I'm trying to find a list of the members still in the U.S. delegation as well as those added to replace existing members.
No one in the current administration will ever admit to having done anything wrong, correct a problem, etc. But the members of this committee are supposed to be engineers and/or scientists and well aware of the meritocracy that they are supposed to participate in. They need to be contacted individually and convinced to quit the delegation.
Also, anyone who accepted the post of an existing member who was kicked off should be well aware of how they got the position and should have already resigned by this point. If not, then people within the telecommunications industry need to know who they are.
Only if the administration cannot find people willing to participate in this farce will they be forced to stop. Otherwise it will be full speed ahead.
In fact, you made the case beautifully for why people may in fact adopt a micropayment system. "There was something I wanted to buy." That got you over the hump with PayPal and there is no reason why the same won't work with BitPass or Peppercoin. I've not yet looked at what's available with Peppercoin but I can tell you that I've already found things I liked with BitPass and I hope to see a lot more. In fact, I took the time to install the software to sell stuff from my website (it was fairly easy) and I hope to add some things myself for sale.
I know "Hallelujah Brother" isn't much of a comment but that's what I really want to say. Composer is off to an excellent start. Having more people contribute to it and make it better is awesome.
What I don't understand is why people continue to pay the insane prices for TI calculators. Take the TI-83 Plus for example. It was pushed a lot at the start of this last school year.
It's currently selling for $85 from Staples online. It features a 64x96 display and 160K of RAM. Then let's look at a Palm Zire handheld. It has a 160x160 display, a touch sensitive display, and 2MB of RAM. It sells for $95 (also from Staples). And it's a generic computer, you can run all manner of programs on it.
Why the hell is the TI selling at all? Why is any teacher recommending a graphing calculator when most of them are clearly a ripoff? What we need is some open source software to offer parity of functionality between the Palm and the calculator and then encourage teachers to start promoting the purchase of PDAs rather than TIs overpriced units.
Do the words moron and your name come up together a lot in conversation?
Yeah, if everybody could somehow shuttle around a copy fast enough I guess that would be enough for everybody. But we both know that one copy isn't enough for everybody to get their taxes done in the allotted time. Nor would everybody willingly buy the software and then turn around and sell it or give it away. For example, I wouldn't give my copy to anyone outside my family to use because I couldn't be sure I could get it back. Nor will I sell it, I may need it again. So my best friend, he always buys a copy for himself.
And as for the suggestion that this is theft. Wow! So libraries are all theft organizations as well? Or how about your local Blockbuster? Or the CD resale shop. Yeah, we could all pass around one copy of a CD until we had all heard it and were tired of it, but that's just not going to happen is it. But in your (very special) world, that's not just unlikely to happen, it's theft too.
>I too used to "share" Intuit Tax software with friends, but when they instituted Activation here (we did it first) most people whined and then bought it anyway, because it's worth it.
WHOA THERE! I recognize that you are writing as an individual and not on behalf of your corporate master but this is exactly the same BS that Intuit is spreading currently too.
DO NOT equate piracy with legitimate resale of _purchased_ items. Once someone is done with TurboTax and they uninstall it from their system, they should be able to resell or give away that software to another individual. This is exactly the same as reselling a book, magazine, DVD, CD, or anything else you own. Intuit's protection scheme doesn't just harm piracy, it also prevents what is perfectly legitimate disposal of something you are done using.
> so the useage lifetime for the software is as long as it takes me to actually do my taxes
That would be the usage lifetime of the software _for you_. I on the other hand, have for several years now, done taxes at my house, printed them, mailed them, uninstalled the software and given the software to my daughter and her husband to do their taxes. With anything other than this bizarre assed license this would be perfectly legal as my ownership of the software would allow me to either resell or give away what I own after I'm done using it (as long as I don't try to keep a copy).
I can do that with a book, DVD, magazine, CD, VHS tape, audio cassette, etc. but not TurboTax. Uh huh...
