I must congratulate him for his tenacity and bravery
What? It's his JOB. You don't think he and Ballamer worked out this whole good cop/bad cop thing? Yeah, that's really brave... getting paid six figures to lecture the Open Source community about Microsoft's self-serving licensing position. How tenacious that he spends many hours per week earning his living.
I think the Senator is talking about stuff like this, Windows Media Player 8, Windows Movie Maker, and Digital Photo Support...
So we should prevent MS (and Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc, etc...) from integrating these features and let Apple, who is heavily marketing these features take and take market share until they have the monopoly?
The fact is a computer is an entire product. And the fact is no one is even trying to market a competetive alternative to windows to PC makers. What good will crippling windows do? I forget where I read this but it rings true: Linux's success or failure on the desktop will be driven by the Linux community, not by Microsoft.
So I could write a program 'makeDVF' that took video and created a.DVF file that just happened to be the same format as a DVD. Then my 'deDVF' program would decrypt the DVF files and oops! DVDs too?
Or is all that patented? And would Cyberlink really be as guilty for decrypting.DVF files accidentally as I would be for decrypting DVDs?
This interview does indeed provide a quite different perspective on his statements:
"There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem.
"There is a part of open source called GPL that breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or (e-mail technology) Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that" -Bill Gates
The statements in the original story are actually the worst of the worst of what he says.
Looking at the image on the web site, it appears they put charges on both the top and bottom layers. Does that mean their "layer of circuitry" is transparent? If so, there'd be a negative of the image on the back side, which would be uh, something.
Or maybe the charge is only on one side. It seems like a charge on both sides would be redundant. After all, the same charges would repel (pushing them to the top) and the opposite charges would attract (pulling them to the bottom.
For a slightly less ambitious solution, resize your browser window so you can only see a little of the link, click it, and check the title or slowly drag the window open so you don't see anything you didn't want to.
Also useful at work when you're unsure the content of a link you are visiting might "disturb" your boss. You can get a mini-preview beforehand to avoid disaster.
This article reads like a glossary. I vote it the most incomprehensible-for-non-tech-heads article I've ever seen on Slashdot:
"... we have just released Ganymede 1.0. Ganymede GPL'ed metadirectory, put an NDS Active Directory style concurrent GUI network's NIS, LDAP, Windows NT PDC, Samba, and even DNS directory services. Ganymede 1.0 userKit password synchronization to UNIX, Windows NT, and Samba. Ganymede Java Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows NT, Mac OS, and OS/2."
I've been thinking about this repeat question. Think about a magazine like "Runners World" for example, or "Golf" or something. They basically just rotate their content once a year. If you've read 12 issues, you've read them all.
So slashdot repeats some stories every now and then. Big deal. At least the comments are different.
Broadband is slowly making inroads into people's consciousness
This is quite true. Especially if you look at the fact that most universities provide broadband connections to their students IN THEIR DORM ROOMS. Kids are getting hooked on it, and they're much more likely to go out hunt down an apartment in a DSL or cable capable area.
As soon as all the old modem-fogies are dead and only the college-graduated broadband junkies are left, the demand will be high enough to get ubiquitous high speed connections.
neither really pays attention to what comes out of Redmond... nor should they.
That's bullshit. Poke around on the gnome mailing lists for a while you'll see that certain high profile Gnome hackers pay very keen attention to certain upcoming projects in Redmond. And that's exactly what they should be doing. Microsoft and Apple do many things right, and linux has the benefit of being able to copy the good things and ignore the bad things. Linux's inherent strengths become the icing on the cake.
I've been pleasantly surprised at the Gnome organizations plans--many of their developers are aiming to make an environment that will be able to fight with the big dogs. And judging by the speed at which progressed so far, I think they might make it. They're focused on the right things and they've got an extremely solid footing on which to implement them.
"[kernel releases] don't seem to break programs that previously worked"
...and...
"the attitude I see from many is 'if it's working, don't touch it'."
