hall most likely references this, from one Edsger Dijkstra:
Unfortunately, you'll find a lot of people that think he meant "Submarines don't swim, you retard! So computers don't think!" It seems pretty clear to me that he means making computers think like organisms would be an inefficient and pointless gesture, as they are capable of something far less primitive.
(I found this quote in Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and loved it. It's Creative Commons, so you have no excuse not to read a little.)
I'm not one to post quotes willy-nilly, but this one is particularly relevant to the free internet:
Versions are numbered this way due to tradition.
Each numbered part of a version number is supposed to be taken on it's own as an integer. The jump from 0.2 to 0.3 is the same as 0.21 to 0.22. And yes, this means that version 0.2 is much earlier than 0.20, whether or not that makes intuitive sense.
I'm not saying that these scheme makes any sense, or really helps at all for people new to open source. I'm just saying that's how this particular tradition works, and given time most people pick it up easily enough.
(While on the topic of versioning traditions, a lot of projects go by major.minor.revision, with revision changed for each packaged release, minor with new features / binary changes, and major for complete rewrites. Gnome 2.26.n? OGRE? Often, if minor is odd, the software is a development release. This tends to happen a lot with GNU software, too.)
For some reason, I read the headline as "Are Software Developers Naturally Wired?"
On an unrelated note, do you want to try some Snow Crash? Free sample!
Err, the GIMP is GNU software... (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
I agree mostly with what you have to say, especially that Ubuntu is the best way to refer to the OS that Ubuntu installs, et cetera. An additional reason why GNU/Linux proponents want you to call it that, is that most everything in the system that is non-GNU (and non-kernel-specific) builds heavily on GNU work, either with glibc, readline, GTK, GNOME, .... The GNU project wrote so much software, so many good libraries, that it's hard not to. Not to mention GCC...
Though I'm sure you know this, I want to stress it for those who don't seem to know this. GNOME is part of the GNU project. Yes, GNOME, that bar, desktop program, file browser, text editor, system settings manager, login manager, ..., that you see every time you start Ubuntu (or a ton of other distros). That's a large portion of the user-visible operating system right there. When most people talk about Windows, they think of the Windows desktop. When most people think about Linux (if they don't have the old command-line notion), they think about GNOME. That doesn't seem right...
Too bad GNU/Linux is too akward to use.
Just turn down the biophysics model locally, or create a discontinuous environment bubble.
Or rather, do that whenever you arrive there. It'll be a while... make sure you don't grow too big to transmit.
I'm fairly certain that you'll be labeled troll by trying to use Linux as a Windows emulator. It looks rather like a troll, but if you're telling the truth here than you have been misled.
The great thing about Ubuntu is, when you need software, fire up Synaptic and search for it. One click installation!
You don't run Internet Explorer in Ubuntu, you run Firefox (installed by default), or Konqueror, or another of the many web browsers available.
The ISP software thing is unfortunate, but there should be documentation with the software that tells you how to set up your connection manually. Besides, that sort of software usually just adds bloat to your system.
In the version of Ubuntu that I'm running right now (9.04), I can select a bunch of songs, right click them and open them, and get a playlist. Maybe you used an earlier version? Things are changing all the time, for the better. It moves much quicker than in the windows world.
StellaX is a windows application, again. Interestingly, StellaX is the windows port of the multi-platform Stella, which Ubuntu has a package for. Look it up in Synaptic and install it.
As for the screen resolution thing, that has been a problem in the past. I can't say it's fixed for 9.04 (I don't have the time to test it), but they put low-resolution compatibility as a goal for this release. I will suggest if you ever have the same problem again, use tab-navigation and enter.
When most people ask "Will it do everything Windows does?", they mean word processing, internet browsing, IM, music playing, and other basic things like that. Ubuntu will do all of that, out of the box, with OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgen, Totem/Rythmbox, and the slew of other useful things installed by default.
It sounds like you had a bad experience, but to be fair, you weren't using Ubuntu correctly. I have no doubt your windows experience would suck if you tried to run only Cygwin applications.
If you can find the time and effort to try ubuntu again, I would urge you to do so. This time, find Linux native applications to do what you want instead of running Windows applications through wine.
LTE will eventually be a combined broadband voice/data solution that can do everything that WiMax can and more
I thought that, as a species, we had evolved beyond separating voice and data.
Come on, guys, everything's a number.