Secondly, I'll make another but different example. I gave my wife a new adventure game (Syberia) for Christmas. She started playing it shortly after Christmas, played it constantly and beat it within a few days. She then immediately turned around and put the game onto Half.com for sale and sold it for 2/3rds of the price I paid to buy it in the first place. Thus getting about 20 or so hours of enjoyment out of the game for approximately $10.
Had that game only been _licensed_ to her though, she wouldn't have been able to resell the game even though she was totally done with it.
While everybody else speculates about how to get rid of the virus, why it won't spread in the lab, etc. I'd like to address the person who shipped this in the first place.
Have you taken the time to carefully consider your DDOS targets? For example, is the RIAA on your list (http://www.riaa.org/)? What about the MPAA (http://www.mpaa.org/)? Fritz Hollings, Senator from Disney (http://hollings.senate.gov/)? Adobe, Blizzard, or anyone else abusing the DMCA? Microsoft?
When you've got a dangerous weapon in your hands, use it wisely...
Too bad the law won't pass period until sufficient pressure is put on elected representatives to put the electorate they represent ahead of those who are stuffing money in their pockets.
I wish I could say that it was only Republicans on the dole in this case but that is hardly the case. Representatives of both parties have shown that they can be bought and paid for by the RIAA and the MPAA (among others).
Umm. LimeWire _is_ open source. Go to LimeWire.org to get the source. LimeWire.com simply has it all packaged up nice and neat for end users for a few bucks.
So if you want to do a new release of LimeWire that doesn't have any crap in it, go right ahead.
>Now on an ontopic note - MS' Developer community >drawves the size of the Open Source community by >at least a few hundred if not a thousand fold.
How you arrived at this conclusion is beyond me but I'll try to rebut it with some facts, rather than opinions stated as facts.
If we are to assume that the MS Developer community in fact dwarves the existing open source community we have to assume that it includes people who themselves are interested in open source projects. And that said open source developers are producing and will continue to produce open source software for Windows, Active Server Pages,.NET, etc.
To test this theory I looked at projects a couple of places. One is freshmeat.net, which hosts information about many many open source projects. Browsing through their projects by language provides scary numbers like 16 C# projects and 10 Visual Basic projects. Wow, clearly the open source developers for Windows aren't hanging out at Freshmeat.net. Looking at it from the standpoint of operating system balances it out more, 1800+ Windows apps vs. 3000+ marked as "OS Independent" but we are still perhaps cursed with a skewed picture.
Maybe a better picture is presented by Microsoft's own "GotDotNet" website where they have recently added the GotDotNet Workspaces Directory. Yup, it's SourceForge for.NET developers. Unfortunately, unlike SourceForge it hasn't existed for several years, it's still in beta, and it doesn't have the 40,000+ registered projects already in SourceForge. While it is true that only a small percentage of those SF projects ever release any code, do you honestly believe it will be any different over at GotDotNet?
The point I'm making here is that the Windows community in the entire time I dealt with it (I did Windows development from the beta releases of 3.0 up to mid 2001) never banded together to produce anything that they shared. If they release anything, it typically costs money and does not come with source. That inability to build upon each others work makes 10 people do the work of 1 person in the open source community. Even assuming that you are correct about the numbers, and I don't think the evidence will indicate you are, cooperation is what evens it out.
>They generally have a richer centralized >repository of information and technical knowledge >(MSDN) to draw from and their development tools >are widely considered to be superior.
Hmm. Microsoft is schizophrenic in this area, take for example game development. They will produce a lot of articles and info on DirectX at any point surrounding a release but then allow it to largely drop off in between releases. They also don't produce any of the surrounding information that has to do with the subject matter that is not directly related to an API (e.g. how do I make a multi-player game deal with lag). As a result I ended up starting my first game development website XPlus, then DevGames.com, then joining with several other sites to create GameDev.net (currently the #1 site in the world for game development). While GDN once had a heavy Microsoft bias, I'd have to say that we are at least as interested now in cross platform gaming using SDL, Java, OpenGL, etc. and thus Microsoft's central repository is interesting but not crucial to developers anywhere. The reality is that a Microsoft developer has a kind of myopia. MSDN is critical to him/her but not to a developer on any other platform. On the other hand, even if I were to go back to development on a Microsoft platform, MSDN would become important but Freshmeat.net and SourceForge would be as critical to me as they are today.
