Because the GPL is designed to protect the customers' (i.e. users') rights, not the rights of the original authors. Specifically, under the GPL, Asus has no obligation to distribute the code to the original authors, UNLESS of course the authors are also customers having bought the eeePC.
That is what the GPL says... HOWEVER, the author's have every right to relicense the source code if they chose, and give Asus an exception. And more to the point, the software authors are the only ones who have the right to sue Asus for violating the copyright terms they chose for their work.
I'm talking claymores and tasers. Neither are designed to kill.
Claymores (and most mines) are designed to kill. The fact that they often injure instead is besides the point.
And besides that, claymores aren't designed to be used against prisoners, and you don't use 'torture' to protect your lives against armed opposition forces. The two couldn't be more different. The analogy is idiotic.
And precisely how to you anticipate collecting methane from cows (burps, not farts)?
Collecting the droppings rather than letting them naturally decay, and processing the intestines after slaughter, rather than discarding them.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to find any sources that state what percentage of methane that would capture. Most every source just bundles all cattle methane emissions together, and often incorrectly labels it all "burping."
This is akin to arresting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
Actually no. It would be more accurate to compare it to arresting Ralph Nader.
Even if not for the police state, Kasparov is running on the ticket of a tiny political party, and doesn't really have a chance of actually winning. Quite the opposite of Clinton/Obama.
Yes, unfortunately the negative rails are always very low power, hence it not being so easy to get 19V... -12V seems to exist only because of the odd electrical signaling used by RS-232 serial ports.
No, I don't have Flash at all, yet Moz is just as much of a resource hog.
And even then some scripting is safe, some is not, so there are rules that the code has to implement
I use NoScript, so no Javascript in-use here 99% of the time, either...
like pop-up blockers, password managers, warnings on insecure pages,
A pop-up blocker is a passive device, simply refusing to execute certain code, it saves CPU time, not the other way around. Similar for pointless warnings about page contents.
And again, I have the password manager disabled, so it should not be using any resources.
All that and the browsers STILL need to be able to sensibly parse and display completely borked pages with invalid HTML.
Point me to the "borked pages" code, and I'll be damn happy to remove it, if it will give a huge performance boost. No question.
Although it doesn't handle javascript (which I disable with Moz anyhow), Dillo does basically everything you've described, using a fraction as much memory.
Right now, with the same 3 tabs open, Dillo is using 1/5th the memory of FF2.0.0.9, and that's just for starters. The performance disparity is much larger... Much of the time, the next page will be loaded just about the instant I finish clicking on the link. It's like the difference between night and day.
The real shame of it is that the Dillo project is on hold now, even though with the tiniest fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project, it could very quickly become an absolutely amazing web browser. It's really the same thing that happened with Links-GUI... Two amazingly promising browsers, going nowhere.
Human diet isn't remotely simple enough for over-simplified physics for several reasons... It is NOT a closed loop, and the volume of excrement will vary based on the food. The level of energy output can be varied dramatically as necessary. And the potential for serious harm is very real.
Human bodies are incredibly complex systems, and modeling what actually happens isn't remotely easy as counting calories. Or more accurately, while cutting your calories to 1,500 will cause you to lose weight, a man who currently eats 6,000 calories a day could very possibly die in the process of doing so. Further, counter-intuitively, a man eating 6,000 calories a day, cutting, that down to 5,800 calories might NOT lose weight, even over long periods of time, but simply to become less active instead. But more importantly, the complexities mean there may be much easier ways than just going hungry, and dismissing all diets as baseless is pretty stupid.
Some things are only free if you value your time at nothing.
My experience is quite the opposite. More like: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine. It certainly takes time to switch from what you already know (new computer users would be better off learning Unix in the first place) but once you know enough to get around, the savings in time, effort, and other frustrations are huge, even more than the cash eaten by the Windows tax.
You count Microsoft Office as free, even though you've paid a lot of money to get 'free' access to it, but you haven't made any mention of how much time it wastes every 3 years, when Microsoft changes the interface.
Windows is even worse, COMPLETELY reorganizing the system every release, and wasting tons of your time. No X11 desktop that I'm aware of has ever been so dramatically changed. Even if that had been the case, unlike in Windows, there's nothing to stop you from using an older version of most any program, if you'd like. I continue to use Openbox v2 myself.
And what of performance? How much does it cost to have a CPU-hog like Vista running, either forcing you to purchase a new computer, or wasting lots of your time waiting on it?
And although Microsoft can at least be said to be improving, it still isn't all that reliable... A great many times, I've seen Windows systems where some driver just decided to stop working, not to mention often partially failing in one way or another.
