I suspect the "500 million users" refers to the number of "unique IP's" for each of their services, added together with out regard to duplicates between services.
So each/. reader most likely count as several "users", even if we don't actually use Yahoo! normally, since we most likely sometime has been referred to some page hosted by Yahoo!.
I'm sure more knowledgeable slashdotters could name packages for Fedora that were originally developed in Ubuntu or other distros. Nobody seemed to answer that one.
I don't care about specific distributions, but I respect companies like Red Hat who develop a lot of code that constitute the common GNU/Linux base. Does Ubuntu (or whatever organization is behind it) also contribute significant amount of code that is used outside the Ubuntu distributions? If so, what?
If they don't care about the commercial version, I'd recommend they go with a weak copyleft like the LGPL or MPL rather than a BSDL. Both are fine for commercial application developers (since you can link to proprietary code), but minimizes of forks of the library itself, as any fork will have to remain open.
Changing the license to LGPL would make most sense, as it would put them on equal terms with Gtk and Wine license wise (Wine, BTW, switched from a BSDL'ish license to LGPL precisely because of the "proprietary fork" problem became urgent for them).
So if the parents play video games (probably more likely than not these days), the kids will at least "play" that they play video games starting when they are 1 to 2 years old. About one year later, they will be able to actually play the games. I don't see any reason to prevent them from playing real video games at that point.
If the parents doesn't play video games, the kids won't be interested for a couple of years more, when they get playmates who play video games. I don't see any reason to introduce them to games before that, nor to stop them when they ask for it.
For pre-schoolers, you choose the games. For primary schoolers, they probably want to choose the games, but you should play the games as well. After that, general advice is more harmful than helpful. It depends too much on you and the kid.
> Cult: organization pretending to be a religion. Keeps true beliefs secret from recruits, one > would think because they would have no recruits if beliefs were known. Viciously attacks any > and all who expose secret beliefs.
Religions with "secret" knowledge reserved for the priests has been the norm throughout human history, and seems a rather arbitrary criteria for whether something is a cult.
> Has tendency to lock people up, either through social pressure or actual locked doors.
All religions do this.
> Uses any means possible to intimidate press, infiltrate government, and co-opt police forces.
"Any means possible" would include assassination, the only religions that openly does this today is various branches of Islam. Scientology may employ assassins, but if so, they manage to keep it secret.
If we limit it to "some means", all big religions use "some means" for political influence.
All active users of my application use MS Windows, so MS Windows is my main development platform. I started out with Solaris, but there are pretty good arguments for developers using the same platform as the users. But I don't want my application to be the reason my users stick to MS Windows, so I stick with portable tools for the development. GCC plus the standard libraries for the base code and command line interface, and Qt for a GUI for those who prefer that.
What this means to me and other developers concerned about cross platform portability, is that I could start using the KDE libraries, if they provide something of value for my application.
I suspect this is where the release is most significant, it might lure developers to KDE. I doubt it will have much affect on users, MS Windows and MacOS X both already have pretty good desktops and desktop tools.
I'll of course only use the KDE libs if they are non-intrusive to the users, like Qt is (a Qt application does not feel "foreign" to a MS Windows user).
I'm all for Microsoft flames (just read any of my comments about Vista), but this really is the most reasonable option. The web always had a tradition of favoring user experience over elegance, just look at the content of the User-Agent field. The cost of putting an extra tag on standard compliant web pages is negligible, compared with the cost of showing all the old, broken web pages incorrectly.
I suppose msie8.exe could have a "/mode=std" switch so it could still technically pass the Acid test.
You response to point 1, 4 and 5 just shows a different opinion. You think it is good that millions of trivial "works" are removed from the public domain every day. The GP (and I disagree).
Point 2 demonstrates a frighteningly narrow view of privacy. The "right" of a worker in a big corporation not to get credit for his work is equated with "all of privacy". Scary stuff.
Point 3 is fairy tale, both the person who build boats, and the person who design boats for a living, sell the boats/designs. There is no boats left for their children to inherit. If they want to secure their children, they better get life insurance. In that they are similar to the 98% of us who work for a salary. All of us get paid once for our work and skills, not the rest of our life when people use the product of our work and skills.