>They also >sell a platform which offers the best chance for >close to 100% market saturation.
Again, opinion stated as fact. I'm thinking you might have made a similar statement a few years ago while telling your friends that Linux inroads in the server room were pointless, that Microsoft already had the market majority and thus was the best chance for 100% saturation:)
Simply having the largest market share means nothing in a market where product gets replaced over time. Netscape also had the market before they were illegally pushed from the market.
Can I ask that this reply be modded UP, for some reason it got modded down to zero?
This is actually an excellent idea although I'd modify it to say that you should be able to publicize all of the shortcuts that you want your application to have cut across the OS (much like you can register sound events with Windows and I think Gnome as well) and then the user could decide how to assign his/her keyboard to those shortcuts. Then the OS's shortcuts and application shortcuts (at least the ones that cut across all applications) are maintained in exactly the same way.
If I look at my KDE control panel it looks like it already has support for this key binding idea but it's not obvious that third party applications have a way to register their shortcuts into the system.
Hardly... You forgot a strong equivalent to DirectX to give games a place to migrate to (sorry, a mix of OpenGL + some sound library doesn't equate to DirectX).
Then there's _one_ unified sound standard (I think Linux has four or five now), because a sound card cannot serve two masters. Single standards for the clipboard, adding/removing menu items from the desktop "Start" menu, mime type associations, adding of control panels, event sounds, display of notification icons in the desktop toolbar, registration of keyboard shortcuts that cut across all applications (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+I means "get the next instant message" and it will get back to the right program no matter if I'm in OpenOffice right now or Mozilla). And all of those standards have to be agreed upon and fully supported by both KDE and Gnome so I can know that all my applications will cooperate nicely with one another and my choice of desktop doesn't equal choice of application interoperability.
Desktop success for Linux is not impossible, far from it, but few people are paying attention to the mounds of things that are _really_ important to giving a typical end user a choice other than Windows vs. Mac OS X (a battle that we already know who wins 95% of the time).
"If they want to write their book in hieroglyphics they may do so and no one may translate the material and distribute these translations. You will have to wait for the author to provide a translation in a language you can understand if you want to read the book."
The courts have ruled, on at least two separate occassions, that transferral of "format" constitutes fair-use. That is, if you had purchased a CD and you had to record it to a tape in order to listen to it in a car then you were more than welcome to do so. You weren't violating any laws as long as you didn't sell or give away the tape or the CD independently of the other item. The same topic when it came to CD->MP3 was settled in Rio's favor. Now, it hasn't been tested as far as I know that conversion of one language to another is simply a format change but I'm willing to bet that if you had the translation done just for you and you didn't attempt to sell or give it away independently of the original book that you could argue precedent and that the two situations are exactly the same.
So I would agree that you are correct that no one is going to require them to translate books and that no one is allowed to distribute the translations. That is a far cry from the topic of "is anyone allowed to perform the translation _if they do not distribute it_". That kind of lock is what the industry wants but it conflicts directly with our fair use rights.
Um, that would be seriously cool as Alpha Centauri is a little over four light years away so they would have had to start in 1994 to try bouncing a signal off of it...
This will probably get modded down to -1 in no time but for the few who do get to read it.... Here is my weblog rant from last year as "Back to School" specials were appearing in the paper.
August 26, 2001 Calculator Rip Offs
OK. Let's talk about a scam that's being perpetrated on households across America (and probably lots of other nations as well) at this time of year. That scam is... the handheld calculator.
When I opened up the paper today and I saw not one, but two different office supply stores offering the HP 12C calculator for $70 my eyes popped out of their sockets, rolled across the room, and spontaneously started trying to bounce up and down on the 9, 1, 1 buttons on the phone to report the robbery. This is a calculator that cost around $100 the first year I attended college and I purchased my HP 11C (basically the same calculator but the 11C has engineering oriented functions rather than financial functions). That's 18 years ago people! Can you think of any piece of electronics in existence that hasn't either gotten massively faster and more capable or else had its price plummet in 18 years?!?
