what if there's 300 linux distro's? i can compile just about anything on all of them. More choice, is NEVER a bad thing
It gets very annoying when you have several servers if they have different distributions, because of the differences in where they put things. Suppose you need to take a look at a CGI script on a server. Where is it?/usr/lib/cgi-bin?/srv/www/cgi-bin? Somewhere else?
Where's the apache configuration?/etc/httpd or/etc/apache2? Do you change the Apache configuration by editing httpd.conf, or has the distro set it up so you drop your config changes somewhere else and are supposed to never touch httpd.conf lest you screw up updating?
Where's the mysql databases? Those are all over the map, too.
I've found that different Linux distros on my servers introduce as much extra work in developing and maintaining things as mixing Linux and FreeBSD does.
Now note that I can avoid all of the above problems by picking one distro and using it on all my servers. However, if I ever need help on something and search the net, the other distros rear their ugly heads, as I run into documentation that seems helpful, but turns out to have been written based on a different distro, and makes assumptions that aren't valid on mine.
That raises an interesting question. Is the Vader thing still a spoiler?
On the one hand, it's something like 20 years old.
On the other hand, the Star Wars movies have become pop classics, and cultural icons. Thus, it is safe to assume that many people of each generation will want to watch them, and so we should try not to spoil it.
But wait...what order will they watch them? If they start with TPM, then they are going to already know about Vader when they get to the "I am your father" scene. It is no spoiler.
However, many of them will be lucky enough to have someone tell them the right way to watch the movies. (Start with ANH, and go forward until "I am your father", then gosub to TPM, AotC, and RotS to get the story behind Vader, then return and finish the series). It would be a spoiler for these people.
I think the Harry Potter books and/or films might end up in a similar position.
The rule should probably be that for any story (whether book, movie, comic, erotic flip book, whatever), you don't give away story details that might be spoilers unless you are sure you have an audience that already knows, or won't care.
How do they figure out what a patent is worth?
on
Patents Don't Pay
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· Score: 1
It sounds like they were looking at how much patents made in licensing or in lawsuits. But what about patents that are neither licensed out nor lead to a lawsuit? The third way to make money off a patent is to be the exclusive provider of whatever is covered by the patent.
To elaborate on what Stubear said, in the case of scores for old composers, sometimes we don't have a complete, original score. Just parts have survived, possibly from different versions of the work. There can be considerable creativity involved for a modern arranger to put together a score for such a work.
And even if we do have the complete, original, score, it may have been for old instruments. A lute is not the same as a guitar, for example, and when Vivaldi wrote for lute, he knew how it would be tuned, and what fingerings were possible. To make it work on a guitar can be quite a creative challenge.
Even if we still use the same instruments as the composer wrote the piece for, we might want a score for different instruments. You can't just sit down at your piano, or guitar, or with your full orchestra, with the score to, say, Bach's cantata #147 ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring") as originally written as a choral work, and start playing. It just won't work. You basically have to rewrite the music for those different settings.
Mod parent up! As soon as I read the extra Apple provisions in the CUPS license, this is the first thing I thought of
Same here. But then the second thing I thought of was to check out cups.org at the internet archive, where I found out that those provisions have been there since sometime before October, 2002, so it seems unlikely this purchase is about that.:-)
The real issue for open source development I see was that Sweet violated an implicit understanding. Everyone transferred their copyrights to him, but there was the idea that the project was open source.
Furthermore, Novell makes the coupons, which they sold to Microsoft, who then gives them to customers. So, even if distributing coupons that are redeemable for a copyrighted work counted as a distribution of that copyright work under copyright law (a position with no support in case law or statute that I've seen anyone cite), this particular distribution would be covered under the first sale doctrine.
I would not be surprised if this turned out to be the reason that the deal was structured to use coupons.
When waiting in line at a movie theater, ask people.
When in line at the supermarket, ask people.
When waiting to pick up your kids at daycare, strike up a conversation about computers with the other parents, and find out what they use. Or ask other parents at the next PTA meeting.
Ask others at your church or coven.
At the next meeting of your model rocketry club or RC airplane club, find out what people are using.
Next time you are at BestBuy buying blank CDs, or a thumb drive, or anything else in the computer section, say "I wonder if this works with Linux?" when several other customers can overhear you, and see if you get anyone offering advice.
Take a peek at the laptops when you walk through a coffee shop with an active wifi hotspot user population.
