In this case, it would be EvilCorp taking your software, modifying it "at your request" and then selling you the modified copy. So for example, Linksys could have you download the latest Linux code and then sell you their router without releasing the code. By purchasing their router, you just requested from them the modified code after obtaining the original. This ruling is definately in the interest of OSS
Is there really a performance benefit for going from 1GB to 2GB for average user? I've felt that the last noticeble jump with average usage pattern happens at 512->1GB jump. After that, all of your OS/Browser/Office/mplayer/etc. can sit in your RAM at the same time without much contention. That would mean that the performance improvement would only happen due to OS caching and maybe minimal RAM contention. (ie. Browser with lots of tabs + many huge Office documents)
You should take a look at the Gears of War video from E3. That is definitely a real-time capture of the game as it is played, and not something pre-rendered or a rendered cinematic. (Halo 3 is a rendered cinematic, which means no AI, extra game logic, etc.)
You completely mis-state the reason that monopolies are regulated. There is completely no problem with a monopoly leveraging some resource to enter into a new market, as long as they are entering the market on equal footing. The illegal part of a monopoly is to use their monopolistic power to underprice the competition through aggressive pricing.
That means that if some monopoly can build a widget for cost of $x, they are not allowed to price it for $y if yx. As that would be the abuse of monopoly size to price the competition out of the market. (Even this is not a hard rule, because some industries function like that, for example the razor+razor blades or game systems+games) That was exactly the reason for the monopolistic actions against the old railroads.
The specific action that Microsoft was found to be abusing the monopoly power for was bundling. The problem there is to use your monopoly in some area to gain market in another area by combining two products. If Microsoft was selling Internet Explorer without combining it with the OS, then it would not be abusing the monopoly in OS for a new product. That would be a legal way for a company to grow the portfolio.
So if microsoft is willing to spend the money to develop a new product, but doesn't abuse the monopoly for pricing or bundling - then it is a completely normal way to enter the merket.
Philanthropy is also important to Gates. He and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $27 billion (as of March 2004) to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available for all people. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $3.2 billion to organizations working in global health; more than $2 billion to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $477 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $488 million to special projects and annual giving campaigns.
I have and am using Linux together with Windows for many years. Neither of my installations have had a spyware/adware/virus problems for the same reason - I don't run unnecessary software for being a user. My workstation doesn't run Apache/IIS/SQL/etc.
Um, no. Sorry. That "logic" just doesn't hold. I think what you're trying to say is:
"I really hope the spyware will start coming out for Linux as well."
Umm.. I've worked at major company that decided to create a port of their software for Linux. After looking at the market, they decided that porting the code to provide the ads that support the software was not worth the time considering the userbase. Therefore the software was ported without adding the code to display the ads that were shown in Windows version.
So yeah, the marketing people don't consider Linux users as a demographics for use with general ads, especially considering the possibility of them just blocking the ad servers at host level. (The target audience of the software was young adults, so technical users were a small enough nieche to not care) That is why I'm saying that the adware will come to Linux if the general demographic will come, because the market is there. Spyware/adware is in majority based upon the "weatherbug/gator shpping book/etc." model, because that way they can claim legality against any anti-spyware software.
The only way to make OS secure from the user is to limit the user. If the user can install that latest plugin/weatherbug/etc. and will not think twice about that - spyware is a potential threat.
But if your personal less-priveledged account is affected, it doesn't matter that not the whole OS is affected. The most important thing is that the user's data/experience is the one that is affected.
I somehow don't see how you can fix the spyware problem at OS level. The problem is user installing untrusted software which is not an OS problem. If I sent you the latest and greatest version of Bejeweled 2 (assuming you really wanted the game 'cause all your friends said it was really good) that was compiled for linux, but included some spyware, how would the choice of your OS protect you?
It's really annoying to me that all of the linux users keep on taking the holier-than-thou attitude to spyware. Spyware is not a virus and does not prolifirate on it's own. The vector of attack for spyware/adware is through the uneducated/uninterested user downloading his latest fun program. That means that as soon as those nice downloadable games will be available for Linux, the spyware will start coming out for Linux as well. It doesn't matter if you are running as admin or as the user, because for spyware the only thing that matters is your user behavior. Therefore if you install it as the user, it will still be able to show ads, replace your mozilla start page, do popups, etc. The only difference is that it will be per-user rather than machine-wide. For most people that wouldn't matter as they are a single user on that machine and the difference between having it be user-process or admin-process really isn't large. As it has been previously pointed out - the only thing that matters on a personal workstation is the user's data and you don't have to be an admin to have access to that. The only good thing could be the fact that removing it could be just a tad simpler, assuming that the software doesn't try to exploit some type of local-root exploits.