Just a couple weeks ago, I had the driver for my Twinhan card just fail to work one day, nothing at all had changed, hardware or software wise. It just quit. And just yesterday... Same Windows XP system, I had one file transferring over FTP, and WMP starting to play a video. For no reason at all, the video stopped, file transfer stopped, neither would respond (nor Explorer), and though Taskman opened up just fine, it couldn't kill any apps at all, even given my patience in waiting several minutes. The system had to be powered down. All issues I've never seen happen to any Linux or *BSD systems, yet common occurrences, even as infrequently as I use Windows. Despite the fact it seems to be downloading updates of some sort or other, almost constantly. Compared to my FreeBSD 6.2 desktop system, there's absolutely no contest which one wastes more (nearly all) of my time and efforts.
I've never witnessed despite spending my life under DST, this would be an event that occurs once every 600 years.
DST is, only about a 30 minute change, as it is done in-sync with seasonal (hence, astronomical) changes. Leap seconds will be an additional error, on top of DST changes, and will simply continue to accumulate.
And what's to say they do anything about it even when it has accumulated? Do you think that it will be easier to write software to make a 30 minute change, around every 300 years, than it is to handle a leap second every 6 months? If you're going to have to make the change, better to do it in small increments, with smaller errors.
Those few groups are the ones writing time-based software for everyone else. Big thing to miss.
No. They happen to be write time-based software, but they aren't remotely the only ones, and certainly not for "everyone."
The time zones are linked to UTC so it doesn't matter what TAI is.
Leap seconds are the only reason why UTC is divergent from TAI. In other words, it matters very much.
The fewer adjustments that are made to UTC, the fewer software problems.
Handling the case of twice-a-year leap seconds is simple enough. Those who need more accuracy should by all rights be using TAI rather than trying to force us all to shift to a new time standard for their minor convenience.
High-end headphones and speakers necessary to hear the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $1000.
I was with you until there...
Certainly with the very crappiest equipment you won't be able to tell the difference, but anything halfway decent will do. With a $30 pair of Aiwa headphones, plugged into my $15 SB Live card, I can pretty easily tell the difference between current lossy audio codecs, up to ~192K, and even more, MP3/WMA to any rate. The same is true with a $40 portable Sony CD/MP3 player + ear buds.
Where lossy becomes transparent, in my experience (at least without terribly high-end equipment, that I don't have) is with Musepack at --standard (~160k), or AC3/MP2 over 192k. Vorbis need not apply, because at any bitrate, it will occasionally have a few jarring artifacts. MP3/WMA have noticeable distortion at higher frequencies, no matter the bitrate. AAC omitted because faac/faad is crap.
I thought the idea behind using gold-plated connectors was not that they sounded better, but because they stayed sounding the same for longer due to not corroding?
There are a few problems with that...
Have you ever seen a standard (nickel-plated, IIRC) headphone plug corrode? Speaker wires are a bit different, as cheaper stuff isn't plated at all, but in any case gold really isn't necessary.
Even if your headphone plugs and speaker wires are gold plated, what benefit do you get from it? The other end of the connection is very likely NOT gold-plated, so it's moot.
Inherently, those who want to get rid of leap seconds also want to get rid of time zones (at least they indirectly do).
Having our clocks NOT agreeing with astronomical time, completely eliminates all the benefits of time zones.
Whether you actively think about it or not, our sense of direction is substantially driven by the combination of our clocks, and the Sun. We use it as a reference all the time (why do you think it's harder to find your way in a new area, when it's dark?). Even if there's no other defining features, there's still the Sun to tell us which way is North (or South), and our clocks give us a reference to relatively where the Sun should be. Subtly change someone's clocks, and you'll see them having a slightly more difficultly with their (otherwise good) sense of direction.
Seems to me, the only argument here is that there are a few groups who _really_ just happen to need TAI time, but they see that it's just much easier to access sources of UTC time, and so want to redefine UTC (eliminating leap seconds) so that it is monotonic, and strictly corresponds with TAI at all times. Did I miss anything?
I *really* don't think you can make an argument that your average person will put out $400 for an e-reader.
See: College Students. $400 is a drop in the bucket if it'll last around 4 years, and digitized content is reasonably inexpensive.
See: Executives, Electricians, Construction Foremen, Pilots, System Admins... Hell, anyone who works in an office, and many who don't. eBook readers aren't just for novels.
There isn't any particular reason it needs to be $400 either, prices on tech always fall quickly.
Durable rechargeable batteries are not cheap and there has been intense research into improving them in thelast decades. They allone may be more expensive than the two paperbacks.