Almost everyone, almost everyday, encounters plenty of other computer users in contexts that won't be biased toward a particular operating system, providing an opportunity for a little informal polling.
Yes, you could do that. But it would give you results consistent with all the other counting methods, and so it must be flawed too.:-)
The gist of the article seems to be that no counting method is perfect and therefore gives you no useful information. In fact, an imperfect counting method can still give some information, and the information from independent methods can be combined. This is done all the time in science, for instance. Does the original author think that marine biologists get counts of fish populations by counting every single fish in the ocean?
By "Spybot," do you mean "Patrick Kolla?" I know now he's got help, but how many years ago did these "years" occur?
Some started as far back as 2002, and are still there in the current version.
If Spybot were a brand new program, from someone unknown, it would probably make the rogue list for too many false positives. But because it was one of the first, and was very good back in the old days when the spyware problem was much smaller, it gets grandfathered in, and people overlook a lot in it that they would not overlook in a modern program.
What are the other antivirus vendors doing (or not doing) that is avoiding this problem?
At the AV vendor I've worked for, when they get a report from another AV vendor of a false positive on that other vendor's product, they would investigate and get an update out within 24 hours to fix it.
Unfortunately, some vendors are not this fast. I've seen Spybot take years to fix false positives that have been brought to their attention.
Most are somewhere between these two. Generally, it goes like this. Company A notices that company B's product has a false positive on A's files. A contacts B about this, using B's public contact information, which generally is meant for the general public. So, A's complaint might end up in the support system, and might get kicked around there for a while as the support people try to figure out what to do with it. Eventually, it reaches some manager who has got a bunch of stuff on his plate, directly from his superiors, so he doesn't give this high priority.
A notices it is taking a long time, so looks for a better way to contact B. If A and B are reasonably big and in the same country or region, it will probably turn out someone high in A's management knows someone high in B's management, or knows someone who knows someone high in B's management who can introduce them, and then there is a high level request from A to B. That has a decent chance of getting results.
If no such contact can be found, or it fails to get action, then A calls the lawyers, and they write a letter to B's lawyers. That should get some attention at B, and whatever manager the first request got stuck at gets prompted to do something.
If nothing happens then, it is lawsuit time. When a lawsuit is actually filed, THAT gets the attention of B, all the way up to the top, and then things happen. (And the people who failed to act earlier get in a lot of trouble...companies do not like it when they get sued, even if the actual purpose of the suit is just to get someone's attention to fix a problem).
I suspect that a good percentage of lawsuits filed in the software industry (in general, not just AV) are to get the attention of upper management in the defendant to get some simple problem resolved that has fallen through the cracks.
A lesson here for anyone starting a company is to hire some top management people who are well-connected. If your Director of Engineering or CTO or Chief Scientist or whatever, in a situation like this, can say, "Hey...B's CTO went to my school and we were in the same fraternity...I can get his number, call, give the secret Alpha Delta Smegma pass phrase, and I'm sure he'll get the problem taken care of", that's great. The tech industry, just like the other industry groups, has its old boy's network, and you want to have someone who is connected to that.
Yes, monitors are wider, can support smaller fonts, etc, so on screen you can get wider. (Using a small but readable font, I just maximized my terminal, and it came out to 276 columns).
But sometimes it's nice to print code on paper. And that sucks mightily if the code is formatted for a zillion column displays.
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand. Take, for example, Amazon's infamous 1-click case. Who would have thought it neccessary to catalog "a technique of allowing customers to make online purchases with a single click" as prior art? It wasn't until Amazon patented this that anyone even THOUGHT about this as something that needed to be defended as obvious
If it is so obvious, how come it wasn't in widespread use before Amazon did it? Anything that speeds up the ordering or checkout process makes a LOT of money at ecommerce sites, and ecommerce sites know this and are always looking for ways to do that, so your contention is basically that 1-click is obvious, but no one bothered to implement it? That's rather farfetched. If it were obvious, it would not have taken 6 years to find prior art to challenge the patent.
Who is going to pay for all the lawyers you need after the site becomes embroiled in about 1,000 lawsuits?
How would the site become embroiled in lawsuits?
Who is going to determine WHICH art is truly "prior" when users start fighting over who "did it first"?
That's not the site's problem. That would be determined by the courts, when the disagreeing users sue each other.
