The artical however states that many of our gene sequences are similar to bacteria. I doubt that this is because humans and bacteria are similar.
The real argument on the side of religion would be "Of course they are similar, they were all created by [insert proper diety here]." Honestly there is nothing precluding either side of the argument in this discovery, just an additional bit of confidence for the people that believe in evolution.
Personally I believe that evolution was guided by a higher power and that creation was a long process that happened over billions of years rather than in a short and spectacular fashion.
I've never really studied religions other than christianity but I have found nothing in the bible that counters scientific discovery. The bible says earth was created in 7 days and I ask how long were gods days.
IANAL but I think that reimplementation is no protection to the company from the disgruntled employee. I think that if there was not some sort of agreement between the employee and the employer that knowledge gained by the employee before employment was ok for the company to use and that they could have rights to it, the employee could still sue for royaltees. At least with my company it seems in these cases that there is a dual ownership of that knowledge and of rights to use it. Though the anit-competition clause swings around and wipes out my ability to use that knowledge for my own gain (if they can enforce the clause).
I would hafta say that in this case you hafta sell your soul to make the almighty dollar. If the company doesn't make you do that, they are screwed. So I guess its up to you what you do, either work for the place or not. Its a sticky situation where none of the answers are right because both you and the company are being greedy.
A big problem is when you incorporate knowledge from a prior invention in a current solution you are workin on for your company. In this case do you deserve compensation for the solution above and beyond the salary you are being paid to develop the solution? Do you have rights to come back later and claim partial ownership for the solution because it contains parts developed off the job? I know it may sound mean but a company has to protect itself in these cases and that means contractually claiming rights to use knowledge contained in your head. Maybe it all needs to be worded better in the contract so that the exact case is more clear, but the company can't be expected to be put in the oppisite case that the article is claiming, the case where you are trying to claim company work for your own because you worked on it in off company time.
If you have any works that are GPL (or under any other open source licence) the chance that any of that code can be included in a company project are zero. The legal wierdness with all this is enough to keep any corporation well away from it.
Another thing is that you would not stop the company from "owning" the works if you signed the contract saying they would (assuming the contract is legal and binding) and in that vien they most likely would be able to release those works under a new, non-open licence.
IP is way tricky because once you know something you can't "unknow" it. Thats why this issue is so unclear.
A company pays you to develop something for them and they would like to keep that knowledge exclusively. The problem is that its impossible to prevent that knowledge from moving as the person that developed it moves. Same goes the other way around, if you develope something, its impossible for that not to move with you when you work on a project. A company that wants you to declare prior inventions is most likely trying to protect itself from the case where you write code for them that uses knowledge that you developed previously and then you later decide to sue them for rights or compensation for that knowledge other than the salary that was paid to you.
I personally think that most all of the problems would be solved if there was a legal limit of 2 years on the "ownership" of IP. Meaning that you can only be protected for 2 years legally if someone uses your IP without your permission. Not too many developements in CS are revolutionary enough that they need protection for longer than two years, because most are old news by then. Also the developments that are around longer than 2 years are things that should be public knowledge so that the field can advance as a whole.
And of course you would get fired and with a bad enough reference to probably not get hired again. Mixing the GPL and business is tricky stuff and I wouldn't recommend it. I would imagine most employers strictly forbid it, I know mine does.
The thing I hate with window's media player's music rights protection scheme is that if you reinstall the OS and then reinstall windows media player, you can no longer play your music because you lose your "licence" directory.
I can only assume that every time napster gets nuked on your machine, you can throw away ALL the songs you downloaded because they won't play. I think that sux.
I think that a napster like sharing with a per-song transfer fee paid to the artist owning the song would be a good deal. It would allow you charge a resonable subscription rate and allow a decent max number of transfers per person.
Copyright protection would be upheld in this way. There would be an "accepted song" list on the server, each song would be hashed and the hash would be compared against the list of acceptable songs before it was added as "available on the network". That is basically just a filter placed on napsters already existant file scan.
Any band would be able to get a song on the accepted song list by providing an mp3 of thier song. They would have to sign into the compensation deal (like $0.02 per song transfer or something like that). That way people could pay a resonable rate for music, and the artists would get paid directly. Advertising could be done via the web as well as in napsters little advertisement window. Record companies would be stupid not to buy into the system because its an incredible vehicle for distribution.
