I think it would bother me a lot more if this meant that nobody got to see it. But Apple's economic power isn't that high. It still bothers me a little though.
I believe firmly in the freedom of individuals to engage in whatever contracts they find mutually beneficial. But, I'm not so sure about a big, powerful public corporation. I think as organizations get larger and more powerful, they become more government-like. You die just as surely whether you starve because nobody will sell you food or someone shoots you.
No, I didn't forget that. I didn't come up with the number by counting the different kinds of D&D dice. It was just the number that popped out when I was thinking of how many platonic solids their were. It would've been safer to have counted D&D dice because I know a D10 isn't. On those rare occasions I explain platonic solids to people, I often use a D10 to demonstrate what a platonic solid is and is not.
When someone said 'undecahedron', I was hoping at least for something that had sides that were all the same shape. I knew that they all couldn't be regular polygons because there are only 6 possible shapes in 3-space that can do that, and an undecahedron is not one of them. But, they could all be the same irregular polygon. I was very disappointed to learn it was a prism.
So, will that software run on any system I have? It looks to me like it only runs under Mac OS X, and Windows. That means, in order to run it at all, I have to invest several hundred dollars in a copy of XP and many hours of my time re-partitioning a software RAID system just to run it.
Sorry, if you can't tell me how your stuff works, you're not really selling it to me, it's just on loan until you decide to stop providing service and support for it.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that your major chip manufacturer employer would stand to gain a great deal by getting these things into gcc instead of having it be in their proprietary compiler. Because then people would have even more incentive to start using your employers products.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if French spelling was in the least rational. Almost all the hardest words to spell in English came from French. My mental pronunciation of 'Hors d'oeuveres' after seeing it in print was "horse dee oover rays", and it took me awhile to link up the pronunciation with the word.
Besides, French refuses to pick up any English words. They have a whole committee of people to determine what is 'official French' and one of the goals of that committee seems to be to avoid important stuff from English.
I do not have any irrational French sentiment. It's totally rational. I will hate the French much less as soon as various idiots stop importing impossible to spell words like 'hors d'eurves', 'faux pas', and such because French is supposedly somehow more cultured than everything else.
But, I would still have moderated that post up.:-)
I'm actually OK with restrictions on soliciting. If there is a pre-arrangement for any kind of compensation other than seeing the information you give out in print as a condition for you having given the information, then I'm OK with calling it industrial espionage or something.
But, IMHO, there should be no restrictions at all on publishing information that was under NDA if you didn't offer people something to get it. Once it escapes from being under NDA, it should be free. Otherwise, we could just replace all copyrights with NDA-style shrink-wrap agreements and have perpetual copyright.
From what I understand, the judge forced Thinksecret to become an informant. The judge did not tell them they couldn't publish the information. The judge can't tell them that. They never signed an NDA with Apple, and every once in awhile, the first ammendment actually means something in this country.
Personally, I see morales as a decision making tool for helping people who don't have the time or inclination to carefully think out all the ramifications. So, in that way, a moral stance and a market argument aren't that far apart.
That's why eating meat is considered immoral in warmer parts of the world. Meat there spoils quickly, so it's generally a bad idea to eat it. Additionally, cows are a very useful resource to have around and it would be bad to slaughter them all for meat in times of famine. But, trying to explain that to people at large, especially when they can see the local, short-term gain from slaughtering their cow is very hard. It's best to make it a matter of morals.
This would take way more engineering and effort than we can manage today, but....
The gamma rays would be emanating effectively from a point source. If you got a big asteroid and put it between the Earth and the point source, it would shadow the Earth from the beam. It would have to stay there for the duration of the burst.
As a random, no-basis in fact estimate, I would guess that in order for us to have the know-how and ability to do this, we would have to have had a colony on another planet that grew up into a major nation all its own and each planet to have several beanstalks. We would also have to have a major antimatter production facility somewhere.
Of course, this would mean a lot of our space holdings would be likely to be wiped out. We could probably only manage 2-3 asteroids to keep the planets safe. Maybe some of the more mobile space stuff could hide behind the sun or something. But, it could work if models could give us a few months warning and be accurate to within a couple of weeks.