...seem contradictory. If people were sure that kernel releases wouldn't break their stuff, they would be much less cautious about upgrading. The fact that people are reluctant to apply minor updates in security or stability implies they're worried something will break.
-Erik
Re:Best laid || layed plans
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 1
How can you become "freed" from anything when at the rate the tech field is going, we've seen a surge of lawsuits from all walks of life ranging from patents, to copyrights, to any other fabled scenario a company wants to spend money litigating?
The same way you survive in a forest full of bears. Protect yourself as best you can, and get the hell on with your life. Netscape paints a nice picture of what happens to crybabies.
We never hear about the law when it is properly upheld (as it is 99.99999% of the time), we only hear about the bad rulings. When did you start basing your picture of the world on what you read in newspapers and see on T.V.? Slashdot is a supplement, not a survey.
-Erik
Re:It's not currently cool, but it has potential
on
3D w/o Goggles
·
· Score: 2
You speak of going to 64 layers as if the difficuty of this is the same order of magnitude as going from one layer to two.
This two-layer screen is probably a two-layer hack. They haven't designed a system that can be layered, or they would be advertising that.
Flashy or not, NS4 can hardly render standard HTML.
The problem with NS is it tries to render things it doesn't know how to render properly so even if you try to "embed" a degraded page in your layout, the browser still barfs. I especially like it when the entire program actually crashes because it tries to render HTML features that are bigger than its britches. At least IE says "sorry, I don't know that" and skips over the code.
That's bullshit. If someone is producing a movie, they pitch it to distributors. Artisan didn't *make* the Blair Witch Project, they just promote and distribute it. If you think they're doing a bad job of it or are overcharging, start your own distribution company and try to convince directors and producers to have you distribute their movies.
Yes, it's hard to start a distribution business. But if you think members of the MPAA are doing such a horrible job, explain that to some investors, get some capital and do it right! What right does Universal Pictures have to "shut you down"?
I'm not suggesting libertarian anything. Just good old fashioned free-market competition.
1) These distributors/publishers are selling things pretty close to what it takes to cover costs. Maybe for every movie they distribute, for every $25 DVD they sell, they also snag $2 from people who watch the movie on the plane, another $4 from people who want to watch their movies over the web at a friends house. But that $31 is roughly what it costs to make the movie, the DVD, distribute it, market it, and provide technology for all those time-shifts and whatever-shifts you've paid for.
In this case, if we were to overturn whatever laws you want to overturn in the name of FAIR USE, these movie distributors will have to raise the price of DVD's by 20% to cover the costs they were making.
So you'll still be paying the same damn amount, you'll just have to pay up front for your right to do those things, instead of later on as needed.
2) The second possibility is that these companies are charging waaay more than they need to cover costs. In this case, the law has a solution. No, don't violate their copyrights to "send a message"...
START YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION COMPANY. Distribute movies cheapy, to just cover costs. Dissuade pirates by making your movies available cheaply.
IF THIS WILL ACTUALLY WORK, GO FOR IT. There's a wide open market for cheap DVDs.
Personally, I think is that it's not enough. You can sell your DVDs for $5 and people will still copy them. Especially the young kids who don't remember when DVDs were $25 and are pissed at the increase to $6. REVOLT! WE DON'T HAVE TO TAKE THESE LUDICROUS $6 PRICES! ASSEMBLE AND COPYRIGHT-VIOLATE!
The cave is very cool, PERIOD! I got to use the CAVE at brown about a month ago, and it was the best experience of my life. Cave painting completed my existence. It was amazing.
You keep calling them "fundies"... isn't that rather inflammatory of you? You, who keeps going off about flames and giving people ammo. You complain about militant atheism while being an offensive agnostic.
Slashdot Mirror
I must congratulate him for his tenacity and bravery
What? It's his JOB. You don't think he and Ballamer worked out this whole good cop/bad cop thing? Yeah, that's really brave... getting paid six figures to lecture the Open Source community about Microsoft's self-serving licensing position. How tenacious that he spends many hours per week earning his living.
