Slashdot Mirror


User: Omnifarious

Omnifarious's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
3,455
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 3,455

  1. Re:Market Solutions on Pay-per-email and the "Market Myth" · · Score: 1

    It's not obvious. I didn't think of it. But it's still an excellent idea. Thank you.

  2. Re:no legal distinction on Germany Accepts Strict Piracy Law · · Score: 1

    I'm having difficulty figuring out which of those alternatives you mean to refer to copyright violation as they are both equally inapplicable.

    I have the ability to get a large organization to monitor your house and come over to beat you up whenever you say the word 'foo' and don't give me money. Therefor, you are depriving me of my money if you don't give me money when you say the word 'foo'.

  3. Re:What is it, Bash Microsoft Day at the press cor on 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten · · Score: 1

    I think any shareholders of Microsoft deserve exactly what they get. Buying shares in an unethical company because they will make you money is (or at least should be) a long-term losing proposition. It's just sad that it loses them nothing more than money.

    Fund a bank robbery, go to jail. Set up a corporate shell and get people to buy your stock, then have the 'corporation' rob the bank, and suddenly *poof* no responsibility for the investors aside from financial responsibility.

  4. Re:"Copyright holders" on DRM More Important Than Life or Security? · · Score: 1

    I disagree with you on that. I don't think work for hire clauses are ever fair. Sure, they're taking on financial risk. But if it weren't for the creator, there'd be nothing to invest in. The most that should be allowed is a very limited time (less than 5 years, probably less than 2 years) exclusive distribution right.

  5. Re:"Copyright holders" don't give a fuck ... on DRM More Important Than Life or Security? · · Score: 1

    I think you're right, but kind of think the original poster had the right idea. Instead of allowing the creator to ignore the whole, allow the creator (who must be an individual human being) to ignore any exclusivity clauses, or possibly have a strict, very short time limit on the validity of such clauses.

  6. Re:bug sorted? on Fedora Core 5 Available · · Score: 1

    I feel very much the same way you do. I'm a gamer (and a developer), and it really gets under my skin that nVidia's drivers are closed source. It's why I refuse to buy a motherboard that has their chipset, and why I recommend against everything but their graphics cards to all I talk to.

    This is an almost intolerable situation. I have DRM on my system (some silly analog/digital anti-copy technology, spectravision or something). I feel dirty.

  7. Re:PostgreSQL is BSD licensed on Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL · · Score: 1

    That's an interesting argument. That essentially GPL licensed code who's copyright is owned by a company that dual licenses is just as (and perhaps more) vulnerable to a proprietary fork than a piece of BSD licensed code.

    You are right in that anybody who quit and formed their own company would have to start using a pure service model. And I think they would get some business that way, but I suspect a fair amount less than MySQL AB was getting.

    Still doesn't address my other complaint about 'chip on their shoulder' PostgreSQL supporters though.

  8. Re:PostgreSQL is BSD licensed on Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL · · Score: 1

    I bet almost none of those companies actually ship any product to anybody that uses MySQL. I suspect many just do in house development with it and buy a license out of either unfounded fear, or just because they want the support. I suspect MySQL's revenue model is not anywhere near as dependent on dual licensing as you think.

    I'm going to have to ask about that and make sure though. But I strongly suspect it's true.

  9. Re:Of course he's concerned with the *perception*. on Judge May Force Google to Submit to Feds · · Score: 1

    Culturally, who defeated who? I would argue that Greece has it all over Rome from the standpoint of who's memes managed to infect the world.

  10. Re:Of course he's concerned with the *perception*. on Judge May Force Google to Submit to Feds · · Score: 1

    Also, and this is completely off-topic here, morality by evolution does not justify your viewpoints. Survival depends on more than just reproduction. I would argue that the single biggest survival trait of humans is our ability to form large-scale cooperative societies. I think the dynamics of human sexuality and ability to form sexual relationships that don't have reproduction as their primary goal are a major force enabling us to build such societies. I think the idea of limiting the expression of sexuality to those things that drive reproduction have negative survival value.

  11. Re:PostgreSQL is BSD licensed on Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL · · Score: 1

    Even using a project is a contribution. I'm contributing my time and energy to getting it running in some situation or environment. Then there's bug reports, and asking (and answering) questions in forums, and devoting time to learning how to use it. I don't have to be some fantastic RDBMS design guru in order to contribute to a project. One of the thing that makes Open Source work is that every single user is a contributor, whether or not they realize it.

    Also, outsmarting PhDs isn't so hard. Microsoft still can't make an OS who's kernel outperforms BSD or Linux except in specially contrived situations. There's a lot more to a project or organization than how many smart people they employ.