That is pure unadulterated bullshit... But it's not like the 12C is alone in its mystical fantasy pricing world. Just look at the prices on calculators like the TI 83 Plus. This is a calculator with a "large" 64 X 96 display (6,144 pixels) and 24K bytes RAM (160K bytes of data archive and application space). It costs almost $100 dollars? What?!? A Palm M100 with two megabytes of RAM and a 160x160 (25,600 pixels) costs $129 and that's probably too high!
Folks, you are being ripped off! Do not buy an expensive scientific graphing calculator. Your child will probaly not even be able to run it anyway. Do not buy into this magical pricing system. Buy a reasonably priced scientific calculator like the HP 30S and if the kid needs to do graphs, get him or her some software for the computer. If you absolutely have to have something that the child can take to school, buy an inexpensive PDA and find some software to put onto it to get the capabilities the kid needs. If the software hasn't already been written it should shoot to the top of the must-write list for open source software groups in order to break this ridiculous TI, HP, and Casio theft ring.
Not to intrude on this wonderful flamewar, but I think he meant a browser generation. For example, IE 5 to IE 6 where there was not much of any difference other than someone at Microsoft typing a six instead of a five into the dialog box. I'm confident he didn't mean a human generation.
His observation that innovation in the browser at Microsoft has come to a full halt is, in my opinion, quite correct. They've cornered the market and unless enough of us switch to Mozilla or the AOL-TimeWarner switch makes them come back to life, it seems likely that they won't be doing anything new there for the forseeable future.
A real, shared book database offers opportunities beyond simply the book titles, isbn numbers, etc.
One thing that bothers me endlessly is that there is no shared database of reviews available. Everybody who wants to review a book goes to where all the reviews are already (i.e. Amazon). If you go to a third party to look at books to see if prices might be cheaper (e.g. Half.com, BookPool) you can't get any reviews for anything. But if there was a shared resource that all those book sellers could access, ala the CDDB, then you could have reviews available at any of those sites. And they could pay a small fee to get access to the data on a commercial basis.
There's one detail that I notice and it may be very important. They list at the end of the document a set of JSRs that they are committed ("at a minimum") to changing to meet Apache's requirements. Can you see which one is missing?
JSR 151, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition 1.4 (J2EE 1.4) Specification is not in the list. That's the one that JBoss really needs (or JSR 58 for J2EE 1.3) access to testing on and a guarantee that Sun isn't going to go after them for implementing an open source version of their specification.
Now I could be overreacting, it could be that they left 151 out of the list because it is still open and they intend to get to it for that reason, but if that was the case you would expect to see 58 in the list. I'm hoping this is more oversight than an actual attempt to continue the foolishness with JBoss.
Why should I not boycott all products from your company as you appear to be just another pathetic DMCA loser?
Re:Turn the damn thing off and leave it off
on
New Years Marathons
·
· Score: 1
Some idiot modded this tripe as "insightful"?!? Please kill me now.
See if you can guess the real value from this classic children's tale quote? "You cannot cross until you pay toll to the _____"
Yes! It's TROLL. If "FreeUser" isn't intentionally trying to bait people into a flame war then he/she lives in a very special world where you're watching a TV marathon is going to bring down open source software and everybody else who reads Slashdot is a dateless geek like himself. Sorry pal, I have a wife and I have the kind of sex that people buy tapes of. I don't sleep alone and I'm willing to bet a sizable portion of the population here doesn't either.
If you have moderation points, for gods sake, use them with some sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to find a list of the members still in the U.S. delegation as well as those added to replace existing members.
No one in the current administration will ever admit to having done anything wrong, correct a problem, etc. But the members of this committee are supposed to be engineers and/or scientists and well aware of the meritocracy that they are supposed to participate in. They need to be contacted individually and convinced to quit the delegation.
