Actually, the thoery is that if there were no patents, companies would keep everything as trade secrets. By giving them legal protection if they explain what they've done, everyone can build on their innovation, at least once their patent runs out. Also, patents help companies recoup R&D costs, thereby encouraging them to do more research
Of course, since patents now last 17 years, and are awarded for things that could never have been protected by being trade secrets (One-click, anyone?), or for that matter even required R&D, the situation is ridiculous.
Is anyone else as amused as I am by this name? Okay, so first there was "Metal Gear," then "Snake, Rattle and Roll," then "Metal Gear Solid," now "Metal Gear Solid 2." It's almost as crazy as Street Fighter (SF, SF 2, SF Alpha, SFA2, SFA3, SF EX 3, plus a few that I can't remember).
Seriously, I know the marketing people are always trying to come up with names to make the products seem newer and more exciting, but is it really SO bad to just follow a regular numbering system? Why do all major commercial product HAVE to come up with funky versioning systems? Intel had 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III, and Windows had 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 95, 98, and ME. What's wrong with these people? Numbers were invented for counting, why don't we use them for that purpose?
Christmas actually is one of the few other examples, aside from open source software, of the "gift culture" mentality at work that ESR is always talking about. Sure, there are some people who view Christmas as a time to get presents (especially children who don't really have the means to get themselves what they want). I think for most of us though, we enjoy giving presents more.
The fact of the matter is, anything that costs little enough for someone to give it to me as a Christmas gift, I could buy for myself. However, it does feel good to get someone that perfect gift. And, if someone gives you a really good gift, defined as something that you want, but can't justify buying for yourself, it makes you feel positive things about the other person, because it shows that they really know you.
The point is not to spend as little as you can get away with, while guilt tripping others into getting you things. The point is to demonstrate what a great person you are by getting your friends even better gifts than they get you. Likewise, with open source software, the point isn't to contribute just enough to keep the movement alive, so you can keep getting free software, the point is to contribute more than everyone else, so you will be worshipped like Linus.
I apologize for the rambling nature of this email, but I've been up all night, and I'm tired.
Penguin mints are sugar-free
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Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 2
Penguin Caffeinated Peppermints - ifive brands $12 (four-pack) Essential fuel for all-night hacking: sugar and caffeine wrapped in a handy breath mint.
Nope, just caffine. On the advice of dentists, Adam Smith (incredibly cool name) and Brett Canfield decided not to put sugar in their mints. Which makes the fact that they taste good quite amazing to me.
Sorry, I missed a year in there. 8 Ghz by the middle of 2005. Okay, so it's not quite as obvious as I thought then, but still, it's not that staggering.
Okay, using Moore's revised law (an increase by a factor of 2 every 18 months), and the current speeds of about 1 Ghz, that gives us 4 Ghz by the end of 2003, 8 Ghz by the middle of 2004, and 16 Ghz by the end of 2006. Why should we be surprised that we'll hit 10 Ghz in 2005? Besides, given Intel's strategy with the P3 of getting mind numbing clock speeds without actually improving performance substantially, it should be even easier.
The satellites break up (unlike, I'm guessing, titanium fuel tanks), and a pretty small chunk travelling at terminal velocity will cause pretty serious harm.
Besides, the odds of any individual satellite hitting someone is only on the order of 1 in 20,000, which is quite reasonable.
I don't have the Earth escape velocity handy, but suffice to say that with the amount of extra fuel these things carry, all you'd do is move the satellites into a higher orbit. When they deorbit satellites like this, all they're doing is nudging it into a lower orbit, within earth's atmosphere, and then let the air resistance do the rest.
This is a joke on a Yahoo! television commercial that was broadcast earlier this year. A guy living in a trailer in Quasi sees the report on television, and orders a bunch of pillows from Yahoo to protect himself. Not the most hilarious thing I've ever seen, but it just irks me when people don't understand that something is a joke.
Now the earth will be even more densely populated when the satellites rain down firy death...
