It's interesting how this thread has brought out the best and the worst of people. I've seen some comments that are really kind-hearted, and some that are truly foul and uncalled for.
In one experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft. This is a very specific situation though, but it shows how sensitive to light our visual system is.
Let's conduct the following experiment:
A) Take an electronic flash and a volunteer into a dark room.
B) Close your eyes.
C ) Hold the flash up to the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubject and trigger it.
D) Run.
Electronic flashes generally have a duration of 1/1000th at most. I'm not sure that concluding that humans can perceive events that have 1/1000th or less of a second duration is useful, especially in the context of this article.
I've yet to see an open source license that required applications built on top
of its platform to cede back IP rights - clearly that would destroy incentive to use that platform.
... and it wouldn't be an open open source platform. Nor would any license that tried to do such a thing be enforcible in any real way. I'm sure if RMS thought he could get away with it, he would try it.
I wonder who they talked to about this. The comments about open source are really glaringly ignorant. Even the trade rags haven't said anything this stupid in a _long_ time.
I'm not sure I'd use this myself though. I find myself resurecting machines that won't boot from lilo anymore quite a bit. It'd be awfully annoying not to be able to use an off the shelf rescue disk. It's bad enough when you have to get some weird scsi driver working.
OTOH, it'd be a lifesaver if you have some wounded machine you need to get back up ASAP.
I was hoping that they'd be able to demonstrate at least a quad configuration by now. I thought that part of AMD's sell was that their bus architecture was better and could support more CPUs than Intel's.
RMS isn't a particullay rational character. He has some good ideas, but ofeten he needxs to be taken with a grain of salt.
I go along with RMS as an idealist and if he says something irrational, I try laugh it off. For instance the nonsence/doublespeak of "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux."
When KDE decided to use QT it alienated a lot of open source developers, including RMS. In fact, it's pretty clear to me that RMS doesn't really like the KDE project. This dislike prompted the formation of GNOME, which attracted the more open source devout of us.
So no QT has been GPLed and all is forgiven right? Well, not exactly. This has been a long standing adversarial situation, and the bad blood isn't going away anytime soon.
Yes. RMS is being irrational, and he's getting on your case. He doesn't like you. He's going to give you a hard time for a while.
Get the URL of the file you want to download, and feed it to wget
with the -c option. When your modem disconnects, reconnect and type the command again.
You might read the manual yourself.
From the wget manpage:
-c --continue-ftp
[...]
Note that you do not
need to specify this option if the only thing you
want is wget to continue retrieving where it left
off when the connection is lost - wget does this by
default. You need this option when you want to continue retrieval of a file already halfway
retrieved, saved by other FTP software, or left by wget being killed.
Why not just hand out cash and prewritten reviews? Certainly it's nVidia's right to hand out cash with stipulations. It's their free cash afterall.
...
I'm rather surprised that dolling out review boards based on anything besides the number of hits on a site is considered the right and privlidge of the manufacturer.
I'm rather surprised that anyone would think that anything like this was anywhere near acceptable behavior for either the websites or the manufacturer.
Linux sucks because it doesn't have office 2000 intergrated?
X sucks because it runs on more than one operating system (and doesn't have office 2000 intergrated)?
And off in another corner I hear, "Gnome sucks because it isn't innovative."
Look, The Linux desktop situation is crazy, but _not_all_machines_need_a_desktop! It's also nice to have machines that don't cease to function when their desktops go down.
Additionally, if we want innovation, we need to have more than one desktop. I'd be nice if the two existing desktops played a little more nicely together.
Miguel's argument is just a rehash of the UNIX haters handbook's view of X. The bit about code reuse is a good point, but it doesn't really make sense that code reuse needs to be tied to a specific desktop environment.
After some careful consideration I would like to retract my statement. eWatch is a wonderful, moral, profitable company with very nice people working for it. If anyone is thinking about using their software I wholeheartedly recommend it!
As a former customer, I can say eWatch is a terrible company. The customer service reps are unhelpful and their software stinks. I spent $5000 dollars and got incorrect information.
> As most Debian users have come to learn and > love, a sure sign of reliability in the Linux > world is indicated when Debian decides to > release a binary deb. [...] > Doesn't that tell you a lot > about the current stability of the server?
Logically, no.
Your first statement can be translated as "if a package is in debian, it is stable."