Also, anyone who accepted the post of an existing member who was kicked off should be well aware of how they got the position and should have already resigned by this point. If not, then people within the telecommunications industry need to know who they are.
Only if the administration cannot find people willing to participate in this farce will they be forced to stop. Otherwise it will be full speed ahead.
As someone who has actually viewed some of the content, I can say no, you are wrong.
Here's three things worth the money on BitPass: Geeks In Love, the moving paper model of Cupid, and stock photos from iStockPhoto.
In fact, you made the case beautifully for why people may in fact adopt a micropayment system. "There was something I wanted to buy." That got you over the hump with PayPal and there is no reason why the same won't work with BitPass or Peppercoin. I've not yet looked at what's available with Peppercoin but I can tell you that I've already found things I liked with BitPass and I hope to see a lot more. In fact, I took the time to install the software to sell stuff from my website (it was fairly easy) and I hope to add some things myself for sale.
"Obviously, there is work to be done in the Election Supervisor's office before November comes around."
Indeed there is, covering up this stuff so it isn't so obvious next time.
I know "Hallelujah Brother" isn't much of a comment but that's what I really want to say. Composer is off to an excellent start. Having more people contribute to it and make it better is awesome.
What I don't understand is why people continue to pay the insane prices for TI calculators. Take the TI-83 Plus for example. It was pushed a lot at the start of this last school year.
It's currently selling for $85 from Staples online. It features a 64x96 display and 160K of RAM. Then let's look at a Palm Zire handheld. It has a 160x160 display, a touch sensitive display, and 2MB of RAM. It sells for $95 (also from Staples). And it's a generic computer, you can run all manner of programs on it.
Why the hell is the TI selling at all? Why is any teacher recommending a graphing calculator when most of them are clearly a ripoff? What we need is some open source software to offer parity of functionality between the Palm and the calculator and then encourage teachers to start promoting the purchase of PDAs rather than TIs overpriced units.
Do the words moron and your name come up together a lot in conversation?
Yeah, if everybody could somehow shuttle around a copy fast enough I guess that would be enough for everybody. But we both know that one copy isn't enough for everybody to get their taxes done in the allotted time. Nor would everybody willingly buy the software and then turn around and sell it or give it away. For example, I wouldn't give my copy to anyone outside my family to use because I couldn't be sure I could get it back. Nor will I sell it, I may need it again. So my best friend, he always buys a copy for himself.
And as for the suggestion that this is theft. Wow! So libraries are all theft organizations as well? Or how about your local Blockbuster? Or the CD resale shop. Yeah, we could all pass around one copy of a CD until we had all heard it and were tired of it, but that's just not going to happen is it. But in your (very special) world, that's not just unlikely to happen, it's theft too.
>I too used to "share" Intuit Tax software with friends, but when they instituted Activation here (we did it first) most people whined and then bought it anyway, because it's worth it.
WHOA THERE! I recognize that you are writing as an individual and not on behalf of your corporate master but this is exactly the same BS that Intuit is spreading currently too.
DO NOT equate piracy with legitimate resale of _purchased_ items. Once someone is done with TurboTax and they uninstall it from their system, they should be able to resell or give away that software to another individual. This is exactly the same as reselling a book, magazine, DVD, CD, or anything else you own. Intuit's protection scheme doesn't just harm piracy, it also prevents what is perfectly legitimate disposal of something you are done using.
> so the useage lifetime for the software is as long as it takes me to actually do my taxes
That would be the usage lifetime of the software _for you_. I on the other hand, have for several years now, done taxes at my house, printed them, mailed them, uninstalled the software and given the software to my daughter and her husband to do their taxes. With anything other than this bizarre assed license this would be perfectly legal as my ownership of the software would allow me to either resell or give away what I own after I'm done using it (as long as I don't try to keep a copy).
I can do that with a book, DVD, magazine, CD, VHS tape, audio cassette, etc. but not TurboTax. Uh huh...
