If Average Joe here wanted to get a fish, which of these would he be more likely to do?
Take out his fishing pole, go down to the dock, and catch a fish.
Go to the supermarket and buy a fish.
The first option is free and offers more variety than the second. Yet most people, who just want a fish for dinner, will spend money on the supermarket fish because it is more convenient. I imagine that, in many cases, if companies would make more than a couple desktop models with Linux preinstalled, there would be much deeper market penetration by virtue of the fact that many people accept whatever is available for the least effort.
By the way, I almost laughed at the "sheer intellectual curiosity" line. The lack of "sheer intellectual curiosity" is what drives the entire advertising industry: unwillingness to do research before buying a product.
Of course, you would always want to prioritize VOIP, games, DNS and other types of vital traffic. Could even prioritize based on what servers are being accessed. Blackberry.net, Chase Online Banking, ETrade, and other similar sites are a bit more important than YouTube.com for most customers. Yes, but can you imagine the lawsuits when <insert website/service/network protocol> demands that it be given higher priority?
You are right - you can not copyright schematics - redraw it preserving the netlist and it will not be covered by the original copyright. If I were to write different code that produced, when compiled, the same binary as the Windows kernel, could I be sued?
Re:Another argument for variability of "constants"
on
Galaxy Sans Dark Matter
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· Score: 4, Informative
No (or negligible) dark matter in our galaxy, eh? That's what I thought when I first read this story, too. The summary is confusing:
Astronomers have crunched some numbers on a galaxy to discover that its rotation can be fully explained by the gravity of the observable matter -- in effect, this galaxy seems to lack dark matter. Here, "this galaxy" refers not to the Milky Way but to the other galaxy mentioned in the first part of the sentence.
Unless I am REALLY missing something, it is next to impossible to go from a blurry distorted image to pin-sharp. Really close to impossible. Actually, mathematically, it is completely impossible for most images. This is the same reason that any data compression algorithm must, at least some of the time, produce "compressed" files that are larger than the originals: if they didn't, there would be a many-to-one mapping, violating the pigeonhole principle.
I've been running Vista 64-bit for over a year. No bluescreens, no incompatible hardware, no problems with media files of any type - divx, xvid, mp3, wma, etc.
I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. I bought a brand new machine with Vista preinstalled back in the summer of 2007. The system was incompatible with its own built-in hardware. It also freezes all the time for no reason if I have even a single memory-intensive application open (e.g. Firefox 2).
Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. Why? I mean, obviously its going to need more memory to have things like transparent windows and automatic screen double buffering, but remember, the recommended RAM for Vista is 1 GB, and it was 128 MB for XP. That's quite a lot of difference that can't be attributed to changes other than simple code bloat. Actually, its rather revealing to look at this chart, which shows that there was far more bloat in Vista compared to XP than there was in any of the other versions of Windows compared to their predecessors.
I think that the major problem with patents is not just that, in software in particular, rapidly changing ideas are patented as soon as they are thought up. At least to a degree, patents also defeat the purpose of capitalism as it was originally designed. Capitalism thrives on competition. If you remove the ability of more than one company to create a product with a certain feature, then you have a limited form of a monopoly. The best way to prevent other people from making more money than you by copying your product is to make your product better than the competing versions. (Or, unfortunately, to spend more money on advertising.)
On a somewhat related note, I find this graph rather interesting.
I think that is a silly measure of bugginess. Not only does the number of flaws reported being less reflect lower usage of Vista, it also likely says the the reporting system is difficult to work with. If anything, I think the fact that the non-Windows systems have a higher number of flaws reported indicates that they have easier-to-use bug reporting systems. The correct way to measure statistics on things like this is either to have a third party subject them to a standardized battery of tests (indicating actual security levels) or to measure the ratio of bugs fixed to total bugs reported (indicating the development team's ability to correct reported flaws quickly).
The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. I agree. I was actually thinking that the correct thing for Microsoft to do in this situation would be to drop IE entirely (except for a backwards-compatible rendering mode) and release IE 8 under a new name and identification. That would solve all of their problems and not break anything... except the brand perception. Of course, the MS marketing department would never allow it.
It just happens that IL (the bytecode that.NET languages compile to) is quite high-level Does anyone remember the joke about Microsoft introducing object-oriented assembly language?
Microsoft's new motto is, "Finding new ways to alienate paying customers, one day at a time". I'm waiting for them to start suing their own customers... oh, wait, the music industry has already tried that.
Wildcharge and Fulton banked on magnetic coupling while Powercast decided to go with RF (Radio Frequency). So which technology will eventually prevail to be the future of wireless power? Blu-ray!