There is a tiny truth behind point 3, a small number of musicians can actually live by their old royalties. But even for musicians I would not recommend this as an alternative to a proper retirement plan. It is very rare.
Point 6 and 7 shows that you are unaware that standard royalties are existing practice, think music radio.
Point 6 also shows an inability to distinguish between imaginary and real property. Even if you could license the design of a Mercedes for US$ 20.000, an actual working car would be far more expensive. You cannot drive around in imaginary property, you need real property for that.
So, to summary: Unlike the GP you believe putting zillions of trivial stuff under copyright is a worthy goal in itself, you are woefully unaware of how the real world function in many aspects from boat building to royalty, and you are unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary.
Even that would not kill copyleft for "professional" software. The FSF already has copyright assignments on file, and could easily afford the FSF. Same goes for corporate sponsored software like SAMBA. Depending on the details, it might mean that anonymous cvs access would be cut off, which would be annoying but survivable.
It would kill off copyleft for most hobbyist software though. I think this is an acceptable price for a more sane copyright regime. And I say that as a card carrying FSF member.
Contrary to peoples constant whining, vista is a reasonable enough O/S, the only problem i've seen with it is the resource intensiveness. Rarely do i ever have crash problems. Comments like that makes me want to hit you. I have spend so much time combating application that doesn't work, network services that are unavailable, and a brand new and totally unintuitive interface for. Yeah, the slow response time doesn't bother me as much more, and the occasional crash comes with the territory. And who knows, the occasional dropping of a device might be blames on the hardware (it is just a Thinkpad, some Chinese brand).
I had very few problems going from NT 4.0 to XP (after switching away from the Fischer-Price look to classic), and I remembered all the flames against XP. So I thought the flames against Vista was similar, and didn't insist on getting XP on my new laptop.
Boy was I wrong.
My advice: Stay with XP until Windows 7, or at least until a couple of services packs for Vista.
> Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.
Uh, I'm suffering MS Vista, and there is no lack of needless backward compatibility breakage. Lot's of application doesn't work any more. Lots of network services doesn't work any more. And the UI has changed pointlessly, trying to find the old network settings is a nightmare.
There are of course people going for the specs, but they are just as much about branding. The target markets has very little overlap.
The guy on the Gizmondo blog that compared it with Volvo vs Porche got it right (a car analogy always helps:-), someone in the market for a new Volvo is unlikely to be swayed by a Porche, and vice versa.
The rest of the bloggers aso got it right, they focused on how ugly, boring, old fashioned, and conservative the Thinkpad looked (it looked like every other Thinkpad), which is exactly what the Thinkpad market wants. They don't want something looking flimsy and flashy as they would consider the MacBook Air to look.
Waiting for the system to boot, plus whatever manual post boot action the user takes, is not productive use of the employee time. For a full shutdown, I suspect the cost of this "employee downtime" far outweigh any power saving.
For hibernate or sleep, the situation might be better.
Not sure there is any future in putting people on the moon, or down on the bottom of any other gravity well. To prove it can be done? Well, we proved that in 1969, and that didn't get us anywhere.
I'd much rather see us put people (or robots) somewhere that actually direct us towards a future in space. Mining the asteroids has potential, not for putting anything back to Earth (too expensive), but for raw material for further space exploration, building space stations, and manufacturing specialized composited that require weightlessness.
Eventually, we may send expeditions and construct bases on the bottom of the gravity wells. But that should be done from our permanent bases in space, not from Earth.
I suspect there is a limit on how many blind alleys we get a chance to explore. Let's go towards where there is most potential. And that is not on the bottom of any gravity well.
I have been in a couple of large scientific projects, and the main problem with making the data public has been to ensure that the researchers who collect the data are getting "author credit" in scientific publications.
The scientists who collect the data are often other people than those who analyze the data, and fit them to the models. As long as everybody is working on the same project, it is possible to ensure that the people who collect the data will be listed as authors in the papers, even if they are usually written by the people who analyze the data.
Once the data has been published, all bets are off. People will analyze the data, and write articles about it, with themselves as authors and a proper acknowledgment to the project that collected the data.
As science works today, being listed as author is paramount. It is the only criteria used by the bean counters to judge whether a scientist is doing any active research. With zero publication follows zero grants, and soon after, zero paycheck.
