While I am not up to date on Linux's actual POSIX compliance (although it's definitely not 100% POSIXLY_CORRECT), I can confirm that you're definitely right in that POSIX covers more than just the kernel. Especially conspicuous are its specs for utility progs and shells.
For more information, you can order the POSIX standards from IEEE (yes, they charge for this; they suck) by calling 1-800-678-IEEE (+1-732-981-1393 international), or get the bible of posix.
Those of you who own a PDA right now -- try to think of the last 5 places where you've used it. Thought of them? Good. Now think to yourself, in exactly how many of those places would talking aloud (esp to a little black box) be regularly tolerated? Maybe I'm seeing things from a distorted viewpoint, but I'd primarily have to use it in class, and, well, you can probably see what can come of that. I somehow doubt that modern speech recognition technology is sufficient to recognize instructions at a quiet-whisper level.
Yea, this has its applications for accessibility to people who can't use the stylus standard, but, as a mainstream item, I don't see this getting too far.
As a Russian emigrant, I can tell you right now what will cure most of these misunderstandings -- have a couple of senior NASA officials live in Russia for a year. Outside the "foreigner" protection shield. Let them feel the corruption, realize to what extent the country is in political, economic, and social ruin, and then judge as to whether expecting them to produce something that works, let alone flies, is reasonable.
As much as I respect my motherland, I must admit that the US is consistently underestimating just how f@$*ed up it is right now and will be over the next several decades.
Once upon a time, all these systems had no computers to rely on whatsoever. And they managed. With all due respect to Linux for reaching yet another audience, we should keep in mind that every step like this is just a relatively small improvement for whichever group took it. Yea, windows boxen crashing daily on 911 systems isn't a pleasant thought -- but think of it as 0.01% cases falling through because of that being replaced by 0.0001% now.
All they did was rename what was going to be Solaris 2.7 to Solaris 7, since it became obvious they weren't getting out of 2.x in the observable future.
My apologies for my clearly not-too-hot Norwegian; apparently this article only refers to 3 US site shutdowns rather than the arrest of Jon Johansen himself.
Sir Isaac Newton, for 'cracking' mechanics and thereby enabling anvils to fall on poor innocent cartoon animals. Hasn't he ever heard of animal rights?
Aristotle, for 'cracking' the secret of floating and thereby enabling sh*t to float.
Anyone who has ever made any progress in human history, since we know progress has never led to any good
Case study: shareware. It has existed for over two decades until being effectively over-shadowed by opensource. Hordes of cr4ck3rz were churning out cracks on a regular basis. Did that stop anyone from writing shareware? Not really. The average consumer never really delved into the black-hat world, never heard of (let alone used) the cracks, and really didn't care less about a $20 fee for a decent piece of software.
Same is happenning with the banners. Yea, there're some of us out there messing with little mouse-movement macro utils and variations thereof to turn off annoying ads. So what? Ten times as many users will never have heard of these techniques. And even if they had -- the advertisers wouldn't notice until much later, and they'd still pay for click-thrus. The whole system, it seems to me, rests on two basic human characteristics -- laziness and stupidity. No, scratch that, just one -- laziness. The rest is being too lazy to go out and learn how to get around the minor annoyances which are the banner ads.
You're right, I misunderstood their initial method. Although, hypothetically, depending on a turned-on cell phone being in the area is still a statistical risk, although nowhere near as great.
They're making a very error-prone assumption that cell phones are distributed uniformly, or at least approximately uniformly, throughout the Bay Area. I will guarantee you that a jam in downtown of San Jose will be reported even if there's a slight slowdown, and a jam around some less well-off areas (e.g. south SF) is quite likely to go completely unnoticed. And it appears more or less impossible to make adjustments for this; so what data comes out of this system should be double checked at the very least.
What kind of opportunities will this bring to an undergrad at MIT? How sensational would an undergrad have to be to have an important place in the project?
From my experience, this is likely to give a lot of undergrads a spot on the research team, but in terms of "important places" -- highly unlikely. It is very rare that an undergrad obtains a top role in a major research project, let alone a widely-publicized one such as this.
The article says that discoveries made solely by MIT affiliates (or whatever) are owned by MIT. What does this mean in practice? What exactly does MIT do with a patent it posesses?
In practice, you will find that all universities retain IP rights to IP created by their professors -- otherwise why would they be paying them? (No, teaching is far too minor to be the primary source of income). A patent held by a university usually only means that those in the industry who want to actually implement the idea have to pay royalties (otherwise the world's scientific community would just be a public-use R & D team). A university would not, generally, put restrictions on a patent that would prevent the work from being at the basis of future studies.
Imagine, an international smuggling ring completely destroyed, eliminating a large fraction of organized crime on the entire planet, by one simple idea: .
A much more to-the-point idea: hamster feces. Certainly gets the point across -- especially if the user has ever had to deal with groups of 3 or more hamsters.