Anyways thats my $0.02. I am sick and tired of people whining that they don't get free music under the guise of wanting alternate distribution. I am also tired of the record companies fighting so hard for a status quo that really isn't great for anyone involved. I hope someone would look at ideas like the one I presented and really give us alternate distribution that works.
By that definition Microsoft is nowhere near a monopoly because it has competitors that are no where near going under. Notice I said virtual monopoly, meaning that they command a large portion of the market and can for all intents and purposes choose thier prices.
I already mentioned that they were not the only company, just the only one with much power in the market. I don't put nVidia down for it, just wish other companies would jump in and make a new good product.
I am frightened of the day when AOL picks up a console system company. They will be worse than nintendo was for two reasons. The games will be even stupider than a great deal of the nintendo games (I hated that "kid-oriented" phase of nintendo) and everyone will play them anyways.
Although it would be kind of nice to get a free console in the mail once a month:P Unfortunately it will only cost $200 a month to get it activated and you will have to download your games from the net every time you want to play.
They will also put rotating banner ad's at the top of the games and a little display that sucks your mind out in the control, and if you call thier 1-800 number they will install a device in your wallet that automatically sends all your money to them.
I would think that being the provider of the graphics chipset and one of the groups giving MS input on directX 8.0 would definitely show a Microsoft - nVidia alliance.
I must say though that there are markets where nVidia doesn't have the upper hand, and in fact can't seem to figure out how to compete. That is the high end graphics market (like designers and such). nVida's tech is all about pushing pixels, and the designers spend more time with wireframes and a few other features. Last I heard, diamond had them creamed in this market.
Unfortunately I have to say that nVidia has cleaned up in the consumer market. Matrox has religated itself to building solid business cards (which is why the g450 ended up being slower than the g400) and ATI has completely lost in my mind because thier drivers suck.
With the loss of 3dfx as a resonable competitor I would have to say that nVidia has a virtual monopoly in home gamer 3d graphics arena. I just hope they don't stop building significantly better cards for that arena just because they are able to make money at the status quo.
Not that I am making any predictions on what will happen, I think there is some hope. I hafta think that with the merger they will take the best from both groups and put it together. We can all hope that the good design and content of the site that dies will be grafted on to the site that lives and we will end up with something even better than either was on its own.
As much as I think competing sites makes for better service, I think it may also be good to have one uber site to visit for game info rather than bounce through a few that may or may not have what you are looking for.
I guess that I want to point out that before you start shouting your message of doom you give things a little time to settle in.
I can't help but be on the shouters side just a little though, the small time i-net companies (cnet and zdnet are not small I know) are dying off rapidly.
It might be the display resolution of evolution but the little o's looked square and the s's had there tails joined. Those two things made the clarity worse than if the font was not anti-aliased. I do think that the mozzilla shot was very nice.
All in all anti-aliasing on text always seemed to make it less "crisp" to me. I'd rather see jagies than to basically blur the text.
This is what will make xhtml really great, because its XML that complies with a public DTD, the browsers and content authoring tools can validate a document with almost no effort.
This should reduce the amount of broken documents in the world as well as allowing the browser to have two render modes, one for correct documents, and one to make a best guess of how the document is supposed to be shown.
Why is it that people automatically assume that the hardware in a game box is faultless and PC hardware is riddled with problems? Its probably true that game boxes have more problems than the average PC. I mean does it matter if a few pixels are in the wrong place when you are playing mortal combat? Also, being closed hardware and all any of the big bugs are just "limitations of the system" and are just worked around.
I find it hard to believe that the game companies took very much time to make sure there systems had any significant amount of uptime. I mean really if a game locks up I usually decide the box is too hot or something and shut if off for a while. I have also seen bugs in console games. People just need to realize that PC's and game consoles are electronic devices and all prone to the same types of problems. I think the only reason people think that PC's are less stable than game consoles is because they expect more from the pc and run wierder combinations of software.
Figure it out people, if console systems were really more reliable than the pc systems in use today, pc's would be using the console hardware so that they ran better.
It seems that the capacitors are awfully close to the sockets on this board. Is there a way mobo companies could get them backed away from the socket so we can fit our burly heatsinks on?