The way we have done it has been to delay publication of the raw data until the first batch of scientific papers has been accepted. After that, everyone have access.
Acording to TFA it was the social networking sites that were trying to hook in. But it was not the social networking sites that was accused for anti-competitive behaviour. To R TFA isn't enough when you aren't able to U it.
Flaming Microsoft is fun but after the first decade or so it got old. I never was young enough to flame Microsoft for fun or otherwise. But I do point out when people start inventing false history, like Microsoft being where it is because it is inventive rather than because of its systematic use of illegal business practice, or that Microsoft is no worse than other companies with regard to the law. Or that the reason people complain about Microsoft is just nerds having fun. Damn, these days journalists claim with a straight face that it was Bill Gates that gave us the GUI and the Internet.
Finding folk who are upset enough to flame Microsoft is rather easier than finding folk interested in writing or deploying code that might change the situation. That's a red herring, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on webmail, and the competitors don't play the same game. There are plenty of alternatives, usually technically superior. Getting people to use them is the question, and not really that hard when it come to webmail.
In general, plenty of (often technically superior) alternatives exist, but getting people to use them is a problem because if tying. Mainly to and between MS Windows and MS Office.
As long as MS is allowed to get away with its anti-competitive behaviour, the MS products really is the practically best products for a lot of people (because of the tying, and because it is what other people use). It is not something we can solve with a technical fix (the technical solutions already exists). The best bet is make people and politicians aware of the long time bad effects of tying (disabling the market), allow the already existing laws against anti-competitive behavior take effect, and adopt standardized protocols and formats for public institutions.
[ And the problem that concern you so much, namely your friends sending your invitations to social sites, it not really something that can be solved with a technical fix either. You have to teach your friends not to do that, or teach yourself to ignore them. ]
It wasn't "social networking sites", but "webmail sites". And of the three big ones (Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google), only Microsoft try to use control of the mail contacts as a "leverage" for their other products.
When it comes to anti-competitive behavior, Microsoft really is worse than other companies. If nothing else, the number of times Microsoft has been convicted of illegal business practices (especially tying) should witness of this.
The submission is someone putting a spin to a story of someone putting a spin to a story based on someone putting a spin on this original scientific article.
My goodness, it's almost as if you had some way to make companies who don't want to participate in the development of free software participate by funding it! That's so... evil?
It is false advertising. Just like the other day, where I asked a free man to do some work for me. And he asked me in return how much I was willing to pay him. Pay? But he was supposed to be free!
Someone has totally misunderstand the concept of freedom.
I think you're greatly oversimplifying. The complexity isn't in storing the bits of data, it's in designing a system that's intuitive for players. Not to mention that I'd bet that the actual data structures are much more complex than you described above. Having written a couple of such games, the data structures really are that simple. But designing an intuitive UI is not simple at all, you are right about that part.
Slashdot Mirror
Once we get a candidate that can honestly answer "yes" to "Do you use Emacs or vi?", I'll vote for him without any further questions.
I suspect the "500 million users" refers to the number of "unique IP's" for each of their services, added together with out regard to duplicates between services.
/. reader most likely count as several "users", even if we don't actually use Yahoo! normally, since we most likely sometime has been referred to some page hosted by Yahoo!.
So each
I don't care about specific distributions, but I respect companies like Red Hat who develop a lot of code that constitute the common GNU/Linux base. Does Ubuntu (or whatever organization is behind it) also contribute significant amount of code that is used outside the Ubuntu distributions? If so, what?
If they don't care about the commercial version, I'd recommend they go with a weak copyleft like the LGPL or MPL rather than a BSDL. Both are fine for commercial application developers (since you can link to proprietary code), but minimizes of forks of the library itself, as any fork will have to remain open.
Changing the license to LGPL would make most sense, as it would put them on equal terms with Gtk and Wine license wise (Wine, BTW, switched from a BSDL'ish license to LGPL precisely because of the "proprietary fork" problem became urgent for them).
So if the parents play video games (probably more likely than not these days), the kids will at least "play" that they play video games starting when they are 1 to 2 years old. About one year later, they will be able to actually play the games. I don't see any reason to prevent them from playing real video games at that point.
If the parents doesn't play video games, the kids won't be interested for a couple of years more, when they get playmates who play video games. I don't see any reason to introduce them to games before that, nor to stop them when they ask for it.