I consider the shell part of the operating system, though it is a userland application, because it is essential to the proper functioning of the operating system familiar to us as linux. If the shell wasn't there, the system would fail.
I consider anything essential to the system, including the kernel and the primary userland components, as the operating system. Calling it the GNU operating system is just as correct as calling it Linux, as they are both essential parts of the system, and I'm fine with either.
Just as that beige box is a hard drive, memory, motherboard, cpu, etc., an operating system is the kernel and essential userland.
And yes, I consider GNOME as part of the operating system, as much as X, because it is essential for most people these days. I consider the graphical part of Windows part of the Windows operating system, too.
Unfortunately, you are arguing against calling it a GNU operating system just because it includes some GNU tools, by saying it's not just because there are some tools that aren't GNU.
For tools like modprobe, those are always going to be different for each kernel. It wouldn't make any sense for GNU to write these, unless it's for HURD.
And yes, I consider the kernel and the operating system to be different things, here, as they have separate code bases in almost all systems. Also, I consider the operating system to be the system of software, separate from the kernel, that the kernel runs, which then runs end-user applications. You can swap out the kernel with a radically different one, and still have a system that is nearly identical. This is not an unreasonable position.
Linux is heavily shell based. Even if the system's primary shell isn't GNU (and it probably is, or was at some point in it's history), almost every command line tool is. Init is itself usually a collection of shell scripts. I dare you to try to launch something on a modern Linux distro without going through at least 3 GNU utilities.
My point is, much of the essential software in a distro is GNU. After the kernel boots, it executes init, which then runs a crapton of shell scripts. All these scripts will use coreutils, not to mention glibc. Everything was certainly compiled with GCC. It will probably launch GNOME, at some point. Almost every part of a basic linux installation that isn't linux, is GNU, and the majority of it is GNU.
I don't think it's unreasonable to call it a GNU operating system.
(now, I don't generally correct people when they say just "linux". I think that GNU deserves a ton of credit, and I will say "GNU/linux" unless I'm in a hurry, but I don't think it's unreasonable to call it just "linux" either.)
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
We're still aerobic, we still transmit information as glyphs on a page (or screen), what's your point? The future won't revolutionize everything ever immediately. As pointed out elsewhere, the biggest change is the Internet. Not many would have predicted such a thing 50 years ago, and no one even 20 years ago would have predicted it's ubiquity. It's even available on mobile phones, now, which were themselves revolutionary.
I actually think the biggest problem here is that most people don't see how much change has occurred because most recent technology is so complicated, it's impossible for any one person to fully understand any one device. Most people, even those here on slashdot, have a point of complexity beyond which any device is magic. When this device is better, or faster, or brighter, it's easier to accept it if the device was magic to begin with. Just think of how much effort went in to the design and production of every single chip and component of the new iPhone, and scale that up. Grand change has occured here, folks. We've just become more accepting.
For some reason, I thought it was talking about the Chrome OS, which was particularly interesting because that'd be a big thing for a new OS, and because we haven't really seen much of the OS so far.
Shame on Google for naming two different things Chrome. It only causes confusion.
I can mount the entire library at magnatune.com through FUSE, then run AudioSurf through wine (yes, not native, but try running native linux apps in windows, sucker!) and play all of that music without having to download each individually.
I can transform my windows arbitrarily on my multi-touch screen, such as scaling and rotating them, while the input still works seamlessly, even for hardware-accelerated 3D, even through WINE.
I can compile my own programs without having to muck about with a non-standardized development environment. LSB is great!
I can modify the operating system I run as much as I want, with the relative ease of C code instead of a binary mess.
I can run it on as many computers as I want, legally, for free.
(despite everyone bashing Pulse so much) I can play music, or a video, and have the audio come out, synchronized, from any speaker in the house.
I can have desktop effects that melt faces, and while they don't do anything functionally, they make me look way cooler in front of buddies. Even more if they're computer literate, and you're running hyper-optimized gentoo. "This entire operating system is locally compiled and optimized for my specific chip family... also wiggly windows OMG"
and, as demonstrated by my ability to install it at all, I don't need an internet license.
Protip: if you need a gun prop, this isn't the correct venue.
I fear for future historians, having to go through all these encrypted Blu-Ray movies as the only hard-format source of cinema from our culture. What will they do when the last licensed Blu-Ray player goes kaput? Hope there's a nice archive of keys just hanging around somewhere?