Okay, sure, so the chances aren't that high that anyone will be hit, but I still find it remarkable that a US company was able to do this without so much as a peep from the other countries that are put at risk. Much as I want to encourage private industry to exploit space, this kind of thing does suggest to me that perhaps we need to set up some more stringent international rules on what sorts of launches are permitted.
I haven't really looked much at the kernel, but puting aside for a second stability and security issues, is a large kernel really so bad?
If there actually is bloat, in the form of unnecessary or poorly written code, that's unquestionably bad, but if there's simply a lot of cool things being put into the kernel, that doesn't strike me as bad. You can always recompile, thereby stripping your kernel down to just what YOU need.
I know, I know, the average desktop user isn't going to have the skills to recompile a kernel, but that's okay. Whether a user's kernel is 2 megs or 200 megs, they've probably got enough HD space to fit it. The situations where kernel size matters are probably going to be small devices (pda's, palmtops, etc.), and old devices (486). Small devices generally have customized OSes anyway, so you can expect that the manufacturers will take care of that. Old devices are probably better off running older software, so I'm not too worried about them.
I probably missed a few things, again I'm not a kernel expert. Plus, the security and stability issues are not trivial, and are a big strike against a project like this. But, any other reasons why this is bad?
I went to high school with Asa Raskin, son of Jef Raskin, so while this is a rumor, it's a rumor from a not totally unrealiable source. He claimed that one of the things OSX programmers kept in the back of their minds was "can this be easily ported to x86?" Supposedly, if MS gets broken up, Apple may make a push to expand their software empire by getting Mac software running on Intel hardware.
Yes, again, this is just a rumor, take it with a grain of salt, but it makes sense to me. Perhaps it will occur.
+5, mentioned BSD license? Seriously, if you put software under the GPL, you'll do a far better job of "keeping it free" than with the BSD license. Look at OSX. That's exactly the kind of thing MS could do. When it's apple, we don't care, because they're not that big. If it's MS, on the other hand, then you've got problems. I have no overwhelming love for RMS, but he definately has written a robust license.
Actually, while IANAL, does anyone know if the BSD license is actually legally binding? There's lots of things that strike me as required legalese (like those all caps disclaimer of warranty bits) that the BSD license lacks. Could you sue the developers if BSD-licensed code crashes your computer? Hmm, thanks but no thanks...
Here's why Open Source works: it's easy to learn to program, if you can't program you can still debug, and almost everyone above the poverty line can afford a computer. You can start a project in your spare eand still have enough time left over for work. Hell, Linus works for Transmeta, has a kid, and STILL does Linux. Furthermore, Open Source companies can make money, in a variety of ways. You can make money off of support, like O'Reilly, you can sell your unique product for a modest fee, like Red Hat, or you can sell your product for a while, then open source it when it's no longer commercially viable, like ID Software.
Here's why "open source AIDS research" won't work: it's not easy to learn how to to cure diseases, "debugging" requires that you already have AIDS and you're willing to sacrifice your last two or three years to help others find a cure, and biotech equipment is incredibly expensive. If you're going to do this kind of work, it's really a full time job. Even if you already have the schooling, each project is so different (curing AIDS vs. curing cancer) that it will still take you a while to get good at what you're working on. Finally, there's no way to make a profit off of open sourced medicine. You can't sell "support," your product isn't unique (because all your collaborators will be making exactly the same thing, they won't be customizing distros or any nonsense like that), and if your product ever loses commercial viability, it'll probably be after your 17 year patent expires.
Open Source is nice, but it can't be applied to anything. The fields in which Open Source will work will probably discover it on their own.
Doesn't work for Freenet. Freenet storage is not permanent. Since nodes must set aside dedicated HD space for storing Freenet files, whenever there's a space crunch, the least popular files go. So, if people don't want to download your English essay, it's probably going to get removed.
You could automate it, I guess, so that you kept requesting your files, thereby increasing their popularity. Unfortunately, I believe that if you have space for it, the file will be moved to your node if you've left room (Freenet tries to move files to the areas where they're most popular), and if there is no room, I guess you've got a little extra space, but you've probably got no bandwidth left because you're constantly requesting your own files.
