Yeah, but if MacOS displayed a black hole iff removable media were present, and you ejected such media by throwing them in the black hole, that would make a heck of a lot more sense then ejecting them by throwing them away.
An example of "Open but not free" would be the Thomas and Finney calculus text that happens to be on my desk.
In this case, none of the *ideas* in the book are protected. I can use any equation in the book for any purpose. However, I can't just take T and F's text, munge it electronicly and republish it.
There's nothing to stop me from writing my own calculus text (excepting of course my incomplete knowledge of the subject) but I would have to prove that the organization and presentation in the text is original and not just a rearrangement of T and F.
So, I reason you can protect source in the same manner as books are protected. Protecting ideas is another matter. The only way I can think of to simultaneously publish and protect an idea is (shudder) to patent it.
BTW, if you have a copy of T and F, look in the index for "Whales". It's good for a laugh.
...I spent a lot of time being too short, marveling at the bad-boy mystery that was pinball, waiting for the day I would be tall enough. Around 1976 or 1977 I got tall enough and was able to persuade my dad to spot me the occasional quarter. That lasted for about 8 months. Then Space Invaders came out, followed by a lot of other classic arcade games. Guess where my quarters went.
I wouldn't say it's dying though. I think it will always be around, and who knows, it might have a nostalgia based revival someday.
Here you can walk into at least one library that I know of (haven't checked but one) and surf for nothing. Interestingly enough, you are not allowed to use e-mail, but there is no posted restriction against pornography. OTOH, I haven't seen the librarians looking over people's shoulders, so if you checked your hotmail nobody would be the wiser.
Of course, this is Fairfax, the county that's home to AOL and has been flooding the air lately with funky ads about how "This is E-Country". So this may be the exception not the rule.
...never focused on the fact that it is slow. It was always the fact that they had to go and invent another language that isn't any better than C or C++. I'm all in favor of cross-platform development, but forcing us all to maintain yet another codebase, in yet another language is just a royal pain.
If Sun had produced a platform independant C/C++ environment... wow... just imagine. We may never know how good it could have been.
What have you been smoking? Ever looked through a telescope? Rest assured, Jupiter, its moons, the rings of Saturn, and asteroids are real. OK, I never actually saw an asteroid through a telescope, but I've read articles written by people who have, and I don't have any reason to doubt them. Oh, and as someone who also believes in God, I'd like to remind the rest of you that this nut cake is not representative.
...a monitor screen covered with tiny projectors (projexels?) instead of pixels. What do I mean? Each projexel projects a complete image. If you darkened the room, turned off all the projexels except one and held a piece of white paper up to the screen, you would see a complete image of the scene projected on the white paper.
In other words, active holography. Now, this would require a lot of bandwidth if you did it the stupid way. OTOH, it seems you could exploit coherency in the image to a great deal in order to avoid having to retransmit data that doesn't change too often from projexel to projexel. Possibly, something as simple as run-length encoding could do this.
I'm glossing over a lot of details here. This is an idea I've had for quite a while. Also, if anybody tries to patent active holography, they can bugger off. You saw it here first.
BTW, Theirs is $11,000. I'll make you one of mine for $11,000,000.
...was impossible to trace by following the links. Assuming that the US government is involved, it is wrong.
Think about it. Tax dollars come from the people and from corporations. That includes MS employees and other software companies. They are using tax dollars to fund software written under a license that effectively tends to nationalize an industry, without any consent from the people.
This is just symptomatic of the whole leftist Clinton/Gore/Judge Jackson mentality that pervades this administration.
Once again, I have no problem if private organizations want to collectivize themselves, but when my government gets involved, warning bells start to go off. Karma to burn lately, so mod all you want.
I think the principle that people are missing is that, all things being equal, a bug/security hole is going to be found a LOT quicker by examining the source than by simply using the program.
No. Finding any type of bug by using is a heck of a lot easier than finding bugs by examining source. Just imagine auditing 50k lines of source. Now imagine using a program, and discovering some subtle flaw in the output, like the wrong number of significant digits in some tabulated data displayed on a web page.
The value of Open Source is not the ability to find bugs, but to fix them. In fact, one of the strong motives for free releases of betas is so that the program will have lots of users, thus increasing the chances that bugs will be found before the official release.
It would be interesting to do a study. I bet that if you graph bugs/line it falls proportionately to the number of users for both closed and open source programs.
In other words... test Test TEST. And then test again. And when your finished testing, you might want to consider some tests.