The only reason Linux does not have that problem at this time is that there isn't a market for the spyware industry in the Linux world. The current Linux users are less likely to download those type of programs and more likely to ensure that the programs only do what they are supposed to. As soon as there is a noticeble increase in the average usage of Linux, the spyware will start to develop their expertise in that area as well.
It is in general very hard to impossible to take a picture of an arbitrary moving object because the speed of the object may be faster than your fastest setting. For a normal scene where you want just a single shot, it would be possible to set it up, but sometimes the object may move faster than fastest settings. For example, the beating of the wings for insects or very small birds (hummingbirds) requires very fast cameras. I was talking specifically about the movies, where the exposure is preset based upon the required framerate. 1/24second is not fast enough for lots of motion, which means that film has to have blur.
The motion blur in film is for the same reason that you would get a blur on any still picture of something that is moving fast - the amount of time the film is exposed is large enough to capture multiple locations of the object. This would lead to a blurred picture of the original object, as nothing moves in exact jumps to be captured by film without blurring.
The problem with blur in games is the fact that computers know the exact positions of the objects and do the calculations based on that. The general thinking for gaming used to be to get the most clarity, the most details that you can for an object from the hardware and do that at highest frame rate. However that results in very crisp, but as GP said unrealistic, pictures. Adding more frames doesn't really help because they are still too sharp. On the other hand, to create a blur in games requires calculations involving more than just positions of objects and their polygons in one frame, but the locations of them in previous frames. That means that your memory requirements have grown for something that used to be considered the anticedent of perfection - non-crispness.
There are good reasons to play things on console that also came out on PC. When developing for console, the developer knows exactly how much memory, CPU and graphics power they have and don't have to come up with tricks to scale the quality up and down the practically infinite possible combinations on PC. That means that the optimizations can be very specific and not think if it may work on AMD but not work on Intel but only when combined with ATI card above x700. For example, this review claims that Call of Duty 2 on the 360 would look better:
The first thing to note is that even when the console game is running side by side with a top of the range PC version, outputting in as high-resolution as it can muster, the 360 version has the edge visually. Perhaps this will change as graphics cards evolve, but for now, the console game runs more smoothly, has far quicker load times, and looks generally better than its poor home computer cousin.
As has been shown many times, if you know the target hardware from top to bottom, you can get a lot more performance out of it and with greater stability. And I have no idea where the single-threaded rumor came from, as it doesn't make sense unless you have a title that has been ported in a month by a few code monkeys. Basic threading has been done by games for a while. From what I remember it was Quake 3 that benefited somewhat from having multiple CPUs due to multithreading.
The reason that it makes no sense for them to live longer is the fact that we have very recently recorded history (1600-1800) of when majority of the people worked on the farms, had no polution and had an average lifespan of about 50 years. For example take a look at the US's southern states in those time to see complete lack of any polution from industry and majority of farming work. (If you go further back into history you'll find that the lifespan usually stayed the same or got shorter due to limited health knowledge) The work on the farm is really not helpful for longer life because of lack of proper preventive medicine, proper food treatment, etc. Majority of deaths before the invention of antibiotics were simple infections that could easily be animal-born.
Since the previous posts were talking about the economic power, it would seem the total GDP would be more descriptive. A country that is very small but rich in resource or skilled labor would have great GDP/person, but could not be considered a leader in economy/production/etc.
In TOTAL gross domestic product? Somehow I doubt it. Probably more likely that the GDP/person, as those countries have smaller population. (Some stats)
As the person before me has said, it is definitely possible to get re-imbursed for the VAT on purchases. On my recent group tour, they told us that if we spend more than $100 at a particular place we should keep the receipt and get reimbursed for the tax. (I personally didn't spend that much in any one place or even close to that)
Another thing that I remember from my travel was the fact that at least in Germany you do not get reimbursed for the full VAT amount, but only for services that you wouldn't use as tourist. In other words, if the VAT is 17%, you may have to pay 5% for public works (ie. transportation, roads, police), but get reimbursed the 12% going to education, healthcare, etc.
That sounds VERY iffy for the reason that if the word gets out that Xbox 360 is easily modded, publishers will try to release games first on other consoles to get more sales and then port them to X360. The pirating of games is the biggest problem for the makers, as it costs them direct sales. The big benefit of console market is the fact that it's so much harder to pirate.
