...AbiWord to be able to read/write KWord documents losslessly, and vice versa.
Oh wait...
My point here is that a commonly accepted free standard for editable documents may not be quite that important, since it's so easy to parse the few different formats that are already out there (most prominently, KWord and AbiWord, both of which are XML-based).
Sure, a standard format would be great, but not quite as important as you seem to think.
Erg. Sorry, my finger slipped. What I meant was that, you forget that Philips has marketing power too. Unlike us little guys, they can also run a TV smear campaign, as described here.
In other words, they expect you to do your job (protecting your system[s]), but don't allow you to do it (because doing it would require switching to another OS, which they do not permit).
This means that it is not possible for you to avoid getting fired for incompetence or some other green, liquid horse shit.
The solution, of course, is to protest and resign.
Yet another good reason to replace them with LCDs or something... Spending most of my waking hours in front of a particle accelerator pointed at a sheet of phosphor is not exactly comforting!
By the way, how the hell can it have that much capacitance if it only consumes 100 watts when on?
Finally, doesn't anyone think these techniques could be used to turn a monitor into a directed-energy weapon? Perhaps we don't need humongous lasers after all...
The patent system is NOT unworkable. In case you didn't know, the fees for getting a patent are even reduced 50% for "small entities" - essentially individual inventors.
Yeah. They're $400 a pop. There is NO WAY someone is going to shell out that kind of cash just to protect their invention from being patented by big business. I call that unworkable.
I am surprised that someone with a computer science background has this much trouble with an abstract concept - namely property.
You haven't been reading RMS lately, have you? If you haven't, well, maybe you should. His views on such things as patents and the ever-so-repugnant idea of software as property are quite close to my own, but he is much better at describing them.
The fact is the patent system exists to promote progress.
It used to exist to promote progress. Now it exists to promote transfer of large quantities of money from the poor to the rich, and stifle progress. This is largely due to the fact that there are so many trivial patents being issued.
The time is limited so that society as a whole can use the invention when the patent duration has expired.
Which is all fine and dandy, except most computer-related patents are obsolete well before then.
You do not because you are not the first to do it.
I do not have the right to give it away, either, which is what I really object to, and what you seem to keep forgetting for some reason.
You are merely recreating what has been done.
I'm not allowed to improve upon an existing, patented invention, either.
if that were allowable, patents on wheels would be issued on a regular basis.
The software equivalent of patents on wheels (like Amazon's one-click patent) do get issued on a regular basis. Where have you been?
It is impossible for a corporation to obtain a patent directly, but these days, patents are almost invariably owned by corporations after being patented by some individual inventor who works for the company. Don't kid yourself; inventors get screwed in the rear by big business.
Teach one of ordinary skill in the art how to do RGB alpha compositing? Gee, that's nice. I could do it myself, building on existing (monochrome) alpha compositing code, without so much as a glance at Apple's silly patent, if I felt there was some usefulness in it. In other words, this patent is beyond trivial.
Computer-related patents ought to expire much sooner than all others, simply because they become obsolete very quickly -- well before the patent expires. Well, obsolete or commonplace, depending on whether the patent was on something widely useful (like IBM's scroll-down-when-the-screen-gets-full patent, or RSA's public key crypto algorithm) or not so widely useful (like Apple's RGB alpha compositing patent, which is also kind of useless as far as I can tell).
As for ease of implementation, my point is not that software patents shouldn't exist, but that the license fees should always be directly proportional to the amount of money made from the development or transfer of the software which implements that patent. That way, free software developers can still do their thing without getting bothered by big companies with lawyeritis.
As for changing the rules: I would love to change the rules. Believe me. Unfortunately, that's kind of impossible. Congress takes years just to agree on a budget! Imagine how long it would take them to reform the patent system so that it's in a workable state again.
Rights. So, everyone else's (*cough*big*cough*business*cough*) rights supersede mine unconditionally? But mine don't supersede theirs? How nice. My faith in humanity just decreased another notch...
The analogy with food is completely invalid with software patents, simply because software is extremely easy to duplicate, and because software patents are extremely inexpensive to implement (apart from paying the patent license fees, of course). Most hardware patents are a little difficult to implement as a hobby. Most people don't exactly have fabs in their garages. Therefore, these types of patents are only of concern to companies, who wish to manufacture the hardware that is patented. With software patents, an individual can implement the patent, and it is therefore of concern to individuals as well.
