If this were a startup or a company with a more positive history things would be different. As it is, you'll just have to adapt.
If this were a startup or a company which had a better history (i.e. wasn't used to acting like a monopoly), we wouldn't even dream of them being able to get away with the the kind of control-freak bull that this threat seems to entail.
"Do exactly as we say, and nobody will get hurt.   Just remember: It's for your own good." `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The big problem is that he really IS a pioneer for the Open Source movement. Pioneers aren't necessarily happy about the people that followed them. He's not a spokesperson for Open Source, he's not a supporter for it. On the other hand, if it wasn't for his work, the movement might not exist in as lively a format as it does.
He put a lot of thought and work into the Gnu licenses that are pretty much at the heart of both movements and he produced or midwived the early software that made those licenses so well known and respected. Although I think that it's accurate to name him as a pioneer for the Open Source movement, I think that it was improper to not identify him as a spokesperson for the Free Software movement. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I don't see anything wrong with 'paying' for a license to use GNU software (The GNU delux distribution is one example). It's a way of supporting the organizations that produce this great software.
There's a difference between 'don't have to pay' and 'can't pay' for Open Source software.
I think that
Penguin, for example, includes a Red Hat box with each machine that they ship. They don't have to, but they want to. (In practice, I've also found that it's a good way to get distros into peoples' friends' homes.). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
-cc int default color visual class
-co file color database file ...
-gamma f set gamma value (0.1 < f < 10.0) Default: 1.0
-rgamma f set gamma value for red phase
-ggamma f set gamma value for green phase
-bgamma f set gamma value for blue phase
I don't use them personally, but I'm sure that people can come up with tools that would make using
these (and other X color support features) easy for non-geek pre-production types. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Even if Linux doesn't currently have good color calibration software, that doesn't mean that it's not going to. Some people may think that a Mac is the best venue for doing publication work, but SGIs have also been used for quite a while for the same purpose. We can always hope for yet more technology transfer from the SGI world into the Linux world (probably easier than a transfer from the Wintendo/Mac world).
As for the question of "why calibrate": it's mostly for publication purposes. When you're doing up an Add that's going to get 1 Million Dead Tree copies, it's worth spending the time and money to make sure that the soft blue hue isn't going to come out light navy (worst case).
For stuff that's going to get 1 million Dead Electron (Video) impressions, there's no way to make sure that the color on your screen is going to be seen exactly the same on another screen. On the other hand, if you have a (reasonably) well calibrated screen, there's at least some hope that things won't be as far out on average.
Example: If you're calibrated good, and I'm dark, your work will seem no worse than most other good images. On the other hand: If you're calibrated light and I'm calibrated dark, your image may still stand out as noticibly bad on my (already improperly calibrated) video screen.
If you're the only person who's going to see your graphics work, then calibration isn't terribly necessary. On the other hand, simple calibration will make it easier to match stuff from your scanner and it's usually nice to know that you're seeing an image in somewhat the same colors as was intended by the artist that created it. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
There was a time (early 90's) when it was quicker to get a packet from Vancouver, BC to Australia than it was to get one from Vancouver to Edmonton, Alberta (equiv: Washington to Montana). The reason, it turns out, is that a professor at the University of Alberta was continually backing up Gigabyte drive full of data from the UofA to a machine in California.
The result was that he singlehandedly saturated the cross-Rockies pipe. The rest of us plebes with less-than joined-at-the-hip access to the national net got to deal with massive latencies (well over 300ms on average).
With this new pipe to Australia, it looks like we may be back to the old trick of it being faster to send a packet pan-pacific, than to the next province. (though for happier reasons).
Oh, never mind. I currently get 45ms to a machine in Edmonton... still better than the Southern cross pipe. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It's fine using something like.net or C# or VB, as long as you're willing to put up with Microsoft's idea of the Future.
Where do you want to go today?
Do you think we care?
If they decide to drop support for VB in favour of C#, you're screwed. If they decide the C# isn't really all they hoped it was, you've wasted your time learning it. If Linux manages to gain a 50% desktop share, you've locked yourself out of 50% of the market (like you're really expecting MS to support a competetor?)