For pre-schoolers, you choose the games. For primary schoolers, they probably want to choose the games, but you should play the games as well. After that, general advice is more harmful than helpful. It depends too much on you and the kid.
> Cult: organization pretending to be a religion. Keeps true beliefs secret from recruits, one
> would think because they would have no recruits if beliefs were known. Viciously attacks any
> and all who expose secret beliefs.
Religions with "secret" knowledge reserved for the priests has been the norm throughout human history, and seems a rather arbitrary criteria for whether something is a cult.
> Has tendency to lock people up, either through social pressure or actual locked doors.
All religions do this.
> Uses any means possible to intimidate press, infiltrate government, and co-opt police forces.
"Any means possible" would include assassination, the only religions that openly does this today is various branches of Islam. Scientology may employ assassins, but if so, they manage to keep it secret.
If we limit it to "some means", all big religions use "some means" for political influence.
All active users of my application use MS Windows, so MS Windows is my main development platform. I started out with Solaris, but there are pretty good arguments for developers using the same platform as the users. But I don't want my application to be the reason my users stick to MS Windows, so I stick with portable tools for the development. GCC plus the standard libraries for the base code and command line interface, and Qt for a GUI for those who prefer that.
What this means to me and other developers concerned about cross platform portability, is that I could start using the KDE libraries, if they provide something of value for my application.
I suspect this is where the release is most significant, it might lure developers to KDE. I doubt it will have much affect on users, MS Windows and MacOS X both already have pretty good desktops and desktop tools.
I'll of course only use the KDE libs if they are non-intrusive to the users, like Qt is (a Qt application does not feel "foreign" to a MS Windows user).
I'm all for Microsoft flames (just read any of my comments about Vista), but this really is the most reasonable option. The web always had a tradition of favoring user experience over elegance, just look at the content of the User-Agent field. The cost of putting an extra tag on standard compliant web pages is negligible, compared with the cost of showing all the old, broken web pages incorrectly.
I suppose msie8.exe could have a "/mode=std" switch so it could still technically pass the Acid test.
You response to point 1, 4 and 5 just shows a different opinion. You think it is good that millions of trivial "works" are removed from the public domain every day. The GP (and I disagree).
Point 2 demonstrates a frighteningly narrow view of privacy. The "right" of a worker in a big corporation not to get credit for his work is equated with "all of privacy". Scary stuff.
Point 3 is fairy tale, both the person who build boats, and the person who design boats for a living, sell the boats/designs. There is no boats left for their children to inherit. If they want to secure their children, they better get life insurance. In that they are similar to the 98% of us who work for a salary. All of us get paid once for our work and skills, not the rest of our life when people use the product of our work and skills.
There is a tiny truth behind point 3, a small number of musicians can actually live by their old royalties. But even for musicians I would not recommend this as an alternative to a proper retirement plan. It is very rare.
Point 6 and 7 shows that you are unaware that standard royalties are existing practice, think music radio.
Point 6 also shows an inability to distinguish between imaginary and real property. Even if you could license the design of a Mercedes for US$ 20.000, an actual working car would be far more expensive. You cannot drive around in imaginary property, you need real property for that.
So, to summary: Unlike the GP you believe putting zillions of trivial stuff under copyright is a worthy goal in itself, you are woefully unaware of how the real world function in many aspects from boat building to royalty, and you are unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary.
Even that would not kill copyleft for "professional" software. The FSF already has copyright assignments on file, and could easily afford the FSF. Same goes for corporate sponsored software like SAMBA. Depending on the details, it might mean that anonymous cvs access would be cut off, which would be annoying but survivable.
It would kill off copyleft for most hobbyist software though. I think this is an acceptable price for a more sane copyright regime. And I say that as a card carrying FSF member.
I had very few problems going from NT 4.0 to XP (after switching away from the Fischer-Price look to classic), and I remembered all the flames against XP. So I thought the flames against Vista was similar, and didn't insist on getting XP on my new laptop.
Boy was I wrong.
My advice: Stay with XP until Windows 7, or at least until a couple of services packs for Vista.
> Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.
