Mostly, these mythical users with a wrong understanding of optimization exist only in your head. This straw man is revived every time there's an opportunity to snipe at Gentoo. In reality, the vast majority of people who use Gentoo do so because of Portage and the vast potential for customization at every level, not speed. It's a great distro, as is Debian and Fedora. It's not what I recommend for Grandma, but Gentoo certainly has earned its place on the short list of great meta-distributions.

Yeah, he would never see any benefit from it. Except the fact that it would make the whole Linux system more viable, thus attracting more users, thus bringing in more people who don't have the sub-licensing issues that nvidia does and may choose to contribute.

I also love the over-the-top language GPL advocates always use: "Alan Cox would have his hard work stolen from him against his will..." Yeah... his hard work is absolutely stolen. Oh wait, I thought we can't call copyright infringement stealing since it actually doesn't take anything away from the copyright owner. It's actually even more ridiculous in this situation since Alan gives away his code for free (as in beer) anyway, whereas a digital music file or video actually has a price.

Fortunately, the trend for new software is to be licensed more openly (usually the apache or MIT license). People are figuring out that the GPL actually doesn't promote return code contributions nearly as well as it was supposed to, and it brings a whole host of complicated compatibility concerns with other open source licenses.

The GPL can be a useful license for businesses in some cases, but it really sucks as a general-purpose open source (or "free" software) license, and not just because of the distribution issues with "evil" corporations but also for end-users who miss out on better software that is the result of proprietary-friendly open source licenses. Stallman has really done a disservice to the software/computer industry by getting so many sheep to believe in his religious ideology, so let me be at least one voice saying the truth: Your computer is more useful when open source and proprietary software work together. Screaming "proprietary software is always and unequivocally evil" was never helpful, and people are awakening to the realization of how ridiculously false that notion is.

Is compiz still a talking point among people trying to promote desktop linux? Nevermind that OS X was first with useful, hardware-accelerated compositing, I guess. Maybe I've just gotten older, but wobbly windows and spinning cubes stopped being interesting quite a few years ago.

I used a Mac since 2003 and have since used predominantly Linux and BSD. Without compiz. I'm glad that my desktop environment isn't as "snazzy" as yours; any time my window manager draws my attention to itself and away from the applications is wasted time. However, I'm not way big on evangelizing--just use what works, I say--so maybe you know better how to promote desktop linux than I do.

I don't see very much Windows Phone hate. Mostly I see wonder at how Microsoft could be so late to this party and mild amusement at their struggle to remain relevant in that market. As for the MS/Nokia deal and considering who Nokia's CEO is, it doesn't take much tin foil to realize that something smells bad there.

This shouldn't be the case unless your operating system sucks at caching, and I am speaking as an early adopter (have had one SSD or another for 3+ years). The GP's point is valid: SSDs are great for improving bootup and application startup time, but unless you plan to put all your files on SSD (or, like I said, your OS sucks at caching), the returns are definitely diminishing. Better to max out the DRAM.

That said, I generally do recommend SSDs; just get a small, cheap one for the OS. You don't need the headaches of moving files between SSD and HDD. Just keep the distinction clear; SSD is for the OS and apps (/) and HDD is for all my files (/home). Easy. I would only get a hybrid if it was for a laptop and there was only one slot for a hard drive.

I also put the swap on my SSDs. I only have 4G DRAM in one of my machines with such a setup; when I occasionally and unintentially start thrashing, having the swap on an SSD keeps the computer usable and the problem is easily fixed without the UI locking up too badly.

Yeah, probably. This is definitely a great new political trick. As it was, the bill was only barely able to pass using all kinds of [documented cases of] bribery and interesting legislative tricks. If it had been called a tax in the first place, the bill obviously would not have even passed. If we can expect to see more of this, legislators can just stop using the word "tax" entirely and let the courts call it what it is. God knows there's a large enough portion of the American populace sucking on the government tit as it is and don't care care about anything besides getting more "free" stuff, getting their "fair share," or screwing the "rich" generally, but for those who do care about the details (like how to actually pay for something), there probably is a significant portion of them who are too retarded to see a spade for a spade or a tax for a tax without their legislators using the correct keywords. It obviously worked this time.