It's your money, your time and your life. Good luck. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
SUN = Stanford University Networks.
Sounds nice, but Bill Joy (if not other SUN founders) was a Berkleyite. (I think he helped write the original vi(1)). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
They have the right to refuse you entry to their private property for any reason they see fit. On the way in, if you don't consent to a search, there and then, they have the right to exercise that right.
On the way out, they have absolutely no right to deny you the right to leave unless they're willing to place you under citizen's arrest with probable cause. As stated before -- refusal to be searchde is not probable cause.
If they don't have probable cause (as mentioned in a previous post), then all that they can do in response to a refusal to be searched is to ask you to leave (job done). If they try to stop you from leaving (short of a formal arrest), then it's called 'illegal confinement'. If they touch you in the process, you can probably add assault, and any assortment of civil and criminal complaints (talk to your lawyer on this).
There's a reason why the stores responded in the way they did in a previous post that addressed this issue head-on.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Bwah. If you know that your nose is clean, offer to do the audit for a reasonable sum of money ($75~150/hour). You're doing them a favour. There's no reason not to ask them for reasonable reinbursment (including profit), having paid their friends an outrageous sum (in some cases) for a copy of a $.50 CD. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Somebody suggested that if your school wants the code of your dissertation, they should pay you an
hourly rate. OK, but are you willing to pay your
advisor an hourly consultation fee?
If you compare the number of hours you 'consult' with your advisor to the number of hours you spend working on your thesis and other {non-,}associated work, I think that -- even with a good premium on advisor time -- the student would come out ahead. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The company owned code that eroneously 'got GPLed' as part of a greater GPL project can sue your company for using the code. Of course, once that happens, the group that originated the GPL project can sue the company that's suing your company. The GPL group would sue them for copyright violation of the original code (which can only be distributed under GPL). An employee of the company 'owning' the contributed GPL code, would be deemed as acting as an agent of the company.
Probably the easiest way to do it would be to assign (partial) rights to counter-sue to the company that's being sued for using the code.
IANAL. My sister is, but she doesn't talk to me. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
When the election is final, we'll
post one more story, and kiss politics good bye for a few years.
Right... Napster, Copyrights, Patent laws, all that political stuff is behind you for the next four years until the next opportunity to put a mark on a piece of paper....
I'm Canadian, so our election is still a few weeks away. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Well, I'm not a doctorate, but I have a simple explanation.
Gravity sucks.
As for them ending up as a double-galaxy singularit, I don't think that they'll become a singularity, but current theory considers the probability/liklihood, that most normal galaxies contain a central black hole. Becomming a black hole would require more than two black holes passing through each other on a cyclical basis.
I would expect that they'll end up intertwining over time. If we're alive a couple hundred million years from now, we might even see the next iteration. (presuming that the sun hasn't melted down by then). I guess that that leads to the next question:
Are there any signs of globular clusters (or whatever galexies turn into post-collision) going for a second try? `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Relax. The/. community -- like any other large community -- consists of users of all levels. Some people will read the whold article, and understand it. Others will go off early and respond to what "William Gates" had to say, as if it's really THE Bill Gates that wrote it.
Such is life.
That's why we have the moderation system. You can always up the moderation threshold and only read from people who've managed to finagle a 2 or 3 moderation level. -- they're much more likely to be of the level of writing that you're hoping for.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
One of the responses in the article mentioned Linux starting a new era where people did stuff, and gave it away for free (wow!). It's not a new era.
People getting together and doing things for the community 'for free' has been around since before the days of money. It was a normal way of doing things in the era of the pioneer, and it's been the way of doing things on the internet since it was usenet (and before that, when it was simply "the academic community").
People enjoy contributing to each other. More often than not, we tend to ignore the contribution that other people wish to make to us. The Free and Open software movements simply re-awaken those instincts in us and allow us to contribute to the community at large. Human nature will not die out as long as human beings exist.
