I get the impression that the IBM anti-trust case had a radical impact on the company's behavior. It sounds as though their experience with the government being angry at them was sufficiently chastening that they've tended to bend over backward to avoid a repeat ever since. I almost get the impression that they've concluded that their business is so well off that they don't have to behave unethically to get an edge, and so the combined advantage of avoiding further government unfriendlyness and appearing to be nice guys is considered to be a smart business position.
But this claim is just silly. If they can hack people's genes that well, it should be no problem to add an extra photoreceptor or three onto the X chromosome so that men could be tetra-, penta-, hexa-, or whatevera- chromic, too. The author of the quote just lacks sufficient, err, vision.
When they discover something new, they always get some talking head to say 'It just shows how insignificant we are'
I have never seen a scientist wax lyrical about how incredible we are, it's always how insignificant we are.
Then blame the talking head, not the scientist. In any case, you must not spend very much time talking to scientists if that's your view, because the ones I talk to (i.e. my coworkers, as I myself am a scientist) are constantly amazed by humanity. That includes physicists who are boggled at the combination of cosmic factors that have to be just the way they are in order for life to exist at all, chemists who are amazed at the complexity and beauty of the way that the molecules that make up our body interact, and biologists who are astounded by the interactions of cells that make us functioning organisms. That doesn't even mention the cognitive scientists who are still baffled and enthralled at how our brains process information and engineers who are impressed by the efficiency of our bodies. Try actually talking to scientists before you make up your mind about what they think.
There is one giant loophole in this law, though, which is that these fees don't apply to computer based systems, only to standalone ones. This was put in, IIRC, specifically because legislators recognized that there were so many legitimate, non-copyright related uses for computer based equipment- specifically backing up data. That's part of the reason that computer CD-RW drives, and all of the reason that computer CD-RW disks, are so much cheaper than their standalone counterparts. What people apparently didn't anticipate was that A) computers would be quite so ubiquitous so rapidly, to the point that anybody technically sophisticated enough to want to copy CDs would have a computer to which a CD-RW drive could be added and B) that it would be possible to engage in massive on-line trading instead of casual, friendly trading. Those two factors have triggered the explosion in copyright violation that's making the RIAA and friends so upset.
If industry cabals like the RIAA are legal, why not an industry cabal of CD and DVD recorder ad MP3 player makers who boycott countries/states that presume guilt on devices (not lawbreakers) and "tax" them.
Partly, at least, because there's a lot of overlap between the hardware manufacturers and the content providers. Companies like Sony and Phillips are heavily involved in both sides of the market. It appears that they currently make more money from milking copyrights than they do from manufacturing consumer electronics, so the music and movie people get to call the shots. One more reason why massive conglomerates are bad for the consumer.
Even better would be an administrator configurable holiday (or rather day off) database. Not only do different countries celebrate different holidays, but different businesses have different day off policies. My employer, for instance, has only 6 set holidays every year (New Years, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) while many other employers in the U.S. celebrate many more holidays. Furthermore, some employers may have additional days off that aren't official holidays- the company picnic, or the founder's birthday, or whatever.
The reason why Linux is being ported to these small devices is FLEXIBILITY.
I think that availability has more to do with it than flexibility. Linux is an available, off-the-shelf kernel that already runs on a lot of lightweight processors like ARM and Dragonball. That means that you can put essentially zero development time and effort into designing your kernel and devote it to other aspects of the project instead. For a small project like this (IIRC from the web-site it was developed in 2 months by 3 people) that's a huge advantage.
IIRC, one of the other stated goals of the project was to make it open so that other people could develop it further. That pretty much demands a Free Software OS like Linux; they specifically mentioned the GPL as an advantage which I assume cuts out NetBSD as an alternative.
I do believe "Correction +1" should be a moderation option.
Just so long as they also add the "Wrong -1" moderation option. I've seen so many posts that I've wanted to mod down because they contain information that is just plain factually incorrect but can't because that's not an option. Maybe they could call it "Misinformative -1", but whatever it's called it's desperately needed.
This is a possible solution (hey, cool, the HHKB now comes in black...), but if I'm going to carry around the
keyboard (which is my preferred input method anyway) and cradle, I may as well just bring the laptop.