Secondly, I'll make another but different example. I gave my wife a new adventure game (Syberia) for Christmas. She started playing it shortly after Christmas, played it constantly and beat it within a few days. She then immediately turned around and put the game onto Half.com for sale and sold it for 2/3rds of the price I paid to buy it in the first place. Thus getting about 20 or so hours of enjoyment out of the game for approximately $10.
Had that game only been _licensed_ to her though, she wouldn't have been able to resell the game even though she was totally done with it.
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
It's a shame that it's so far away that we can't get a good texture map for it (or for Pluto for that matter).
While everybody else speculates about how to get rid of the virus, why it won't spread in the lab, etc. I'd like to address the person who shipped this in the first place.
Have you taken the time to carefully consider your DDOS targets? For example, is the RIAA on your list (http://www.riaa.org/)? What about the MPAA (http://www.mpaa.org/)? Fritz Hollings, Senator from Disney (http://hollings.senate.gov/)? Adobe, Blizzard, or anyone else abusing the DMCA? Microsoft?
When you've got a dangerous weapon in your hands, use it wisely...
Too bad the law won't pass period until sufficient pressure is put on elected representatives to put the electorate they represent ahead of those who are stuffing money in their pockets.
I wish I could say that it was only Republicans on the dole in this case but that is hardly the case. Representatives of both parties have shown that they can be bought and paid for by the RIAA and the MPAA (among others).
Umm. LimeWire _is_ open source. Go to LimeWire.org to get the source. LimeWire.com simply has it all packaged up nice and neat for end users for a few bucks.
So if you want to do a new release of LimeWire that doesn't have any crap in it, go right ahead.
>Now on an ontopic note - MS' Developer community
.NET, etc.
.NET developers. Unfortunately, unlike SourceForge it hasn't existed for several years, it's still in beta, and it doesn't have the 40,000+ registered projects already in SourceForge. While it is true that only a small percentage of those SF projects ever release any code, do you honestly believe it will be any different over at GotDotNet?
:)
>drawves the size of the Open Source community by
>at least a few hundred if not a thousand fold.
How you arrived at this conclusion is beyond me but I'll try to rebut it with some facts, rather than opinions stated as facts.
If we are to assume that the MS Developer community in fact dwarves the existing open source community we have to assume that it includes people who themselves are interested in open source projects. And that said open source developers are producing and will continue to produce open source software for Windows, Active Server Pages,
To test this theory I looked at projects a couple of places. One is freshmeat.net, which hosts information about many many open source projects. Browsing through their projects by language provides scary numbers like 16 C# projects and 10 Visual Basic projects. Wow, clearly the open source developers for Windows aren't hanging out at Freshmeat.net. Looking at it from the standpoint of operating system balances it out more, 1800+ Windows apps vs. 3000+ marked as "OS Independent" but we are still perhaps cursed with a skewed picture.
Maybe a better picture is presented by Microsoft's own "GotDotNet" website where they have recently added the GotDotNet Workspaces Directory. Yup, it's SourceForge for
The point I'm making here is that the Windows community in the entire time I dealt with it (I did Windows development from the beta releases of 3.0 up to mid 2001) never banded together to produce anything that they shared. If they release anything, it typically costs money and does not come with source. That inability to build upon each others work makes 10 people do the work of 1 person in the open source community. Even assuming that you are correct about the numbers, and I don't think the evidence will indicate you are, cooperation is what evens it out.
>They generally have a richer centralized
>repository of information and technical knowledge
>(MSDN) to draw from and their development tools
>are widely considered to be superior.
Hmm. Microsoft is schizophrenic in this area, take for example game development. They will produce a lot of articles and info on DirectX at any point surrounding a release but then allow it to largely drop off in between releases. They also don't produce any of the surrounding information that has to do with the subject matter that is not directly related to an API (e.g. how do I make a multi-player game deal with lag). As a result I ended up starting my first game development website XPlus, then DevGames.com, then joining with several other sites to create GameDev.net (currently the #1 site in the world for game development). While GDN once had a heavy Microsoft bias, I'd have to say that we are at least as interested now in cross platform gaming using SDL, Java, OpenGL, etc. and thus Microsoft's central repository is interesting but not crucial to developers anywhere. The reality is that a Microsoft developer has a kind of myopia. MSDN is critical to him/her but not to a developer on any other platform. On the other hand, even if I were to go back to development on a Microsoft platform, MSDN would become important but Freshmeat.net and SourceForge would be as critical to me as they are today.