Unfortunately to write a proper ebuild with the flags (since there's one already with different flags) requires much more than that. The package should have been split into two pieces, as it first requires compilation of the swi-prolog and only after that allows to compile the rest of them. (Or at least that's what the readme said)
The other part was the fact that I needed it done "yesterday" at that time. Someone else already attempted/submitted a partial ebuild and it wasn't yet accepted.
That is all nice until you find a package that you need that somehow escaped the repository. At that time comes the painful part of finding all the dependencies, installing them and then manually configuring and installing the package. (And don't even ask me how to uninstall)
For example, I needed a swi-prolog installation for a small class project a couple days back. I needed the GUI library, which means the package available in Gentoo (swi-prolog-lite) would not be sufficient. Thus I had to download the.tar.gz and then go through the install steps.
And now, how do I uninstall it,since the Makefiles don't seem to have make remove/uninstall/etc. that would delete the installed binaries.
Linux needs to improve the installer so that I don't have to wait for someone with repository access to create the package for me.
One unfortunate problem that prevents the open source release of the source code for some algorithms could be the fact that it would be possible to bypass the original researcher without credit under the majority of OSS licenses. Things like GPL and compatible licenses do not require the users to cite the location of the original code. As such, it would be possible for someone to take the source code and claim the advancement for their own. (Yes, they would have to publish code and thus you could catch them for being the same, but that's only assuming they publish a binary. If all they care about is the results of their runs, they can just publish papers without proper credit.)
This would obviously be more dangerous for anyone who is not established in the field and trying to make their first break, rather then for someone who's theories are well established/known.
I've seen first hand the exmaple of such problem at the lab I'm working. The PI would be interested in open-sourcing the software used for the investigation, but would like to maintain fairly strict control over the usage. He wants to know what people do with the software and obtain the modifications that are done, without allowing anyone to fork the project out of his control. Unfortunately, I can't suggest a good license to use for those requirements.
As others have pointed out in the comments, you are using the service. The website update feature and check printing feature are both going through their servers. The problem is that their design made something that should be a stand-alone feature into a service.
The feature though is not a feature of software but a service that you've bought. They are not disabling any feature that does not require accessing their service. This is like saying that because I bought my browser, my favorite website must always be available for free.
There's generally no expectation of such from any service-based outfit that has a one-time fee. In general you are required to maintain membership within the organization to be able to continue use their service. Even GPL only requires you to distribute the code for three years after your release and not in perpuity.
How is the deduction for charitable donations and children handled? (Or non-existant?) Those two I would think could present more problems than the previously mentioned ones.
The problem is that only the main links are mirrored. The interesting information (like company details, data collection methods, etc.) are all on the main server and still slashdoted. That's the biggest negative of only doing the links.
All of the phones I've listed are currently offered for $0.00 from their respective providers. The phones without extra features are usually free with new activation.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it would be EvilCorp taking your software, modifying it "at your request" and then selling you the modified copy. So for example, Linksys could have you download the latest Linux code and then sell you their router without releasing the code. By purchasing their router, you just requested from them the modified code after obtaining the original. This ruling is definately in the interest of OSS
Is there really a performance benefit for going from 1GB to 2GB for average user? I've felt that the last noticeble jump with average usage pattern happens at 512->1GB jump. After that, all of your OS/Browser/Office/mplayer/etc. can sit in your RAM at the same time without much contention. That would mean that the performance improvement would only happen due to OS caching and maybe minimal RAM contention. (ie. Browser with lots of tabs + many huge Office documents)
You should take a look at the Gears of War video from E3. That is definitely a real-time capture of the game as it is played, and not something pre-rendered or a rendered cinematic. (Halo 3 is a rendered cinematic, which means no AI, extra game logic, etc.)
You completely mis-state the reason that monopolies are regulated. There is completely no problem with a monopoly leveraging some resource to enter into a new market, as long as they are entering the market on equal footing. The illegal part of a monopoly is to use their monopolistic power to underprice the competition through aggressive pricing.
That means that if some monopoly can build a widget for cost of $x, they are not allowed to price it for $y if yx. As that would be the abuse of monopoly size to price the competition out of the market. (Even this is not a hard rule, because some industries function like that, for example the razor+razor blades or game systems+games) That was exactly the reason for the monopolistic actions against the old railroads.
The specific action that Microsoft was found to be abusing the monopoly power for was bundling. The problem there is to use your monopoly in some area to gain market in another area by combining two products. If Microsoft was selling Internet Explorer without combining it with the OS, then it would not be abusing the monopoly in OS for a new product. That would be a legal way for a company to grow the portfolio.
So if microsoft is willing to spend the money to develop a new product, but doesn't abuse the monopoly for pricing or bundling - then it is a completely normal way to enter the merket.
