Shouldn't be too hard. All we need is lathes, maybe with a few special attachments. Why should we have to put up with Smith & Wesson's proprietary safety mechanism? Trying to unlock one of their guns is worse then opening up a Word file on a Linux box. Come on, Open Source people, get going!
Found it anyway. It didn't occur to me to click on that the first time. This may indeed be yet another case of something standing still and getting burried (Blade, that is).
There was a lot there about how good LAME is, but I didn't see BladeEnc in the comparison.
They said you need 256kbits for CD quality. From BladeEnc site: [BladeEnc] Supports the following bitrates: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kBit/s.
...then the ad banner companies will just have to come up with a way to circumvent it. There are many ways.
I could run a cron that downloads images and links to my server, and then display them in a rotation using Perl.
I could use ASP or PHP to open a socket to the ad server, store the ad in a temporary file on my server, and then serve the ad that way... actually, that sounds better than cron/Perl.
The bottom line? I haven't even been thinking about this for 10 minutes and I've already got two plausible ways for ad companies to render the feature irrelevant.
You want to stop ads? Fine. Put up a site that doesn't run any ads and see how much money you can make from other sources. Otherwise, stop whining.
I would be surprised if the letter of the law actually specified the manner of packaging. My understanding of UCITA is that the manufacturer is liable unless they disclaim liability. Most of the popular free software licenses, including GNU licenses, do just that.
Even if the letter of the law does specify that the software has to be shrink-wrapped to disclaim liability, all you have to do is argue that your copy of Linux is a copy of a shrink-wrapped Mandrake/Redhat/Whatever that you bought off the shelf. And if you are a small-time distributor, all you need is a roll of Saran wrap, a hair dryer, and one shrink-wrapped sale to one customer, for 1 penny.
I Took A Course On Silocon Fab...
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
...one time. Really hard to learn anything in that course, since the stuff changes so fast. It was cool though, since we got to work with some graphical process simulation software.
The other thing I came away with from that course is that yes, there are a *lot* of toxic chemicals involved in chip making. Arsenic and Diborane leap to mind. One guy I knew worked in a lab where there was a "solid arsenic source". I used to kid him about having arsenic on a stick. Every day, I used to walk by a tank full of liquid nitrogen the size of a large van. Ah... the prank potential that went unrealized with that liquid nitrogen.
Of course when you do that, you you're stripping away "compile once run everywhere" and revealing Java for what it really is: a C++ wannabe.
Seriously, I think the idea of having platform independant VMs is cool, but why didn't they just write a VM and a C/C++ compiler for it? With stuff like Bochs out there, who needs Java? All it does is give you yet another codebase in yet another language. Feh!!!.
...or a solution waiting for a problem. Has anybody come up with any good applications yet? How expensive is this device? Could you use it to find, oh... trapped miners, people burried under earthquake debris, or gold veins? I mean, if you can tell that your professor is moving around upstairs, then you can presumeably tell that there is a tiger behind door number 2, but could it be made more precise and/or accurate than other techniques (e.g., ultrasound, cat scans, etc.).
No. They're talking about the universal constant G, not the average gravitational acceleration on earth (g). G, if it's anything like the other universal constants, is the same everywhere in the universe.
Now, wouldn't it throw the physicists for a loop if G turned out to be the first "universal constant" to have local variations?
Hmmm... only way I can think of to test that is to watch the orbit of some planet or double-star system for a few gazillion years.
...is the ability to do things. Often we exchange the ability to do one thing, in exchange for the ability to do another.
Now, if a software package works really well, but I can't hack it, I exchange my freedom to hack it for increased productivity. That increased productivity is also freedom. The ability to copy and hack is not the only freedom that matters.
Until someone convinces me otherwise, I'll continue to discount the idea that there is any moral weight to the Free Software movement's arguments concerning freedom.
Now some will say that software is speach. But if software is speach, then GPL'd software is really just politicly correct speach--the party line as it were, since every GPL'd package must contain the GNU rhetoric in the preamble. I certainly don't see anything morally superior to that either.
Quantum theory doesn't make sense to me, therefore, it must be wrong.
My problem with Objectivism and Socialism is that they both seem to require full participation to work. There is no way we can gaurantee total conformity to *any* philosophy.
Ultimately, goodness and common sense, which can't be defined as an algorithm, must prevail. If the right thing could be defined as an algorithm, it would be nothing more than a machine. I like to believe that the Right Thing is not a machine. How's that for trying to explain Creationism!
