But when a billion-selling company pays its taxes, then you want to be very sure they're not legit before pulling the plug or slapping them with hefty fines.
But I've never been spammed by a reputable company. Sure Sony sends me more mail than perhaps I'd like, but it's all related to Sony products and services, and I did give them an email address when I registered some piece of equipment with them, and it's easy enough to drop it into a Sony folder.
Any company that sends mail containing text deliberately designed to evade a filter ("vuagra" is a typo, "v1agra" is deliberate) is by definition a spammer, and can be squashed without any negative consequences to anyone (who matters).
Xerox could have sat on the idea, but sued Apple, Microsoft, and anybody else who came along with a use, into smouldering red-ink ruin.
But why would they? More likely, they'd simply have licensed the ideas in return for a fee. That, incidentally, is what Xerox, Kodak and a bunch of other companies do for a large chunk of their revenue. They do research and license it out. ARM is based on a similar model.
You are perfectly correct in your understanding. That's the whole point of the patent system. If you invent something, you've got a "head start" in commercializing it. Either you can use it exclusively, or someone can read your patent, decide that it's a good idea, and pay you a licensing fee so they can use it too. Eventually it passes into the public domain. What the anti-patent crowd is arguing that it should pass into the public domain immediately.
What they don't understand is that in a modern industrial economy, there is not necessarily any correlation between what something costs to reproduce and what it cost to create the very first one. Software that took 1 person 1 year to write costs as much to reproduce as something that took 1000 people 10 years. Patents mean that you can invest a lot of time and money and still have an opportunity to recoup that investment. Without patent protection, there is no incentive to invest.
Now, I'm not saying that the patent system works as it ought to at present. I am saying that the patent "algorithm" is sound; it is just poorly implemented in the US. The anti-patent group is composed of people who benefit from other people's research, yet have no intention of investing in research themselves.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD
Personally, I have no idea whatsoever about what a Knoppix is. Or a Gentoo for that matter. Or a Debian.
And I'm not "joe public", I was using Linux professionally in '96! Yes, getting paid to run Linux as a full time job. I do know what I'm talking about.
The open source community, if it wants to make any inroads into public acceptance, has got to lose this obsession with stupid names. Microsoft learnt this years ago. "Windows", "Word", "Access", "Office", all of these are everyday words that have at least a basic reference to what those pieces of software actually do.
If some reactionary soldier kicks the shit out of some guy for saying something even as repugnant as advocating suicide bombing
Free speech does not extend to shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre (unless of course there really is a fire). And it should not extend to inciting heinous acts of terrorism either.
Definitely, considering how expensive ADSL and broadband in general is in the UK
Wha?? 20-25 squids a month, free setup and a free (admittedly probably fairly crap) USB modem with most providers is not "expensive"! Hell, I can't see how anyone who can afford a PC can't afford ADSL!
However, my observations of user habits differs substantially from your experience (see previous message for details).
Oh, I know that people do do it. I'm saying that they should wait and use their monitors - you can still delete just as easily from yout HD if the picture doesn't turn out. Some things you can see on the LCD, but much you can't.
In practice it doesn't work like that. About the only thing the LCD is really good for is looking at the histogram. You cannot really judge an image on that tiny LCD, you have to see it on a 19" calibrated monitor. Many's the time a pic has looked great on the LCD and crap printed, aye, and vice versa.
What level of advance are you willing to put me in jail to protect? How do you decide on this level?
Aye, you've hit the nail on the head there and identified Joy's and Kurzweil's real motives. They want control.
Imagine people like them had actually had the power to smash the first printing press, because it might place too much knowledge in the hands of ordinary people. That's exactly what they're trying to do here.
What? No way! They're only going to filter known sites. It's not BT's job to go looking for child porn just so they can block it. What if a new website was put up, and BT users accessed it before BT managed to filter it? BT should NOT be held repsonsible then
Of course they should be responsible. I cite the example of Demon Internet. Their defense against getting sued is simply that they're a carrier, like the phone company or the post office, the fact that they carry an item of data in no way implies that that item is endorsed by them.
If BT are setting themselves up to filter - and they are winning new business because their customers want that - then they fail to deliver, then they should be liable to everyone who signed up to them because they wanted a filtered network connection. Similarly, if they mistakenly block a legitimate site which subsequently loses business, they should be liable for that too.