I agree with most of what you say, at least the part before the "Read the rest of this comment" link anyway. IP issues on JP2K would make it the next GIF. Who needs that again?
I'd like to add that the real reason PNG wasn't widely accepted as a replacement for GIF is that they didn't come out with an animated format quickly enough; so Internet Explorer supports PNG, but not MNG. Like it or not, advertisers want their animated GIFs.
Don't get me wrong, PNG is great, and I love it to death. It just wasn't timed right. If PNG/MNG had made it into the 3.0 rev of Netscape Navigator, GIF might be a quaint memory by now, which brings me back nicely to the original gentleman's question: IP issues will destroy any new still image standard on the web.
I suspected as much. Here's hoping that the early adapters will latch on to it so that volume increases and, hopefully, prices come down.
This is an important first step towards a quiet PC, and possibly fast booting as well. I am *so* looking forward to the day when my PC makes no noise, and boots up in less than 1 second. Really, this whole "booting" thing is so reminiscent of old vacuum TV sets and radios that had to "warm up". It's gotta go.
There was a/. story a month or so back about the Goldbach conjecture being worth a million.
At least I could understand that problem. These look hopeless. What is a topological manifold anyway? Whenever I hear that, I always picture mathematicians going down to the junkyard and picking apart exhaust systems... Q: Why is that math professor making all that noise and stinking up the place? A: Sounds like he has a hole in his topological manifold.:)
Stallman actually comes off quite sane here. I dare say I could sign on to all of what he says here. This is nothing like the "lets make all MS software Free" rhetoric I expected.
OK... Stallman and me on the same page. The world can END now.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you use an electronic nose for
for treating the boss nicely without soiling the real one.
Yeah, but if MacOS displayed a black hole iff removable media were present, and you ejected such media by throwing them in the black hole, that would make a heck of a lot more sense then ejecting them by throwing them away.
Og go Sourceforge make bug report. Sourceforge make error.
screenshot: http://www.vrml3d.com/temp/error.gif
It raises the question og whether
OG not like pay backbone company. OG raise question.
OG get Invalid Form Key. Og try opening other browser window with IE5 Win98. Og hit submit now. Og hit Cowboy Neal with club if not work this time.
Without them, Quake is impossible. :)
An example of "Open but not free" would be the Thomas and Finney calculus text that happens to be on my desk.
In this case, none of the *ideas* in the book are protected. I can use any equation in the book for any purpose. However, I can't just take T and F's text, munge it electronicly and republish it.
There's nothing to stop me from writing my own calculus text (excepting of course my incomplete knowledge of the subject) but I would have to prove that the organization and presentation in the text is original and not just a rearrangement of T and F.
So, I reason you can protect source in the same manner as books are protected. Protecting ideas is another matter. The only way I can think of to simultaneously publish and protect an idea is (shudder) to patent it.
BTW, if you have a copy of T and F, look in the index for "Whales". It's good for a laugh.
Microsoft should be broken into 3.1415926535897932384626433832795... pieces.
So that everyone can get a piece of the PI.
Thank-you.
...I spent a lot of time being too short, marveling at the bad-boy mystery that was pinball, waiting for the day I would be tall enough. Around 1976 or 1977 I got tall enough and was able to persuade my dad to spot me the occasional quarter. That lasted for about 8 months. Then Space Invaders came out, followed by a lot of other classic arcade games. Guess where my quarters went.
I wouldn't say it's dying though. I think it will always be around, and who knows, it might have a nostalgia based revival someday.
No but I got it too earlier today. Let's see if it happens again...
WWW is the mark of the beast!
So get off the Internet.
I don't know about the States
Here you can walk into at least one library that I know of (haven't checked but one) and surf for nothing. Interestingly enough, you are not allowed to use e-mail, but there is no posted restriction against pornography. OTOH, I haven't seen the librarians looking over people's shoulders, so if you checked your hotmail nobody would be the wiser.
Of course, this is Fairfax, the county that's home to AOL and has been flooding the air lately with funky ads about how "This is E-Country". So this may be the exception not the rule.
...never focused on the fact that it is slow. It was always the fact that they had to go and invent another language that isn't any better than C or C++. I'm all in favor of cross-platform development, but forcing us all to maintain yet another codebase, in yet another language is just a royal pain.
If Sun had produced a platform independant C/C++ environment... wow... just imagine. We may never know how good it could have been.