Heh you think they would have learned from all the complaints with heatsinks breaking the caps on some socket A mobo's.
In my experience, windows 98 runs better than X on older hardware. I had a 486dx2-66 with 8meg of ram and it ran win 98 more comfortably than it did X. Also my old hardware configured alot easier under windows than it did under linux.
When you make comparisons like this compare apples to apples. If we had to compare the running speed of linux cli to straight dos, I think dos would win the race (although by a small margin) but it wouldn't be fair because linux provides a whole level of abstraction and extra functionality that dos doesn't begin to.
As I understand it, the problem with perl and the web (as CGI anyways) is that perl runs with less than perfect permissions, and that leads to exploits if its installed incorrectly. Also, perl allows you to run shell commands as well as execute code stored in strings, so in poorly written programs that leads to exploits.
However, these two problems are very well documented and workaround exist. I am going to assume that right at the start there will be exploits to Mason and they will be documented and worked around and things will be happy.
At work I write ASP pages all the time and I think that the idea of embedded server script is very nifty. Its about time that other platforms had the ability to embed perl in webpages and have it executed by the server like IIS has been able to do for a while now.
Linux community can't be held accountable...
on
Linux Is Going Down
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That would seem to be a very large downfall of linux if I were a business person picking an OS for my company. The truth is the linux community won't be held accountable for failings of thier product because they haven't sold anything and don't maintain ownership of it either.
On the other hand, when Microsoft sells a product they are legally obligated to have that product live up to its claims or have very good explanations of why it did not.
#1 I was talking about real investment in the form of better machinery and smarter and more healthy people, not monetary investment. Monetary investment is only the oil that allows the machine of economy to slide easily and move toward advances. Regardless of what the stock market is doing right now, people in america as a whole are twice as wealthy as thier parents were at thier age. That is something to be said about our economy right there. I still maintain that without better technology that growth would never have happened. Progress may be bad, but a lack of progress is never good.
#2 About taxes and equality... The IRS has numbers that CLEARLY show that people that make less money do not pay more taxes. The top 1% of earners in the US pay 30% of tax dollars while the bottom 50% of earners pay only 5% of tax dollars. Also, regardless of this, if the top 1% of earners weren't running the businesses that exist today and provide a majority of the jobs the bottom 50% of people work in, its very likely that the bottom 50% of earners would be jobless and earn less than they do today.
I agree the world isn't perfect, and its far from fair, but any system that has tried to do better has gotten less. If its in your heart to help those with less than you, do what I do and share some of your wealth with those people. Don't have the government try to solve the problem because thats like trying to turn a screw with a hammer and it rarely works the way you expect.
Um what? Have you failed to notice the last 8 years of prosperity? Have you failed to notice the lowest unemployment numbers in history? Do your realize why?
Expansion of any economy happens only 1 way, investment. This investment has to be in human resources, or in technology. The great prosperity of the last 8 to 10 years is almost certainly attributed to the computer revolution. With computers we are able to get more real work done, period. More work getting done means that people have more real wealth. More real wealth means people can have more. That is good right?
Anyone that says advances in technology that "replace" workers will hurt them is only right in the short term, and then its a tenuous thread. When a business does well because its saving money, it employs more people to do other jobs to try and earn even more money.
Also for you liberals out there, if there is more real money in the system, more taxes will be collected and there will be more money for the social programs that provide for the people that don't have jobs.
All in all I think this development has real potential to make life better in a lot of ways. Miners will not have to risk thier lives for a small amount of money. The cost of resources will be reduced. The economy will grow and allow us to push for new and more wonderful technological developements, like hopefully a solution to our energy crisis.
I agree with this, though I think we have enough minerals currently, we need to find a way to gather energy resources this way. In light of the current energy crisis, finding new sources of energy quickly and cheaply and safely is required. I just hope we don't find new energy and then get lax with our conservation efforts.
About july of last year or so I am pretty sure the govt backed up microsoft in saying that the OEM licences only allow you to use windows from that particular OEM distribution. A number of businesses were hurt farily badly when they were forced to buy 2 licences for all thier machines when they wanted to wipe out the pre-installed windows and install windows from the corporate subcription cd.
