It is worth pointing out that the Lisbon treaty (like the EU Constitution before it) actually greatly simplifies the mess that it the accumulation of all EU treaties. It's just that it was considered politically impossible to make radical changes to the structure, so they couldn't simplify it any more, and what remains is still hideously complex.
However, preferring the current state of affairs to the Lisbon treaty is by no means reasonable. I understand many nay-sayers would prefer a wholly reorganized structure, but any attempt to do so would be even more doomed that the current reorganization.
What's next? rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish? We desperately need an automatic "hip open source software name generator" before someone gets hurt.
That's not a technology limitation. You can get 15" 1920x1200 LCD's on some specialty laptops. They just don't sell them for desktop use because too much software is still pixel-based and would look tiny on a high-resolution screen. And because high-resolution screens are rare, little software works properly on them.
Interesting... so when you optimize a design with the help of a simulation, you end up optimizing for the design that best exploits the weaknesses of your simulation environment. Anyone know if the guys who do design optimization go so far as to use a completely different simulator to evaluate the results of the optimization?
IE is not free - Microsoft pays the salaries of its developers from the income it gets from Windows sales. Given the monopoly position of Windows on the OS market, this happens to break anti-trust regulations in both the US and the EU, but it doesn't look like the regulators have the power to do anything about the situation. The ideal is that in a free market, an OEM could make a deal with Microsoft to buy Windows without IE and to buy another browser from another vendor, in order to provide the best total package to the customer. Right now Microsoft has ensured that OEMs do not have that option - they can either pay for Windows and IE, or for Windows, IE and another browser. Not exactly a good position for another browser manufacturer.
Even in a simple game like Pac-Man, the state space is so large that learning to anticipate complex patterns can take millions of years, unless the programmer assists the learning algorithm by providing carefully crafter building blocks for the player actions. It seems that they did just this for their Ms. Pac Man study.
Don't you mean "web ring"? Anyone still remember those?
Re:You mother fuckers are pissing me off
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
The point is that if there actually was such a thing as "Digital Rights" and you wanted to manage them, "Digital Rights Management" software would do nothing of the kind.
If the software guys cannot take advantage of the increasing hardware performance that is provided by more parallel designs, this will severely dampen the economic incentive to develop parallel hardware. Why would an executive invest in new hardware and software if the end result is no more effective than the old stuff he already has? I'm sure there will be many cases where the software does work better on new parallel hardware, but if the required programming effort is significantly higher than the comparable sequential programming effort, this will inevitably diminish the returns available from parallel hardware developments. Perhaps R&D efforts will be redirected from hardware to smarter parallelizing development tools (not only compilers but refactoring tools, debuggers etc.)
That's nothing! When I tried it, everything went fine, but when I first booted linux, it burned down my house, killed my dog and ran away with my wife! They really have to fix problems like that if they want non-technical users trying out this linux thingy.
Since Red Hat bought Cygnus a couple of years back, Linux is no longer everything they do, there's also the gcc business. As far as I know, the gcc business earns money from embedded toolsets, and contracts with microprosessor manufacturers (including big ones like Intel) to improve gcc on their kit, or to port gcc to new CPUs.
So, can anyone in the know comment on how much of Red Hat's business is Linux, as compared to what used to be Cygnus?
But certainly MySQL is an example of an open source company that has a very useful amount of control over their product: They own the copyight and they sell proprietary licenses to the software. The GPL version cannot be incorporated into commercial products (unless those products are GPL themselves). It seems to me that their business model is very close to some traditional "closed source" companies that offer free evaluation versions.
Simple level adjustment only works well if you've got a very even lighting, otherwise the greys representing the background at the other end of the sheet end up too close to the greys representing the text at the other end of the sheet. I know, I've tried scanning by digital camera myself, and you need a lot of lighting to get it right. And because you need a glass pane to keep a book level, you also need to worry about the lighting angles to avoid reflections.
An image processing tool that would adjust the black and white levels adaptively over the picture would be perfect, anyone know about one?