There's a place for a filtered ISP, parents obviously want one, I've no problems with that. But BT weasels want to have their cake (new business) and eat it (no responsibility) too.
the only issue to be concerned with is whether or not the list of blocked sites is accurate or not.
It didn't even cross my mind that BT's list would be accurate. You've never been a customer of theirs, otherwise it wouldn't have occured to you either.
Which I think just blows the contention that liberal==left-wing
The US uses "liberal" to mean "permissive" or "progressive"; the rest of the world uses it to mean what Americans would call "classically liberal". In the Australian sense, "liberal" means personal freedom and minimum state intervention.
Clusters are only good for doing tasks that "parallelize". Compiling is too linear.
Linking is linear; you could compile C in as many parallel tasks as you have source files. Java compiles can be parellelized quite a bit too, particularly if your code makes heavy use of Class.forName(). I do this a lot, tho' quite gratuitously; I've got 4 CPUs so I use 'em, but with the size of projects I work on and the speed of even a single processor and a modern javac, it doesn't really make a vast amount of difference at the end of the day.
...then perhaps they should look at why projects forks?
Because Sun suspects that the Open Source crowd are only interested in the source for what they can get about it. They think that if they opened say Solaris, immediately the "good" parts of it would be copied into Linux and Solaris itself would get nothing out of the deal. Since Linuxes home platform is x86, not SPARC, they'd just be helping Intel's and Dell's sales by doing so.
Obviously, sql*kitten, you do not understand what it means to care about something other than a career.
Oh, I care about plenty of stuff. The kids of relative strangers just aren't high on that list. Particularly when said parents assume that because I choose to be child-free, I'm happy to do extra work just so they can slack off. Maybe those single people were happy to join in - maybe they felt they had to, since your manager clearly discriminates in favour of parents at every opportunity.
Like I say, they're YOUR kids. If you can raise them without shirking your work, good for you. If you can't, it's not MY problem. By rights, people who slack - for any reason - should be as sackable as each other. Whether your kid was crying all night or you were playing tetris all night makes no difference, if you can't do the job you were paid to do, someone else will have to.
To a parent, a job is something you do so that you have enough money to make certain your kids and spouse have clothes, food, and a roof over their heads.
Yes, your kids are important to YOU. Not to ME. Not, indeed, to ANYONE else. Why is it, then, that I should do your work for you? Why do you expect that your employer owes you a living? Why do you expect your co-workers to pick up the slack just so you can sneak off early just to enjoy yourself?
There are millions of kids in the world, and they all have school plays and trumpet recitals and ballet classes and whatever. What makes YOURS so special?
I have seen that happen, a single mom with two troublesome kids was fired by my employer because she left work early so often to deal with brats' schools
Good for the employer. Few would do that, tho', for fear of getting sued.
If your employer can't handle your family obligations, then Family First says you get a new employer who can.
Ah, but the deck is stacked. An employer doesn't have the right to fire an employee who's unfairly offloading his responsibilities onto his colleagues. I've run into plenty of parents who are just coasting, knowing they're essentially un-sackable now. People wonder why 20-somethings are always on death-marches - maybe it's 'cos parents don't pull their weight in the workplace.
It is absolutely ridiculous to try and equate a movie with a child. Until you have had children, you cannot possibly understand their emotional significance to their parents.
The point that you are missing that they are YOUR kids, not anyone elses, YOURS. You have NO RIGHT to use them as an excuse to impinge on anyone else's life - no matter how trivial their life might seem to you. Why should someone else have to pick up the slack because you overcommitted yourself and are now flaking out or your professional responsibilities?
How important your kids are to you is absolutely irrelevant here. They are not important to anyone else - yet you expect other people to act as if they are. That's not reasonable. Right now the law is stacked in your favour - I'll vote for anyone who'll redress the balance.
I mostly shoot B&W film with an Canon EOS 3, but when I do shoot digital I use a second-hand EOS D30. They're pretty cheap now. Only 3MP, but ignore that; these are 3 clean megapixels with low noise in the shadows, low aberation in the highlights and faithful colour reproduction. It prints great at 12x8 inches, and will blow away any consumer-level 5 or 6MP point-and-shoot. It's usable fully automatic, or fully manual, or anywhere in between. It takes all EF-mount lenses, which is way better than Nikon's mess of subtle incompatibilities with their F-mount. Absolutely superb bit of kit. One day I'll get a new one, but only when I have to; the D30 fulfills all of my digital needs right now.