It basically comes down to the fact that the licence allows you to use the distribution of windows that it was bundled with and no others. For instance, having an upgrade version of windows doesn't give you licence to install from the full version cd's.
It sux but thats the way it works. I guess you get what you pay for though, if you want the full, real, use it anywhere as long as its only on one computer at a time licence then you pay full price for the licence. If you grab a major discount on the cost then you lose some of the rights with that.
is to take away its money. If a company sends lots of junk mail, don't buy the products from them, in any venue. When noone buys stuff from them they will have to rethink thier strategy. I know its painful and it doesn't do much until lots of people join you but thats the way a capitalist society has to work. As long as a company makes money with a practice they will continue to use it.
The only thing I worry about in this situation is that if people see the "This program is not signed it may cause damage to your computer." message for nearly every program they run, they will be conditioned to ignore it. Then when the truely nasty attack that the dialog warns of comes along, the person will just naturally hit ok and there computer will be zapped anyways.
Of course the solution to this on a computer that needs to stay healthy is to not allow running unsigned programs, but this is just particularily anal and Microsoft-centric. I guess I hope that Microsoft includes the ability for this feature, but I want it off by default.
I have to contend that you are completely wrong, its all a marketing ploy.
To write a software upgrade you are looking at 1 year to 2 years of hard work by 50 to 1000 or more people depending on the product.
To upgrade analog to digital recording you use the same machine you did for every other "upgrade" of the music you did. Maybe you hire a tech for a couple days to clean up the music and "remaster" it. You hire artists for a month or two to come up with a clever jacket design and some logo stuff and bam send it to print where it costs you $.25 a copy (I don't really know the price but it can't be much) and ship it to the stores.
The reason that software companies sell the upgrades at a discounted price for people that own the products already and the media companies do not is that the media companies get away with charging full price to everyone.
Think about it, how many people have gone "I'll just keep Office 95 cause it does everything I want and Office 2000 doesn't do anything extra that I like." Also notice that the discounts are all in product areas where there is little difference between the products. Think of games, a place where you rarely get a discount for owning a previous version, they are all fully different in each version and make you want the new version.
In media the same thing goes. Usually the new versions are on media that is vastly superior in quality (DVD or CD) or its some sort of collectors edition that gets you some extra footage or sound clips that you wouldn't get any other way.
So it has very little to do with the price to produce the new version and everything to do with demand in the market.
Slashdot Mirror
The real argument on the side of religion would be "Of course they are similar, they were all created by [insert proper diety here]." Honestly there is nothing precluding either side of the argument in this discovery, just an additional bit of confidence for the people that believe in evolution.
Personally I believe that evolution was guided by a higher power and that creation was a long process that happened over billions of years rather than in a short and spectacular fashion.
I've never really studied religions other than christianity but I have found nothing in the bible that counters scientific discovery. The bible says earth was created in 7 days and I ask how long were gods days.
I would hafta say that in this case you hafta sell your soul to make the almighty dollar. If the company doesn't make you do that, they are screwed. So I guess its up to you what you do, either work for the place or not. Its a sticky situation where none of the answers are right because both you and the company are being greedy.
A big problem is when you incorporate knowledge from a prior invention in a current solution you are workin on for your company. In this case do you deserve compensation for the solution above and beyond the salary you are being paid to develop the solution? Do you have rights to come back later and claim partial ownership for the solution because it contains parts developed off the job? I know it may sound mean but a company has to protect itself in these cases and that means contractually claiming rights to use knowledge contained in your head. Maybe it all needs to be worded better in the contract so that the exact case is more clear, but the company can't be expected to be put in the oppisite case that the article is claiming, the case where you are trying to claim company work for your own because you worked on it in off company time.
Another thing is that you would not stop the company from "owning" the works if you signed the contract saying they would (assuming the contract is legal and binding) and in that vien they most likely would be able to release those works under a new, non-open licence.
IP is way tricky because once you know something you can't "unknow" it. Thats why this issue is so unclear.
A company pays you to develop something for them and they would like to keep that knowledge exclusively. The problem is that its impossible to prevent that knowledge from moving as the person that developed it moves. Same goes the other way around, if you develope something, its impossible for that not to move with you when you work on a project. A company that wants you to declare prior inventions is most likely trying to protect itself from the case where you write code for them that uses knowledge that you developed previously and then you later decide to sue them for rights or compensation for that knowledge other than the salary that was paid to you.