Then maybe you should look at the foldable keyboard instead. It's about the same size as a Palm III/VII, and it's actually a very usable keyboard. It feels very similar to the ones on laptops. You need a hard surface to place it on to keep it from folding in the middle (I guess a briefcase would do) but other than that it's great.
I disagree. I personally find that Gnome (I don't use KDE) is at least as useful as a desktop environment as any version of Windows or MacOS that I've used. I personally find that the degree of customizability allows me to get it working the way that I want it to work. I can set up just the features that I want and eliminate ones that I don't. There are some things that aren't handled as well (notably configuring the underlying system) but those are more issues with the underlying system than the suitability as a desktop environment.
Furthermore, the competetion can be quite useful even if you don't consider them to be equal to Win/Mac yet. Part of their differences are about underlying programming issues rather than direct desktop usability features, and that's going to have a big impact on their long-term development potential. Nothing could more certainly guarantee that they could never catch up to Win/Mac than following a dead end in the underlying technology which would break compatibility to fix. By following two different models of the programming underpinnings, Free Software is protected against that kind of mistake.
Their solution to the high cost of litigation: "We're always right and no one can ever sue us over anything!"
It's not as though consumer lititgation is exactly destroying their profits, either. Microsoft is one of the most profitable companies in the country, so the current level of consumer litigation is hardly driving them into bankruptcy. I hadn't thought of it in exactly these terms, either, but what does it say about a company when they argue that they can't be honest with their customers because it would cause too many lawsuits? Is there any worse indictment of the industry as it now exists than their own admission that being honest with their customers would result in increased litigation and decreased customer choice?
One question that I've always had about UCITA is how it can possibly be reasonable to manage software sales under any state law, much less try the nonsense approach that MS et. al. are trying under which the sale can be held to be under a state that has no apparent relevance to the sale. If I (a citizen and resident of California) buy software written by Microsoft (a Nevada corporation whose primary place of business is in Washington) through a local store, what in hell do the laws of Virginia or Maryland have to do with it? You could plausibly argue that the sale should be under California law, or less plausibly under Washington or Nevada law, but why should the laws of a state where none of the principles of the sale are involved have any relevance? If anything, this is the clearest possible case of interstate commerce and should be handled by a Federal, not a State law. Any plausible suggestions?
I don't see what's so funny about this post; it's actually quite informative, and I think that it makes a good point. If somebody in your organization insists on paying somebody for free software, you might as well take advantage of it to funnel the money to a deserving group like FSF.
It's absolutely amazing the nonsense that comes out of these people. A particularly revealing quote from the article:
Requiring disclosures similar to those for used cars or other hard goods "would create tangible harm through increased costs, litigation and a likely decrease in competition and product choice," wrote the Commerce Coalition, whose members include AOL, Microsoft and Intel.
IOW they claim that it's too expensive to require them to give consumers honest information about their products. At the same time, they want to be able to put terms into their licenses that would make it impossible for third parties to review their products honestly. So much for being able to make informed purchasing decisions, which any economist will tell you is essential for an effective marketplace. At the same time, they want the right to refuse refunds to consumers who do buy the software and then find out how useless it is.
Believe it or not, my sister actually has network access in her chicken coop, so there would be at least one location that would qualify. Actually, half of the building is a small office and the other half is a chicken coop (don't ask) but it's kind of fun to say that in Seattle even chickens can surf the web.
Each language naturally tends to produce obfuscated code in its own idiom. The obfuscated Perl in the contest has a variety of levels of obfuscation, and some of it is wonderfully logically obfuscated as well as simply hard to read. I'll admit that the obfuscated Perl folks do tend to produce extremely dense, hard to read material, but there's also a lot of genuine logical obfuscation in there, too.
I don't know; I think you'd have a hard time getting a lot of Americans to take all of their vacation if they did have a lot. I get what is apparently very generous vacation by American standards (about 4 1/2 weeks per year which can be accumulated to a total of about 3 years' worth) and I have a hard time figuring out how to take advantage of it. Every time I think about taking a week off, I look at what my schedule would be like when I get back and reconsider, and I know that I'm not the only one in that position. There are plenty of people here who complain about maximum vacation accrual policies because they're forced to take time off or lose their vacation without compensation, and lots of people want the ability to cash in unused vacation time. The U.S. just doesn't have a big vacation culture, which is odd considering that our schools have significantly longer vacations that other countries.