If you remember, I'm the guy in the audience who asked the question about getting nanotubes to stick to eachother well enough to form a cable instead of an uncountably huge number of separate strands of nanotube.:-)
Re:A post free of FUD, a dab of on-topic
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I saw your presentation at Norwescon this year, and I was interested and impressed. My only really negative comment is that it seemed a little too much like a presentation by a.com trying desperately to convince people that you really had a viable business model.
I was really hoping for a sober engineering discussion that talked frankly about the problems and possible solutions. I thought your climbing robot was the most interesting part of the discussion. But when the 'vision' guy took over that to explain how you all had a chance in hell of making money on all this, I stopped being interested.
I think your company has a chance of succeeding actually. And your ideas about leveraging the technologies you create along the way in order to fund further R&D is are excellent. But talk that's all pretty powerpoint slides and slick presentation really turns me off. I'm not a businessman, and I don't think most of the people there were. I'm an engineer. Details and plain-talk matter to us.
As for stupid comments on Slashdot... I sometimes wish there were a '-1 counterfactual' rating, but it would get abused horribly to moderate down valid opinions people disagreed with. So the best you can do is to post truth and hope the moderators notice. Really, trying hard to control public perception of your company is going to backfire. It's just best to let people see what's going on and let them decide for themselves.
Actually, both are biased statements. Failing to mention that any IDEs exist on Linux is clearly biased. And calling the IDEs on Linux superior without anything to back it up is also clearly biased.
Personally, I've heard good things about Eclipse, but I really despise Java, and I've never really liked IDEs either. So, both of those opinions have prevented me from trying Eclipse myself.
I say if they are willing to be nice, then let bygones be bygones. Yeah, they tried hard to be sleazy, realized it wouldn't work and now seem interested in doing the right thing.
There is, AFAIK, an excellent precedent set a long time ago when book publishers tried to stick liscensing agreements in books. That was shot down, and so should similar things for software.
The only possible justification for treating software differently is that the act of running it creates several copies just so it can run. But I don't see that as being anything other than fair use and beyond the reach of licensing restrictions.
Oh, no, someone is reverse engineering my program! I must stop them! I must take some insane move that will inconvenience a whole ton of people and break an explicit promise in the hopes that they will all collectively pressure this person to stop! I feel so threatened! How could people even think of doing this horrible thing to me! They must all be louts or criminals or worse! Aigh! Run around, scream and shout!
*rolls eyes* Someone tells me that Larry's parents gave in to him when he threw temper tantrums as a child.
OSDL has about as much control over what the developer does in his spare time as Amazon does for me. Should Amazon fire me when the movie industry asks because I work on P2P software in my spare time? I don't think so. Of course, the industry could then just deny Amazon the right to sell movies. *shrug* Stupid and childish.
A million people have probably told you this already, but...
I'm a big fan of Subversion myself, but it isn't at all appropriate for kernel development due to the distributed nature of kernel development. Subversion is a very centralized version control system.
I think the motivation was childish and stupid. But, the rest of your post is exactly right, and Linus should never have trusted Larry McVoy in the first place.
Proprietary software is ALL about screwing the customer. Whine all you want about money. There are plenty of software businesses making nice profits without screwing their customers. You don't need proprietary software to make money, you need it to screw your customers.
I don't care what a license agreement says, unless you get to look at the source, reverse engineering should be perfectly legal. The progress of science (which is basically just reverse engineering on a grand scale) should not be stopped because it might hurt someone commercially.
Besides, it's not OSDLs job to enforce Larry McVoy's license agreement for him. Larry could sue the developer if he wanted the developer to stop. If I wrote DeCSS in my spare time, should the movie industry go after me, or my employer? What would you say if the movie industry called the fact that my employer wouldn't fire me a "Breach of faith" on the part of my employer?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would bother me a lot more if this meant that nobody got to see it. But Apple's economic power isn't that high. It still bothers me a little though.