And the FreeBSD people would have absolutely not problem with this, assuming it were true. But alas, it isn't true. It just happens that most of Apple's changes aren't incorporated into FreeBSD because it just doesn't make much sense for them to be (e.g. the changes are particular to Apple products or their own operating system), but they do release those changes in the open source version of their OS (Darwin). The parts of Mac OS X that aren't open source or distributed with Darwin are mostly parts which didn't come from FreeBSD anyway. Other code released by Apple that is more general and more appropriate for FreeBSD (like LLVM) is used by FreeBSD.

Regardless, it's a common argument that the GPL has supposedly helped Linux become what it is, but that really short-changes Linux which is really just a kick-ass kernel regardless of the license. The reason Linux "won" over BSD-licensed alternatives was not because of the GPL but because of fortunate timing (USL v. BSDi was obviously a major setback for BSD) and also because Linux is a great kernel.

The GPL itself doesn't do anything to promote a strong free software environment. It just creates a lot of license compatibility problems within a community that would otherwise work better with less duplicated effort. It doesn't even succeed at forcing companies to "give back," it just forces the use of ugly hacks (see how binary blob drivers are implemented). The free software environment already incentivizes companies to "give back," without the need for complicated and incompatibility-inducing license terms, because of reduced maintenance costs (e.g. do companies really want to spend the money maintaining their own fork or patchset? really?), and there are also many good business reasons for a company to release their own code without the GPL supposedly forcing their hand (e.g. to promote interoperability with their products). It's interesting to recognize that most new code released by companies today are not copyleft-licensed but are usually licensed under an Apache license or the MIT or BSD licenses.

Stallman and the FSF should be given credit for the many positive contributions they have made to the free/open source community (GCC and the GNU userland are fantastic and well appreciated), but the GPL just isn't one of those positive contributions.

I don't know that Zimmerman did confront Martin. The operator told him he didn't need to follow, and it's unclear what happened after that because of conflicting testimony. Considering how few real facts are known, the only reasonable response is to say that I have no idea whether Zimmerman's actions are acceptable or not. However, following someone is not usually illegal. Having a gun is not illegal. And, in Florida, shooting someone and killing them with a gun is not illegal under certain (very special) conditions which you may or may not agree with, although it is the law.

Now it seems the prosecutor has collected enough facts that she thinks she can convict Zimmerman for breaking the law. A panel of Zimmerman's peers will determine whether or not he really is guilty. If he is guilty, I hope the trial is the least of his discomforts. If he is innocent, the trial will probably not be any worse than how the media and race baiters have already ruined his life, but having to battle false charges certainly wouldn't make things any easier. Whether he is guilty or innocent, let justice prevail.

Nope, it is where it belongs (in court) if the prosecutor decides to bring charges, and not before that time. It's easy to sit in your armchair and pretend to know facts that can really only come out of a thorough investigation, but there may be a time, if you ever happen to just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that you are grateful that such things are investigated before arrests and charges are made. False charges have ruined the lives of innocent people before. The system may have flaws, but the fact that crimes (which may not be crimes) are investigated before charges are filed is not one of those flaws.

In this case--unless the prosecutor is simply bowing to pressure from the uninformed masses, which would be disgusting--the prosecutor was not convinced of George Zimmerman's story or believes his actions were not sanctioned by the current laws on the books. In that case, a trial is perfectly reasonable. If Zimmerman is found guilty by a panel of his peers, he will be punished. If not, he will walk. This is the way it should be, but only after a proper police investigation and review of the facts by the prosecutor--not the supposed "facts" you get from your nightly news anchor, but the real facts insofar as they can be determined.

On no, a big bad evil corporation is making money. I can't call myself a friend to Apple or Microsoft, but this statement is just retarded. Companies charge what people are willing to pay. A lot of people (apparently) disagree with your valuation of Apple products, and nobody was tricked into buying an iPod or iPhone. There were so many sold that there is no excuse for somebody to not know what they were getting when they threw down their money, and the cost was obviously worth it to them.

Err, where's the unintended pun? It's too subtle for me.

From the blog post:

So, this is only an issue for the Linux version of Flash. Even then, they are providing security updates for the non-Pepper version of Flash on Linux for five years. Mozilla may choose to eventually implement PPAPI just so Linux users can use the Pepper version of Flash, but that need is clearly not as great as you imply.