Uh, I'm suffering MS Vista, and there is no lack of needless backward compatibility breakage. Lot's of application doesn't work any more. Lots of network services doesn't work any more. And the UI has changed pointlessly, trying to find the old network settings is a nightmare.
There are of course people going for the specs, but they are just as much about branding. The target markets has very little overlap.
:-), someone in the market for a new Volvo is unlikely to be swayed by a Porche, and vice versa.
The guy on the Gizmondo blog that compared it with Volvo vs Porche got it right (a car analogy always helps
The rest of the bloggers aso got it right, they focused on how ugly, boring, old fashioned, and conservative the Thinkpad looked (it looked like every other Thinkpad), which is exactly what the Thinkpad market wants. They don't want something looking flimsy and flashy as they would consider the MacBook Air to look.
Waiting for the system to boot, plus whatever manual post boot action the user takes, is not productive use of the employee time. For a full shutdown, I suspect the cost of this "employee downtime" far outweigh any power saving.
For hibernate or sleep, the situation might be better.
Not sure there is any future in putting people on the moon, or down on the bottom of any other gravity well. To prove it can be done? Well, we proved that in 1969, and that didn't get us anywhere.
I'd much rather see us put people (or robots) somewhere that actually direct us towards a future in space. Mining the asteroids has potential, not for putting anything back to Earth (too expensive), but for raw material for further space exploration, building space stations, and manufacturing specialized composited that require weightlessness.
Eventually, we may send expeditions and construct bases on the bottom of the gravity wells. But that should be done from our permanent bases in space, not from Earth.
I suspect there is a limit on how many blind alleys we get a chance to explore. Let's go towards where there is most potential. And that is not on the bottom of any gravity well.
I couldn't find anything about it from an authoritative source, like Google. Anyone has a better link?
I have been in a couple of large scientific projects, and the main problem with making the data public has been to ensure that the researchers who collect the data are getting "author credit" in scientific publications.
The scientists who collect the data are often other people than those who analyze the data, and fit them to the models. As long as everybody is working on the same project, it is possible to ensure that the people who collect the data will be listed as authors in the papers, even if they are usually written by the people who analyze the data.
Once the data has been published, all bets are off. People will analyze the data, and write articles about it, with themselves as authors and a proper acknowledgment to the project that collected the data.
As science works today, being listed as author is paramount. It is the only criteria used by the bean counters to judge whether a scientist is doing any active research. With zero publication follows zero grants, and soon after, zero paycheck.
The way we have done it has been to delay publication of the raw data until the first batch of scientific papers has been accepted. After that, everyone have access.
No idea where you got that idea. As they wrote, the database is free for scientists.
In general, plenty of (often technically superior) alternatives exist, but getting people to use them is a problem because if tying. Mainly to and between MS Windows and MS Office.
As long as MS is allowed to get away with its anti-competitive behaviour, the MS products really is the practically best products for a lot of people (because of the tying, and because it is what other people use). It is not something we can solve with a technical fix (the technical solutions already exists). The best bet is make people and politicians aware of the long time bad effects of tying (disabling the market), allow the already existing laws against anti-competitive behavior take effect, and adopt standardized protocols and formats for public institutions.
[ And the problem that concern you so much, namely your friends sending your invitations to social sites, it not really something that can be solved with a technical fix either. You have to teach your friends not to do that, or teach yourself to ignore them. ]
It wasn't "social networking sites", but "webmail sites". And of the three big ones (Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google), only Microsoft try to use control of the mail contacts as a "leverage" for their other products.
When it comes to anti-competitive behavior, Microsoft really is worse than other companies. If nothing else, the number of times Microsoft has been convicted of illegal business practices (especially tying) should witness of this.
The submission is someone putting a spin to a story of someone putting a spin to a story based on someone putting a spin on this original scientific article.
My goodness, it's almost as if you had some way to make companies who don't want to participate in the development of free software participate by funding it! That's so... evil?
It is false advertising. Just like the other day, where I asked a free man to do some work for me. And he asked me in return how much I was willing to pay him. Pay? But he was supposed to be free!
Someone has totally misunderstand the concept of freedom.
Oops, reading old Usenet groups took me back. Here is a proper link.
At least, the first mention of "cyberlaw" I can find on Google Groups is this EFF newsletter from 1992-04-30:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.org.eff.talk/msg/bc39f25662095d9a >