Yes, Wine really is coming along nicely. It's been a very long hard fight, but an amazing range of things work, and it's just going to keep getting better.

Note that Wine has a sponsor - CodeWeavers - and we have collectively dumped at least $20 Million on Wine through the years. Wine is hard.

We do all of that that $59.95 at a time, with the support of people who understand what we do and who choose to support us. I think this is amazing and powerful and wonderful, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who does support us.

I just wish more people knew the details and understood why PlayOnLinux and stock Wine work so well these days. My ducky demise will not be in vain if just one more person discovers CrossOver goodness :-).

Cheers,
Jeremy

"(Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are his own.)"

Ya know, If I was a prof of CS at UCD, I'd probably think my upward mobility was limited too. I interview fresh college grads and senior professionals alike in my software company. I, personally, am equally likely to pick either. Age isn't as much of a metric for ability as ability is. 20somethings have lots of energy. 50somethings have lots of experience. A good team needs both.

Facebook is an experiment. It's unclear how successful they will be as a company. I do know people that work there and youth is a highly regarded trait.
MSFT is a failed experiment. A company like that is where talent goes to die, in my opinion.

It's ok to be frustrated. I know, I am. But muting people who have a different ideology from your own doesn't solve anything. In fact, the reverse happens- the people you disagree with become as frustrated as you.

The harder problem is getting them to, if not agree with, tolerate your ideology. What we've lost in this country is honest, unadulterated, innocent, discourse. We stopped having conversations where a different point of view doesn't dominate another. Too much of what is being said is predicated by various single-issue objectives and amplified by a blow horn of party loyalists.

Fox news is a blow horn. Would be interesting to see what will happen if the family behind the mouthpiece is ousted. For all anyone knows it may move even further away from the center.

Obv I have no idea how OCZ plans on doing this, but I can tell you what a standard journaling fs does.

Chances are this cache is transparent. The blocks translate to vblocks which map to physical blocks on the rotational media. A "dirty" block is a vblock which hasn't been committed to the physical block. However, this is transparent to the filesystem. When the system comes back up and the journal is replayed at say, some operation 10, and we find the relevant blocks for op 10 which happen to be vblocks in the SSD, the write is stable. It's a NOOP from the filesystem perspective.

This is the same as a single, non-tiered, drive dying. Same semantics- cache is dead is equivalent to the drive being dead. That is to say unless the journal and superblock live somewhere else. IIRC ext2/3 keeps the initial copy of the superblock in a few places on the drive. Depending on which you can recover, you'll get a version of the filesystem (likely the one when you first created the fs, i.e. an empty fs). In short, pay attention to your SMART data, and always (ALWAYS!) backup.

Most journals arent like NVRAM and don't follow the copy on write semantic. Journal replay is usually a data-loss event if all writes weren't stable before the replay. With that in mind, most volume managers (the original "VM"!) allow your fs to write to as many drives as the vm allows. This seems no different. But yeah, maybe they're doing something smarter here.

LTE and WiMax isn't 4G either. This means no 4G phones exist yet.

"Pre-4G technologies such as mobile WiMAX and first-release Long term evolution (LTE) have been on the market since 2006[2] and 2009[3][4][5] respectively, and are often branded as 4G in marketing materials. The current versions of these technologies provide downstream peak bitrates of 144 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s respectively, and do consequently not fulfill the original ITU-R requirements of data rates approximately up to 1 Gbit/s for 4G systems." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G]

What type of behavior? Stealing? Call it what you want and use whatever technical detail to obfuscate the fact that a subset of 23,000 people took something from someone else without paying for it.

And seriously. All that for a Stalone flick?

This is the MPAA going after (with almost 99.9% certainty, illegal) downloaders. Not Haliburton lobbying congress for a no bid contract to deploy security and infrastructure services in Iraq to the Army (which already has it's own security and infrastructure services). Or Morgan Stanley not claiming their debts to inflate their growth numbers so the gov't no longer has a say on executive bonuses.

I can attest to the same behavior. My default page is www.google.com/ig which aggregates a bunch of RSS feeds. Next I open a tab to Gmail, Engadget, Gizmodo, NY Times, and The Consumerist. I leave these tabs open. I then open a new window to my company's bugzilla (which is the default installation of bugzilla, the version escapes me, but I can get the version on monday if it's of importance), open maybe a half dozen bugs in different tabs, editing bugs as the day goes on, then flip back to the original window to see what i missed on each tab.

In this state, 2 windows, lots of tabs each, moderate refreshing as the day goes on, I have yet to last greater than 48hrs without FF dying taking both windows and all tabs with it.

It's the default install of FF with 64bit Ubuntu 10.4 with the Adblock and Adobe Flash plugins as of about 6 months ago. It's an 4 core i7 with 12gigs of ram. As you've mentioned, in this kind of usage, FF caches up to about a gig and eventually the kernel pages the cache out. Naturally when I switch contexts back to FF, things churn for a while which is highly inconvenient.

I've switched to Chrome since and have not seen anything remotely similar- things stay open for weeks sans restarts for updates. (This is not a dig. FF is wonderful when it works. Chrome simply provides the level of stability I can live with.)

Thanks for taking the time. I can give you more details on monday if it would help.

I'm a streamer! Mostly.