It might also have something to do with the greater range of holiday (and business) opportunities within non-passport range, too. The 50 states have a larger land area and a broader range of climates than Europe outside of Russia, and a bigger economy, too (IIRC). You may find that the number of passports in Europe goes down now that they aren't necessary to travel between members of the EU.
So, if your managers are up to it both emotionally and in terms of knowledge of their work to allow for judging
performance fairly, then flex-time (and part-time telecommuting) can be really great...
And there you get the real reason that many companies aren't so hot about flex time; it makes things easier for workers at the (apparent) expense of managers. Since the managers are the ones making the decision about whether or not to go to flex time, their opinion may be very different from that of regular employees. That suggests that if you want to convince your company to switch to flex time, you need to figure out an argument for how it will make managing easier, not for how it will make life easier for employees.
There's no need to crack SDMI when we can simply ignore it.
Only a limited set of people can effectively ignore it. Remember that not everyone will be able to get the software needed for those older, non-SMDI-crippled formats, particularly if there's an effective effort by commercial software houses and equipment manufacturers to stop supporting them. Many/. readers may be able to download and compile their own Ogg player for their computer, but how many of them would be capable of hacking their portable SMDI player to play Ogg files? I'm not sure I could if the manufacturer was actually making a reasonable effort to make it difficult, even with good instructions. How much less so the general public, many of whom are uncomforable even with the relatively simple binary software installation available today? Remember that the RIAA doesn't need to completely stamp out music sharing, just knock it down to the point that they can continue to profit from the people who can't leap the higher technological hurdle that SMDI could impose.
That is a question, and an interesting one, but it's hardly the only question. There's also a serious issue of scholarly integrity. If the work is being done with the intent of publishing it as a scholarly work (as would be the case in a Journal article or PhD dissertation), there is a serious question about the importance of making the source code available. I am personally extremely skeptical of any scientific or technical publication which does not give sufficient details of the methods used that another researcher can replicate the results. In the case of software, that pretty much means that the source code must be available for others to examine and further develop.
That pretty much requires some sort of source code licensing. It might very well not be a pure Free Software license- it might be restricted to academic use, require citation of the original paper in the event that further developed versions were published subsequently, etc.- but the code must be available for other researchers to hack on. I can certainly think of some specific researchers in my field (who shall remain nameless here) who have published papers critically dependent on software that they declined to make available, and I remain highly skeptical of their data as a result.
If you're more interested in winning the right to use a free-software license than in which license to choose, you might do well to bring up the BSD license. It was a very early Free-Software license and has an excellent track record, with some of the most influential software out there released under the BSD license. It also has the big advantage, in terms of convincing University officials, that it has the backing of a major research University. "If Free Software is good enough for UC Berkeley it's good enough for us," is not a particularly logical argument, but it might be more effective in convincing University officials than abstract arguments about licensing fees and the like.
That's the general rule. The person or group that discovers a new taxonomic group- living or extinct- and first demonstrates it to be taxonomically distinct gets to name it. So if it's a new species, you get to give it a new species name, but not the genus name. If you discover a species in a whole new philum, you'd get to give it philum, class, order, family, genus, and species. In practice, though, I suspect that intermediate taxonomic groupings (between genus/species and the highest classification that holds) would be considered provisional until some related groups were found. The neat part is that there are so many species out there that all of the obvious names have been taken and almost everything new gets the kind of (often funny) phony-latin names that they used to make jokes with on Road Runner.
On a more serious note, there's a wealth of on-line taxonomy data at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. They have a lot of information about taxonomy in general, as well as a heirarchical database of every species (including some extinct ones, though no dinosaurs) for which any DNA or Protein sequence has been published. Even if you're not interested in the data there for professional reasons, the NCBI web page is a fantastic example of how to make Gigabytes of data accessable on-line.
Yeah, that post went pretty much like this: "Bronto-... Bronta-... Bronto-.... screw it. T.Rex."