To build on your analogy: if I give a man an apple, the man has an apple and I do not have an apple. If I give a man an idea, the man has an idea and I have an idea. This analogy is all the more applicable with software patents, since it doesn't necessarily cost anything to write code, unlike with hardware, which has to be manufactured, as described above.
From what I know about its history, the patent system was never intended to affect individuals directly. Let's keep it that way.
And be adult enough to have your life savings taken away by some big company to line some greedy, uncaring executive's pockets?
Just because those companies began on a budget of 3 cents doesn't mean they still are on one. Because of the not-generally-appealing-to-the-masses nature of most Open Source software, I find it difficult to believe that any of these companies who go around sending C&D letters to people are going to be impacted significantly by the emergence of the software.
The reason why they are doing it continues to elude me, but whatever the reason, it cannot bode well for Open Source.
Oh, by the way, you should go around your neighborhood and ask Joe Random Citizen what he would think if a big company like, say, AOL-TW sued an individual hobbyist. Chances are, Joe isn't going to like the idea very much.
But I suppose all of this falls on deaf ears. Typical. I only hope there are enough people out there who do understand the value of freedom; you and your kind obviously don't.
Quite frequently, new versions of stable kernels incorporate security fixes. That's why I always make a point of upgrading -- especially if there's an announcement that there was a security fix in the latest version.
Oh good, so I'm supposed to wait several weeks for Debian to make a new kernel package, even though the current kernel has a big gaping security hole that allows 31337 H4X0RZ remote root access on my box?
Oh yeah, and did I mention that most distributions (Brown Hat) don't even release new packages, but new versions of their distribution, several months later? And those who use those God-awful distributions are supposed to simply sit back and let the script kiddies have their way until then? I don't think so!
I agree with the sentiment that the stable kernel series is called 'stable' for a reason -- it's supposed to be stable, tested, and shown to function correctly, and not have glaring bugs like fs corruption on fscking umount. That's just sad.
Apparently you forgot that doing a 'legal feasibility study' is itself infeasible for most Open Source projects, which typically have a grand total funding of, um, 3 cents? How many Open Source developers do you think are going to shell out thousands of dollars to pay the patent attorney, and probably still wind up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars when some asshole company or another decides to sue them? Most Open Source developers are doing this in their free time, mind you. As a labor of love. Because they enjoy it. When the almighty buck becomes a factor, >90% of Open Source software ceases to exist. Few are willing to risk their life savings (and, at the rate things are going, probably soon their freedom or even their life) over a hobby.
I use Ogg whenever I have the original PCM data for the file (eg, the original CD), but I don't convert MP3s to Ogg simply because converting between two lossy formats can be hazardous to the health of the material...
I use PNG whenever I have a need for a lossless raster image format. I only produce GIFs if absolutely necessary (and no, supporting archaic Web browsers does not qualify as 'absolutely necessary').
That sounds accurate for analog video. Digital video is both one- and two-dimensional, and consists of a finite number of pixels, etc. Photorealistic games, likewise, have a finite such resolution, but in three-dimensional terms.
But I'm by no means a DSP expert, so I probably sound like an idiot right now. Ignore me at your leisure;)
What exactly do photorealistic games have to do with signal processing? Most of the CPU they consume is spent on vector math and geometry and such -- ie, rasterizing 3D data. The only signal processing games do, AFAIK, is perhaps decompressing the sound effects and music and playing them. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If you think MacOS is unstable and crashes a lot, you should try using one of Microsoft's recent operating systems, like Me or 2000. Macs crash when you try to do something strange and unusual to them (or install an extension that does something strange and unusual to them) and the OS doesn't cope with it very well. Windows, on the other hand, crashes frequently under normal operating conditions!
My family has bought a decent number of (relatively) new fluorescent light bulbs that fit in where the usual pear-shaped incandescent bulbs usually go. The package labelling states that
This bulb consumes x watts. (Usually around 20)
That's equivalent to y watts from an incandescent bulb. (Usually around 60)
The point I'm making here is that they're doing what AMD should be -- marketing their stuff based not on actual numbers (power consumption, clock speed, etc), but on equivalence to a more widely known product. AMD should state that their 1.4 GHz Athlon is equivalent to a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz. This is not exactly an untested marketing practice.