B&W LCDs and slow embedded CPUs draw a trickle of power... My old Psion 5MX PDA ran for A MONTH on 2 AA batteries. Use newer CPUs, perhaps even slower, and you can stretch that out even longer. In other words: batteries not included.
Look up the term "resilient" some time: It means it still works when damaged.
Go buy yourself a dictionary.
Resilient: The ability to recover quickly
Books do not recover. Many everyday things will damage them permanently.
So you mean the CPU is not so slow after all, the LCD is really a fast one, the Flash is larger?
No idea where you're pulling this nonsense from.
technology. It has disadvantages too, you know.
Perhaps it does, but you haven't named one of them yet.
What it needs is that everybody carries a PDA araund, that can also serve as a book reader.
Everyone is going to carry around a PDA with a gigantic screen? Not likely. Screens are getting smaller, not larger, with the mass switch from PDAs to cell phones.
Cost: A simple e-book reader could easily cost as little as two paperback books... B&W LCD screen, minimal Flash, incredibly slow CPU, a couple buttons, battery compartment. The books themselves can approach $0 easily.
Resilient: Pages do not get ripped, binding glue does not deteriorate. etc. Survives food and drinks being spilled on it, and except in extreme cases, maintains perfect operation and visual quality. Sure, a soda stained paperback may be possibly comprehensible, but really I don't know anyone who would keep it.
Compatible: Digital doesn't require DRM.
Versatile: Can also double as an LCD monitor or terminal (with addition of a keyboard) etc.
Durable: Who needs durability when you have trivially easy digital reproduction, and incredibly inexpensive display devices? Besides, today's books aren't Guttenburg bibles, even stored properly, that paperback is going to die in short order, nor do the contents likely warrant it.
I just can't believe USA people put up with spending 21% of their national budget on the military.
First, before this morphs into yet another uninformed Education vs. Military spending flame-fest, I should mention that's only 21% of the Federal budget. If you included individual state taxes, you'd see it's a much smaller percentage overall.
Also, it's odd that people on slashdot are so quick to encourage massive funding for NASA, because of the technology they develop, yet disparage military spending, which includes a lot of advanced R&D.
And lastly, for better or worse, the US military has been the police force of the world for 60 years, and costs reflect that. The UN doesn't send troops anywhere unless the US volunteers to spend the vast majority of them. No other country has any intention of fielding a blue-water navy, so it's the US Navy that is protecting international trade, even though the vast majority is not going to or from the US. Since the rest of the world isn't paying anything for this service, it has to come out of US Federal taxes.
Strange that this remains the situation today, even though the EU is now economically as large as the US, and has a larger population. It seems only the US is willing to do the hard, thankless work, and the rest of the world is happy to enjoy the benefits, while criticizing everything the US does out the other side of their mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
Both.
What do you think qualifies as cowardice, if not avoiding all those who can actually, fairly compete with you?
That is what the GPL says... HOWEVER, the author's have every right to relicense the source code if they chose, and give Asus an exception. And more to the point, the software authors are the only ones who have the right to sue Asus for violating the copyright terms they chose for their work.
Claymores (and most mines) are designed to kill. The fact that they often injure instead is besides the point.
And besides that, claymores aren't designed to be used against prisoners, and you don't use 'torture' to protect your lives against armed opposition forces. The two couldn't be more different. The analogy is idiotic.
And guns send a projectile at high speeds hurtling through someone's body...
Death != Torture
Collecting the droppings rather than letting them naturally decay, and processing the intestines after slaughter, rather than discarding them.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to find any sources that state what percentage of methane that would capture. Most every source just bundles all cattle methane emissions together, and often incorrectly labels it all "burping."
Actually no. It would be more accurate to compare it to arresting Ralph Nader.
Even if not for the police state, Kasparov is running on the ticket of a tiny political party, and doesn't really have a chance of actually winning. Quite the opposite of Clinton/Obama.
Yes, unfortunately the negative rails are always very low power, hence it not being so easy to get 19V... -12V seems to exist only because of the odd electrical signaling used by RS-232 serial ports.
The history of the past century disagrees with you.
No, I don't have Flash at all, yet Moz is just as much of a resource hog.
I use NoScript, so no Javascript in-use here 99% of the time, either...
A pop-up blocker is a passive device, simply refusing to execute certain code, it saves CPU time, not the other way around. Similar for pointless warnings about page contents.
And again, I have the password manager disabled, so it should not be using any resources.
Point me to the "borked pages" code, and I'll be damn happy to remove it, if it will give a huge performance boost. No question.
Although it doesn't handle javascript (which I disable with Moz anyhow), Dillo does basically everything you've described, using a fraction as much memory.