How are you going to deal with griefers and hucksters who spam the site with stuff like "A technique by which ink is applied to paper using an ink-filled tube"
The simplest way to deal with them is to ignore them. You seem to have completely missed the point of the proposed site.
My point is that RMS seems to think it is serious that Linux seems to infringe the patents from that study. And I agree with him on that.
Sure, most of them have not been tested in court, but so what? There is a legal presumption that a patent is valid, and so even if the patent should not have been issued, it is a big pain to fight it if you find yourself on the wrong end of a patent infringement suit over it.
It's probably the same ones that RMS says Linux violates:
Two years ago, a thorough study found that the kernel Linux infringed 283 different software patents, and that's just in the US. Of course, by now the number is probably different and might be higher.
FastSoft's product may have been big news in the early 1990s, but if a company has to resort to making performance comparisons against the "Reno" TCP implementation, they're a snake oil salesman because Reno is such an obsolete and shitty TCP congestion control implementation
Well, let's see. They won the 2005 supercomputing bandwidth challenge with their system. They also have numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, invited presentations at conferences, etc. Sure doesn't sound like snake oil.
No thanks. I got mine on launch day, after a grueling 40-minute wait in line.:-)
I got up early launch morning, just to drive around to the major stores (Best Buy, Target, Circuit City) to see how big the lines were. I didn't expect to get one. I was just curious.
After that, it occurred to me that I had not checked K-Mart. I had driven by K-Mart the night before, and no lines were forming, and I wasn't even sure K-Mart was participating in the launch. I was curious to see if there was a line there, but not curious enough to drive there without knowing if K-Mart was a launch store.
Around 7:00, it occurred to me that since I'm in GMT-8, and K-Mart is a national chain, I could call a K-Mart in GMT-5 that had been open for a couple hours, and ask if they had carried Wiis. I did this, and found that they had. I now knew that K-Mart was participating in the launch, so there was a chance my local store had some. So, for completeness, I drove to K-Mart to see how big the line was. It was two people, so what the hell, I figured I'd give it a try. It turned out those two were together, only buying one Wii, so if there were at least 2 in that store, I'd have one.
This is actually pretty surprising... 1.3 million Wiis have been sold in Europe, while 1 million PS3s have been sold in the EU/AU? That seems pretty impressive for a machine that costs more than twice as much
It's not impressive at all when you consider that the PS3 is widely available...so widely available that stores are cutting prices to make it move. The Wii, on the other hand, generally still requires giving up your firstborn and your soul to find.
Unfounded, pro-prosecution claims. Belief in authority. Between-the-lines longing for official (i.e. governmental) intervention. You must be a Republican, like all the other hypocrites
What do you mean unfounded? That was HER testimony. She states they started in the morning. She states they were still happening all day. I don't know where you live, but here on Earth, a day is several hours. Hence, pop-ups were occurring for several hours.
You know what's funny? You expect this woman to react appropriately in the heat of the moment. OTOH, you, who is under no pressure and has all the time in the world, failed to come up with the most effective way to prevent the images, i.e. turn off the monitor, and instead would be running around the classroom looking for construction paper and tape.
What do you mean by "in the heat of the moment"? According to her testimony at her trial, the situation continued for several hours. If she could not think of something in the first several minutes, fine, but to not be able to come up with any solution over several hours is not failure to react just "in the heat of the moment".
As for turning off the monitor, I left that off on purpose. She had been told not to turn the computer off. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt there and assuming that she did not realize that the monitor and computer might be separately powered.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets very annoying when you have several servers if they have different distributions, because of the differences in where they put things. Suppose you need to take a look at a CGI script on a server. Where is it? /usr/lib/cgi-bin? /srv/www/cgi-bin? Somewhere else?
Where's the apache configuration? /etc/httpd or /etc/apache2? Do you change the Apache configuration by editing httpd.conf, or has the distro set it up so you drop your config changes somewhere else and are supposed to never touch httpd.conf lest you screw up updating?
Where's the mysql databases? Those are all over the map, too.
I've found that different Linux distros on my servers introduce as much extra work in developing and maintaining things as mixing Linux and FreeBSD does.
Now note that I can avoid all of the above problems by picking one distro and using it on all my servers. However, if I ever need help on something and search the net, the other distros rear their ugly heads, as I run into documentation that seems helpful, but turns out to have been written based on a different distro, and makes assumptions that aren't valid on mine.