Where does the GPL state this. I just took a look and I didn't find anything of the sort. If this was written into the GPL, it would be unenforcable, because the owners of the copyright are not bound by any licensing agreement. Hence, they're still free to patent things.
Re:Obvious Question: Who read the EULA?
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EULA In Games
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· Score: 1
Imagine trying to draft the law for using different font sizes or bold. It's easy to write a law that says "a license agreement must use normal capitalization, except sections which discuss thus-and-such, which must be written the same size, but all upper case." Now think "bold," instead. How bold does it have to be? Bringing that to court would be a nightmare. Font size would be about as easy nowadays as all caps, but it would have been a much bigger burden on people back in the days of typewritters, and since it's worked for the last 100 years, nobody really feels like changing all the laws now, if for no other reason than if one state changes, all the others do too (otherwise you might have the important sections written in double-size, all caps to satisfy all the state laws, which would be horrible).
Yes, PG&E had to shutdown plans that hit air pollution limits. How is that their fault? They had to keep them running at a higher capaciy in order to keep up with the higher demand.
The problem is, absolutely and 100%, the influx of tech companies. It takes years to bring new power plants online, and the demand for electricity has increased much faster than they expected a few years ago when they were deciding how many plants they'd need to have running by the end of 2000.
They've even brought in portable plants via ship, and it still hasn't been enough. When you've got several years of lead time before you can really bring more power to the grid, and a sudden, unexpected influx of tech companies, no one on earth could prevent the shortages that have occured.
The harshest sounding quote seemed to be when one of the ground control people said "Guys, don't swear at me." Wow, cool off there, man. They're in a pretty high stress environment, and they're probably ex-Air Force personnel (and militaries are known for having guys who swear a lot). I dunno, it just doesn't sound like they're really at each other's thoats as much as the article was trying to claim.
Slightly OT, is it just me or will the media report ANYTHING that has to do with space? I mean, I like the fact that we have space probes and all, but they seem to report it every time a shuttle lifts off, or a space walk is conducted, or NASA decides to publish the photos they've been collecting. It strikes me as bizarre, given how often people talk about the public lack of interest in space that everything related to NASA is considered important enough to report.
If someone more in the know would like to answer that'd be great. The info I found was that K-Meleon is 2.6 megs, which puts it more or less on par with Konqueror. Unfortunately, it does take 10 megs of ram to run, and it requires Windows, so I'm not sure they can be fully compared. Either can be run embedded, as above posters have pointed out, because many systems are now coming with 16 or more megs, and it appears that Gecko and Konqueror are more or less comarable in terms of storage space required. Anybody with more info want to speak up?
As the above poster pointed out, Linux can never be cancelled. More importantly, few users who currently have Linux installed are ever likely to go back to Windows, and Linux has a market share of what, 7 or 8 percent? Now then, if you're right, and no one ever has an increased incentive to port to Linux, then maybe Linux stays more or less the same. But if robust Windows support manages to increase Linux's market share up to 15 or 20 percent, then there's no way companies can resist porting.
Part of the point of Wine, IMHO, is to help Linux hit that "critical mass" at which point it can start competing with Windows on equal terms. And that is undeniably a Good Thing(tm).
Fitaly. If you want to use your PDA as a laptop, it's not gonna work, but if you just want to be able to write down phone numbers, addresses, and so forth as people are telling them to you, this is the way to go. It's been reported on Slashdot before (too lazy to look up right now). The company homepage is here.
...there's just nothing cooler than a trampoline room with 20 ft. ceilings. Actually, if you want to see his house, it's right on a lake near Seattle, and they have boat tours that go by. I should point out, EVERYONE on this lake is fabulously wealthy (pro basketball players, CEOs, you name it), and yet when you see Gates' house, it's still obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, since patents now last 17 years, and are awarded for things that could never have been protected by being trade secrets (One-click, anyone?), or for that matter even required R&D, the situation is ridiculous.