It does not logically follow that if it is not in debian, it is not stable.
One can come to this conclusion without knowing anything about Xfree 4 or Debian.
I can say from experience that debian is _way_ behind in a lot of ways. Don't get me wrong, Debian is great for a lot of applications, but for keeping up with rapidly changing software (stable and unstable) it is not the way to go.
One thing that I've noticed is that it never pays to be an alarmist. Terrible things are always happening, but the things we fear the most never seem to come.
There are some that we will lose control over our technology and it will distroy us. This fear has been expressed for a very long time.
Just as many people belive that disaster will come from something outside of technology (e.g. overpopulation), perhaps for an even longer time. Many of these external problems have been avoided due in a large part to technology.
Although part of me still wishes Amazon had completely stepped down from it's decision to patent one click shopping, I'm glad to see that someone out there is talking about rational reform.
I believe one thing is true; if Amazon had just decided not to enforce its patents, not a whole lot would have changed. It's possible that this may be a first step towards a better situation.
I still think that Amazon's patent should not be valid in the first place. On the other hand, it is inevitable that stupid patents will be granted, and it is unlikely that all software patents will be eliminated. At least the proposed changes would help the situation immensely.
They comic book guy on on the Simpsons says:
on
X-Files FPS Episode
·
· Score: 1
In any other country in the world, this would be treated as a relic that would at least fall under government regulation. ( It's ironic that encryption products and supercomputers are more tightly regulated than nearly irreplacable artifacts). This T-Rex skeleton is one of the most complete in the world ( if no the most) and has immense scientific value.
Although I don't think the government should have a monopoly on the fossil business, there needs to be better cooperation between scientists and collectors. Though it is unlikely that this particular fossil will ever be lost tract of, there are many other that are.
The fact is that the high end processors of today will be next week's surplus. Whether this translates into better affordable PC's in the future is another question, but it seems like it can't hurt.
In the end, this has nothing to do with what you or I buy, but it has everything to do with the industry and what seems like the flagging domminance of Intel. People like to buy from the manufacturer that makes the fastest chips. Even if they can't afford top of the line.
While I agree that it is easy to scoll past bad posts (which is debatable depending on you settings, connection and machine speed) The biggest problem seems to me that this flamebait is sucking up all of the moderation points, so no worthwhile moderation is done.
One possibility that comes to mind is a panic button in each discussion. If enough people hit the panic button, extra moderation points are automatically given to mderators in that discussion.
Or there could be an automatic panic if more than a certain percentage of moderation is moderation in the doen, rather than up direction.
I've found moderation to be pretty useful. This is the first discussion that I've seen it clearly fail.
Now wait a second. Of course I can keep releasing my code, but if you make changes ( no matter how minor) you can re-release it and not give back the changes. Now, from one free software developer to another, this realy isn't a problem, since both will exist on the same standing.
The problem comes when people with a lot more marketing power take over your project and make it proprietary. The Kerberos people are losing control of their project to Microsoft because of their use of a BSD style license. How this will finally play out is still to be seen, but it looks pretty grim.
In the cae of Kerberos, this is a total disaster, since Microsoft is essentially changing the protocol by using their market power, which means that a freely distributable version of a kerberos server that operates with all clients won't exist.
Why do some licesnses get more discussion than other licenses? In the case of the GPL, there is a lot of code out there under it, and there are a lot of ways that the GPL can be violated. Since the terms of the GPL are unusual for people who aren't accustomed to free software, there are many people who violate it. It would seem to me that the GPL violations that generate the most discussion on slashdot.
As for the BSD license, there is a fair amount of software out there under the BSD license, but there isn't really a whole lot to discuss, since there isn't really a whole lot to violate.
The artistic license isn't used much, so it isn't discussed much.
Why don't slashdotters like BSD? BSD licenses allow code that you write to come under the control of other people, and you can't stop them. You can't even stop them from putting out full page ads saying that their version of your code is better than theirs. Then there's the possibility that your code will become embrace and extendified by some greedy individual, as seems to be happening to kerberos.
As far as problems with the Artistic License, take a look at the OSD as commented by Bruce Perens for some gripes.
Slashdot Mirror
>Check out the birthday paradox, and please don't write any code that needs to be secure. Thank you.
No need to be rude, especially since you're wrong (or at least misunderstanding the statement).