As for the collapse of the Free/Open Source community under it's own weight, that prediction has been made of a similar user-directed and controlled system that we now know as 'the net'. Those predictions were common as far back as the early '80s. -- Notice how the 'net' collapsed in the mid-90s. Chances are that the same sort of 'collapse' may occur for the Open/Free Source communities at some time in the future (we can only hope so!). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
That's probably because it does more positional calculations (once for each frame). If the frame doesn't 'catch' you at the very top of the parabola, it looks like you didn't jump quite as high.
I remember dealing with this in a moon lander program for Radio-Shack Model I. The original version did a non-realtime cycle of 1 "frame" per second. I found it annoying that you could be 3 feet up dropping 50FPS, and then, after a heavy burn, be 10 feet up climbing at 80FPS. I resolved the problem by calculating lower bound of the curve to see if you touched the ground. If you touched the ground, I'd calculate your speed at touchdown time to decide whether or not you cratered.
Later on, I did a realtime version -- peek commands for keyboard scan codes and input editing routines. I think I got it up to about 5 FPS. At the time, that was considered pretty hot. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Research into encryption and protection mechanisms is now effectively Verbotten. Only commercially significant exceptions are allowed. Research is not a commercially significant use. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If people gave reasons why a general category should be exempted, they said that the submission was to general, and they needed you to be more specific. If people gave specific examples, they rejected the submission because it was specific. They did not explain this restriction before people made supmissions on the measure.
In any case, if a company complained about a possible exemption it was rejected, simply because the company complained.
Smells like payola to me.
Beyond that, If there is a serious problem with a protection mechanism, you can circumvent the mechanism as long as you don't use any sort of device or technology to do so... I.e. you can circumvent a problematic protection mechanism as long as you're incapable of doing so.
This is as close to the original catch-22 as I could expect to see in a normal lifetime.
I presume that there is a record of who voted for this supremely FSCKed up law to begin with? Can anybody give me a pointer? `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Yeah, right. tell that to MS. I think that we can be clear that what you (don't) pay for a product is not necessarily related to the value/power of the product.
You don't get what you pay for, you get what you choose, then you pay for your choice.
mySQL is not (currently) being touted as a real alternative to Oracle for large databases. It has it's uses, and that's not one of them. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I hope your not indirectly implying Linux's track record is any better?
I won't just imply it, I'll say it. Linux's track record is better -- at least in this way:
MS has a reputation of denying and/or pooh-poohing security bugs. There have been a few cases of hackers going to MS, quietly, with bug reports and being given the runaround about them until they get frustrated enough that they simply report the bug to the press to light a fire under MS's ass.
I mean: how many people would have been surprised to find that MS would have let their employees get remote access using Win/95 boxes?
For many security conscious types, that ideas is almost obscene. NT is slightly better, but I wouldn't even THINK of betting my life on it.
Given that kind of history,
I wouldn't be all too surprised to find that there are a few bugs/design errors that Microsoft knows about internally, but "just hasn't had the time to fix" or considered "user enhancements". This probably includes a couple that black-hat hackers have found and not bothered to report to MS or the press.
This is what (I think) was probably meant by leaving your windows open.
In the open source community, there's always somebody out there who -- when a security bug is found -- feels some self-interest in closing the problem as soon as possible. This means that the space between reporting a bug, and having it closed by people who care, is as small as possible.
If I'm feeling paranoid, I can always go to free BSD who apparently clame Zero remote-root exploits in the last 3 years.
I don't have that sort of warm and fuzzy feeling with Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do exactly as we say, and nobody will get hurt.   Just remember: It's for your own good."
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
He put a lot of thought and work into the Gnu licenses that are pretty much at the heart of both movements and he produced or midwived the early software that made those licenses so well known and respected. Although I think that it's accurate to name him as a pioneer for the Open Source movement, I think that it was improper to not identify him as a spokesperson for the Free Software movement.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
There's a difference between 'don't have to pay' and 'can't pay' for Open Source software.
I think that Penguin, for example, includes a Red Hat box with each machine that they ship. They don't have to, but they want to. (In practice, I've also found that it's a good way to get distros into peoples' friends' homes.).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
-cc int default color visual class
...