<PEDANTRY> Well, Brontosaurus (note that genus and species names should normally be italicized) wouldn't be correct, anyway. Officially it's supposed to be Apatosaurus, since the original find of the species was given that name. For some reason this distinction hasn't been followed up very well in the public literature. </PEDANTRY>
Netscape has decided to put a feature freeze on Netscape v6.0, and is
being very selective about what makes it into the codebase.
I think that this perfectly describes the real underlying problem. Netscape has the wrong attitude toward standards compliance/noncompliance. Meeting the standards isn't a neat feature that should be added in the next release. Failing to meet the standards is a serious bug that absolutely must be stomped before the product is fit to ship.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the impression that the IBM anti-trust case had a radical impact on the company's behavior. It sounds as though their experience with the government being angry at them was sufficiently chastening that they've tended to bend over backward to avoid a repeat ever since. I almost get the impression that they've concluded that their business is so well off that they don't have to behave unethically to get an edge, and so the combined advantage of avoiding further government unfriendlyness and appearing to be nice guys is considered to be a smart business position.
But this claim is just silly. If they can hack people's genes that well, it should be no problem to add an extra photoreceptor or three onto the X chromosome so that men could be tetra-, penta-, hexa-, or whatevera- chromic, too. The author of the quote just lacks sufficient, err, vision.
Then blame the talking head, not the scientist. In any case, you must not spend very much time talking to scientists if that's your view, because the ones I talk to (i.e. my coworkers, as I myself am a scientist) are constantly amazed by humanity. That includes physicists who are boggled at the combination of cosmic factors that have to be just the way they are in order for life to exist at all, chemists who are amazed at the complexity and beauty of the way that the molecules that make up our body interact, and biologists who are astounded by the interactions of cells that make us functioning organisms. That doesn't even mention the cognitive scientists who are still baffled and enthralled at how our brains process information and engineers who are impressed by the efficiency of our bodies. Try actually talking to scientists before you make up your mind about what they think.
There is one giant loophole in this law, though, which is that these fees don't apply to computer based systems, only to standalone ones. This was put in, IIRC, specifically because legislators recognized that there were so many legitimate, non-copyright related uses for computer based equipment- specifically backing up data. That's part of the reason that computer CD-RW drives, and all of the reason that computer CD-RW disks, are so much cheaper than their standalone counterparts. What people apparently didn't anticipate was that A) computers would be quite so ubiquitous so rapidly, to the point that anybody technically sophisticated enough to want to copy CDs would have a computer to which a CD-RW drive could be added and B) that it would be possible to engage in massive on-line trading instead of casual, friendly trading. Those two factors have triggered the explosion in copyright violation that's making the RIAA and friends so upset.
Partly, at least, because there's a lot of overlap between the hardware manufacturers and the content providers. Companies like Sony and Phillips are heavily involved in both sides of the market. It appears that they currently make more money from milking copyrights than they do from manufacturing consumer electronics, so the music and movie people get to call the shots. One more reason why massive conglomerates are bad for the consumer.
Even better would be an administrator configurable holiday (or rather day off) database. Not only do different countries celebrate different holidays, but different businesses have different day off policies. My employer, for instance, has only 6 set holidays every year (New Years, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) while many other employers in the U.S. celebrate many more holidays. Furthermore, some employers may have additional days off that aren't official holidays- the company picnic, or the founder's birthday, or whatever.
I think that availability has more to do with it than flexibility. Linux is an available, off-the-shelf kernel that already runs on a lot of lightweight processors like ARM and Dragonball. That means that you can put essentially zero development time and effort into designing your kernel and devote it to other aspects of the project instead. For a small project like this (IIRC from the web-site it was developed in 2 months by 3 people) that's a huge advantage.
IIRC, one of the other stated goals of the project was to make it open so that other people could develop it further. That pretty much demands a Free Software OS like Linux; they specifically mentioned the GPL as an advantage which I assume cuts out NetBSD as an alternative.
Just so long as they also add the "Wrong -1" moderation option. I've seen so many posts that I've wanted to mod down because they contain information that is just plain factually incorrect but can't because that's not an option. Maybe they could call it "Misinformative -1", but whatever it's called it's desperately needed.