I believe firmly in the freedom of individuals to engage in whatever contracts they find mutually beneficial. But, I'm not so sure about a big, powerful public corporation. I think as organizations get larger and more powerful, they become more government-like. You die just as surely whether you starve because nobody will sell you food or someone shoots you.
No, I didn't forget that. I didn't come up with the number by counting the different kinds of D&D dice. It was just the number that popped out when I was thinking of how many platonic solids their were. It would've been safer to have counted D&D dice because I know a D10 isn't. On those rare occasions I explain platonic solids to people, I often use a D10 to demonstrate what a platonic solid is and is not.
Oops, I knew that! *chuckle* Oh, well, I made a mistake.
When someone said 'undecahedron', I was hoping at least for something that had sides that were all the same shape. I knew that they all couldn't be regular polygons because there are only 6 possible shapes in 3-space that can do that, and an undecahedron is not one of them. But, they could all be the same irregular polygon. I was very disappointed to learn it was a prism.
So, will that software run on any system I have? It looks to me like it only runs under Mac OS X, and Windows. That means, in order to run it at all, I have to invest several hundred dollars in a copy of XP and many hours of my time re-partitioning a software RAID system just to run it.
Sorry, if you can't tell me how your stuff works, you're not really selling it to me, it's just on loan until you decide to stop providing service and support for it.
Wow! Where do you live?!
It seems to me that your major chip manufacturer employer would stand to gain a great deal by getting these things into gcc instead of having it be in their proprietary compiler. Because then people would have even more incentive to start using your employers products.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if French spelling was in the least rational. Almost all the hardest words to spell in English came from French. My mental pronunciation of 'Hors d'oeuveres' after seeing it in print was "horse dee oover rays", and it took me awhile to link up the pronunciation with the word.
Besides, French refuses to pick up any English words. They have a whole committee of people to determine what is 'official French' and one of the goals of that committee seems to be to avoid important stuff from English.
I do not have any irrational French sentiment. It's totally rational. I will hate the French much less as soon as various idiots stop importing impossible to spell words like 'hors d'eurves', 'faux pas', and such because French is supposedly somehow more cultured than everything else.
But, I would still have moderated that post up. :-)
I'm actually OK with restrictions on soliciting. If there is a pre-arrangement for any kind of compensation other than seeing the information you give out in print as a condition for you having given the information, then I'm OK with calling it industrial espionage or something.
But, IMHO, there should be no restrictions at all on publishing information that was under NDA if you didn't offer people something to get it. Once it escapes from being under NDA, it should be free. Otherwise, we could just replace all copyrights with NDA-style shrink-wrap agreements and have perpetual copyright.
They weren't under an NDA. I can't see how they could be bound by its terms.
From what I understand, the judge forced Thinksecret to become an informant. The judge did not tell them they couldn't publish the information. The judge can't tell them that. They never signed an NDA with Apple, and every once in awhile, the first ammendment actually means something in this country.
And basically admit they're doing something wrong? That seems especially weird to do when, in fact, they weren't doing anything wrong.
Personally, I see morales as a decision making tool for helping people who don't have the time or inclination to carefully think out all the ramifications. So, in that way, a moral stance and a market argument aren't that far apart.
That's why eating meat is considered immoral in warmer parts of the world. Meat there spoils quickly, so it's generally a bad idea to eat it. Additionally, cows are a very useful resource to have around and it would be bad to slaughter them all for meat in times of famine. But, trying to explain that to people at large, especially when they can see the local, short-term gain from slaughtering their cow is very hard. It's best to make it a matter of morals.
This would take way more engineering and effort than we can manage today, but....
The gamma rays would be emanating effectively from a point source. If you got a big asteroid and put it between the Earth and the point source, it would shadow the Earth from the beam. It would have to stay there for the duration of the burst.
As a random, no-basis in fact estimate, I would guess that in order for us to have the know-how and ability to do this, we would have to have had a colony on another planet that grew up into a major nation all its own and each planet to have several beanstalks. We would also have to have a major antimatter production facility somewhere.