  12. Re:PostgreSQL is BSD licensed on Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL · · Score: 1

    It isn't an utterly stupid argument, but you may be correct that it doesn't strongly apply specifically to this situation. Thinking about it, your assessment of the situation with MySQL is very correct. Though I also happen to know a few of the people who are involved in the development of MySQL, and I'm pretty sure they would quit and start their own company if MySQL's management decided to go that route.

    You know, one thing that might really help PostreSQL is if the advocates didn't complain bitterly about how unfairly unpopular they were, and instead built bridges to MySQL. Get together on the wire protocol. See if maybe the two projects can agree on some of the odder datatypes. If people percieved you as being interested and helpful instead of as combative and whiny, it might help a lot.

    I still don't trust the BSD license very much. But I might be more favorably inclined if I didn't percieve PostreSQL supporters in that light.

  13. Re:Of course he's concerned with the *perception*. on Judge May Force Google to Submit to Feds · · Score: 1

    I didn't say "morally repugnant". I said "repugnant", which is purely a personal value judgement.

  14. PostgreSQL is BSD licensed on Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL · · Score: 1

    I do not trust that the contributions I make by learning it and using it and answering other people's questions will be a wise investment in the future. It's quite possible that some random company will manage to market and promote their closed version of PostgreSQL to the point where it squeezes out the free as in speech versions, and then my investment will be effectively lost.

  15. Re:Of course he's concerned with the *perception*. on Judge May Force Google to Submit to Feds · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well that whole exchange has tons of stupidity and shows none of the participants in a particularly favorable light. OTOH, it demonstrates that you have views that I find so utterly repugnant that I would likely not be able to manage to sit quietly in the same room as you.

    And by referencing it, it seems you want everybody to not only know that tomhudson is a git, but that you hold the opinions and viewpoints you do.

  16. Re:Answering Physics Questions In My Sleep on Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas · · Score: 1

    As I understand it, magnetism in the conventional sense exists almost solely because of the chemistry of the element, which is completely determined by the structure of the electron shells. In a plasma all the electrons are completely stripped from their nuclei, so that structure no longer exists.

    All plasmas are very responsive to magentic fields because they contain free floating charged particles.

  17. Re:Fe / Fusion on Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas · · Score: 1

    I know. Though it is still possible to fuse them. It happens in a supernova and it's how we get things like uranium. It's just a net energy loss reaction, and so would do nothing to explain a strange excess of energy. :-)

  18. Re:Do we want this? on Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas · · Score: 1

    *chuckle* Except, my technobabble had some relation to reality. :-) Look up quark-gluon plasma. Such things exist and are created by high energy collisions between nuclei.

  19. Re:I worked in this department for 3 summers on Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas · · Score: 1

    Could this be the effect of some sort of strong force interaction in the plasma? I know nuclear reactions like fission and fusion involve the weak force. So if the strong force were involved, these would be quark level interactions.

  20. Re:Do we want this? on Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It also sounds like they don't think it's because of fusion. If the ions involved are Fe ions, then you wouldn't expect to get any energy from fusion from them.

    Maybe the energy is coming from strong force interactions of some sort. It sounds like the temperatures were high enough that maybe there was some sort of quark-gluon plasma thing going on.

  21. Re:The Conclusion on Intel's Conroe Previewed and Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    Well, I think they used their money largely to buy better benchmarks. What do you bet that those games used the Intel compiler and would perform a whole ton better with Intel's special AMD-detecting hooks removed?

  22. Re:Good for you on Dell Opens Up About Desktop Linux · · Score: 1

    This might well be true. But that doesn't prevent Dell from committing to only supplying hardware that has Open Source drivers. That wouldn't hurt their market either. I suspect that the hardware people who are actually willing to document how their hardware works make better hardware anyway.

  23. Well, of course! on U.S. Satellite Programs in Jeopardy of Collapse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All those pesky earth-science satelites keep on reporting that the globe is heating up and stuff. Why would we want to hear that? That doesn't fit with our politics at all!

  24. Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea on 5% of All Web Traffic Unsafe · · Score: 1

    Why didn't you just tell them to stop using the garbage software they were using instead? I have several friends who I've switched over. None of them have complained, and none of them ever get viruses.

  25. Re:Oracle was slowler than MySql for me on Oracle Boss Says OSS Needs Big Business · · Score: 1

    As I understand it, there are some IDE and possibly some SATA drives that do this regardless of the setting. They basically lie in order to cheat on benchmarks. In fact, from what I know of the LJ outage this was actually what the problem was.