Then maybe you should look at the foldable keyboard instead. It's about the same size as a Palm III/VII, and it's actually a very usable keyboard. It feels very similar to the ones on laptops. You need a hard surface to place it on to keep it from folding in the middle (I guess a briefcase would do) but other than that it's great.
I disagree. I personally find that Gnome (I don't use KDE) is at least as useful as a desktop environment as any version of Windows or MacOS that I've used. I personally find that the degree of customizability allows me to get it working the way that I want it to work. I can set up just the features that I want and eliminate ones that I don't. There are some things that aren't handled as well (notably configuring the underlying system) but those are more issues with the underlying system than the suitability as a desktop environment.
Furthermore, the competetion can be quite useful even if you don't consider them to be equal to Win/Mac yet. Part of their differences are about underlying programming issues rather than direct desktop usability features, and that's going to have a big impact on their long-term development potential. Nothing could more certainly guarantee that they could never catch up to Win/Mac than following a dead end in the underlying technology which would break compatibility to fix. By following two different models of the programming underpinnings, Free Software is protected against that kind of mistake.
It's not as though consumer lititgation is exactly destroying their profits, either. Microsoft is one of the most profitable companies in the country, so the current level of consumer litigation is hardly driving them into bankruptcy. I hadn't thought of it in exactly these terms, either, but what does it say about a company when they argue that they can't be honest with their customers because it would cause too many lawsuits? Is there any worse indictment of the industry as it now exists than their own admission that being honest with their customers would result in increased litigation and decreased customer choice?
One question that I've always had about UCITA is how it can possibly be reasonable to manage software sales under any state law, much less try the nonsense approach that MS et. al. are trying under which the sale can be held to be under a state that has no apparent relevance to the sale. If I (a citizen and resident of California) buy software written by Microsoft (a Nevada corporation whose primary place of business is in Washington) through a local store, what in hell do the laws of Virginia or Maryland have to do with it? You could plausibly argue that the sale should be under California law, or less plausibly under Washington or Nevada law, but why should the laws of a state where none of the principles of the sale are involved have any relevance? If anything, this is the clearest possible case of interstate commerce and should be handled by a Federal, not a State law. Any plausible suggestions?
I don't see what's so funny about this post; it's actually quite informative, and I think that it makes a good point. If somebody in your organization insists on paying somebody for free software, you might as well take advantage of it to funnel the money to a deserving group like FSF.
It's absolutely amazing the nonsense that comes out of these people. A particularly revealing quote from the article:
IOW they claim that it's too expensive to require them to give consumers honest information about their products. At the same time, they want to be able to put terms into their licenses that would make it impossible for third parties to review their products honestly. So much for being able to make informed purchasing decisions, which any economist will tell you is essential for an effective marketplace. At the same time, they want the right to refuse refunds to consumers who do buy the software and then find out how useless it is.
Believe it or not, my sister actually has network access in her chicken coop, so there would be at least one location that would qualify. Actually, half of the building is a small office and the other half is a chicken coop (don't ask) but it's kind of fun to say that in Seattle even chickens can surf the web.
Each language naturally tends to produce obfuscated code in its own idiom. The obfuscated Perl in the contest has a variety of levels of obfuscation, and some of it is wonderfully logically obfuscated as well as simply hard to read. I'll admit that the obfuscated Perl folks do tend to produce extremely dense, hard to read material, but there's also a lot of genuine logical obfuscation in there, too.
I don't know; I think you'd have a hard time getting a lot of Americans to take all of their vacation if they did have a lot. I get what is apparently very generous vacation by American standards (about 4 1/2 weeks per year which can be accumulated to a total of about 3 years' worth) and I have a hard time figuring out how to take advantage of it. Every time I think about taking a week off, I look at what my schedule would be like when I get back and reconsider, and I know that I'm not the only one in that position. There are plenty of people here who complain about maximum vacation accrual policies because they're forced to take time off or lose their vacation without compensation, and lots of people want the ability to cash in unused vacation time. The U.S. just doesn't have a big vacation culture, which is odd considering that our schools have significantly longer vacations that other countries.