I personally think that most all of the problems would be solved if there was a legal limit of 2 years on the "ownership" of IP. Meaning that you can only be protected for 2 years legally if someone uses your IP without your permission. Not too many developements in CS are revolutionary enough that they need protection for longer than two years, because most are old news by then. Also the developments that are around longer than 2 years are things that should be public knowledge so that the field can advance as a whole.
And of course you would get fired and with a bad enough reference to probably not get hired again. Mixing the GPL and business is tricky stuff and I wouldn't recommend it. I would imagine most employers strictly forbid it, I know mine does.
I can only assume that every time napster gets nuked on your machine, you can throw away ALL the songs you downloaded because they won't play. I think that sux.
Copyright protection would be upheld in this way. There would be an "accepted song" list on the server, each song would be hashed and the hash would be compared against the list of acceptable songs before it was added as "available on the network". That is basically just a filter placed on napsters already existant file scan.
Any band would be able to get a song on the accepted song list by providing an mp3 of thier song. They would have to sign into the compensation deal (like $0.02 per song transfer or something like that). That way people could pay a resonable rate for music, and the artists would get paid directly. Advertising could be done via the web as well as in napsters little advertisement window. Record companies would be stupid not to buy into the system because its an incredible vehicle for distribution.
Anyways thats my $0.02. I am sick and tired of people whining that they don't get free music under the guise of wanting alternate distribution. I am also tired of the record companies fighting so hard for a status quo that really isn't great for anyone involved. I hope someone would look at ideas like the one I presented and really give us alternate distribution that works.
I already mentioned that they were not the only company, just the only one with much power in the market. I don't put nVidia down for it, just wish other companies would jump in and make a new good product.
Although it would be kind of nice to get a free console in the mail once a month :P Unfortunately it will only cost $200 a month to get it activated and you will have to download your games from the net every time you want to play.
They will also put rotating banner ad's at the top of the games and a little display that sucks your mind out in the control, and if you call thier 1-800 number they will install a device in your wallet that automatically sends all your money to them.
Unfortunately I have to say that nVidia has cleaned up in the consumer market. Matrox has religated itself to building solid business cards (which is why the g450 ended up being slower than the g400) and ATI has completely lost in my mind because thier drivers suck.
With the loss of 3dfx as a resonable competitor I would have to say that nVidia has a virtual monopoly in home gamer 3d graphics arena. I just hope they don't stop building significantly better cards for that arena just because they are able to make money at the status quo.
As much as I think competing sites makes for better service, I think it may also be good to have one uber site to visit for game info rather than bounce through a few that may or may not have what you are looking for.
I guess that I want to point out that before you start shouting your message of doom you give things a little time to settle in.
I can't help but be on the shouters side just a little though, the small time i-net companies (cnet and zdnet are not small I know) are dying off rapidly.
All in all anti-aliasing on text always seemed to make it less "crisp" to me. I'd rather see jagies than to basically blur the text.
This should reduce the amount of broken documents in the world as well as allowing the browser to have two render modes, one for correct documents, and one to make a best guess of how the document is supposed to be shown.
I find it hard to believe that the game companies took very much time to make sure there systems had any significant amount of uptime. I mean really if a game locks up I usually decide the box is too hot or something and shut if off for a while. I have also seen bugs in console games. People just need to realize that PC's and game consoles are electronic devices and all prone to the same types of problems. I think the only reason people think that PC's are less stable than game consoles is because they expect more from the pc and run wierder combinations of software.
Figure it out people, if console systems were really more reliable than the pc systems in use today, pc's would be using the console hardware so that they ran better.
Heh you think they would have learned from all the complaints with heatsinks breaking the caps on some socket A mobo's.
When you make comparisons like this compare apples to apples. If we had to compare the running speed of linux cli to straight dos, I think dos would win the race (although by a small margin) but it wouldn't be fair because linux provides a whole level of abstraction and extra functionality that dos doesn't begin to.
However, these two problems are very well documented and workaround exist. I am going to assume that right at the start there will be exploits to Mason and they will be documented and worked around and things will be happy.