The actual number, however, is 252.
Probability of not having the same birthday as Linux's daughter = (364/365) (excluding leap days)
Solve :
.5 = (364/365)^n
which gives n=252.
Counter-intuitive, but true.
It's interesting how this thread has brought out the best and the worst of people. I've seen some comments that are really kind-hearted, and some that are truly foul and uncalled for.
A bit like the Richard Stevens story.
Let's conduct the following experiment:
A) Take an electronic flash and a volunteer into a dark room.
B) Close your eyes.
C ) Hold the flash up to the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Hsubject and trigger it.
D) Run.
Electronic flashes generally have a duration of 1/1000th at most. I'm not sure that concluding that humans can perceive events that have 1/1000th or less of a second duration is useful, especially in the context of this article.
... and it wouldn't be an open open source platform. Nor would any license that tried to do such a thing be enforcible in any real way. I'm sure if RMS thought he could get away with it, he would try it.
I wonder who they talked to about this. The comments about open source are really glaringly ignorant. Even the trade rags haven't said anything this stupid in a _long_ time.
Hmm. I think the price of bad RAM just went up.
I'm not sure I'd use this myself though. I find myself resurecting machines that won't boot from lilo anymore quite a bit. It'd be awfully annoying not to be able to use an off the shelf rescue disk. It's bad enough when you have to get some weird scsi driver working.
OTOH, it'd be a lifesaver if you have some wounded machine you need to get back up ASAP.
>Any hints as to what the
>outcome of all this will be?
A humongous fungus among us.
I was hoping that they'd be able to demonstrate at least a quad configuration by now. I thought that part of AMD's sell was that their bus architecture was better and could support more CPUs than Intel's.
RMS isn't a particullay rational character. He has some good ideas, but ofeten he needxs to be taken with a grain of salt.
I go along with RMS as an idealist and if he says something irrational, I try laugh it off. For instance the nonsence/doublespeak of "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux."
When KDE decided to use QT it alienated a lot of open source developers, including RMS. In fact, it's pretty clear to me that RMS doesn't really like the KDE project. This dislike prompted the formation of GNOME, which attracted the more open source devout of us.
So no QT has been GPLed and all is forgiven right? Well, not exactly. This has been a long standing adversarial situation, and the bad blood isn't going away anytime soon.
Yes. RMS is being irrational, and he's getting on your case. He doesn't like you. He's going to give you a hard time for a while.
You might read the manual yourself.
From the wget manpage:
-c --continue-ftp
[...]
Note that you do not need to specify this option if the only thing you want is wget to continue retrieving where it left off when the connection is lost - wget does this by default. You need this option when you want to continue retrieval of a file already halfway retrieved, saved by other FTP software, or left by wget being killed.
Maybe this will scare away all the people who think that pico is the beat editor under linux.
Why bother with all of these "card" thingies?
Why not just hand out cash and prewritten reviews? Certainly it's nVidia's right to hand out cash with stipulations. It's their free cash afterall.
...
I'm rather surprised that dolling out review boards based on anything besides the number of hits on a site is considered the right and privlidge of the manufacturer.
I'm rather surprised that anyone would think that anything like this was anywhere near acceptable behavior for either the websites or the manufacturer.
Linux sucks because it doesn't have office 2000 intergrated?
X sucks because it runs on more than one operating system (and doesn't have office 2000 intergrated)?
And off in another corner I hear, "Gnome sucks because it isn't innovative."
Look, The Linux desktop situation is crazy, but _not_all_machines_need_a_desktop! It's also nice to have machines that don't cease to function when their desktops go down.
Additionally, if we want innovation, we need to have more than one desktop. I'd be nice if the two existing desktops played a little more nicely together.
Miguel's argument is just a rehash of the UNIX haters handbook's view of X. The bit about code reuse is a good point, but it doesn't really make sense that code reuse needs to be tied to a specific desktop environment.
After some careful consideration I would like to retract my statement. eWatch is a wonderful, moral, profitable company with very nice people working for it. If anyone is thinking about using their software I wholeheartedly recommend it!
As a former customer, I can say eWatch is a terrible company. The customer service reps are unhelpful and their software stinks. I spent $5000 dollars and got incorrect information.