-co file color database file
-gamma f set gamma value (0.1 < f < 10.0) Default: 1.0
-rgamma f set gamma value for red phase
-ggamma f set gamma value for green phase
-bgamma f set gamma value for blue phase
I don't use them personally, but I'm sure that people can come up with tools that would make using these (and other X color support features) easy for non-geek pre-production types.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
As for the question of "why calibrate": it's mostly for publication purposes. When you're doing up an Add that's going to get 1 Million Dead Tree copies, it's worth spending the time and money to make sure that the soft blue hue isn't going to come out light navy (worst case).
For stuff that's going to get 1 million Dead Electron (Video) impressions, there's no way to make sure that the color on your screen is going to be seen exactly the same on another screen. On the other hand, if you have a (reasonably) well calibrated screen, there's at least some hope that things won't be as far out on average.
Example: If you're calibrated good, and I'm dark, your work will seem no worse than most other good images. On the other hand: If you're calibrated light and I'm calibrated dark, your image may still stand out as noticibly bad on my (already improperly calibrated) video screen.
If you're the only person who's going to see your graphics work, then calibration isn't terribly necessary. On the other hand, simple calibration will make it easier to match stuff from your scanner and it's usually nice to know that you're seeing an image in somewhat the same colors as was intended by the artist that created it.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The result was that he singlehandedly saturated the cross-Rockies pipe. The rest of us plebes with less-than joined-at-the-hip access to the national net got to deal with massive latencies (well over 300ms on average).
With this new pipe to Australia, it looks like we may be back to the old trick of it being faster to send a packet pan-pacific, than to the next province. (though for happier reasons).
Oh, never mind. I currently get 45ms to a machine in Edmonton... still better than the Southern cross pipe.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
As for .COM being reserved for Umericuns, try http://really.bcgreen.com
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It's fine using something like .net or C# or VB, as long as you're willing to put up with Microsoft's idea of the Future.
If they decide to drop support for VB in favour of C#, you're screwed. If they decide the C# isn't really all they hoped it was, you've wasted your time learning it. If Linux manages to gain a 50% desktop share, you've locked yourself out of 50% of the market (like you're really expecting MS to support a competetor?)It's your money, your time and your life. Good luck.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
SUN = Stanford University Networks.
Sounds nice, but Bill Joy (if not other SUN founders) was a Berkleyite. (I think he helped write the original vi(1)).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
On the way out, they have absolutely no right to deny you the right to leave unless they're willing to place you under citizen's arrest with probable cause. As stated before -- refusal to be searchde is not probable cause.
If they don't have probable cause (as mentioned in a previous post), then all that they can do in response to a refusal to be searched is to ask you to leave (job done). If they try to stop you from leaving (short of a formal arrest), then it's called 'illegal confinement'. If they touch you in the process, you can probably add assault, and any assortment of civil and criminal complaints (talk to your lawyer on this). There's a reason why the stores responded in the way they did in a previous post that addressed this issue head-on.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Bwah. If you know that your nose is clean, offer to do the audit for a reasonable sum of money ($75~150/hour). You're doing them a favour. There's no reason not to ask them for reasonable reinbursment (including profit), having paid their friends an outrageous sum (in some cases) for a copy of a $.50 CD.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Probably the easiest way to do it would be to assign (partial) rights to counter-sue to the company that's being sued for using the code.
IANAL. My sister is, but she doesn't talk to me.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Right... Napster, Copyrights, Patent laws, all that political stuff is behind you for the next four years until the next opportunity to put a mark on a piece of paper....
I'm Canadian, so our election is still a few weeks away.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Gravity sucks.
As for them ending up as a double-galaxy singularit, I don't think that they'll become a singularity, but current theory considers the probability/liklihood, that most normal galaxies contain a central black hole. Becomming a black hole would require more than two black holes passing through each other on a cyclical basis.
I would expect that they'll end up intertwining over time. If we're alive a couple hundred million years from now, we might even see the next iteration. (presuming that the sun hasn't melted down by then). I guess that that leads to the next question:
Are there any signs of globular clusters (or whatever galexies turn into post-collision) going for a second try?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Such is life.