Ever occur to anyone that Linus might be getting bored with Linux? I mean, if I had worked on a *NIX clone for the past 10 years, I think I'd be bored. Code morphing low-power CPUs are new, exciting, different. Linux could end up being just a small part of his day. Also, the fact that it depends so much on him has been cited as a weakness. Maybe Linux will be turned over to a successor or some kind of committee (sp?).
I sit in traffik ever day behind a deezel bus for 6 hours so I can work for 20 hours and cum home tired. It's OK becuzzz i mak lotza mon... uh... I forgot what I was going to say. Anyway... I like pollution just fine, and even though I used to be a roads skollar and am now just... I forgot what I do...grr... I hate when that happens. Anyway, I don't think palution has had any effect on my itlligenc.
And if you actually get the service manual, you'll find all kinds of things in there like "the pitman arm must be removed with tool 56-A3523". Of course the tool is only available from the manufacturer, and most likely overpriced if it is even available to the general public.
Naturally, most of the time the tool can be substituted with some generic item purchased at a 3rd party auto parts store.
This, by the way, is what can happen when a business derives most of its revenue from service. Many dealers make little or no money on the actual sale of a car/truck. They rake it in on service, so they have little interest in making this easy for you. Of course what's really made cars difficult to service is emission controls, computers, airbags, air conditioners and other add-ons... but I digress.
If you go paperless, please don't choose PDF as your help format. For cross platform support, HTML is best, and it is kindest on the eyes. PDF is such a b**** to read on line. I sometimes think it stands for Pulling Down the Forest, because it only looks good when printed on a dead tree.
Even Microsoft abandoned proprietary help formats in Developer Studio, which has at least a full CD worth of HTML help.
I know there are tools out there to convert PDF to HTML. I understand they are a bit pricey, but if your company is serious about going paperless, it will be a wise investment.
...is that the software would be useless if it were not open. This is especially true for anything that seeks to set a standard, or that needs to be installed on a wide variety of operating systems that are likely to be configured in many different ways.
Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated. You will do more before 9AM than other lifeforms do all day. Tiredness is irrelevant. Be all that We can be. Contact your local assimilation center today!
If you follow the hyperlinks a little deeper, you get:
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''
This is plainly NOT a reference to copying GNU software, but to illegal copying.
One of your arguments in favor of Free Software is that it is the best thing for the good of the public. If a general consensus ever develops that Free Software does not benefit the public, can you imagine changing your mind?
For example, let's say that business loses an interest in software to the point where only free software can be found, and users are often forced to wait long times to get the product they desire. Let's say that hospitals can't get software updates for their medical scanners because there is such a reduced incentive for people to provide updates.
In other industries, socialism tends to do a fine job of providing everyone with a minimum level of coverage, yet falls short at providing extra coverage for those who desire it. In many cases, the average level of output under a socialist system is considerably less than the average level of output under other systems. How do you justify persuing a course of action that may reduce the level of output? Exactly what is the chain of reasoning by which you justify your belief that Free Software benefits the public as a whole? It plainly benefits some people in the short term, but that's insufficient to prove it will benefit society as a whole in the long term. Do you have any economic and/or social science to back up your position?
I guess the key question here is, has Free Software become such a strong surrogate for Public Benefit in your mind that you can no longer separate the two?
I mean, come on Taco, a *lot* of the people who read/. have an interest in this. Without modern computing, there would be no NASDAQ market. Like it or not, the market is part of the fabric of our lives.
Consider this: One of the most famous headlines *ever* was when a publication that one would think has nothing to do with Wall Street reported on the crash of '29. "Wall Street Lays an Egg" is indelibly etched on the minds of many Americans. The publication was Variety. A periodical geared towards Hollywood and its interests. What does Wall Street have to do with movies? Arguably nothing, but the editors of Variety recognized that it was important enough to warrent a huge banner headline on their front page, and that crash didn't have anything to do with the entertainment industry specificly.
Flash forward to today, and a significant market correction occurs. Many believe it's due to an overvaluation of technology stocks, so this time there is arguably a link to the interests of/.ers. You wait until two days after the event and whine that it's not important.
Can they prove they're not weenies? Does that mean that a judge would have to establish a legal definition of what constitutes being a weenie? I say the MS engineers should challenge the NS engineers to a Nerf battle. Winner take all.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't be too hard. All we need is lathes, maybe with a few special attachments. Why should we have to put up with Smith & Wesson's proprietary safety mechanism? Trying to unlock one of their guns is worse then opening up a Word file on a Linux box. Come on, Open Source people, get going!