What immediately jumped out at me was not that the PCB was prefabricated, though I will have to disagree with a sibling comment and say that these can still be quite educational, though maybe not newsworthy. What really got to me was that there is clearly a Propeller Chip on the board! (look for the beanie hat icon)
I have nothing against the propeller chip, and I have used it before and it is great for concurrency and really high-level stuff that you still want a microcontroller for. But I was under the impression this was a historical recreation, and the Propeller was definitely not around when Woz built this thing. It's a really recent chip.
I looked on the site for what the Prop was used for. I could maybe excuse it for providing some auxiliary function that it would be too hard (or pointless) to reproduce with authentic silicon, but I sense it's being used for something central to the device, which is inexcusable.
I want to clarify this because I realize now I didn't in the original post. I know that the GPL doesn't do this. I'm trying to point out that the idea that the GPL would do this is as ridiculous as the claim that Wolfram Alpha's output is copyrighted. Also, I was trying to list what would be theoretically possible to claim if Wolfram's claim was upheld in court.
The post was hyperbole to show how ridiculous the idea that a program's output is copyrighted, by using the more interesting example of GPL instead of a more common copyright.
You missed the really fun part about all of this: GPL is based on copyright.
Everything anyone edited in the GIMP is now GPL'd.
Everything anyone made in Blender is now GPL'd.
Used Audacity? It's GPL'd.
Here's the real kicker: how many non-GPL programs out there do you think are compiled by GCC? Well, now, they're GPL'd too. Any game released on linux, for sure (World of Goo, UT200x, Quake 3 [oh wait]), and tons of other programs where people use GCC because they don't want to deal with/pay for anything else.
As much of a free software advocate I am, this would screw over everything. I hope some stupid judge doesn't uphold this without realizing the implications.
The difference here is that Apple is not actually removing the apps from the user's iPhone. (At least, I don't think so. They haven't in the past.) Apple is removing them from their store. To fit your analogy, it would be like if Microsoft hosted Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera on their website to download, then decided they shouldn't do that and took them down. No one would be nearly as mad about that as they are getting over this.
I'm not saying I like it, though. I'd rather have a freer platform. But I recognize Apple's right to do this, as the owner of the hosting and the application that actually does the downloading.
Interestingly, there's some language in the Apple developer license that specifically allows for 'duplicating functionality' when there is a significant improvement. Of course, it's kind of pointless when Apple (and AT&T) get to decide what a significant improvement is, but it seems that at least someone had their head on straight when they wrote it up.
It is very unlikely that a jailbroken iPhone will brick during an update, at least as long as Apple keeps doing updates the way they have in the past. Updates are distributed as disk images, which overwrite the partition on the iPhone that does not hold music. It's hard to make the system inoperable when you replace the whole system at once.
In addition, if you do brick the iPhone, it has a really handy feature where holding down both buttons in a really precise but not particularly hard sequence will put it into a mode where the whole disk can be accessed by iTunes. Even the most dead iPhone can be restored this way. If this doesn't work, then chances are something happened to your iPhone at the hardware level, not the software level.
Where you'll really get in to trouble with bricked iPhones is unlocking, which is different from jailbreaking. An unlocked iPhone can be used with SIM cards from other carriers, so you could use your iPhone with Verizon, etc. To unlock the iPhone, you need to overwrite the firmware in the cellular modem, and if there's an update to that firmware in the future, or an update to the OS that expects different firmware, this can brick your iPhone pretty irretrievably.
God Almighty, it's about time.
(that trailer looks visually impressive, which is excellent considering even Mech 4 looked like crap)
What I really want, though, is a MechWarrior Mercenaries style MMO. You could form merc squads with friends, buy 'mechs with the money you earn, get in to duels, fight in a war... It really could be very fun. They could even add support classes, like aircraft. Or... have data available from satellites. Make it as open as possible, and try to let players plan the mission as much as possible.
The only problem with that is MechWarrior has a small fan base, compared to World of Warcraft, or others. It will probably never happen, or never happen as well as it should. Oh well, I can dream.
I think the biggest thing about Moon is that it is the first hard science fiction film in a long time that has gained even the meager attention it has. Hard Sci-Fi is a dying breed, as far as I can tell from the last decade or so.
Maybe Moon didn't introduce any new ideas. But it did present those ideas in a medium where it is easier to evoke an emotional response, if it's done correctly. Moon did it very well, at least in my opinion, and it reached a wider audience than most sci-fi.
If Moon is playing near you, I highly recommend you see it.