>They also
>sell a platform which offers the best chance for
>close to 100% market saturation.
Again, opinion stated as fact. I'm thinking you might have made a similar statement a few years ago while telling your friends that Linux inroads in the server room were pointless, that Microsoft already had the market majority and thus was the best chance for 100% saturation
Simply having the largest market share means nothing in a market where product gets replaced over time. Netscape also had the market before they were illegally pushed from the market.
Can I ask that this reply be modded UP, for some reason it got modded down to zero?
This is actually an excellent idea although I'd modify it to say that you should be able to publicize all of the shortcuts that you want your application to have cut across the OS (much like you can register sound events with Windows and I think Gnome as well) and then the user could decide how to assign his/her keyboard to those shortcuts. Then the OS's shortcuts and application shortcuts (at least the ones that cut across all applications) are maintained in exactly the same way.
If I look at my KDE control panel it looks like it already has support for this key binding idea but it's not obvious that third party applications have a way to register their shortcuts into the system.
Good, then maybe as a forced user of Debian (it's the "official" distribution at work) I'll have that in a couple of years :)
I have high hopes that Debian will ship KDE 3.0 before KDE 4.0 comes out.
Hardly... You forgot a strong equivalent to DirectX to give games a place to migrate to (sorry, a mix of OpenGL + some sound library doesn't equate to DirectX).
Then there's _one_ unified sound standard (I think Linux has four or five now), because a sound card cannot serve two masters. Single standards for the clipboard, adding/removing menu items from the desktop "Start" menu, mime type associations, adding of control panels, event sounds, display of notification icons in the desktop toolbar, registration of keyboard shortcuts that cut across all applications (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+I means "get the next instant message" and it will get back to the right program no matter if I'm in OpenOffice right now or Mozilla). And all of those standards have to be agreed upon and fully supported by both KDE and Gnome so I can know that all my applications will cooperate nicely with one another and my choice of desktop doesn't equal choice of application interoperability.
Desktop success for Linux is not impossible, far from it, but few people are paying attention to the mounds of things that are _really_ important to giving a typical end user a choice other than Windows vs. Mac OS X (a battle that we already know who wins 95% of the time).
"If they want to write their book in hieroglyphics they may do so and no one may translate the material and distribute these translations. You will have to wait for the author to provide a translation in a language you can understand if you want to read the book."
The courts have ruled, on at least two separate occassions, that transferral of "format" constitutes fair-use. That is, if you had purchased a CD and you had to record it to a tape in order to listen to it in a car then you were more than welcome to do so. You weren't violating any laws as long as you didn't sell or give away the tape or the CD independently of the other item. The same topic when it came to CD->MP3 was settled in Rio's favor. Now, it hasn't been tested as far as I know that conversion of one language to another is simply a format change but I'm willing to bet that if you had the translation done just for you and you didn't attempt to sell or give it away independently of the original book that you could argue precedent and that the two situations are exactly the same.
So I would agree that you are correct that no one is going to require them to translate books and that no one is allowed to distribute the translations. That is a far cry from the topic of "is anyone allowed to perform the translation _if they do not distribute it_". That kind of lock is what the industry wants but it conflicts directly with our fair use rights.
Um, that would be seriously cool as Alpha Centauri is a little over four light years away so they would have had to start in 1994 to try bouncing a signal off of it...
This will probably get modded down to -1 in no time but for the few who do get to read it.... Here is my weblog rant from last year as "Back to School" specials were appearing in the paper.
August 26, 2001
Calculator Rip Offs
OK. Let's talk about a scam that's being perpetrated on households across America (and probably lots of other nations as well) at this time of year. That scam is... the handheld calculator.