(source: bio)
I have and am using Linux together with Windows for many years. Neither of my installations have had a spyware/adware/virus problems for the same reason - I don't run unnecessary software for being a user. My workstation doesn't run Apache/IIS/SQL/etc.
Um, no. Sorry. That "logic" just doesn't hold. I think what you're trying to say is:
"I really hope the spyware will start coming out for Linux as well."
Umm.. I've worked at major company that decided to create a port of their software for Linux. After looking at the market, they decided that porting the code to provide the ads that support the software was not worth the time considering the userbase. Therefore the software was ported without adding the code to display the ads that were shown in Windows version.
So yeah, the marketing people don't consider Linux users as a demographics for use with general ads, especially considering the possibility of them just blocking the ad servers at host level. (The target audience of the software was young adults, so technical users were a small enough nieche to not care) That is why I'm saying that the adware will come to Linux if the general demographic will come, because the market is there. Spyware/adware is in majority based upon the "weatherbug/gator shpping book/etc." model, because that way they can claim legality against any anti-spyware software.
The only way to make OS secure from the user is to limit the user. If the user can install that latest plugin/weatherbug/etc. and will not think twice about that - spyware is a potential threat.
But if your personal less-priveledged account is affected, it doesn't matter that not the whole OS is affected. The most important thing is that the user's data/experience is the one that is affected.
I somehow don't see how you can fix the spyware problem at OS level. The problem is user installing untrusted software which is not an OS problem. If I sent you the latest and greatest version of Bejeweled 2 (assuming you really wanted the game 'cause all your friends said it was really good) that was compiled for linux, but included some spyware, how would the choice of your OS protect you?
It's really annoying to me that all of the linux users keep on taking the holier-than-thou attitude to spyware. Spyware is not a virus and does not prolifirate on it's own. The vector of attack for spyware/adware is through the uneducated/uninterested user downloading his latest fun program. That means that as soon as those nice downloadable games will be available for Linux, the spyware will start coming out for Linux as well.
It doesn't matter if you are running as admin or as the user, because for spyware the only thing that matters is your user behavior. Therefore if you install it as the user, it will still be able to show ads, replace your mozilla start page, do popups, etc. The only difference is that it will be per-user rather than machine-wide. For most people that wouldn't matter as they are a single user on that machine and the difference between having it be user-process or admin-process really isn't large. As it has been previously pointed out - the only thing that matters on a personal workstation is the user's data and you don't have to be an admin to have access to that. The only good thing could be the fact that removing it could be just a tad simpler, assuming that the software doesn't try to exploit some type of local-root exploits.
The only reason Linux does not have that problem at this time is that there isn't a market for the spyware industry in the Linux world. The current Linux users are less likely to download those type of programs and more likely to ensure that the programs only do what they are supposed to. As soon as there is a noticeble increase in the average usage of Linux, the spyware will start to develop their expertise in that area as well.
It is in general very hard to impossible to take a picture of an arbitrary moving object because the speed of the object may be faster than your fastest setting. For a normal scene where you want just a single shot, it would be possible to set it up, but sometimes the object may move faster than fastest settings. For example, the beating of the wings for insects or very small birds (hummingbirds) requires very fast cameras.
I was talking specifically about the movies, where the exposure is preset based upon the required framerate. 1/24second is not fast enough for lots of motion, which means that film has to have blur.
The motion blur in film is for the same reason that you would get a blur on any still picture of something that is moving fast - the amount of time the film is exposed is large enough to capture multiple locations of the object. This would lead to a blurred picture of the original object, as nothing moves in exact jumps to be captured by film without blurring.
The problem with blur in games is the fact that computers know the exact positions of the objects and do the calculations based on that. The general thinking for gaming used to be to get the most clarity, the most details that you can for an object from the hardware and do that at highest frame rate. However that results in very crisp, but as GP said unrealistic, pictures. Adding more frames doesn't really help because they are still too sharp. On the other hand, to create a blur in games requires calculations involving more than just positions of objects and their polygons in one frame, but the locations of them in previous frames. That means that your memory requirements have grown for something that used to be considered the anticedent of perfection - non-crispness.
As has been shown many times, if you know the target hardware from top to bottom, you can get a lot more performance out of it and with greater stability.
And I have no idea where the single-threaded rumor came from, as it doesn't make sense unless you have a title that has been ported in a month by a few code monkeys. Basic threading has been done by games for a while. From what I remember it was Quake 3 that benefited somewhat from having multiple CPUs due to multithreading.