At work I write ASP pages all the time and I think that the idea of embedded server script is very nifty. Its about time that other platforms had the ability to embed perl in webpages and have it executed by the server like IIS has been able to do for a while now.
On the other hand, when Microsoft sells a product they are legally obligated to have that product live up to its claims or have very good explanations of why it did not.
#2 About taxes and equality... The IRS has numbers that CLEARLY show that people that make less money do not pay more taxes. The top 1% of earners in the US pay 30% of tax dollars while the bottom 50% of earners pay only 5% of tax dollars. Also, regardless of this, if the top 1% of earners weren't running the businesses that exist today and provide a majority of the jobs the bottom 50% of people work in, its very likely that the bottom 50% of earners would be jobless and earn less than they do today.
I agree the world isn't perfect, and its far from fair, but any system that has tried to do better has gotten less. If its in your heart to help those with less than you, do what I do and share some of your wealth with those people. Don't have the government try to solve the problem because thats like trying to turn a screw with a hammer and it rarely works the way you expect.
Expansion of any economy happens only 1 way, investment. This investment has to be in human resources, or in technology. The great prosperity of the last 8 to 10 years is almost certainly attributed to the computer revolution. With computers we are able to get more real work done, period. More work getting done means that people have more real wealth. More real wealth means people can have more. That is good right?
Anyone that says advances in technology that "replace" workers will hurt them is only right in the short term, and then its a tenuous thread. When a business does well because its saving money, it employs more people to do other jobs to try and earn even more money.
Also for you liberals out there, if there is more real money in the system, more taxes will be collected and there will be more money for the social programs that provide for the people that don't have jobs.
All in all I think this development has real potential to make life better in a lot of ways. Miners will not have to risk thier lives for a small amount of money. The cost of resources will be reduced. The economy will grow and allow us to push for new and more wonderful technological developements, like hopefully a solution to our energy crisis.
I agree with this, though I think we have enough minerals currently, we need to find a way to gather energy resources this way. In light of the current energy crisis, finding new sources of energy quickly and cheaply and safely is required. I just hope we don't find new energy and then get lax with our conservation efforts.
It basically comes down to the fact that the licence allows you to use the distribution of windows that it was bundled with and no others. For instance, having an upgrade version of windows doesn't give you licence to install from the full version cd's.
It sux but thats the way it works. I guess you get what you pay for though, if you want the full, real, use it anywhere as long as its only on one computer at a time licence then you pay full price for the licence. If you grab a major discount on the cost then you lose some of the rights with that.
is to take away its money. If a company sends lots of junk mail, don't buy the products from them, in any venue. When noone buys stuff from them they will have to rethink thier strategy. I know its painful and it doesn't do much until lots of people join you but thats the way a capitalist society has to work. As long as a company makes money with a practice they will continue to use it.
Of course the solution to this on a computer that needs to stay healthy is to not allow running unsigned programs, but this is just particularily anal and Microsoft-centric. I guess I hope that Microsoft includes the ability for this feature, but I want it off by default.
To write a software upgrade you are looking at 1 year to 2 years of hard work by 50 to 1000 or more people depending on the product.
To upgrade analog to digital recording you use the same machine you did for every other "upgrade" of the music you did. Maybe you hire a tech for a couple days to clean up the music and "remaster" it. You hire artists for a month or two to come up with a clever jacket design and some logo stuff and bam send it to print where it costs you $.25 a copy (I don't really know the price but it can't be much) and ship it to the stores.
The reason that software companies sell the upgrades at a discounted price for people that own the products already and the media companies do not is that the media companies get away with charging full price to everyone.
Think about it, how many people have gone "I'll just keep Office 95 cause it does everything I want and Office 2000 doesn't do anything extra that I like." Also notice that the discounts are all in product areas where there is little difference between the products. Think of games, a place where you rarely get a discount for owning a previous version, they are all fully different in each version and make you want the new version.
In media the same thing goes. Usually the new versions are on media that is vastly superior in quality (DVD or CD) or its some sort of collectors edition that gets you some extra footage or sound clips that you wouldn't get any other way.
So it has very little to do with the price to produce the new version and everything to do with demand in the market.