-Erik
I think the Senator is talking about stuff like this, Windows Media Player 8, Windows Movie Maker, and Digital Photo Support...
So we should prevent MS (and Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc, etc...) from integrating these features and let Apple, who is heavily marketing these features take and take market share until they have the monopoly?
The fact is a computer is an entire product. And the fact is no one is even trying to market a competetive alternative to windows to PC makers. What good will crippling windows do? I forget where I read this but it rings true: Linux's success or failure on the desktop will be driven by the Linux community, not by Microsoft.
-Erik
I thought beta implied feature complete? Much of the linux software necessary to make it competetive w/ Windows is pre v0.5.
-Erik
So I could write a program 'makeDVF' that took video and created a .DVF file that just happened to be the same format as a DVD. Then my 'deDVF' program would decrypt the DVF files and oops! DVDs too?
.DVF files accidentally as I would be for decrypting DVDs?
Or is all that patented? And would Cyberlink really be as guilty for decrypting
-Erik
This interview does indeed provide a quite different perspective on his statements:
"There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem.
"There is a part of open source called GPL that breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or (e-mail technology) Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that" -Bill Gates
The statements in the original story are actually the worst of the worst of what he says.
-Erik
Looking at the image on the web site, it appears they put charges on both the top and bottom layers. Does that mean their "layer of circuitry" is transparent? If so, there'd be a negative of the image on the back side, which would be uh, something.
Or maybe the charge is only on one side. It seems like a charge on both sides would be redundant. After all, the same charges would repel (pushing them to the top) and the opposite charges would attract (pulling them to the bottom.
-Erik
For a slightly less ambitious solution, resize your browser window so you can only see a little of the link, click it, and check the title or slowly drag the window open so you don't see anything you didn't want to.
Also useful at work when you're unsure the content of a link you are visiting might "disturb" your boss. You can get a mini-preview beforehand to avoid disaster.
-Erik
This article reads like a glossary. I vote it the most incomprehensible-for-non-tech-heads article I've ever seen on Slashdot:
"... we have just released Ganymede 1.0. Ganymede GPL'ed metadirectory, put an NDS Active Directory style concurrent GUI network's NIS, LDAP, Windows NT PDC, Samba, and even DNS directory services. Ganymede 1.0 userKit password synchronization to UNIX, Windows NT, and Samba. Ganymede Java Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows NT, Mac OS, and OS/2."
-Erik
I've been thinking about this repeat question. Think about a magazine like "Runners World" for example, or "Golf" or something. They basically just rotate their content once a year. If you've read 12 issues, you've read them all.
So slashdot repeats some stories every now and then. Big deal. At least the comments are different.
-Erik
I work all night and I post all day
that's quality.
-Erik
Broadband is slowly making inroads into people's consciousness
This is quite true. Especially if you look at the fact that most universities provide broadband connections to their students IN THEIR DORM ROOMS. Kids are getting hooked on it, and they're much more likely to go out hunt down an apartment in a DSL or cable capable area.
As soon as all the old modem-fogies are dead and only the college-graduated broadband junkies are left, the demand will be high enough to get ubiquitous high speed connections.
-Erik
neither really pays attention to what comes out of Redmond... nor should they.
That's bullshit. Poke around on the gnome mailing lists for a while you'll see that certain high profile Gnome hackers pay very keen attention to certain upcoming projects in Redmond. And that's exactly what they should be doing. Microsoft and Apple do many things right, and linux has the benefit of being able to copy the good things and ignore the bad things. Linux's inherent strengths become the icing on the cake.
I've been pleasantly surprised at the Gnome organizations plans--many of their developers are aiming to make an environment that will be able to fight with the big dogs. And judging by the speed at which progressed so far, I think they might make it. They're focused on the right things and they've got an extremely solid footing on which to implement them.
-Erik
Hmm...
"[kernel releases] don't seem to break programs that previously worked"
...and...
"the attitude I see from many is 'if it's working, don't touch it'."
...seem contradictory. If people were sure that kernel releases wouldn't break their stuff, they would be much less cautious about upgrading. The fact that people are reluctant to apply minor updates in security or stability implies they're worried something will break.
