Wales may be squandering Wikipedia funds, but that's not the same as "corruption" or embezzlement. As long as he officially requests the reimbursements from the foundation and the foundation pays and this is visible in its financial documents, it may be stupid on their part and his, but it's not wrongdoing.
Many non-profits, including so-called aid organizations, that have achieved much less than Wikipedia, pay their officers lavish salaries.
The ndiswrapper developers can release their code under any license they like, including the GPL; Linus has nothing to say about that. Furthermore, as long as Linux is under the GPL, Linus has no say over what I link into my kernel. If I want to link code under non-GPL compatible licenses into my kernel, that's my good right, under the GPL.
Linus possibly has a say over whether distributors can simultaneously distribute the Linux kernel and ndiswrapper as pre-packaged binaries. But even there, I don't see a problem: ndiswrapper itself is under the GPL and complies with the GPL. The fact that it allows end users to link code under non-GPL compliant licenses into the kernel doesn't change that.
While I think it would be nice if we didn't have to use ndiswrapper, and while one can argue either way about the desirability of its existence, now that it exists, Linus needs to honor the letter of the GPL and not try to redefine the terms after the fact. If he wants to, he can always relicense his code under different licenses in the future.
Netflix is paying peanuts to get a lot of research done for them. The people actually paying for this are the tax payers, who mostly pay the salaries of the contributors. And Netflix's conditions under which the prize money will be paid are odious.
Competitions can be a good thing when there is a reasonable business model attacked to it and if there is a chance of commercialization of a product to benefit everybody. But Netflix wants to own it all for next to no money.
I think the only thing that bothers me about Android is that the full source code has not been released yet, although Google claims they will be making that available.
The biggest reasons are that you have some excellent IDEs
Java IDEs attempt to solve at the IDE level what are really language problems.
and a huge collection of libraries that take care of the grunt work for just about anything you want to do.
Did you read what I said? I do not find Java's libraries useful: a lot of functionality doesn't exist at all, and the libraries that do exist are poor in many ways.
I find existing C/C++ libraries a lot more useful than existing Java libraries, and that makes Python, not Jython, the language of choice.
I'm interested to know where your dislike for Java comes from?
From actually implementing the same kind of system once in Java and once in other languages. From trying to write desktop applications in Java. From using it for more than a decade.
You know, real stuff...the one corporations really use when they need to pull in a project involving 50 developers that will serve hundreds or thousands of users.
You know, the really laughable thing is that morons like you were arguing against Java with exactly the same bullshit arguments a decade ago. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Java world.
Not some little HelloWorld app with 3 script file that a kid puts together in Notepad and thinks he's a programmer now.
You just show your ignorance with comments like that; there have been many more successful startups using scripting languages than Java.
Yeah, corporations buy lots of Java: that's because they have plenty of money to waste, don't need to innovate, and rely on mediocre developers.
Sure, Jython is the nicest way of using the Java platform. That still doesn't answer the question of why I would want to use the Java platform at all. Maybe Jython is good for people with a big Java legacy code problem, but for anybody else, C Python seems better to me.
well, yes, Sun realized that. But I realized a few years ago that I don't really need a JVM anymore. If I want safe code, I write it in Python. if I want speed, I write in Pyrex or C.
jVM+Jython+C just doesn't look compelling to me compared to Python+C, in particular since Jython lacks a lot of important Python libraries. And I don't see Sun catching upwithn two devs.
I think Sun missed the boat on dynamic languages. For years, they had a Java-only policy for the JVM.
At this point, there are more useful libraries and tools for C Python than there are for Java. Sun's new found love for Ruby, Groovy, Bsh, and Jython mainly seems to stem from the realization that "pure" Java just didn't work out.
Just send out a warning "We have detected that you're using illegal file sharing." to 100% of the users. Of the x% that use P2P, 70% will stop and 30% will ignore it. The (100-x)% who aren't using illegal file sharing will simply ignore it.
This presumes that it would be possible to line up people perfectly prior to boarding; that is a pretty naive assumption. In fact, there would likely be large numbers of mistakes anyway.
I suspect that airlines actually are boarding pretty close to optimally, subject to the constraints that they are operating under: assigned seats, passengers that make mistakes, and aircraft layout and design.
That's the wrong question to ask, since the patents aren't just on the "world wide telescope", they are on much more basic technologies. Why don't you actually read them?
Google Earth does what the world wide telescope is doing. It also does on-demand multi-resolution downloads of image data (as did Google Maps even), which is what some of the patents are actually claiming.
Oh, and of course, you're also anonymous. But based on your posting history, it seems likely that you work for Microsoft.
You're the one making the claim that this has been done before. Either prove it, mention a company/product, link to something or simply don't say anything.
Why? Is this a court of law? A peer reviewed journal?
I don't give prior art for patent claims in public; it just makes life of the patent trolls easier, Mr. Anonymous.