It stands for layerS, of course. 9 layerS, 9S :)
Seriously, I know the marketing people are always trying to come up with names to make the products seem newer and more exciting, but is it really SO bad to just follow a regular numbering system? Why do all major commercial product HAVE to come up with funky versioning systems? Intel had 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III, and Windows had 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 95, 98, and ME. What's wrong with these people? Numbers were invented for counting, why don't we use them for that purpose?
The fact of the matter is, anything that costs little enough for someone to give it to me as a Christmas gift, I could buy for myself. However, it does feel good to get someone that perfect gift. And, if someone gives you a really good gift, defined as something that you want, but can't justify buying for yourself, it makes you feel positive things about the other person, because it shows that they really know you.
The point is not to spend as little as you can get away with, while guilt tripping others into getting you things. The point is to demonstrate what a great person you are by getting your friends even better gifts than they get you. Likewise, with open source software, the point isn't to contribute just enough to keep the movement alive, so you can keep getting free software, the point is to contribute more than everyone else, so you will be worshipped like Linus.
I apologize for the rambling nature of this email, but I've been up all night, and I'm tired.
Nope, just caffine. On the advice of dentists, Adam Smith (incredibly cool name) and Brett Canfield decided not to put sugar in their mints. Which makes the fact that they taste good quite amazing to me.
Sorry, I missed a year in there. 8 Ghz by the middle of 2005. Okay, so it's not quite as obvious as I thought then, but still, it's not that staggering.
Okay, using Moore's revised law (an increase by a factor of 2 every 18 months), and the current speeds of about 1 Ghz, that gives us 4 Ghz by the end of 2003, 8 Ghz by the middle of 2004, and 16 Ghz by the end of 2006. Why should we be surprised that we'll hit 10 Ghz in 2005? Besides, given Intel's strategy with the P3 of getting mind numbing clock speeds without actually improving performance substantially, it should be even easier.
Besides, the odds of any individual satellite hitting someone is only on the order of 1 in 20,000, which is quite reasonable.
I don't have the Earth escape velocity handy, but suffice to say that with the amount of extra fuel these things carry, all you'd do is move the satellites into a higher orbit. When they deorbit satellites like this, all they're doing is nudging it into a lower orbit, within earth's atmosphere, and then let the air resistance do the rest.
This is a joke on a Yahoo! television commercial that was broadcast earlier this year. A guy living in a trailer in Quasi sees the report on television, and orders a bunch of pillows from Yahoo to protect himself. Not the most hilarious thing I've ever seen, but it just irks me when people don't understand that something is a joke.
Okay, sure, so the chances aren't that high that anyone will be hit, but I still find it remarkable that a US company was able to do this without so much as a peep from the other countries that are put at risk. Much as I want to encourage private industry to exploit space, this kind of thing does suggest to me that perhaps we need to set up some more stringent international rules on what sorts of launches are permitted.
If there actually is bloat, in the form of unnecessary or poorly written code, that's unquestionably bad, but if there's simply a lot of cool things being put into the kernel, that doesn't strike me as bad. You can always recompile, thereby stripping your kernel down to just what YOU need.
I know, I know, the average desktop user isn't going to have the skills to recompile a kernel, but that's okay. Whether a user's kernel is 2 megs or 200 megs, they've probably got enough HD space to fit it. The situations where kernel size matters are probably going to be small devices (pda's, palmtops, etc.), and old devices (486). Small devices generally have customized OSes anyway, so you can expect that the manufacturers will take care of that. Old devices are probably better off running older software, so I'm not too worried about them.
I probably missed a few things, again I'm not a kernel expert. Plus, the security and stability issues are not trivial, and are a big strike against a project like this. But, any other reasons why this is bad?
Yes, again, this is just a rumor, take it with a grain of salt, but it makes sense to me. Perhaps it will occur.
Actually, while IANAL, does anyone know if the BSD license is actually legally binding? There's lots of things that strike me as required legalese (like those all caps disclaimer of warranty bits) that the BSD license lacks. Could you sue the developers if BSD-licensed code crashes your computer? Hmm, thanks but no thanks...