When I opened up the paper today and I saw not one, but two different office supply stores offering the HP 12C calculator for $70 my eyes popped out of their sockets, rolled across the room, and spontaneously started trying to bounce up and down on the 9, 1, 1 buttons on the phone to report the robbery. This is a calculator that cost around $100 the first year I attended college and I purchased my HP 11C (basically the same calculator but the 11C has engineering oriented functions rather than financial functions). That's 18 years ago people! Can you think of any piece of electronics in existence that hasn't either gotten massively faster and more capable or else had its price plummet in 18 years?!?
That is pure unadulterated bullshit... But it's not like the 12C is alone in its mystical fantasy pricing world. Just look at the prices on calculators like the TI 83 Plus. This is a calculator with a "large" 64 X 96 display (6,144 pixels) and 24K bytes RAM (160K bytes of data archive and application space). It costs almost $100 dollars? What?!? A Palm M100 with two megabytes of RAM and a 160x160 (25,600 pixels) costs $129 and that's probably too high!
Folks, you are being ripped off! Do not buy an expensive scientific graphing calculator. Your child will probaly not even be able to run it anyway. Do not buy into this magical pricing system. Buy a reasonably priced scientific calculator like the HP 30S and if the kid needs to do graphs, get him or her some software for the computer. If you absolutely have to have something that the child can take to school, buy an inexpensive PDA and find some software to put onto it to get the capabilities the kid needs. If the software hasn't already been written it should shoot to the top of the must-write list for open source software groups in order to break this ridiculous TI, HP, and Casio theft ring.
Not to intrude on this wonderful flamewar, but I think he meant a browser generation. For example, IE 5 to IE 6 where there was not much of any difference other than someone at Microsoft typing a six instead of a five into the dialog box. I'm confident he didn't mean a human generation.
His observation that innovation in the browser at Microsoft has come to a full halt is, in my opinion, quite correct. They've cornered the market and unless enough of us switch to Mozilla or the AOL-TimeWarner switch makes them come back to life, it seems likely that they won't be doing anything new there for the forseeable future.
No, because they are also considering Arthur Anderson as a replacement for the Office of Management and Budget :)
A real, shared book database offers opportunities beyond simply the book titles, isbn numbers, etc.
One thing that bothers me endlessly is that there is no shared database of reviews available. Everybody who wants to review a book goes to where all the reviews are already (i.e. Amazon). If you go to a third party to look at books to see if prices might be cheaper (e.g. Half.com, BookPool) you can't get any reviews for anything. But if there was a shared resource that all those book sellers could access, ala the CDDB, then you could have reviews available at any of those sites. And they could pay a small fee to get access to the data on a commercial basis.
There's one detail that I notice and it may be very important. They list at the end of the document a set of JSRs that they are committed ("at a minimum") to changing to meet Apache's requirements. Can you see which one is missing?
JSR 151, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition 1.4 (J2EE 1.4) Specification is not in the list. That's the one that JBoss really needs (or JSR 58 for J2EE 1.3) access to testing on and a guarantee that Sun isn't going to go after them for implementing an open source version of their specification.
Now I could be overreacting, it could be that they left 151 out of the list because it is still open and they intend to get to it for that reason, but if that was the case you would expect to see 58 in the list. I'm hoping this is more oversight than an actual attempt to continue the foolishness with JBoss.
Why should I not boycott all products from your company as you appear to be just another pathetic DMCA loser?
Some idiot modded this tripe as "insightful"?!? Please kill me now.
See if you can guess the real value from this classic children's tale quote? "You cannot cross until you pay toll to the _____"
Yes! It's TROLL. If "FreeUser" isn't intentionally trying to bait people into a flame war then he/she lives in a very special world where you're watching a TV marathon is going to bring down open source software and everybody else who reads Slashdot is a dateless geek like himself. Sorry pal, I have a wife and I have the kind of sex that people buy tapes of. I don't sleep alone and I'm willing to bet a sizable portion of the population here doesn't either.
If you have moderation points, for gods sake, use them with some sense.