That's pure fiction, and bad fiction at that. It doesn't matter how you slice it or dice it, the change in angular momentum depends on the mass and the distance, and while a space elevator has a significant mass, it's negligible compared to the planet. And it wouldn't do much damage while falling either: most of it would burn up.
I don't see MS using patents as a weapon, only for FUD and defense.
Yeah, "defense" as in "if you don't do what we want, we'll sue so long and hard, your investors will run screaming and your startup will crumble". Here, "do" can be anything from "give us a cross-license agreement on your patents" to "sell your company to us".
And because of cross-licensing agreements, Microsoft doesn't have to worry about any big competitor getting into a big fight with them.
With competent lawyers and business people involved, very few patent infringement claims ever make it to court.
I've been working with images and networks for a long time, and I've never seen anything that could even claim to do what Photosynth does automatically and seamlessly.
These patents will likely be challenged if Microsoft tries to enforce them; I'm sorry, but you'll have to do your own prior art searches.
Saying that computers *could* do something for a long time is nothing like having a product that actually does those things through a seamless user experience.
That's quite right. And their implementation is quite nice. But good engineering and coding doesn't warrant a dozen patents.
They say it uses biopotentials which basically means [...]
As I was saying, it's not clear what it is actually measuring. Most likely, it's actually electric potentials from muscles.
This has been done before, though, in the 90s with cursors too. Unfortunately, it was slow as all hell and took months to master.
Well, that's what I'm getting at: I think this doesn't do the same thing. I think this measures muscle activity, not anything from within the brain. That means that you can probably learn this thing much quicker, but it's also less impressive.
Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.
Yes, it is, but it isn't new. It's nice that Microsoft has a cleaner and better implementation of it now and that better hardware makes it look smooth, but it's been around for nearly as long as images and networks.
The guy who founded the company has been filing a dozen patents on obvious ways of doing image zooming and multiple level of detail rendering. Buying the company, Microsoft got the software, the patents, and they also established that the patents are valuable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd find it more "poetic" if McBride served some prison time.
It can no be "wrongdoing" but still news.
Sure: stupidity of this kind is news. But it's not corruption or embezzlement, both of which are actually crimes.
Wales may be squandering Wikipedia funds, but that's not the same as "corruption" or embezzlement. As long as he officially requests the reimbursements from the foundation and the foundation pays and this is visible in its financial documents, it may be stupid on their part and his, but it's not wrongdoing.
Many non-profits, including so-called aid organizations, that have achieved much less than Wikipedia, pay their officers lavish salaries.
"Academic, non-commercial" is not "open source".
Technically, Singularity is intellectual masturbation; ignore it.
The ndiswrapper developers can release their code under any license they like, including the GPL; Linus has nothing to say about that. Furthermore, as long as Linux is under the GPL, Linus has no say over what I link into my kernel. If I want to link code under non-GPL compatible licenses into my kernel, that's my good right, under the GPL.
Linus possibly has a say over whether distributors can simultaneously distribute the Linux kernel and ndiswrapper as pre-packaged binaries. But even there, I don't see a problem: ndiswrapper itself is under the GPL and complies with the GPL. The fact that it allows end users to link code under non-GPL compliant licenses into the kernel doesn't change that.
While I think it would be nice if we didn't have to use ndiswrapper, and while one can argue either way about the desirability of its existence, now that it exists, Linus needs to honor the letter of the GPL and not try to redefine the terms after the fact. If he wants to, he can always relicense his code under different licenses in the future.
Netflix is paying peanuts to get a lot of research done for them. The people actually paying for this are the tax payers, who mostly pay the salaries of the contributors. And Netflix's conditions under which the prize money will be paid are odious.
Competitions can be a good thing when there is a reasonable business model attacked to it and if there is a chance of commercialization of a product to benefit everybody. But Netflix wants to own it all for next to no money.
That's why people make software open source.
I think the only thing that bothers me about Android is that the full source code has not been released yet, although Google claims they will be making that available.
The biggest reasons are that you have some excellent IDEs
Java IDEs attempt to solve at the IDE level what are really language problems.
and a huge collection of libraries that take care of the grunt work for just about anything you want to do.
Did you read what I said? I do not find Java's libraries useful: a lot of functionality doesn't exist at all, and the libraries that do exist are poor in many ways.
I find existing C/C++ libraries a lot more useful than existing Java libraries, and that makes Python, not Jython, the language of choice.
I'm interested to know where your dislike for Java comes from?
From actually implementing the same kind of system once in Java and once in other languages. From trying to write desktop applications in Java. From using it for more than a decade.
You know, real stuff...the one corporations really use when they need to pull in a project involving 50 developers that will serve hundreds or thousands of users.
You know, the really laughable thing is that morons like you were arguing against Java with exactly the same bullshit arguments a decade ago. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Java world.