All they could possibly be after is spreading FUD.
Next time, look up your acronymns before removing all doubt.
I meant just that -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- albeit not in the conventional sense. Fear for people running servers, and uncertainty/doubt as to the legality of the whole affair.
How many MP3 sites are out there? Hundreds, at least. How many private servers? Tens, hundreds of thousands. Any team of lawyers will not be dumb enough to think they can sue them all. All they could possibly be after is spreading FUD. And considering the effort it takes to pull one lawsuit through, we shouldn't expect to see any serious impact of this until oooh, say, 2025 or so. Needless to say, MP3 has negligible chances of existing for that long as a predominant format.
2600 does not advocate any of the above. The only thing 2600 advocates is freedom of information and freedom of speech. I realize this is a somewhat idealistic stance, but they have never explicitly encouraged illegal activity based on the information they release. It is printed for the benefit of those of us who disagree with the law and choose, at our own free will, to go against it.
part of me wonders why the industry and their lawyers bother, but another part of me realizes that (digital) democracy doesn't come easy.
Part of you should also realize that the lawyers get paid no matter what happens (although, granted, more so if they win), and that the industry at large still has no more respect for our culture than for the homeless guys outside its offices. And, obviously, it thinks it can deal with us the same way it deals with them -- send a few security guards out and scare them into moving across the street.
It should be interpreted as meaning that basically because of the possibility of high cost people might be desuaded from using linux or experimenting with it; and that is something that Corel will not do.
And, as a side thought, "If people get Linux it will be with the sole purpose of running our wonderful suite." Note that the original wording was not "High prices should not be a factor in keeping people away from WP Office."
Where have I heard this "you bought your computer to run my software" philosophy before... Certainly didn't lead to any good there...
You are forgetting that DOS came with next to no documentation, and the amount of peer advice one was limited to was one's classmates at worst and the local BBS social network at best. When a kid nowadays gets a Linux distribution, he not only has a rather extensive amount of HOWTO and various other docs included, he also generally has access to the 'net at large, where there're likely to be someone willing to answer any given question. (Although, agreed, an Apprenticeships section certainly wouldn't hurt)
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While I am not up to date on Linux's actual POSIX compliance (although it's definitely not 100% POSIXLY_CORRECT), I can confirm that you're definitely right in that POSIX covers more than just the kernel. Especially conspicuous are its specs for utility progs and shells.
For more information, you can order the POSIX standards from IEEE (yes, they charge for this; they suck) by calling 1-800-678-IEEE (+1-732-981-1393 international), or get the bible of posix.
Those of you who own a PDA right now -- try to think of the last 5 places where you've used it. Thought of them? Good. Now think to yourself, in exactly how many of those places would talking aloud (esp to a little black box) be regularly tolerated? Maybe I'm seeing things from a distorted viewpoint, but I'd primarily have to use it in class, and, well, you can probably see what can come of that. I somehow doubt that modern speech recognition technology is sufficient to recognize instructions at a quiet-whisper level.
Yea, this has its applications for accessibility to people who can't use the stylus standard, but, as a mainstream item, I don't see this getting too far.
As a Russian emigrant, I can tell you right now what will cure most of these misunderstandings -- have a couple of senior NASA officials live in Russia for a year. Outside the "foreigner" protection shield. Let them feel the corruption, realize to what extent the country is in political, economic, and social ruin, and then judge as to whether expecting them to produce something that works, let alone flies, is reasonable.
As much as I respect my motherland, I must admit that the US is consistently underestimating just how f@$*ed up it is right now and will be over the next several decades.
Once upon a time, all these systems had no computers to rely on whatsoever. And they managed. With all due respect to Linux for reaching yet another audience, we should keep in mind that every step like this is just a relatively small improvement for whichever group took it. Yea, windows boxen crashing daily on 911 systems isn't a pleasant thought -- but think of it as 0.01% cases falling through because of that being replaced by 0.0001% now.
All they did was rename what was going to be Solaris 2.7 to Solaris 7, since it became obvious they weren't getting out of 2.x in the observable future.
My apologies for my clearly not-too-hot Norwegian; apparently this article only refers to 3 US site shutdowns rather than the arrest of Jon Johansen himself.
This has made it through to Yahoo!-Norway News: http://no.news.yahoo.com/000124/4/pwx.ht ml.
Sorry, this is in Norwegian, but this will hit the fan any minute now. Expect headlines in hours.
Case study: shareware. It has existed for over two decades until being effectively over-shadowed by opensource. Hordes of cr4ck3rz were churning out cracks on a regular basis. Did that stop anyone from writing shareware? Not really. The average consumer never really delved into the black-hat world, never heard of (let alone used) the cracks, and really didn't care less about a $20 fee for a decent piece of software.