It doesn't even support the functional paradigm (one of the oldest in computer science). If I understand you correctly, you are trying to imply that the older a given paradigm is, the more useful it is. Allow me to paraphrase you:
It doesn't even support the spaghetti code paradigm (one of the oldest in software engineering). Java has its uses, just like any other language. Don't criticize a language based on what features it has. You should only look at how suited the language is to the task at hand.
Let me guess: the next mission after this one will upgrade the telescope to be able to see up to 300 million years before the Big Bang! Even better, it has the same chance of succeeding on budget and schedule as the mission the article describes!
Unfortunately, all the Windows NT family (including Vista) still have the same security flaw -- MBR [Master Boot Record] can be modified from usermode.
"Security flaw"? Heck, I'm almost finished with the virus that overwrites the MBR with GRUB stage 1!
Alright, I guess I'm forced to admit I'm just kidding.
On the other hand, one must be careful of the difference in logic between the arguments, "Just because it's open source doesn't mean anyone can come in and hack it." and "Just because there are lots of hackers are viruses on the internet doesn't mean you need a firewall." The problem is that many people can't see a difference in format of those two arguments.
Also, "open source" does not mean "anyone can tinker with it" as you suggest. Hackers (the malicious type) may be able to read the source code, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can modify it or the compiled version on your machine.
Slashdot Mirror
- Take out his fishing pole, go down to the dock, and catch a fish.
- Go to the supermarket and buy a fish.
The first option is free and offers more variety than the second. Yet most people, who just want a fish for dinner, will spend money on the supermarket fish because it is more convenient. I imagine that, in many cases, if companies would make more than a couple desktop models with Linux preinstalled, there would be much deeper market penetration by virtue of the fact that many people accept whatever is available for the least effort.By the way, I almost laughed at the "sheer intellectual curiosity" line. The lack of "sheer intellectual curiosity" is what drives the entire advertising industry: unwillingness to do research before buying a product.
This ought to be tagged with "!amistake".
</conspiracy-theory>
Maybe he meant to imply that he would step on it on his way out.
I wonder how many of the "Vista sucks" crows are trying to run it on outdated hardware. I bought a brand new machine with Vista preinstalled back in the summer of 2007. The system was incompatible with its own built-in hardware. It also freezes all the time for no reason if I have even a single memory-intensive application open (e.g. Firefox 2). Vista does like a lot of memory - I wouldn't touch it without at least 1.5 GB - but this isn't 2001 any more. There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. Why? I mean, obviously its going to need more memory to have things like transparent windows and automatic screen double buffering, but remember, the recommended RAM for Vista is 1 GB, and it was 128 MB for XP. That's quite a lot of difference that can't be attributed to changes other than simple code bloat. Actually, its rather revealing to look at this chart, which shows that there was far more bloat in Vista compared to XP than there was in any of the other versions of Windows compared to their predecessors.
I think that the major problem with patents is not just that, in software in particular, rapidly changing ideas are patented as soon as they are thought up. At least to a degree, patents also defeat the purpose of capitalism as it was originally designed. Capitalism thrives on competition. If you remove the ability of more than one company to create a product with a certain feature, then you have a limited form of a monopoly. The best way to prevent other people from making more money than you by copying your product is to make your product better than the competing versions. (Or, unfortunately, to spend more money on advertising.)
On a somewhat related note, I find this graph rather interesting.
I think that is a silly measure of bugginess. Not only does the number of flaws reported being less reflect lower usage of Vista, it also likely says the the reporting system is difficult to work with. If anything, I think the fact that the non-Windows systems have a higher number of flaws reported indicates that they have easier-to-use bug reporting systems. The correct way to measure statistics on things like this is either to have a third party subject them to a standardized battery of tests (indicating actual security levels) or to measure the ratio of bugs fixed to total bugs reported (indicating the development team's ability to correct reported flaws quickly).
Please see this comment and my response.
Let me guess: the next mission after this one will upgrade the telescope to be able to see up to 300 million years before the Big Bang! Even better, it has the same chance of succeeding on budget and schedule as the mission the article describes!
I think we have a new distributed computing project...
NetworkSolutionsMustDie@Home?
"Security flaw"? Heck, I'm almost finished with the virus that overwrites the MBR with GRUB stage 1!
Alright, I guess I'm forced to admit I'm just kidding.
Microsoft apologized?!
Wait... uhmm...
So ... confused ...
*** BAM! ***
But seriously, does anyone really think this was an accident or expect this to be any better than it was before?
On the other hand, one must be careful of the difference in logic between the arguments, "Just because it's open source doesn't mean anyone can come in and hack it." and "Just because there are lots of hackers are viruses on the internet doesn't mean you need a firewall." The problem is that many people can't see a difference in format of those two arguments.
Also, "open source" does not mean "anyone can tinker with it" as you suggest. Hackers (the malicious type) may be able to read the source code, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can modify it or the compiled version on your machine.