That's why we have the moderation system. You can always up the moderation threshold and only read from people who've managed to finagle a 2 or 3 moderation level. -- they're much more likely to be of the level of writing that you're hoping for.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
People getting together and doing things for the community 'for free' has been around since before the days of money. It was a normal way of doing things in the era of the pioneer, and it's been the way of doing things on the internet since it was usenet (and before that, when it was simply "the academic community").
People enjoy contributing to each other. More often than not, we tend to ignore the contribution that other people wish to make to us. The Free and Open software movements simply re-awaken those instincts in us and allow us to contribute to the community at large. Human nature will not die out as long as human beings exist.
As for the collapse of the Free/Open Source community under it's own weight, that prediction has been made of a similar user-directed and controlled system that we now know as 'the net'. Those predictions were common as far back as the early '80s. -- Notice how the 'net' collapsed in the mid-90s. Chances are that the same sort of 'collapse' may occur for the Open/Free Source communities at some time in the future (we can only hope so!).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I remember dealing with this in a moon lander program for Radio-Shack Model I. The original version did a non-realtime cycle of 1 "frame" per second. I found it annoying that you could be 3 feet up dropping 50FPS, and then, after a heavy burn, be 10 feet up climbing at 80FPS. I resolved the problem by calculating lower bound of the curve to see if you touched the ground. If you touched the ground, I'd calculate your speed at touchdown time to decide whether or not you cratered.
Later on, I did a realtime version -- peek commands for keyboard scan codes and input editing routines. I think I got it up to about 5 FPS. At the time, that was considered pretty hot.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Research into encryption and protection mechanisms is now effectively Verbotten. Only commercially significant exceptions are allowed. Research is not a commercially significant use.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
If people gave reasons why a general category should be exempted, they said that the submission was to general, and they needed you to be more specific. If people gave specific examples, they rejected the submission because it was specific. They did not explain this restriction before people made supmissions on the measure.
In any case, if a company complained about a possible exemption it was rejected, simply because the company complained.
Smells like payola to me.
Beyond that, If there is a serious problem with a protection mechanism, you can circumvent the mechanism as long as you don't use any sort of device or technology to do so... I.e. you can circumvent a problematic protection mechanism as long as you're incapable of doing so.
This is as close to the original catch-22 as I could expect to see in a normal lifetime.
I presume that there is a record of who voted for this supremely FSCKed up law to begin with? Can anybody give me a pointer?
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Yeah, right. tell that to MS. I think that we can be clear that what you (don't) pay for a product is not necessarily related to the value/power of the product.
You don't get what you pay for, you get what you choose, then you pay for your choice.
mySQL is not (currently) being touted as a real alternative to Oracle for large databases. It has it's uses, and that's not one of them.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
(all the developers use linux boxen)
I doubt that most MS developers use linux boxen.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
sleep() calls.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I won't just imply it, I'll say it. Linux's track record is better -- at least in this way:
MS has a reputation of denying and/or pooh-poohing security bugs. There have been a few cases of hackers going to MS, quietly, with bug reports and being given the runaround about them until they get frustrated enough that they simply report the bug to the press to light a fire under MS's ass.
I mean: how many people would have been surprised to find that MS would have let their employees get remote access using Win/95 boxes? For many security conscious types, that ideas is almost obscene. NT is slightly better, but I wouldn't even THINK of betting my life on it.
Given that kind of history, I wouldn't be all too surprised to find that there are a few bugs/design errors that Microsoft knows about internally, but "just hasn't had the time to fix" or considered "user enhancements". This probably includes a couple that black-hat hackers have found and not bothered to report to MS or the press.
This is what (I think) was probably meant by leaving your windows open.
In the open source community, there's always somebody out there who -- when a security bug is found -- feels some self-interest in closing the problem as soon as possible. This means that the space between reporting a bug, and having it closed by people who care, is as small as possible. If I'm feeling paranoid, I can always go to free BSD who apparently clame Zero remote-root exploits in the last 3 years. I don't have that sort of warm and fuzzy feeling with Microsoft.
'Nuff said.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!