Right now, with the same 3 tabs open, Dillo is using 1/5th the memory of FF2.0.0.9, and that's just for starters. The performance disparity is much larger... Much of the time, the next page will be loaded just about the instant I finish clicking on the link. It's like the difference between night and day.
The real shame of it is that the Dillo project is on hold now, even though with the tiniest fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project, it could very quickly become an absolutely amazing web browser. It's really the same thing that happened with Links-GUI... Two amazingly promising browsers, going nowhere.
Actually not.
Human diet isn't remotely simple enough for over-simplified physics for several reasons... It is NOT a closed loop, and the volume of excrement will vary based on the food. The level of energy output can be varied dramatically as necessary. And the potential for serious harm is very real.
Human bodies are incredibly complex systems, and modeling what actually happens isn't remotely easy as counting calories. Or more accurately, while cutting your calories to 1,500 will cause you to lose weight, a man who currently eats 6,000 calories a day could very possibly die in the process of doing so. Further, counter-intuitively, a man eating 6,000 calories a day, cutting, that down to 5,800 calories might NOT lose weight, even over long periods of time, but simply to become less active instead. But more importantly, the complexities mean there may be much easier ways than just going hungry, and dismissing all diets as baseless is pretty stupid.
Has anyone here ever seen an obese vegetarian?
My experience is quite the opposite. More like: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine. It certainly takes time to switch from what you already know (new computer users would be better off learning Unix in the first place) but once you know enough to get around, the savings in time, effort, and other frustrations are huge, even more than the cash eaten by the Windows tax.
You count Microsoft Office as free, even though you've paid a lot of money to get 'free' access to it, but you haven't made any mention of how much time it wastes every 3 years, when Microsoft changes the interface.
Windows is even worse, COMPLETELY reorganizing the system every release, and wasting tons of your time. No X11 desktop that I'm aware of has ever been so dramatically changed. Even if that had been the case, unlike in Windows, there's nothing to stop you from using an older version of most any program, if you'd like. I continue to use Openbox v2 myself.
And what of performance? How much does it cost to have a CPU-hog like Vista running, either forcing you to purchase a new computer, or wasting lots of your time waiting on it?
And although Microsoft can at least be said to be improving, it still isn't all that reliable... A great many times, I've seen Windows systems where some driver just decided to stop working, not to mention often partially failing in one way or another.
Just a couple weeks ago, I had the driver for my Twinhan card just fail to work one day, nothing at all had changed, hardware or software wise. It just quit. And just yesterday... Same Windows XP system, I had one file transferring over FTP, and WMP starting to play a video. For no reason at all, the video stopped, file transfer stopped, neither would respond (nor Explorer), and though Taskman opened up just fine, it couldn't kill any apps at all, even given my patience in waiting several minutes. The system had to be powered down. All issues I've never seen happen to any Linux or *BSD systems, yet common occurrences, even as infrequently as I use Windows. Despite the fact it seems to be downloading updates of some sort or other, almost constantly. Compared to my FreeBSD 6.2 desktop system, there's absolutely no contest which one wastes more (nearly all) of my time and efforts.
DST is, only about a 30 minute change, as it is done in-sync with seasonal (hence, astronomical) changes. Leap seconds will be an additional error, on top of DST changes, and will simply continue to accumulate.
And what's to say they do anything about it even when it has accumulated? Do you think that it will be easier to write software to make a 30 minute change, around every 300 years, than it is to handle a leap second every 6 months? If you're going to have to make the change, better to do it in small increments, with smaller errors.
No. They happen to be write time-based software, but they aren't remotely the only ones, and certainly not for "everyone."
Leap seconds are the only reason why UTC is divergent from TAI. In other words, it matters very much.
Handling the case of twice-a-year leap seconds is simple enough. Those who need more accuracy should by all rights be using TAI rather than trying to force us all to shift to a new time standard for their minor convenience.
Even better: give government officials high paying jobs in your company, the day they leave office.
Maybe even jobs where they directly lobby the government in your company's interests.
I was with you until there...
Certainly with the very crappiest equipment you won't be able to tell the difference, but anything halfway decent will do. With a $30 pair of Aiwa headphones, plugged into my $15 SB Live card, I can pretty easily tell the difference between current lossy audio codecs, up to ~192K, and even more, MP3/WMA to any rate. The same is true with a $40 portable Sony CD/MP3 player + ear buds.
Where lossy becomes transparent, in my experience (at least without terribly high-end equipment, that I don't have) is with Musepack at --standard (~160k), or AC3/MP2 over 192k. Vorbis need not apply, because at any bitrate, it will occasionally have a few jarring artifacts. MP3/WMA have noticeable distortion at higher frequencies, no matter the bitrate. AAC omitted because faac/faad is crap.