Same is happenning with the banners. Yea, there're some of us out there messing with little mouse-movement macro utils and variations thereof to turn off annoying ads. So what? Ten times as many users will never have heard of these techniques. And even if they had -- the advertisers wouldn't notice until much later, and they'd still pay for click-thrus. The whole system, it seems to me, rests on two basic human characteristics -- laziness and stupidity. No, scratch that, just one -- laziness. The rest is being too lazy to go out and learn how to get around the minor annoyances which are the banner ads.
You're right, I misunderstood their initial method. Although, hypothetically, depending on a turned-on cell phone being in the area is still a statistical risk, although nowhere near as great.
They're making a very error-prone assumption that cell phones are distributed uniformly, or at least approximately uniformly, throughout the Bay Area. I will guarantee you that a jam in downtown of San Jose will be reported even if there's a slight slowdown, and a jam around some less well-off areas (e.g. south SF) is quite likely to go completely unnoticed. And it appears more or less impossible to make adjustments for this; so what data comes out of this system should be double checked at the very least.
What kind of opportunities will this bring to an undergrad at MIT? How sensational would an undergrad have to be to have an important place in the project?
From my experience, this is likely to give a lot of undergrads a spot on the research team, but in terms of "important places" -- highly unlikely. It is very rare that an undergrad obtains a top role in a major research project, let alone a widely-publicized one such as this.
The article says that discoveries made solely by MIT affiliates (or whatever) are owned by MIT. What does this mean in practice? What exactly does MIT do with a patent it posesses?
In practice, you will find that all universities retain IP rights to IP created by their professors -- otherwise why would they be paying them? (No, teaching is far too minor to be the primary source of income). A patent held by a university usually only means that those in the industry who want to actually implement the idea have to pay royalties (otherwise the world's scientific community would just be a public-use R & D team). A university would not, generally, put restrictions on a patent that would prevent the work from being at the basis of future studies.
Hey, so when do we get a "State of /." address?
"With 'first posts' at an all-time high, our readers are setting world records of obsession with petrification of females"...
Imagine, an international smuggling ring completely destroyed, eliminating a large fraction of organized crime on the entire planet, by one simple idea: .
A much more to-the-point idea: hamster feces. Certainly gets the point across -- especially if the user has ever had to deal with groups of 3 or more hamsters.
All they could possibly be after is spreading FUD.
Next time, look up your acronymns before removing all doubt.
I meant just that -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- albeit not in the conventional sense. Fear for people running servers, and uncertainty/doubt as to the legality of the whole affair.
Will people start complaining about overuse of the <STINK> tag?
Of all things, this isn't the main problem here -- if you don't want to smell it, don't install the hardware.
And, of course, my entry: MPAA/RIAA websites -- rotting sleaze smell. Goes for microsoft.com, too.
How many MP3 sites are out there? Hundreds, at least. How many private servers? Tens, hundreds of thousands. Any team of lawyers will not be dumb enough to think they can sue them all. All they could possibly be after is spreading FUD. And considering the effort it takes to pull one lawsuit through, we shouldn't expect to see any serious impact of this until oooh, say, 2025 or so. Needless to say, MP3 has negligible chances of existing for that long as a predominant format.
2600 does not advocate any of the above. The only thing 2600 advocates is freedom of information and freedom of speech. I realize this is a somewhat idealistic stance, but they have never explicitly encouraged illegal activity based on the information they release. It is printed for the benefit of those of us who disagree with the law and choose, at our own free will, to go against it.
[I am not affiliated with 2600]
part of me wonders why the industry and their lawyers bother, but another part of me realizes that (digital) democracy doesn't come easy.
Part of you should also realize that the lawyers get paid no matter what happens (although, granted, more so if they win), and that the industry at large still has no more respect for our culture than for the homeless guys outside its offices. And, obviously, it thinks it can deal with us the same way it deals with them -- send a few security guards out and scare them into moving across the street.
It should be interpreted as meaning that basically because of the possibility of high cost people might be desuaded from using linux or experimenting with it; and that is something that Corel will not do.
And, as a side thought, "If people get Linux it will be with the sole purpose of running our wonderful suite." Note that the original wording was not "High prices should not be a factor in keeping people away from WP Office."
Where have I heard this "you bought your computer to run my software" philosophy before... Certainly didn't lead to any good there...
High prices should not be a factor in keeping people away from Linux.
Corel seems to be under a rather interesting impression that they are the reason people are switching to Linux in the first place. I'm quite amused.
You are forgetting that DOS came with next to no documentation, and the amount of peer advice one was limited to was one's classmates at worst and the local BBS social network at best. When a kid nowadays gets a Linux distribution, he not only has a rather extensive amount of HOWTO and various other docs included, he also generally has access to the 'net at large, where there're likely to be someone willing to answer any given question. (Although, agreed, an Apprenticeships section certainly wouldn't hurt)