Not some little HelloWorld app with 3 script file that a kid puts together in Notepad and thinks he's a programmer now.
You just show your ignorance with comments like that; there have been many more successful startups using scripting languages than Java.
Yeah, corporations buy lots of Java: that's because they have plenty of money to waste, don't need to innovate, and rely on mediocre developers.
Google Street View is heavily scrutinized for personally recognizable information and you can have personal information removed.
There are live cameras on every corner; that's what you should worry about, not Google Street View.
Sure, Jython is the nicest way of using the Java platform. That still doesn't answer the question of why I would want to use the Java platform at all. Maybe Jython is good for people with a big Java legacy code problem, but for anybody else, C Python seems better to me.
well, yes, Sun realized that. But I realized a few years ago that I don't really need a JVM anymore. If I want safe code, I write it in Python. if I want speed, I write in Pyrex or C.
jVM+Jython+C just doesn't look compelling to me compared to Python+C, in particular since Jython lacks a lot of important Python libraries. And I don't see Sun catching upwithn two devs.
I think Sun missed the boat on dynamic languages. For years, they had a Java-only policy for the JVM.
At this point, there are more useful libraries and tools for C Python than there are for Java. Sun's new found love for Ruby, Groovy, Bsh, and Jython mainly seems to stem from the realization that "pure" Java just didn't work out.
Just send out a warning "We have detected that you're using illegal file sharing." to 100% of the users. Of the x% that use P2P, 70% will stop and 30% will ignore it. The (100-x)% who aren't using illegal file sharing will simply ignore it.
This presumes that it would be possible to line up people perfectly prior to boarding; that is a pretty naive assumption. In fact, there would likely be large numbers of mistakes anyway.
I suspect that airlines actually are boarding pretty close to optimally, subject to the constraints that they are operating under: assigned seats, passengers that make mistakes, and aircraft layout and design.
That's the wrong question to ask, since the patents aren't just on the "world wide telescope", they are on much more basic technologies. Why don't you actually read them?
Google Earth does what the world wide telescope is doing. It also does on-demand multi-resolution downloads of image data (as did Google Maps even), which is what some of the patents are actually claiming.
Oh, and of course, you're also anonymous. But based on your posting history, it seems likely that you work for Microsoft.
You're the one making the claim that this has been done before. Either prove it, mention a company/product, link to something or simply don't say anything.
Why? Is this a court of law? A peer reviewed journal?
I don't give prior art for patent claims in public; it just makes life of the patent trolls easier, Mr. Anonymous.
That's pure fiction, and bad fiction at that. It doesn't matter how you slice it or dice it, the change in angular momentum depends on the mass and the distance, and while a space elevator has a significant mass, it's negligible compared to the planet. And it wouldn't do much damage while falling either: most of it would burn up.
So this is 1-2GPa tensile strength. We need about 60-100GPa tensile strength for a space elevator.
I don't see MS using patents as a weapon, only for FUD and defense.
Yeah, "defense" as in "if you don't do what we want, we'll sue so long and hard, your investors will run screaming and your startup will crumble". Here, "do" can be anything from "give us a cross-license agreement on your patents" to "sell your company to us".
And because of cross-licensing agreements, Microsoft doesn't have to worry about any big competitor getting into a big fight with them.
With competent lawyers and business people involved, very few patent infringement claims ever make it to court.
I've been working with images and networks for a long time, and I've never seen anything that could even claim to do what Photosynth does automatically and seamlessly.
These patents will likely be challenged if Microsoft tries to enforce them; I'm sorry, but you'll have to do your own prior art searches.
Saying that computers *could* do something for a long time is nothing like having a product that actually does those things through a seamless user experience.
That's quite right. And their implementation is quite nice. But good engineering and coding doesn't warrant a dozen patents.
They say it uses biopotentials which basically means [...]
As I was saying, it's not clear what it is actually measuring. Most likely, it's actually electric potentials from muscles.
This has been done before, though, in the 90s with cursors too. Unfortunately, it was slow as all hell and took months to master.
Well, that's what I'm getting at: I think this doesn't do the same thing. I think this measures muscle activity, not anything from within the brain. That means that you can probably learn this thing much quicker, but it's also less impressive.
Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.
Yes, it is, but it isn't new. It's nice that Microsoft has a cleaner and better implementation of it now and that better hardware makes it look smooth, but it's been around for nearly as long as images and networks.
The guy who founded the company has been filing a dozen patents on obvious ways of doing image zooming and multiple level of detail rendering. Buying the company, Microsoft got the software, the patents, and they also established that the patents are valuable.
These people are real sleazeballs.
http://www.google.com/patents?q=Blaise+Aguera+y+Arcas&btnG=Search+Patents
Why, isn't it obvious? It's Windows-only. As far as Microsoft is concerned, that's a big advantage. For everybody else...