The reason that it makes no sense for them to live longer is the fact that we have very recently recorded history (1600-1800) of when majority of the people worked on the farms, had no polution and had an average lifespan of about 50 years. For example take a look at the US's southern states in those time to see complete lack of any polution from industry and majority of farming work. (If you go further back into history you'll find that the lifespan usually stayed the same or got shorter due to limited health knowledge)
The work on the farm is really not helpful for longer life because of lack of proper preventive medicine, proper food treatment, etc. Majority of deaths before the invention of antibiotics were simple infections that could easily be animal-born.
Since the previous posts were talking about the economic power, it would seem the total GDP would be more descriptive. A country that is very small but rich in resource or skilled labor would have great GDP/person, but could not be considered a leader in economy/production/etc.
In TOTAL gross domestic product? Somehow I doubt it. Probably more likely that the GDP/person, as those countries have smaller population. (Some stats)
As the person before me has said, it is definitely possible to get re-imbursed for the VAT on purchases. On my recent group tour, they told us that if we spend more than $100 at a particular place we should keep the receipt and get reimbursed for the tax. (I personally didn't spend that much in any one place or even close to that)
Another thing that I remember from my travel was the fact that at least in Germany you do not get reimbursed for the full VAT amount, but only for services that you wouldn't use as tourist. In other words, if the VAT is 17%, you may have to pay 5% for public works (ie. transportation, roads, police), but get reimbursed the 12% going to education, healthcare, etc.
That sounds VERY iffy for the reason that if the word gets out that Xbox 360 is easily modded, publishers will try to release games first on other consoles to get more sales and then port them to X360. The pirating of games is the biggest problem for the makers, as it costs them direct sales. The big benefit of console market is the fact that it's so much harder to pirate.
Unfortunately to write a proper ebuild with the flags (since there's one already with different flags) requires much more than that. The package should have been split into two pieces, as it first requires compilation of the swi-prolog and only after that allows to compile the rest of them. (Or at least that's what the readme said)
The other part was the fact that I needed it done "yesterday" at that time. Someone else already attempted/submitted a partial ebuild and it wasn't yet accepted.
That is all nice until you find a package that you need that somehow escaped the repository. At that time comes the painful part of finding all the dependencies, installing them and then manually configuring and installing the package. (And don't even ask me how to uninstall)
.tar.gz and then go through the install steps.
For example, I needed a swi-prolog installation for a small class project a couple days back. I needed the GUI library, which means the package available in Gentoo (swi-prolog-lite) would not be sufficient. Thus I had to download the
And now, how do I uninstall it,since the Makefiles don't seem to have make remove/uninstall/etc. that would delete the installed binaries.
Linux needs to improve the installer so that I don't have to wait for someone with repository access to create the package for me.
One unfortunate problem that prevents the open source release of the source code for some algorithms could be the fact that it would be possible to bypass the original researcher without credit under the majority of OSS licenses. Things like GPL and compatible licenses do not require the users to cite the location of the original code. As such, it would be possible for someone to take the source code and claim the advancement for their own. (Yes, they would have to publish code and thus you could catch them for being the same, but that's only assuming they publish a binary. If all they care about is the results of their runs, they can just publish papers without proper credit.)
This would obviously be more dangerous for anyone who is not established in the field and trying to make their first break, rather then for someone who's theories are well established/known.
I've seen first hand the exmaple of such problem at the lab I'm working. The PI would be interested in open-sourcing the software used for the investigation, but would like to maintain fairly strict control over the usage. He wants to know what people do with the software and obtain the modifications that are done, without allowing anyone to fork the project out of his control. Unfortunately, I can't suggest a good license to use for those requirements.
As others have pointed out in the comments, you are using the service. The website update feature and check printing feature are both going through their servers. The problem is that their design made something that should be a stand-alone feature into a service.
The feature though is not a feature of software but a service that you've bought. They are not disabling any feature that does not require accessing their service. This is like saying that because I bought my browser, my favorite website must always be available for free.
There's generally no expectation of such from any service-based outfit that has a one-time fee. In general you are required to maintain membership within the organization to be able to continue use their service. Even GPL only requires you to distribute the code for three years after your release and not in perpuity.
How is the deduction for charitable donations and children handled? (Or non-existant?) Those two I would think could present more problems than the previously mentioned ones.
The problem is that only the main links are mirrored. The interesting information (like company details, data collection methods, etc.) are all on the main server and still slashdoted. That's the biggest negative of only doing the links.
All of the phones I've listed are currently offered for $0.00 from their respective providers. The phones without extra features are usually free with new activation.