Of course, this would mean a lot of our space holdings would be likely to be wiped out. We could probably only manage 2-3 asteroids to keep the planets safe. Maybe some of the more mobile space stuff could hide behind the sun or something. But, it could work if models could give us a few months warning and be accurate to within a couple of weeks.
I'm a strong supporter of what Richard Stallman stands for, but I agree with this statement and find it highly amusing to see it phrased this way. :-)
If you remember, I'm the guy in the audience who asked the question about getting nanotubes to stick to eachother well enough to form a cable instead of an uncountably huge number of separate strands of nanotube. :-)
I saw your presentation at Norwescon this year, and I was interested and impressed. My only really negative comment is that it seemed a little too much like a presentation by a .com trying desperately to convince people that you really had a viable business model.
I was really hoping for a sober engineering discussion that talked frankly about the problems and possible solutions. I thought your climbing robot was the most interesting part of the discussion. But when the 'vision' guy took over that to explain how you all had a chance in hell of making money on all this, I stopped being interested.
I think your company has a chance of succeeding actually. And your ideas about leveraging the technologies you create along the way in order to fund further R&D is are excellent. But talk that's all pretty powerpoint slides and slick presentation really turns me off. I'm not a businessman, and I don't think most of the people there were. I'm an engineer. Details and plain-talk matter to us.
As for stupid comments on Slashdot... I sometimes wish there were a '-1 counterfactual' rating, but it would get abused horribly to moderate down valid opinions people disagreed with. So the best you can do is to post truth and hope the moderators notice. Really, trying hard to control public perception of your company is going to backfire. It's just best to let people see what's going on and let them decide for themselves.
Actually, both are biased statements. Failing to mention that any IDEs exist on Linux is clearly biased. And calling the IDEs on Linux superior without anything to back it up is also clearly biased.
Personally, I've heard good things about Eclipse, but I really despise Java, and I've never really liked IDEs either. So, both of those opinions have prevented me from trying Eclipse myself.
I say if they are willing to be nice, then let bygones be bygones. Yeah, they tried hard to be sleazy, realized it wouldn't work and now seem interested in doing the right thing.
There is, AFAIK, an excellent precedent set a long time ago when book publishers tried to stick liscensing agreements in books. That was shot down, and so should similar things for software.
The only possible justification for treating software differently is that the act of running it creates several copies just so it can run. But I don't see that as being anything other than fair use and beyond the reach of licensing restrictions.
*shrug*
Oh, no, someone is reverse engineering my program! I must stop them! I must take some insane move that will inconvenience a whole ton of people and break an explicit promise in the hopes that they will all collectively pressure this person to stop! I feel so threatened! How could people even think of doing this horrible thing to me! They must all be louts or criminals or worse! Aigh! Run around, scream and shout!
*rolls eyes* Someone tells me that Larry's parents gave in to him when he threw temper tantrums as a child.
OSDL has about as much control over what the developer does in his spare time as Amazon does for me. Should Amazon fire me when the movie industry asks because I work on P2P software in my spare time? I don't think so. Of course, the industry could then just deny Amazon the right to sell movies. *shrug* Stupid and childish.
A million people have probably told you this already, but...
I'm a big fan of Subversion myself, but it isn't at all appropriate for kernel development due to the distributed nature of kernel development. Subversion is a very centralized version control system.
I think the motivation was childish and stupid. But, the rest of your post is exactly right, and Linus should never have trusted Larry McVoy in the first place.
Proprietary software is ALL about screwing the customer. Whine all you want about money. There are plenty of software businesses making nice profits without screwing their customers. You don't need proprietary software to make money, you need it to screw your customers.
I don't care what a license agreement says, unless you get to look at the source, reverse engineering should be perfectly legal. The progress of science (which is basically just reverse engineering on a grand scale) should not be stopped because it might hurt someone commercially.
Besides, it's not OSDLs job to enforce Larry McVoy's license agreement for him. Larry could sue the developer if he wanted the developer to stop. If I wrote DeCSS in my spare time, should the movie industry go after me, or my employer? What would you say if the movie industry called the fact that my employer wouldn't fire me a "Breach of faith" on the part of my employer?