The CD-ROM drive is powered down >90% of the time.
It would be nice for someone to come up with a practical, cheap, solid-state, fast storage device with plenty of space (read: flash card on steroids), so we can get rid of traditional hard disks in laptops. The problem with those is also that they can be damaged if you use the machine in a moving vehicle -- a bump on the road would bump your disk drive's head(s), possibly enough to damage the surface of the disk. Permanently.
The processor power usage is lower on Linux, which uses power management features pretty much to the max in the idle loop. This includes
The HLT instruction.
APM/ACPI.
Not being a piece of bloated crap, and therefore being idle more often.;)
I concur. Research should go into fuel cells small enough to be practical in laptops and other such devices.
The Californian power crisis is over. I would know -- I live there. Our power supply is in reasonable condition now, mostly thanks to better-than-expected weather (ie, it's not a raging inferno like it usually is).
Besides reduced power consumption (which is a good thing -- don't get me wrong), another thing that needs to be done to extend battery life on laptops is research into other energy storage technologies. The primitive batteries that laptops presently use are sufficient, but not that great really. Perhaps research should be done into using fuel cells or some other such technology to power laptops.
Why exactly would anyone want a desktop replacement laptop? That's what desktops are for. Or am I just confused?
There should be big chassis for desktops if you want to make the normal ones be really small. Some of us do still use a lot of expansion slots/bays...
0.13 micron process??
An MP3 server/player could be readily built on a 200 MHz Pentium 1 and work beautifully. You overestimate the hardware demands of that application.
Why did Apple discontinue the Cube, anyway? It was cute, and therefore marketable, so I'm not sure I understand...
Slashdot Mirror
The Pocket PC runs Microsoft Windows. 'Nuff said.
</bigotry>
Why not simply have the BIOS itself throw up the logo, and then maybe get some checksums or something from the cartridge?
And what's the 'very simple checksum' for? To insure that your code hasn't been corrupted?
Oh wait...
My point here is that a commonly accepted free standard for editable documents may not be quite that important, since it's so easy to parse the few different formats that are already out there (most prominently, KWord and AbiWord, both of which are XML-based).
Sure, a standard format would be great, but not quite as important as you seem to think.
Erg. Sorry, my finger slipped. What I meant was that, you forget that Philips has marketing power too. Unlike us little guys, they can also run a TV smear campaign, as described here.
You forget that Philips has marketing power too.
This means that it is not possible for you to avoid getting fired for incompetence or some other green, liquid horse shit.
The solution, of course, is to protest and resign.
How much power would it consume in that state?
By the way, how the hell can it have that much capacitance if it only consumes 100 watts when on?
Finally, doesn't anyone think these techniques could be used to turn a monitor into a directed-energy weapon? Perhaps we don't need humongous lasers after all...
Teach one of ordinary skill in the art how to do RGB alpha compositing? Gee, that's nice. I could do it myself, building on existing (monochrome) alpha compositing code, without so much as a glance at Apple's silly patent, if I felt there was some usefulness in it. In other words, this patent is beyond trivial.
Computer-related patents ought to expire much sooner than all others, simply because they become obsolete very quickly -- well before the patent expires. Well, obsolete or commonplace, depending on whether the patent was on something widely useful (like IBM's scroll-down-when-the-screen-gets-full patent, or RSA's public key crypto algorithm) or not so widely useful (like Apple's RGB alpha compositing patent, which is also kind of useless as far as I can tell).
As for ease of implementation, my point is not that software patents shouldn't exist, but that the license fees should always be directly proportional to the amount of money made from the development or transfer of the software which implements that patent. That way, free software developers can still do their thing without getting bothered by big companies with lawyeritis.
As for changing the rules: I would love to change the rules. Believe me. Unfortunately, that's kind of impossible. Congress takes years just to agree on a budget! Imagine how long it would take them to reform the patent system so that it's in a workable state again.