Found it anyway. It didn't occur to me to click on that the first time. This may indeed be yet another case of something standing still and getting burried (Blade, that is).
There was a lot there about how good LAME is, but I didn't see BladeEnc in the comparison.
They said you need 256kbits for CD quality. From BladeEnc site: [BladeEnc] Supports the following bitrates: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kBit/s.
...then the ad banner companies will just have to come up with a way to circumvent it. There are many ways.
I could run a cron that downloads images and links to my server, and then display them in a rotation using Perl.
I could use ASP or PHP to open a socket to the ad server, store the ad in a temporary file on my server, and then serve the ad that way... actually, that sounds better than cron/Perl.
The bottom line? I haven't even been thinking about this for 10 minutes and I've already got two plausible ways for ad companies to render the feature irrelevant.
You want to stop ads? Fine. Put up a site that doesn't run any ads and see how much money you can make from other sources. Otherwise, stop whining.
I would be surprised if the letter of the law actually specified the manner of packaging. My understanding of UCITA is that the manufacturer is liable unless they disclaim liability. Most of the popular free software licenses, including GNU licenses, do just that.
Even if the letter of the law does specify that the software has to be shrink-wrapped to disclaim liability, all you have to do is argue that your copy of Linux is a copy of a shrink-wrapped Mandrake/Redhat/Whatever that you bought off the shelf. And if you are a small-time distributor, all you need is a roll of Saran wrap, a hair dryer, and one shrink-wrapped sale to one customer, for 1 penny.
...one time. Really hard to learn anything in that course, since the stuff changes so fast. It was cool though, since we got to work with some graphical process simulation software.
The other thing I came away with from that course is that yes, there are a *lot* of toxic chemicals involved in chip making. Arsenic and Diborane leap to mind. One guy I knew worked in a lab where there was a "solid arsenic source". I used to kid him about having arsenic on a stick. Every day, I used to walk by a tank full of liquid nitrogen the size of a large van. Ah... the prank potential that went unrealized with that liquid nitrogen.
Of course when you do that, you you're stripping away "compile once run everywhere" and revealing Java for what it really is: a C++ wannabe.
Seriously, I think the idea of having platform independant VMs is cool, but why didn't they just write a VM and a C/C++ compiler for it? With stuff like Bochs out there, who needs Java? All it does is give you yet another codebase in yet another language. Feh!!!.
Sorry. Had to vent somewhere.
Sure MAD is good now, because it's working. The trouble with MAD is that it only has to fail once to become a really, really, bad thing.
Yawn... has anybody printed it out on a T-shirt yet?
...or a solution waiting for a problem. Has anybody come up with any good applications yet? How expensive is this device? Could you use it to find, oh... trapped miners, people burried under earthquake debris, or gold veins? I mean, if you can tell that your professor is moving around upstairs, then you can presumeably tell that there is a tiger behind door number 2, but could it be made more precise and/or accurate than other techniques (e.g., ultrasound, cat scans, etc.).
No. They're talking about the universal constant G, not the average gravitational acceleration on earth (g). G, if it's anything like the other universal constants, is the same everywhere in the universe.
Now, wouldn't it throw the physicists for a loop if G turned out to be the first "universal constant" to have local variations?
Hmmm... only way I can think of to test that is to watch the orbit of some planet or double-star system for a few gazillion years.
...is the ability to do things. Often we exchange the ability to do one thing, in exchange for the ability to do another.
Now, if a software package works really well, but I can't hack it, I exchange my freedom to hack it for increased productivity. That increased productivity is also freedom. The ability to copy and hack is not the only freedom that matters.
Until someone convinces me otherwise, I'll continue to discount the idea that there is any moral weight to the Free Software movement's arguments concerning freedom.
Now some will say that software is speach. But if software is speach, then GPL'd software is really just politicly correct speach--the party line as it were, since every GPL'd package must contain the GNU rhetoric in the preamble. I certainly don't see anything morally superior to that either.
Isn't the law hard enough to read already?
That makes no sense
Quantum theory doesn't make sense to me, therefore, it must be wrong.
My problem with Objectivism and Socialism is that they both seem to require full participation to work. There is no way we can gaurantee total conformity to *any* philosophy.
Ultimately, goodness and common sense, which can't be defined as an algorithm, must prevail. If the right thing could be defined as an algorithm, it would be nothing more than a machine. I like to believe that the Right Thing is not a machine. How's that for trying to explain Creationism!