There are a few problems with that...
Have you ever seen a standard (nickel-plated, IIRC) headphone plug corrode? Speaker wires are a bit different, as cheaper stuff isn't plated at all, but in any case gold really isn't necessary.
Even if your headphone plugs and speaker wires are gold plated, what benefit do you get from it? The other end of the connection is very likely NOT gold-plated, so it's moot.
Inherently, those who want to get rid of leap seconds also want to get rid of time zones (at least they indirectly do).
Having our clocks NOT agreeing with astronomical time, completely eliminates all the benefits of time zones.
Whether you actively think about it or not, our sense of direction is substantially driven by the combination of our clocks, and the Sun. We use it as a reference all the time (why do you think it's harder to find your way in a new area, when it's dark?). Even if there's no other defining features, there's still the Sun to tell us which way is North (or South), and our clocks give us a reference to relatively where the Sun should be. Subtly change someone's clocks, and you'll see them having a slightly more difficultly with their (otherwise good) sense of direction.
Seems to me, the only argument here is that there are a few groups who _really_ just happen to need TAI time, but they see that it's just much easier to access sources of UTC time, and so want to redefine UTC (eliminating leap seconds) so that it is monotonic, and strictly corresponds with TAI at all times. Did I miss anything?
Ding, ding, ding! I've got a new favorite phrase!
Why doesn't your cell phone get a signal? It's because there is a strong field of non-Hertzian frequencies in the area.
See: College Students. $400 is a drop in the bucket if it'll last around 4 years, and digitized content is reasonably inexpensive.
See: Executives, Electricians, Construction Foremen, Pilots, System Admins... Hell, anyone who works in an office, and many who don't. eBook readers aren't just for novels.
There isn't any particular reason it needs to be $400 either, prices on tech always fall quickly.
B&W LCDs and slow embedded CPUs draw a trickle of power... My old Psion 5MX PDA ran for A MONTH on 2 AA batteries. Use newer CPUs, perhaps even slower, and you can stretch that out even longer. In other words: batteries not included.
Go buy yourself a dictionary.
Resilient: The ability to recover quickly
Books do not recover. Many everyday things will damage them permanently.
No idea where you're pulling this nonsense from.
Perhaps it does, but you haven't named one of them yet.
Everyone is going to carry around a PDA with a gigantic screen? Not likely. Screens are getting smaller, not larger, with the mass switch from PDAs to cell phones.
Cost: A simple e-book reader could easily cost as little as two paperback books... B&W LCD screen, minimal Flash, incredibly slow CPU, a couple buttons, battery compartment. The books themselves can approach $0 easily.
Resilient: Pages do not get ripped, binding glue does not deteriorate. etc. Survives food and drinks being spilled on it, and except in extreme cases, maintains perfect operation and visual quality. Sure, a soda stained paperback may be possibly comprehensible, but really I don't know anyone who would keep it.
Compatible: Digital doesn't require DRM.
Versatile: Can also double as an LCD monitor or terminal (with addition of a keyboard) etc.
Durable: Who needs durability when you have trivially easy digital reproduction, and incredibly inexpensive display devices? Besides, today's books aren't Guttenburg bibles, even stored properly, that paperback is going to die in short order, nor do the contents likely warrant it.
That's too bad. I guess they'll just have to market this device to the proper niche... the other 99% of the population.
Indeed: http://despair.com/achievement.html
Because the higher, the fewer.
So because it won't specifically affect your internet connection, it isn't news?
FTTH is last-mile distribution.
First, before this morphs into yet another uninformed Education vs. Military spending flame-fest, I should mention that's only 21% of the Federal budget. If you included individual state taxes, you'd see it's a much smaller percentage overall.
Also, it's odd that people on slashdot are so quick to encourage massive funding for NASA, because of the technology they develop, yet disparage military spending, which includes a lot of advanced R&D.
And lastly, for better or worse, the US military has been the police force of the world for 60 years, and costs reflect that. The UN doesn't send troops anywhere unless the US volunteers to spend the vast majority of them. No other country has any intention of fielding a blue-water navy, so it's the US Navy that is protecting international trade, even though the vast majority is not going to or from the US. Since the rest of the world isn't paying anything for this service, it has to come out of US Federal taxes.
Strange that this remains the situation today, even though the EU is now economically as large as the US, and has a larger population. It seems only the US is willing to do the hard, thankless work, and the rest of the world is happy to enjoy the benefits, while criticizing everything the US does out the other side of their mouth.