On the one hand, it's something like 20 years old.
On the other hand, the Star Wars movies have become pop classics, and cultural icons. Thus, it is safe to assume that many people of each generation will want to watch them, and so we should try not to spoil it.
But wait...what order will they watch them? If they start with TPM, then they are going to already know about Vader when they get to the "I am your father" scene. It is no spoiler.
However, many of them will be lucky enough to have someone tell them the right way to watch the movies. (Start with ANH, and go forward until "I am your father", then gosub to TPM, AotC, and RotS to get the story behind Vader, then return and finish the series). It would be a spoiler for these people.
I think the Harry Potter books and/or films might end up in a similar position.
The rule should probably be that for any story (whether book, movie, comic, erotic flip book, whatever), you don't give away story details that might be spoilers unless you are sure you have an audience that already knows, or won't care.
It sounds like they were looking at how much patents made in licensing or in lawsuits. But what about patents that are neither licensed out nor lead to a lawsuit? The third way to make money off a patent is to be the exclusive provider of whatever is covered by the patent.
And even if we do have the complete, original, score, it may have been for old instruments. A lute is not the same as a guitar, for example, and when Vivaldi wrote for lute, he knew how it would be tuned, and what fingerings were possible. To make it work on a guitar can be quite a creative challenge.
Even if we still use the same instruments as the composer wrote the piece for, we might want a score for different instruments. You can't just sit down at your piano, or guitar, or with your full orchestra, with the score to, say, Bach's cantata #147 ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring") as originally written as a choral work, and start playing. It just won't work. You basically have to rewrite the music for those different settings.
Same here. But then the second thing I thought of was to check out cups.org at the internet archive, where I found out that those provisions have been there since sometime before October, 2002, so it seems unlikely this purchase is about that. :-)
And the project is still open source.
It does? Amazon lists more Wii games than PS3 games. Gamestop does list more PS3 than Wii games, but only about 10% more, not "far more".
I would not be surprised if this turned out to be the reason that the deal was structured to use coupons.
When in line at the supermarket, ask people.
When waiting to pick up your kids at daycare, strike up a conversation about computers with the other parents, and find out what they use. Or ask other parents at the next PTA meeting.
Ask others at your church or coven.
At the next meeting of your model rocketry club or RC airplane club, find out what people are using.
Next time you are at BestBuy buying blank CDs, or a thumb drive, or anything else in the computer section, say "I wonder if this works with Linux?" when several other customers can overhear you, and see if you get anyone offering advice.
Take a peek at the laptops when you walk through a coffee shop with an active wifi hotspot user population.
Almost everyone, almost everyday, encounters plenty of other computer users in contexts that won't be biased toward a particular operating system, providing an opportunity for a little informal polling.
The gist of the article seems to be that no counting method is perfect and therefore gives you no useful information. In fact, an imperfect counting method can still give some information, and the information from independent methods can be combined. This is done all the time in science, for instance. Does the original author think that marine biologists get counts of fish populations by counting every single fish in the ocean?
Some started as far back as 2002, and are still there in the current version.
If Spybot were a brand new program, from someone unknown, it would probably make the rogue list for too many false positives. But because it was one of the first, and was very good back in the old days when the spyware problem was much smaller, it gets grandfathered in, and people overlook a lot in it that they would not overlook in a modern program.
The question is what is the first thing you do when you get to work. I would hope that showering is before you get to work!
At the AV vendor I've worked for, when they get a report from another AV vendor of a false positive on that other vendor's product, they would investigate and get an update out within 24 hours to fix it.
Unfortunately, some vendors are not this fast. I've seen Spybot take years to fix false positives that have been brought to their attention.
Most are somewhere between these two. Generally, it goes like this. Company A notices that company B's product has a false positive on A's files. A contacts B about this, using B's public contact information, which generally is meant for the general public. So, A's complaint might end up in the support system, and might get kicked around there for a while as the support people try to figure out what to do with it. Eventually, it reaches some manager who has got a bunch of stuff on his plate, directly from his superiors, so he doesn't give this high priority.
A notices it is taking a long time, so looks for a better way to contact B. If A and B are reasonably big and in the same country or region, it will probably turn out someone high in A's management knows someone high in B's management, or knows someone who knows someone high in B's management who can introduce them, and then there is a high level request from A to B. That has a decent chance of getting results.