What have you been smoking? Ever looked through a telescope? Rest assured, Jupiter, its moons, the rings of Saturn, and asteroids are real. OK, I never actually saw an asteroid through a telescope, but I've read articles written by people who have, and I don't have any reason to doubt them. Oh, and as someone who also believes in God, I'd like to remind the rest of you that this nut cake is not representative.
...a monitor screen covered with tiny projectors (projexels?) instead of pixels. What do I mean? Each projexel projects a complete image. If you darkened the room, turned off all the projexels except one and held a piece of white paper up to the screen, you would see a complete image of the scene projected on the white paper.
In other words, active holography. Now, this would require a lot of bandwidth if you did it the stupid way. OTOH, it seems you could exploit coherency in the image to a great deal in order to avoid having to retransmit data that doesn't change too often from projexel to projexel. Possibly, something as simple as run-length encoding could do this.
I'm glossing over a lot of details here. This is an idea I've had for quite a while. Also, if anybody tries to patent active holography, they can bugger off. You saw it here first.
BTW, Theirs is $11,000. I'll make you one of mine for $11,000,000.
What'll they say to that?
/\p0g33... looks better in this font on my machine.
If it's government funded, it should be public domain. The government shouldn't be developing proprietary software either.
Emphasis is on the word developing
...was impossible to trace by following the links. Assuming that the US government is involved, it is wrong.
Think about it. Tax dollars come from the people and from corporations. That includes MS employees and other software companies. They are using tax dollars to fund software written under a license that effectively tends to nationalize an industry, without any consent from the people.
This is just symptomatic of the whole leftist Clinton/Gore/Judge Jackson mentality that pervades this administration.
Once again, I have no problem if private organizations want to collectivize themselves, but when my government gets involved, warning bells start to go off. Karma to burn lately, so mod all you want.
I think the principle that people are missing is that, all things being equal, a bug/security hole is going to be found a LOT quicker by examining the source than by simply using the program.
No. Finding any type of bug by using is a heck of a lot easier than finding bugs by examining source. Just imagine auditing 50k lines of source. Now imagine using a program, and discovering some subtle flaw in the output, like the wrong number of significant digits in some tabulated data displayed on a web page.
The value of Open Source is not the ability to find bugs, but to fix them. In fact, one of the strong motives for free releases of betas is so that the program will have lots of users, thus increasing the chances that bugs will be found before the official release.
It would be interesting to do a study. I bet that if you graph bugs/line it falls proportionately to the number of users for both closed and open source programs.
In other words... test Test TEST. And then test again. And when your finished testing, you might want to consider some tests.
I agree with most of what you say, at least the part before the "Read the rest of this comment" link anyway. IP issues on JP2K would make it the next GIF. Who needs that again?
I'd like to add that the real reason PNG wasn't widely accepted as a replacement for GIF is that they didn't come out with an animated format quickly enough; so Internet Explorer supports PNG, but not MNG. Like it or not, advertisers want their animated GIFs.
Don't get me wrong, PNG is great, and I love it to death. It just wasn't timed right. If PNG/MNG had made it into the 3.0 rev of Netscape Navigator, GIF might be a quaint memory by now, which brings me back nicely to the original gentleman's question: IP issues will destroy any new still image standard on the web.
Ever heard of prohibition? <sarcasm> What a roaring success that was. </sarcasm>
I suspected as much. Here's hoping that the early adapters will latch on to it so that volume increases and, hopefully, prices come down.
This is an important first step towards a quiet PC, and possibly fast booting as well. I am *so* looking forward to the day when my PC makes no noise, and boots up in less than 1 second. Really, this whole "booting" thing is so reminiscent of old vacuum TV sets and radios that had to "warm up". It's gotta go.
A really quick google search yielded:
http://home.plutonium.net/~dagreve/qdd. html
It's GPL so now the question is, are there any public domain QC emulators.
There was a /. story a month or so back about the Goldbach conjecture being worth a million.
At least I could understand that problem. These look hopeless. What is a topological manifold anyway? Whenever I hear that, I always picture mathematicians going down to the junkyard and picking apart exhaust systems... Q: Why is that math professor making all that noise and stinking up the place? A: Sounds like he has a hole in his topological manifold. :)
Stallman actually comes off quite sane here. I dare say I could sign on to all of what he says here. This is nothing like the "lets make all MS software Free" rhetoric I expected.
OK... Stallman and me on the same page. The world can END now.
So that everyone can get a piece of the PI.