Fine, so you can change your node to keep all inserted files. This still doesn't free up any hard drive space for you.
Here's why "open source AIDS research" won't work: it's not easy to learn how to to cure diseases, "debugging" requires that you already have AIDS and you're willing to sacrifice your last two or three years to help others find a cure, and biotech equipment is incredibly expensive. If you're going to do this kind of work, it's really a full time job. Even if you already have the schooling, each project is so different (curing AIDS vs. curing cancer) that it will still take you a while to get good at what you're working on. Finally, there's no way to make a profit off of open sourced medicine. You can't sell "support," your product isn't unique (because all your collaborators will be making exactly the same thing, they won't be customizing distros or any nonsense like that), and if your product ever loses commercial viability, it'll probably be after your 17 year patent expires.
Open Source is nice, but it can't be applied to anything. The fields in which Open Source will work will probably discover it on their own.
You could automate it, I guess, so that you kept requesting your files, thereby increasing their popularity. Unfortunately, I believe that if you have space for it, the file will be moved to your node if you've left room (Freenet tries to move files to the areas where they're most popular), and if there is no room, I guess you've got a little extra space, but you've probably got no bandwidth left because you're constantly requesting your own files.
Where does the GPL state this. I just took a look and I didn't find anything of the sort. If this was written into the GPL, it would be unenforcable, because the owners of the copyright are not bound by any licensing agreement. Hence, they're still free to patent things.
Imagine trying to draft the law for using different font sizes or bold. It's easy to write a law that says "a license agreement must use normal capitalization, except sections which discuss thus-and-such, which must be written the same size, but all upper case." Now think "bold," instead. How bold does it have to be? Bringing that to court would be a nightmare. Font size would be about as easy nowadays as all caps, but it would have been a much bigger burden on people back in the days of typewritters, and since it's worked for the last 100 years, nobody really feels like changing all the laws now, if for no other reason than if one state changes, all the others do too (otherwise you might have the important sections written in double-size, all caps to satisfy all the state laws, which would be horrible).
The problem is, absolutely and 100%, the influx of tech companies. It takes years to bring new power plants online, and the demand for electricity has increased much faster than they expected a few years ago when they were deciding how many plants they'd need to have running by the end of 2000.
They've even brought in portable plants via ship, and it still hasn't been enough. When you've got several years of lead time before you can really bring more power to the grid, and a sudden, unexpected influx of tech companies, no one on earth could prevent the shortages that have occured.
Slightly OT, is it just me or will the media report ANYTHING that has to do with space? I mean, I like the fact that we have space probes and all, but they seem to report it every time a shuttle lifts off, or a space walk is conducted, or NASA decides to publish the photos they've been collecting. It strikes me as bizarre, given how often people talk about the public lack of interest in space that everything related to NASA is considered important enough to report.
If someone more in the know would like to answer that'd be great. The info I found was that K-Meleon is 2.6 megs, which puts it more or less on par with Konqueror. Unfortunately, it does take 10 megs of ram to run, and it requires Windows, so I'm not sure they can be fully compared. Either can be run embedded, as above posters have pointed out, because many systems are now coming with 16 or more megs, and it appears that Gecko and Konqueror are more or less comarable in terms of storage space required. Anybody with more info want to speak up?
Part of the point of Wine, IMHO, is to help Linux hit that "critical mass" at which point it can start competing with Windows on equal terms. And that is undeniably a Good Thing(tm).
Fitaly. If you want to use your PDA as a laptop, it's not gonna work, but if you just want to be able to write down phone numbers, addresses, and so forth as people are telling them to you, this is the way to go. It's been reported on Slashdot before (too lazy to look up right now). The company homepage is here.
...there's just nothing cooler than a trampoline room with 20 ft. ceilings. Actually, if you want to see his house, it's right on a lake near Seattle, and they have boat tours that go by. I should point out, EVERYONE on this lake is fabulously wealthy (pro basketball players, CEOs, you name it), and yet when you see Gates' house, it's still obvious.