-Erik
How can you become "freed" from anything when at the rate the tech field is going, we've seen a surge of lawsuits from all walks of life ranging from patents, to copyrights, to any other fabled scenario a company wants to spend money litigating?
The same way you survive in a forest full of bears. Protect yourself as best you can, and get the hell on with your life. Netscape paints a nice picture of what happens to crybabies.
We never hear about the law when it is properly upheld (as it is 99.99999% of the time), we only hear about the bad rulings. When did you start basing your picture of the world on what you read in newspapers and see on T.V.? Slashdot is a supplement, not a survey.
-Erik
You speak of going to 64 layers as if the difficuty of this is the same order of magnitude as going from one layer to two.
This two-layer screen is probably a two-layer hack. They haven't designed a system that can be layered, or they would be advertising that.
-Erik
Flashy or not, NS4 can hardly render standard HTML.
The problem with NS is it tries to render things it doesn't know how to render properly so even if you try to "embed" a degraded page in your layout, the browser still barfs. I especially like it when the entire program actually crashes because it tries to render HTML features that are bigger than its britches. At least IE says "sorry, I don't know that" and skips over the code.
-Erik
That's bullshit. If someone is producing a movie, they pitch it to distributors. Artisan didn't *make* the Blair Witch Project, they just promote and distribute it. If you think they're doing a bad job of it or are overcharging, start your own distribution company and try to convince directors and producers to have you distribute their movies.
Yes, it's hard to start a distribution business. But if you think members of the MPAA are doing such a horrible job, explain that to some investors, get some capital and do it right! What right does Universal Pictures have to "shut you down"?
I'm not suggesting libertarian anything. Just good old fashioned free-market competition.
-Erik
aughgh! You were so close, but the i was just too tempting, wasn't it?
-Erik
Threshold -1, Highest scores first, start at the bottom.
-Erik
Ok, there are two possibilities here.
1) These distributors/publishers are selling things pretty close to what it takes to cover costs. Maybe for every movie they distribute, for every $25 DVD they sell, they also snag $2 from people who watch the movie on the plane, another $4 from people who want to watch their movies over the web at a friends house. But that $31 is roughly what it costs to make the movie, the DVD, distribute it, market it, and provide technology for all those time-shifts and whatever-shifts you've paid for.
In this case, if we were to overturn whatever laws you want to overturn in the name of FAIR USE, these movie distributors will have to raise the price of DVD's by 20% to cover the costs they were making.
So you'll still be paying the same damn amount, you'll just have to pay up front for your right to do those things, instead of later on as needed.
2) The second possibility is that these companies are charging waaay more than they need to cover costs. In this case, the law has a solution. No, don't violate their copyrights to "send a message"...
START YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION COMPANY. Distribute movies cheapy, to just cover costs. Dissuade pirates by making your movies available cheaply.
IF THIS WILL ACTUALLY WORK, GO FOR IT. There's a wide open market for cheap DVDs.
Personally, I think is that it's not enough. You can sell your DVDs for $5 and people will still copy them. Especially the young kids who don't remember when DVDs were $25 and are pissed at the increase to $6. REVOLT! WE DON'T HAVE TO TAKE THESE LUDICROUS $6 PRICES! ASSEMBLE AND COPYRIGHT-VIOLATE!
another $.02 in the pot.
-Erik
This paper can be found here
-Erik
The cave is very cool, PERIOD! I got to use the CAVE at brown about a month ago, and it was the best experience of my life. Cave painting completed my existence. It was amazing.
-Erik
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. It's a joke guys, "Funny" not "Interesting".
-Erik
You keep calling them "fundies"... isn't that rather inflammatory of you? You, who keeps going off about flames and giving people ammo. You complain about militant atheism while being an offensive agnostic.
-Erik
Well, whenever I poke through, I give everyone a 10. I figure I'm doing my little part to boost someone's self esteem.
Maybe if that just shows up as a spike in their graph that's not the case.
-Erik