> As most Debian users have come to learn and
> love, a sure sign of reliability in the Linux
> world is indicated when Debian decides to
> release a binary deb.
[...]
> Doesn't that tell you a lot
> about the current stability of the server?
Logically, no.
Your first statement can be translated as "if a package is in debian, it is stable."
It does not logically follow that if it is not in debian, it is not stable.
One can come to this conclusion without knowing anything about Xfree 4 or Debian.
I can say from experience that debian is _way_ behind in a lot of ways. Don't get me wrong, Debian is great for a lot of applications, but for keeping up with rapidly changing software (stable and unstable) it is not the way to go.
With this statement by the FTC, it seems that they are saying that MAP agreements are generally illegal.
MAP agreements are widespread in the electronics industry and are used by Apple. What does this mean for them.
One thing that I've noticed is that it never pays to be an alarmist. Terrible things are always happening, but the things we fear the most never seem to come.
There are some that we will lose control over our technology and it will distroy us. This fear has been expressed for a very long time.
Just as many people belive that disaster will come from something outside of technology (e.g. overpopulation), perhaps for an even longer time. Many of these external problems have been avoided due in a large part to technology.
Life _will_ go on. It always has.
Although part of me still wishes Amazon had completely stepped down from it's decision to patent one click shopping, I'm glad to see that someone out there is talking about rational reform.
I believe one thing is true; if Amazon had just decided not to enforce its patents, not a whole lot would have changed. It's possible that this may be a first step towards a better situation.
I still think that Amazon's patent should not be valid in the first place. On the other hand, it is inevitable that stupid patents will be granted, and it is unlikely that all software patents will be eliminated. At least the proposed changes would help the situation immensely.
Worst episode ever.
In any other country in the world, this would be treated as a relic that would at least fall under government regulation. ( It's ironic that encryption products and supercomputers are more tightly regulated than nearly irreplacable artifacts). This T-Rex skeleton is one of the most complete in the world ( if no the most) and has immense scientific value.
Although I don't think the government should have a monopoly on the fossil business, there needs to be better cooperation between scientists and collectors. Though it is unlikely that this particular fossil will ever be lost tract of, there are many other that are.
The fact is that the high end processors of today will be next week's surplus. Whether this translates into better affordable PC's in the future is another question, but it seems like it can't hurt.
In the end, this has nothing to do with what you or I buy, but it has everything to do with the industry and what seems like the flagging domminance of Intel. People like to buy from the manufacturer that makes the fastest chips. Even if they can't afford top of the line.
>It's either that, or paying an extra penny or two >in USPS subsidies.
I think you'll find that the USPS has operated without tax dollars since the early eighties.
While I agree that it is easy to scoll past bad posts (which is debatable depending on you settings, connection and machine speed) The biggest problem seems to me that this flamebait is sucking up all of the moderation points, so no worthwhile moderation is done.
One possibility that comes to mind is a panic button in each discussion. If enough people hit the panic button, extra moderation points are automatically given to mderators in that discussion.
Or there could be an automatic panic if more than a certain percentage of moderation is moderation in the doen, rather than up direction.
I've found moderation to be pretty useful. This is the first discussion that I've seen it clearly fail.
Now wait a second. Of course I can keep releasing my code, but if you make changes ( no matter how minor) you can re-release it and not give back the changes. Now, from one free software developer to another, this realy isn't a problem, since both will exist on the same standing.
The problem comes when people with a lot more marketing power take over your project and make it proprietary. The Kerberos people are losing control of their project to Microsoft because of their use of a BSD style license. How this will finally play out is still to be seen, but it looks pretty grim.
In the cae of Kerberos, this is a total disaster, since Microsoft is essentially changing the protocol by using their market power, which means that a freely distributable version of a kerberos server that operates with all clients won't exist.
As for the BSD license, there is a fair amount of software out there under the BSD license, but there isn't really a whole lot to discuss, since there isn't really a whole lot to violate.
The artistic license isn't used much, so it isn't discussed much.
Why don't slashdotters like BSD? BSD licenses allow code that you write to come under the control of other people, and you can't stop them. You can't even stop them from putting out full page ads saying that their version of your code is better than theirs. Then there's the possibility that your code will become embrace and extendified by some greedy individual, as seems to be happening to kerberos.
As far as problems with the Artistic License, take a look at the OSD as commented by Bruce Perens for some gripes.