Get one of those as your "entry level" and use it 'til you're sure you need something that it doesn't do, then and only then think about spending a serious amount of money. In serious photography, you're almost always better of saving money on the body and investing it in good lenses, which a) make more of a difference to the photo anyway and b) will outlast any body.
Btw, it should be more common knowledge that Sun's TCP/IP performance has dropped about 30% from version 7 to 9. This has been measured multiple times by a coworker of mine, and Sun has no response to our findings.
Their response to us was "wait for FireEngine" which is their rewritten TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10.
I agree with your assessment of their collective sanity, tho'.
Yeah, because I frequently need to stop bullets or pound nails and stuff with my $1000 camera.
You'll be wanting a Nikon F4 then:-)
But seriously, when you hire a photographer, you aren't paying for someone to point the camera and press the shutter button. You're paying for someone to take the responsibility for delivering pictures. For a one-time event like a wedding, a photographer simply can't risk equipment failure. A photographer working away from civilization, such as a nature photographer or a photojournalist, simply can't risk equipment failure. That's why these people are willing to pay $5000 or more for the EOS-1D and the like.
The people buying the 10D are the ones who can't justify the cost of a 1D, but need more reliability than a consumer model can give them. Maybe they like to travel a lot for example. The people buying the 300D won't have reliability near the top of the priorities. That's not to say that the 300D is necessarily flimsy, but it's just not built to take abuse. Canon made no secret that the sensor in the 300D is exactly the same as the one in the 10D, and unlike Nikon, all EF lenses work perfectly with all EOS bodies, so image quality isn't a reason to choose between them.
Slashdot Mirror
But when a billion-selling company pays its taxes, then you want to be very sure they're not legit before pulling the plug or slapping them with hefty fines.
But I've never been spammed by a reputable company. Sure Sony sends me more mail than perhaps I'd like, but it's all related to Sony products and services, and I did give them an email address when I registered some piece of equipment with them, and it's easy enough to drop it into a Sony folder.
Any company that sends mail containing text deliberately designed to evade a filter ("vuagra" is a typo, "v1agra" is deliberate) is by definition a spammer, and can be squashed without any negative consequences to anyone (who matters).
Xerox could have sat on the idea, but sued Apple, Microsoft, and anybody else who came along with a use, into smouldering red-ink ruin.
But why would they? More likely, they'd simply have licensed the ideas in return for a fee. That, incidentally, is what Xerox, Kodak and a bunch of other companies do for a large chunk of their revenue. They do research and license it out. ARM is based on a similar model.
Correct - explain - enlighten me, please.
You are perfectly correct in your understanding. That's the whole point of the patent system. If you invent something, you've got a "head start" in commercializing it. Either you can use it exclusively, or someone can read your patent, decide that it's a good idea, and pay you a licensing fee so they can use it too. Eventually it passes into the public domain. What the anti-patent crowd is arguing that it should pass into the public domain immediately.
What they don't understand is that in a modern industrial economy, there is not necessarily any correlation between what something costs to reproduce and what it cost to create the very first one. Software that took 1 person 1 year to write costs as much to reproduce as something that took 1000 people 10 years. Patents mean that you can invest a lot of time and money and still have an opportunity to recoup that investment. Without patent protection, there is no incentive to invest.
Now, I'm not saying that the patent system works as it ought to at present. I am saying that the patent "algorithm" is sound; it is just poorly implemented in the US. The anti-patent group is composed of people who benefit from other people's research, yet have no intention of investing in research themselves.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD
Personally, I have no idea whatsoever about what a Knoppix is. Or a Gentoo for that matter. Or a Debian.
And I'm not "joe public", I was using Linux professionally in '96! Yes, getting paid to run Linux as a full time job. I do know what I'm talking about.
The open source community, if it wants to make any inroads into public acceptance, has got to lose this obsession with stupid names. Microsoft learnt this years ago. "Windows", "Word", "Access", "Office", all of these are everyday words that have at least a basic reference to what those pieces of software actually do.
Fairly easy to do too.
You're assuming that failing to hand over a key isn't actually a crime, when requested to do so by a court of law. You are mistaken.