Rights. So, everyone else's (*cough*big*cough*business*cough*) rights supersede mine unconditionally? But mine don't supersede theirs? How nice. My faith in humanity just decreased another notch...
The analogy with food is completely invalid with software patents, simply because software is extremely easy to duplicate, and because software patents are extremely inexpensive to implement (apart from paying the patent license fees, of course). Most hardware patents are a little difficult to implement as a hobby. Most people don't exactly have fabs in their garages. Therefore, these types of patents are only of concern to companies, who wish to manufacture the hardware that is patented. With software patents, an individual can implement the patent, and it is therefore of concern to individuals as well.
To build on your analogy: if I give a man an apple, the man has an apple and I do not have an apple. If I give a man an idea, the man has an idea and I have an idea. This analogy is all the more applicable with software patents, since it doesn't necessarily cost anything to write code, unlike with hardware, which has to be manufactured, as described above.
From what I know about its history, the patent system was never intended to affect individuals directly. Let's keep it that way.
Just because those companies began on a budget of 3 cents doesn't mean they still are on one. Because of the not-generally-appealing-to-the-masses nature of most Open Source software, I find it difficult to believe that any of these companies who go around sending C&D letters to people are going to be impacted significantly by the emergence of the software.
The reason why they are doing it continues to elude me, but whatever the reason, it cannot bode well for Open Source.
Oh, by the way, you should go around your neighborhood and ask Joe Random Citizen what he would think if a big company like, say, AOL-TW sued an individual hobbyist. Chances are, Joe isn't going to like the idea very much.
But I suppose all of this falls on deaf ears. Typical. I only hope there are enough people out there who do understand the value of freedom; you and your kind obviously don't.
Quite frequently, new versions of stable kernels incorporate security fixes. That's why I always make a point of upgrading -- especially if there's an announcement that there was a security fix in the latest version.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that most distributions (Brown Hat) don't even release new packages, but new versions of their distribution, several months later? And those who use those God-awful distributions are supposed to simply sit back and let the script kiddies have their way until then? I don't think so!
I agree with the sentiment that the stable kernel series is called 'stable' for a reason -- it's supposed to be stable, tested, and shown to function correctly, and not have glaring bugs like fs corruption on fscking umount. That's just sad.
Or maybe that's the idea... The plot thickens.
Hmmm....
:)
I use Ogg whenever I have the original PCM data for the file (eg, the original CD), but I don't convert MP3s to Ogg simply because converting between two lossy formats can be hazardous to the health of the material...
I use PNG whenever I have a need for a lossless raster image format. I only produce GIFs if absolutely necessary (and no, supporting archaic Web browsers does not qualify as 'absolutely necessary').
Next question, please.
That sounds accurate for analog video. Digital video is both one- and two-dimensional, and consists of a finite number of pixels, etc. Photorealistic games, likewise, have a finite such resolution, but in three-dimensional terms.
But I'm by no means a DSP expert, so I probably sound like an idiot right now. Ignore me at your leisure ;)
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 7
model name : Pentium III (Katmai)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 451.029
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 897.84
My CPU is a Pentium III Katmai at 450 MHz, so my cpuinfo is correct.
What exactly do photorealistic games have to do with signal processing? Most of the CPU they consume is spent on vector math and geometry and such -- ie, rasterizing 3D data. The only signal processing games do, AFAIK, is perhaps decompressing the sound effects and music and playing them. Correct me if I'm wrong.
And a face, cigarette, and hat, apparently. Your assessment amuses me greatly, though. Thanks. :)
If you think MacOS is unstable and crashes a lot, you should try using one of Microsoft's recent operating systems, like Me or 2000. Macs crash when you try to do something strange and unusual to them (or install an extension that does something strange and unusual to them) and the OS doesn't cope with it very well. Windows, on the other hand, crashes frequently under normal operating conditions!
- This bulb consumes x watts. (Usually around 20)
- That's equivalent to y watts from an incandescent bulb. (Usually around 60)
The point I'm making here is that they're doing what AMD should be -- marketing their stuff based not on actual numbers (power consumption, clock speed, etc), but on equivalence to a more widely known product. AMD should state that their 1.4 GHz Athlon is equivalent to a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz. This is not exactly an untested marketing practice.