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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Let’s say you write a novel. It’s really really good. But no one reads it because no one ever hears about it.

    Later, I stumble upon your novel and recognize how great it is. Then I republish it verbatim, except with my name as the author. I am much better at business and marketing than you, so it goes viral. I receive millions in sales, am tapped to produce a movie version, and win a Pulitzer for it.

    Is that fair? Or should you have some rights in all of this since it was your copy?




  • You don’t need to provide root access just because you used GPL code, you just have to follow the GPL.

    Well, to follow version 3 of the GPL, you do actually need to provide effective root access.

    Specifically, version 3 of the GPL adds language to prevent Tivoization.

    It’s not enough to just provide the user with the code. The user is entitled to the freedom to modify that code and to use their modifications.

    In other words, in addition to providing access to the source code, you must actually provide a mechanism to allow the user to change the code on the device.

    The name “Tivoization” comes from the practice of the company TiVo, which sold set-top boxes based on GPL code, but employed DRM to prevent the user from applying custom patches. V3 of the GPL remedies this bug.




  • I’m visiting with the fam for the 4th. My grandparents keep CNN on 24/7.

    CNN has been running “Biden should step down” as their main lead, all week. Every show has at least one segment on it.

    They’re saying stuff like “70% of democrat voters think he is not fit” or something like that (dunno what their polling data and methodology are though.)

    I expect that these 24/7 news networks can apply a lot of pressure to drive a story like this.

    Edit: I may have misquoted those polls. Which I think shows how bad CNN’s reporting is. They just said something very different came out of a Reuter’s poll.






  • cbarrick@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
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    10 days ago

    However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated.

    Quite the opposite.

    GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.

    Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.

    Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.






  • \1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.

    \2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.

    \3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.

    Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators toe this line pretty well.

    But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.

    (I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)