The problem is that Adobe has effectively eliminated the reason that PDF was safer than Postscript, by adding another Turing-complete language to the format definition. There are a lot of advantages to a data format that can be used without worrying about arbitrary execution paths or unbounded memory and time requirements. Let's just hope that Javascript in PDF stays a little-used feature that can be easily disabled without worrying e.g. about access to government forms.
Perl's engine and its brethren use search-and-backtrack. They accept a lot things that are not regular expressions. Such engines don't have much theory behind them, and it's hard to reason generally about what they do and how fast they do it.
Of course, that is a failing of computer scientists, not of Perl. As scientists, they should aim for an analysis of such a practical tool, even if (and because of) it turns out to be hard.
It's not really a government conspiracy. Ordinary, well-meaning people get nervous when they think about all those heinous acts that can be carried out without police being able to do anything about it. Where would we get if we let people communicate safely without possibility of any oversight? Why, that would surely lead to lawlessness and anarchy! People want the police to be in control.
And you know what, it's not necessarily a bad thing that police investigators can get access to other people's secrets, as long as there is judicial oversight to keep the police in check. There really are people out there who wouldn't mind being able to ruin other people's lifes if they could get away with it. Witness the Craigslist prank that was reported recently.
HP invented the ink jet. That was back in the early 1980's when HP still was an innovative engineering company. However, all the early Laser Jets were based on a Canon print engine. Check out wikipedia, and if you don't believe that, here's an article on the HP site..
Steve Irwin was a full-blown weirdo who turned his weirdness into huge success, and all us weirdos at slashdot respect him for that. His untimely loss is no reason for us to suppress our weirdness to express our "heartfelt platitudes". Quite the opposite! This is an occasion for all the misfits of the world to express their emotions in their own socially non-standard ways.
So, let me participate in this modern technical adapatation of ancient social ritual by expressing my empathic reaction to the few people here who had personal ties to the dead guy, as well as all the slackers reading this bit at work. I hope that the social network that was affected, partially even disconnected, by the loss of this highly-connected individual will mend and even increase its connectivity as a result of this event. I state this wish even though I am aware of no peer-reviewed studies into the issue, solely on the basis of my own emotionally affected state.
Slashdot Mirror
It is worth pointing out that the Lisbon treaty (like the EU Constitution before it) actually greatly simplifies the mess that it the accumulation of all EU treaties. It's just that it was considered politically impossible to make radical changes to the structure, so they couldn't simplify it any more, and what remains is still hideously complex. However, preferring the current state of affairs to the Lisbon treaty is by no means reasonable. I understand many nay-sayers would prefer a wholly reorganized structure, but any attempt to do so would be even more doomed that the current reorganization.
What's next? rabbitelephant? curvaceous coelacanth? fishfishfishrabbitfish? We desperately need an automatic "hip open source software name generator" before someone gets hurt.
Or at least, wrong in the US. There certainly isn't anything like that in the Berne convention or the EU copyright directive.
That's not a technology limitation. You can get 15" 1920x1200 LCD's on some specialty laptops. They just don't sell them for desktop use because too much software is still pixel-based and would look tiny on a high-resolution screen. And because high-resolution screens are rare, little software works properly on them.
Interesting... so when you optimize a design with the help of a simulation, you end up optimizing for the design that best exploits the weaknesses of your simulation environment. Anyone know if the guys who do design optimization go so far as to use a completely different simulator to evaluate the results of the optimization?
IE is not free - Microsoft pays the salaries of its developers from the income it gets from Windows sales. Given the monopoly position of Windows on the OS market, this happens to break anti-trust regulations in both the US and the EU, but it doesn't look like the regulators have the power to do anything about the situation. The ideal is that in a free market, an OEM could make a deal with Microsoft to buy Windows without IE and to buy another browser from another vendor, in order to provide the best total package to the customer. Right now Microsoft has ensured that OEMs do not have that option - they can either pay for Windows and IE, or for Windows, IE and another browser. Not exactly a good position for another browser manufacturer.