If no such contact can be found, or it fails to get action, then A calls the lawyers, and they write a letter to B's lawyers. That should get some attention at B, and whatever manager the first request got stuck at gets prompted to do something.
If nothing happens then, it is lawsuit time. When a lawsuit is actually filed, THAT gets the attention of B, all the way up to the top, and then things happen. (And the people who failed to act earlier get in a lot of trouble...companies do not like it when they get sued, even if the actual purpose of the suit is just to get someone's attention to fix a problem).
I suspect that a good percentage of lawsuits filed in the software industry (in general, not just AV) are to get the attention of upper management in the defendant to get some simple problem resolved that has fallen through the cracks.
A lesson here for anyone starting a company is to hire some top management people who are well-connected. If your Director of Engineering or CTO or Chief Scientist or whatever, in a situation like this, can say, "Hey...B's CTO went to my school and we were in the same fraternity...I can get his number, call, give the secret Alpha Delta Smegma pass phrase, and I'm sure he'll get the problem taken care of", that's great. The tech industry, just like the other industry groups, has its old boy's network, and you want to have someone who is connected to that.
But sometimes it's nice to print code on paper. And that sucks mightily if the code is formatted for a zillion column displays.
If it is so obvious, how come it wasn't in widespread use before Amazon did it? Anything that speeds up the ordering or checkout process makes a LOT of money at ecommerce sites, and ecommerce sites know this and are always looking for ways to do that, so your contention is basically that 1-click is obvious, but no one bothered to implement it? That's rather farfetched. If it were obvious, it would not have taken 6 years to find prior art to challenge the patent.
How would the site become embroiled in lawsuits?
That's not the site's problem. That would be determined by the courts, when the disagreeing users sue each other.
The simplest way to deal with them is to ignore them. You seem to have completely missed the point of the proposed site.
Sure, most of them have not been tested in court, but so what? There is a legal presumption that a patent is valid, and so even if the patent should not have been issued, it is a big pain to fight it if you find yourself on the wrong end of a patent infringement suit over it.
There is a legal presumption of validity to any issued patent. BTW, you are the first person I've ever heard call RMS a Microsoft apologist.
Two years ago, a thorough study found that the kernel Linux infringed 283 different software patents, and that's just in the US. Of course, by now the number is probably different and might be higher.
TCP over UDP would be very useful, as it would allow two people behind NAT routers to communicate using protocols that are built on TCP.
Well, let's see. They won the 2005 supercomputing bandwidth challenge with their system. They also have numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, invited presentations at conferences, etc. Sure doesn't sound like snake oil.
I got up early launch morning, just to drive around to the major stores (Best Buy, Target, Circuit City) to see how big the lines were. I didn't expect to get one. I was just curious.
After that, it occurred to me that I had not checked K-Mart. I had driven by K-Mart the night before, and no lines were forming, and I wasn't even sure K-Mart was participating in the launch. I was curious to see if there was a line there, but not curious enough to drive there without knowing if K-Mart was a launch store.
Around 7:00, it occurred to me that since I'm in GMT-8, and K-Mart is a national chain, I could call a K-Mart in GMT-5 that had been open for a couple hours, and ask if they had carried Wiis. I did this, and found that they had. I now knew that K-Mart was participating in the launch, so there was a chance my local store had some. So, for completeness, I drove to K-Mart to see how big the line was. It was two people, so what the hell, I figured I'd give it a try. It turned out those two were together, only buying one Wii, so if there were at least 2 in that store, I'd have one.
The store had 2.
It's not impressive at all when you consider that the PS3 is widely available...so widely available that stores are cutting prices to make it move. The Wii, on the other hand, generally still requires giving up your firstborn and your soul to find.
What do you mean unfounded? That was HER testimony. She states they started in the morning. She states they were still happening all day. I don't know where you live, but here on Earth, a day is several hours. Hence, pop-ups were occurring for several hours.
That page contains links to where you can download and read the trial transcript, if you want more than that story summarizes.
What do you mean by "in the heat of the moment"? According to her testimony at her trial, the situation continued for several hours. If she could not think of something in the first several minutes, fine, but to not be able to come up with any solution over several hours is not failure to react just "in the heat of the moment".
As for turning off the monitor, I left that off on purpose. She had been told not to turn the computer off. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt there and assuming that she did not realize that the monitor and computer might be separately powered.