It might also have something to do with the greater range of holiday (and business) opportunities within non-passport range, too. The 50 states have a larger land area and a broader range of climates than Europe outside of Russia, and a bigger economy, too (IIRC). You may find that the number of passports in Europe goes down now that they aren't necessary to travel between members of the EU.
And there you get the real reason that many companies aren't so hot about flex time; it makes things easier for workers at the (apparent) expense of managers. Since the managers are the ones making the decision about whether or not to go to flex time, their opinion may be very different from that of regular employees. That suggests that if you want to convince your company to switch to flex time, you need to figure out an argument for how it will make managing easier, not for how it will make life easier for employees.
Only a limited set of people can effectively ignore it. Remember that not everyone will be able to get the software needed for those older, non-SMDI-crippled formats, particularly if there's an effective effort by commercial software houses and equipment manufacturers to stop supporting them. Many /. readers may be able to download and compile their own Ogg player for their computer, but how many of them would be capable of hacking their portable SMDI player to play Ogg files? I'm not sure I could if the manufacturer was actually making a reasonable effort to make it difficult, even with good instructions. How much less so the general public, many of whom are uncomforable even with the relatively simple binary software installation available today? Remember that the RIAA doesn't need to completely stamp out music sharing, just knock it down to the point that they can continue to profit from the people who can't leap the higher technological hurdle that SMDI could impose.
That is a question, and an interesting one, but it's hardly the only question. There's also a serious issue of scholarly integrity. If the work is being done with the intent of publishing it as a scholarly work (as would be the case in a Journal article or PhD dissertation), there is a serious question about the importance of making the source code available. I am personally extremely skeptical of any scientific or technical publication which does not give sufficient details of the methods used that another researcher can replicate the results. In the case of software, that pretty much means that the source code must be available for others to examine and further develop.
That pretty much requires some sort of source code licensing. It might very well not be a pure Free Software license- it might be restricted to academic use, require citation of the original paper in the event that further developed versions were published subsequently, etc.- but the code must be available for other researchers to hack on. I can certainly think of some specific researchers in my field (who shall remain nameless here) who have published papers critically dependent on software that they declined to make available, and I remain highly skeptical of their data as a result.
If you're more interested in winning the right to use a free-software license than in which license to choose, you might do well to bring up the BSD license. It was a very early Free-Software license and has an excellent track record, with some of the most influential software out there released under the BSD license. It also has the big advantage, in terms of convincing University officials, that it has the backing of a major research University. "If Free Software is good enough for UC Berkeley it's good enough for us," is not a particularly logical argument, but it might be more effective in convincing University officials than abstract arguments about licensing fees and the like.
That's the general rule. The person or group that discovers a new taxonomic group- living or extinct- and first demonstrates it to be taxonomically distinct gets to name it. So if it's a new species, you get to give it a new species name, but not the genus name. If you discover a species in a whole new philum, you'd get to give it philum, class, order, family, genus, and species. In practice, though, I suspect that intermediate taxonomic groupings (between genus/species and the highest classification that holds) would be considered provisional until some related groups were found. The neat part is that there are so many species out there that all of the obvious names have been taken and almost everything new gets the kind of (often funny) phony-latin names that they used to make jokes with on Road Runner.
On a more serious note, there's a wealth of on-line taxonomy data at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. They have a lot of information about taxonomy in general, as well as a heirarchical database of every species (including some extinct ones, though no dinosaurs) for which any DNA or Protein sequence has been published. Even if you're not interested in the data there for professional reasons, the NCBI web page is a fantastic example of how to make Gigabytes of data accessable on-line.
<PEDANTRY>
Well, Brontosaurus (note that genus and species names should normally be italicized) wouldn't be correct, anyway. Officially it's supposed to be Apatosaurus, since the original find of the species was given that name. For some reason this distinction hasn't been followed up very well in the public literature.
</PEDANTRY>
I think that this perfectly describes the real underlying problem. Netscape has the wrong attitude toward standards compliance/noncompliance. Meeting the standards isn't a neat feature that should be added in the next release. Failing to meet the standards is a serious bug that absolutely must be stomped before the product is fit to ship.