If some reactionary soldier kicks the shit out of some guy for saying something even as repugnant as advocating suicide bombing
Free speech does not extend to shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre (unless of course there really is a fire). And it should not extend to inciting heinous acts of terrorism either.
Definitely, considering how expensive ADSL and broadband in general is in the UK
Wha?? 20-25 squids a month, free setup and a free (admittedly probably fairly crap) USB modem with most providers is not "expensive"! Hell, I can't see how anyone who can afford a PC can't afford ADSL!
Your principal is an idiot.
However, my observations of user habits differs substantially from your experience (see previous message for details).
Oh, I know that people do do it. I'm saying that they should wait and use their monitors - you can still delete just as easily from yout HD if the picture doesn't turn out. Some things you can see on the LCD, but much you can't.
You can immediately delete any bad pictures.
In practice it doesn't work like that. About the only thing the LCD is really good for is looking at the histogram. You cannot really judge an image on that tiny LCD, you have to see it on a 19" calibrated monitor. Many's the time a pic has looked great on the LCD and crap printed, aye, and vice versa.
What level of advance are you willing to put me in jail to protect? How do you decide on this level?
Aye, you've hit the nail on the head there and identified Joy's and Kurzweil's real motives. They want control.
Imagine people like them had actually had the power to smash the first printing press, because it might place too much knowledge in the hands of ordinary people. That's exactly what they're trying to do here.
What? No way! They're only going to filter known sites. It's not BT's job to go looking for child porn just so they can block it. What if a new website was put up, and BT users accessed it before BT managed to filter it? BT should NOT be held repsonsible then
Of course they should be responsible. I cite the example of Demon Internet. Their defense against getting sued is simply that they're a carrier, like the phone company or the post office, the fact that they carry an item of data in no way implies that that item is endorsed by them.
If BT are setting themselves up to filter - and they are winning new business because their customers want that - then they fail to deliver, then they should be liable to everyone who signed up to them because they wanted a filtered network connection. Similarly, if they mistakenly block a legitimate site which subsequently loses business, they should be liable for that too.
There's a place for a filtered ISP, parents obviously want one, I've no problems with that. But BT weasels want to have their cake (new business) and eat it (no responsibility) too.
the only issue to be concerned with is whether or not the list of blocked sites is accurate or not.
It didn't even cross my mind that BT's list would be accurate. You've never been a customer of theirs, otherwise it wouldn't have occured to you either.
It makes it easier for NTL and other companies to introduce censorship, now that they know they're not the first.
Don't you remember that site parodying ntlworld.com, nthellworld.com, set up by a disgruntled customer?
You'll find that it now owned by NTL.
Which I think just blows the contention that liberal==left-wing
The US uses "liberal" to mean "permissive" or "progressive"; the rest of the world uses it to mean what Americans would call "classically liberal". In the Australian sense, "liberal" means personal freedom and minimum state intervention.
Clusters are only good for doing tasks that "parallelize". Compiling is too linear.
Linking is linear; you could compile C in as many parallel tasks as you have source files. Java compiles can be parellelized quite a bit too, particularly if your code makes heavy use of Class.forName(). I do this a lot, tho' quite gratuitously; I've got 4 CPUs so I use 'em, but with the size of projects I work on and the speed of even a single processor and a modern javac, it doesn't really make a vast amount of difference at the end of the day.
...then perhaps they should look at why projects forks?
Because Sun suspects that the Open Source crowd are only interested in the source for what they can get about it. They think that if they opened say Solaris, immediately the "good" parts of it would be copied into Linux and Solaris itself would get nothing out of the deal. Since Linuxes home platform is x86, not SPARC, they'd just be helping Intel's and Dell's sales by doing so.
Obviously, sql*kitten, you do not understand what it means to care about something other than a career.
Oh, I care about plenty of stuff. The kids of relative strangers just aren't high on that list. Particularly when said parents assume that because I choose to be child-free, I'm happy to do extra work just so they can slack off. Maybe those single people were happy to join in - maybe they felt they had to, since your manager clearly discriminates in favour of parents at every opportunity.
Like I say, they're YOUR kids. If you can raise them without shirking your work, good for you. If you can't, it's not MY problem. By rights, people who slack - for any reason - should be as sackable as each other. Whether your kid was crying all night or you were playing tetris all night makes no difference, if you can't do the job you were paid to do, someone else will have to.