Most streaming sources (Comedy Central, ABC News) have really crappy quality. I end up going the old fashioned route for broadcast TV and go home at a certain time and flip on the rabbit ears. OTA HD is really amazing.

For everything else, Netflix, AppleTV, and PS3 fulfill my entertainment needs. The quality of their streams/content are usually very good.

I tried Boxee and most free streamed content just looks terrible on a large HD TV.

Cutting the cord is doable, but you have to keep your expectations low and have to be of the mind of someone who enjoys tinkering for the sake of tinkering. Often, you'll end up tinkering more than couch-potato'ing. If you have a 2-body problem (i.e. significant other), this is an unacceptable solution for the most part, and for good reason. It really shouldn't be that hard to watch what you want when you want it.

So it boils down to how much you watch tv vs how much time you want to spend hunting for content. It's never a free lunch, but if you have a significant-other/family then it's probably not worth the grief.

What is the probability you'd be in a situation professionally where you had enough time to boot up a laptop, install the relevant software, assume you already know how to use it, and do something productive with it and not get fired?

Solving simple differential equations or linear algebra in a pinch is exactly why I keep my calculator. The same calculator I used in school many moons ago. I've used Matlab and Mathematica, and can be moderately productive with them. But I'll always stick to my trust TI-89 for its utility and consistently error-free operation.

For me its the same thing as having a PC instead of a TV. Yeah, it works. But the startup cost (in time) and maintenance is non-negligible.

Have you tried watching accelerated 1080p video on a relatively new nVidia card? You'll soon find the hardware AVC decoder (Xvmc does not equal decoder) available in Windows is not available in Linux. GL works grand, but watching videos at any high resolution (native, not some upscaled Xvid or the like) is totally CPU bound in Linux while HW accelerated in windows.

It seems only the newest cards support HW video decoding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

The GPL, as many have commented, does not preclude or even discourage charging money for the software. The primary ethical thrust of the GPL is that your users must have unbridled freedom to use, modify, and redistribute the software you have provided to them. You appear to have met that cleanly.

But, as a considerate human being, you've also taken the time to consider the original authors personal wishes. That's a gracious thing to do, but obviously it's now landed you in an awkward position. Candidly, I'm with you; I'm rather biased, and think that folks deserve to receive compensation for their work on Free Software. However, it's up to you to decide how far to go in satisfying their personal wishes. So, it remains an interesting ethical dilemma, but I think it has nothing to do with the GPL.

Of course, if this is all a clever marketing stunt, and you're in cahoots with the original developer to create a fake controversy, then my hat is off to you, sir. :-).

Cheers,
Jeremy

One clarification: in my last paragraph, I implied that I was upset with people on the Wine mailing list. That was poorly written on my part; my anger is almost entirely directed at the original poster. Max has written some nifty code. Alexandre won't take it, for reasons that most folks are clear on. So folks are working to find ways to make that code available for folks to try. That's all good; it in fact makes good pressure for getting it done 'right', and makes it a great tool to test the usefulness of a DIB engine. So it's all good, and healthy, and for this to somehow be spun up the way it was really bugged me.

Cheers,
Jeremy

I find this story spin deeply offensive and highly misleading.

Let's start at the bottom, because that's the one that offends me so mightily. My blog is pointed to, with a caption 'adverse commercial agenda'. In that self same blog post, I refer to the energy we put into the DIB engine - I paid Huw to work on the DIB engine for six months. In fact, CodeWeavers has had the highly unenviable job of doing the long, hard dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, because they're not fun. (Can you say "COM", boys and girls). CodeWeavers contributes all of its patches to Wine first, and if you look at the top contributors to the Wine project throughout its lifetime, you will find a stunning number of CodeWeavers people. I find it personally insulting to the many people at CodeWeavers that have worked so very hard on Wine, often for very little pay, to imply that we have an evil agenda. We don't. We do want to make a living. We do put our customers ahead of shills on mailing lists. We do sometimes focus on making CrossOver better for specific tasks, but at all times our core mission remains making Wine better.

The proposed 'wonder' patch is based upon solid work by Jesse Allen, along with some of the work we paid Huw to do. And, in fact, it does some nifty things, because the author went after the fun cool part of the task, and ignored the long, hard, nasty part of the task. Indeed, the author repeatedly refuses to consider Alexandre's requirements for doing it right. Max has not 'satisfied all requirements set'. In fact, if you read this post, you'll see that Max has no interest in implementing the DIB Engine in the fashion that Alexandre has requested - it's too much work.

Wine has come a long way in the past 8-10 years - anyone who has used Wine lately can tell you how amazing it is becoming. This is largely driven by the ever increasing standard that Alexandre is using - the bar for patches, particularly against stable and well tested code - is becoming very high. This is a Good Thing (TM).

And finally, up to the top, this phrase is troubling: 'the dissatisfaction of core developers with the arbitrary project governance'. Once a year, the core Wine developers get together at WineConf. We often have a topic called 'Wine governance', where we have great fun lampooning Alexandre. (He certainly is terse, and can be incredibly maddening). But the overwhelming and unanimous consensus, year over year, is that he does a damn fine job and that the Wine project is lucky to have him.

Change that to be 'the dissatisfaction of a bunch of vocal people on the mailing list, who don't really understand the technical issues at hand, but think they're missing out on a cool shiny' and now you have an accurate statement.

Cheers,

Jeremy