Ever occur to anyone that Linus might be getting bored with Linux? I mean, if I had worked on a *NIX clone for the past 10 years, I think I'd be bored. Code morphing low-power CPUs are new, exciting, different. Linux could end up being just a small part of his day. Also, the fact that it depends so much on him has been cited as a weakness. Maybe Linux will be turned over to a successor or some kind of committee (sp?).
I sit in traffik ever day behind a deezel bus for 6 hours so I can work for 20 hours and cum home tired. It's OK becuzzz i mak lotza mon... uh... I forgot what I was going to say. Anyway... I like pollution just fine, and even though I used to be a roads skollar and am now just... I forgot what I do...grr... I hate when that happens. Anyway, I don't think palution has had any effect on my itlligenc.
And if you actually get the service manual, you'll find all kinds of things in there like "the pitman arm must be removed with tool 56-A3523". Of course the tool is only available from the manufacturer, and most likely overpriced if it is even available to the general public.
Naturally, most of the time the tool can be substituted with some generic item purchased at a 3rd party auto parts store.
This, by the way, is what can happen when a business derives most of its revenue from service. Many dealers make little or no money on the actual sale of a car/truck. They rake it in on service, so they have little interest in making this easy for you. Of course what's really made cars difficult to service is emission controls, computers, airbags, air conditioners and other add-ons... but I digress.
If you go paperless, please don't choose PDF as your help format. For cross platform support, HTML is best, and it is kindest on the eyes. PDF is such a b**** to read on line. I sometimes think it stands for Pulling Down the Forest, because it only looks good when printed on a dead tree.
Even Microsoft abandoned proprietary help formats in Developer Studio, which has at least a full CD worth of HTML help.
I know there are tools out there to convert PDF to HTML. I understand they are a bit pricey, but if your company is serious about going paperless, it will be a wise investment.
...is that the software would be useless if it were not open. This is especially true for anything that seeks to set a standard, or that needs to be installed on a wide variety of operating systems that are likely to be configured in many different ways.
Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated. You will do more before 9AM than other lifeforms do all day. Tiredness is irrelevant. Be all that We can be. Contact your local assimilation center today!
If you follow the hyperlinks a little deeper, you get:
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''
This is plainly NOT a reference to copying GNU software, but to illegal copying.
Now THERE is a baseless generalization. Care to back that up in any way?
Go here and keyword search on piracy
Here is a direct quote: "Note that the GNU Project recommends avoiding the term piracy since it implies that sharing copies is somehow illegitimate."
I could site numerous other examples.
One of your arguments in favor of Free Software is that it is the best thing for the good of the public. If a general consensus ever develops that Free Software does not benefit the public, can you imagine changing your mind?
For example, let's say that business loses an interest in software to the point where only free software can be found, and users are often forced to wait long times to get the product they desire. Let's say that hospitals can't get software updates for their medical scanners because there is such a reduced incentive for people to provide updates.
In other industries, socialism tends to do a fine job of providing everyone with a minimum level of coverage, yet falls short at providing extra coverage for those who desire it. In many cases, the average level of output under a socialist system is considerably less than the average level of output under other systems. How do you justify persuing a course of action that may reduce the level of output? Exactly what is the chain of reasoning by which you justify your belief that Free Software benefits the public as a whole? It plainly benefits some people in the short term, but that's insufficient to prove it will benefit society as a whole in the long term. Do you have any economic and/or social science to back up your position?
I guess the key question here is, has Free Software become such a strong surrogate for Public Benefit in your mind that you can no longer separate the two?
I mean, come on Taco, a *lot* of the people who read /. have an interest in this. Without modern computing, there would be no NASDAQ market. Like it or not, the market is part of the fabric of our lives.
Consider this: One of the most famous headlines *ever* was when a publication that one would think has nothing to do with Wall Street reported on the crash of '29. "Wall Street Lays an Egg" is indelibly etched on the minds of many Americans. The publication was Variety. A periodical geared towards Hollywood and its interests. What does Wall Street have to do with movies? Arguably nothing, but the editors of Variety recognized that it was important enough to warrent a huge banner headline on their front page, and that crash didn't have anything to do with the entertainment industry specificly.
Flash forward to today, and a significant market correction occurs. Many believe it's due to an overvaluation of technology stocks, so this time there is arguably a link to the interests of /.ers. You wait until two days after the event and whine that it's not important.
Can Netscape sue for libel?
Can they prove they're not weenies?
Does that mean that a judge would have to establish a legal definition of what constitutes being a weenie?
I say the MS engineers should challenge the NS engineers to a Nerf battle. Winner take all.