To a parent, a job is something you do so that you have enough money to make certain your kids and spouse have clothes, food, and a roof over their heads.
Yes, your kids are important to YOU. Not to ME. Not, indeed, to ANYONE else. Why is it, then, that I should do your work for you? Why do you expect that your employer owes you a living? Why do you expect your co-workers to pick up the slack just so you can sneak off early just to enjoy yourself?
There are millions of kids in the world, and they all have school plays and trumpet recitals and ballet classes and whatever. What makes YOURS so special?
I have seen that happen, a single mom with two troublesome kids was fired by my employer because she left work early so often to deal with brats' schools
Good for the employer. Few would do that, tho', for fear of getting sued.
If your employer can't handle your family obligations, then Family First says you get a new employer who can.
Ah, but the deck is stacked. An employer doesn't have the right to fire an employee who's unfairly offloading his responsibilities onto his colleagues. I've run into plenty of parents who are just coasting, knowing they're essentially un-sackable now. People wonder why 20-somethings are always on death-marches - maybe it's 'cos parents don't pull their weight in the workplace.
It is absolutely ridiculous to try and equate a movie with a child. Until you have had children, you cannot possibly understand their emotional significance to their parents.
The point that you are missing that they are YOUR kids, not anyone elses, YOURS. You have NO RIGHT to use them as an excuse to impinge on anyone else's life - no matter how trivial their life might seem to you. Why should someone else have to pick up the slack because you overcommitted yourself and are now flaking out or your professional responsibilities?
How important your kids are to you is absolutely irrelevant here. They are not important to anyone else - yet you expect other people to act as if they are. That's not reasonable. Right now the law is stacked in your favour - I'll vote for anyone who'll redress the balance.
I mostly shoot B&W film with an Canon EOS 3, but when I do shoot digital I use a second-hand EOS D30. They're pretty cheap now. Only 3MP, but ignore that; these are 3 clean megapixels with low noise in the shadows, low aberation in the highlights and faithful colour reproduction. It prints great at 12x8 inches, and will blow away any consumer-level 5 or 6MP point-and-shoot. It's usable fully automatic, or fully manual, or anywhere in between. It takes all EF-mount lenses, which is way better than Nikon's mess of subtle incompatibilities with their F-mount. Absolutely superb bit of kit. One day I'll get a new one, but only when I have to; the D30 fulfills all of my digital needs right now.
Get one of those as your "entry level" and use it 'til you're sure you need something that it doesn't do, then and only then think about spending a serious amount of money. In serious photography, you're almost always better of saving money on the body and investing it in good lenses, which a) make more of a difference to the photo anyway and b) will outlast any body.
Btw, it should be more common knowledge that Sun's TCP/IP performance has dropped about 30% from version 7 to 9. This has been measured multiple times by a coworker of mine, and Sun has no response to our findings.
Their response to us was "wait for FireEngine" which is their rewritten TCP/IP stack in Solaris 10.
I agree with your assessment of their collective sanity, tho'.
The only one that exsists. FREE. Not free with reservations, not free with restrictions, not free blah blah blah, FREE
You mean public domain? That's not gonna happen.. even RMS isn't that extreme.
Yeah, because I frequently need to stop bullets or pound nails and stuff with my $1000 camera.
:-)
You'll be wanting a Nikon F4 then
But seriously, when you hire a photographer, you aren't paying for someone to point the camera and press the shutter button. You're paying for someone to take the responsibility for delivering pictures. For a one-time event like a wedding, a photographer simply can't risk equipment failure. A photographer working away from civilization, such as a nature photographer or a photojournalist, simply can't risk equipment failure. That's why these people are willing to pay $5000 or more for the EOS-1D and the like.
The people buying the 10D are the ones who can't justify the cost of a 1D, but need more reliability than a consumer model can give them. Maybe they like to travel a lot for example. The people buying the 300D won't have reliability near the top of the priorities. That's not to say that the 300D is necessarily flimsy, but it's just not built to take abuse. Canon made no secret that the sensor in the 300D is exactly the same as the one in the 10D, and unlike Nikon, all EF lenses work perfectly with all EOS bodies, so image quality isn't a reason to choose between them.