Even in a simple game like Pac-Man, the state space is so large that learning to anticipate complex patterns can take millions of years, unless the programmer assists the learning algorithm by providing carefully crafter building blocks for the player actions. It seems that they did just this for their Ms. Pac Man study.
Don't you mean "web ring"? Anyone still remember those?
The point is that if there actually was such a thing as "Digital Rights" and you wanted to manage them, "Digital Rights Management" software would do nothing of the kind.
If the software guys cannot take advantage of the increasing hardware performance that is provided by more parallel designs, this will severely dampen the economic incentive to develop parallel hardware. Why would an executive invest in new hardware and software if the end result is no more effective than the old stuff he already has? I'm sure there will be many cases where the software does work better on new parallel hardware, but if the required programming effort is significantly higher than the comparable sequential programming effort, this will inevitably diminish the returns available from parallel hardware developments. Perhaps R&D efforts will be redirected from hardware to smarter parallelizing development tools (not only compilers but refactoring tools, debuggers etc.)
That's nothing! When I tried it, everything went fine, but when I first booted linux, it burned down my house, killed my dog and ran away with my wife! They really have to fix problems like that if they want non-technical users trying out this linux thingy.
Since Red Hat bought Cygnus a couple of years back, Linux is no longer everything they do, there's also the gcc business. As far as I know, the gcc business earns money from embedded toolsets, and contracts with microprosessor manufacturers (including big ones like Intel) to improve gcc on their kit, or to port gcc to new CPUs.
So, can anyone in the know comment on how much of Red Hat's business is Linux, as compared to what used to be Cygnus?
But certainly MySQL is an example of an open source company that has a very useful amount of control over their product: They own the copyight and they sell proprietary licenses to the software. The GPL version cannot be incorporated into commercial products (unless those products are GPL themselves). It seems to me that their business model is very close to some traditional "closed source" companies that offer free evaluation versions.
Simple level adjustment only works well if you've got a very even lighting, otherwise the greys representing the background at the other end of the sheet end up too close to the greys representing the text at the other end of the sheet. I know, I've tried scanning by digital camera myself, and you need a lot of lighting to get it right. And because you need a glass pane to keep a book level, you also need to worry about the lighting angles to avoid reflections.
An image processing tool that would adjust the black and white levels adaptively over the picture would be perfect, anyone know about one?
The problem is that Adobe has effectively eliminated the reason that PDF was safer than Postscript, by adding another Turing-complete language to the format definition. There are a lot of advantages to a data format that can be used without worrying about arbitrary execution paths or unbounded memory and time requirements. Let's just hope that Javascript in PDF stays a little-used feature that can be easily disabled without worrying e.g. about access to government forms.
Of course, that is a failing of computer scientists, not of Perl. As scientists, they should aim for an analysis of such a practical tool, even if (and because of) it turns out to be hard.
It's not really a government conspiracy. Ordinary, well-meaning people get nervous when they think about all those heinous acts that can be carried out without police being able to do anything about it. Where would we get if we let people communicate safely without possibility of any oversight? Why, that would surely lead to lawlessness and anarchy! People want the police to be in control.
And you know what, it's not necessarily a bad thing that police investigators can get access to other people's secrets, as long as there is judicial oversight to keep the police in check. There really are people out there who wouldn't mind being able to ruin other people's lifes if they could get away with it. Witness the Craigslist prank that was reported recently.
HP invented the ink jet. That was back in the early 1980's when HP still was an innovative engineering company. However, all the early Laser Jets were based on a Canon print engine. Check out wikipedia, and if you don't believe that, here's an article on the HP site..
So, let me participate in this modern technical adapatation of ancient social ritual by expressing my empathic reaction to the few people here who had personal ties to the dead guy, as well as all the slackers reading this bit at work. I hope that the social network that was affected, partially even disconnected, by the loss of this highly-connected individual will mend and even increase its connectivity as a result of this event. I state this wish even though I am aware of no peer-reviewed studies into the issue, solely on the basis of my own emotionally affected state.