Microsoft did hold back the industry for about three decades, but they finally dropped the DOS based line of operating systems with XP.
We can still complain about their illegal and unethical business practises, and of course specific software glitches. But today, their OSes are as real as any other provider.
It was a good thing when it was only blue-collar jobs being outsourced. It meant cheaper goods for us. But now it is the jobs of the self-righteous and self-pitying American middle class being affected, making it an entirely different matter.
The GPL allows for "mere bundling" with propritary software.
Whether it is "mere bundling" or a derived work most likely depend not on the specific mechanism the two components use to communicate, but whether it happens through standard, predefined protocol.
If Jin already included a socket interface and a documented protocol for remote control, Maryanovsky has to live with the fact that someone used it (or he should have used the Alladin Licence).
If it was something Rabinovitch created for IChessU, he will have to pay up. He is not going to convince a judge it is "mere bundling".
Everything negative about Apple is automatically moderated down, the effect is far stronger than negative comments about Linux even here on/..
Apple does a lot of good, they produce some cool technology, and the contribute greatly to free software development.
But in this case, they are the Microsoft of online music sale. The problem is the tying between the iTunes store, and the iPod, which stiffle competition. If you have a new device you can't enter the market because you can't access the larger seller, iTunes. And if you have a new store you can't enter the market because you can't access the majority of devices. This is similar as what Microsoft is doing when they bundle software products.
Microsoft are temporarily on the side of the angels here, when someone elses proprietary technology is the market leader, Microsoft is a proponent of open and interchangable solutions. This last until they themselves become dominant.
Oh, and "DRM is evil" isn't the issue here. "Using DRM to lock out competition is evil" is the issue.
I enter text in Wikipedia, and it is automatically improved, especially with regard to spelling and grammar. Maybe it is done by a million monkeys, I don't care.
Occasionally I'm one of the monkeys, and fix mistakes that are obvious even to me. I don't see that as a big problem either.
...but in practice, it seems like the articles on prominent controversial topics tend to be excellent. The people who complain are usually people who have a strong partisan interest in the subject
The problem isn't 20 idiots. The problem is 1 idiot. The low quality articles are mostly in areas that doresn't have the wide interest, and thus have very few authors.
In order to properly use Wikipedia, you need to look at the history and talk page.
Only in the last couple of centuries have we had a protected childhood where children lived in a seperate world from the adults. If kids grow up faster today, and I think it might be the case that increased access to information about the world adults live in might do that, it is just a return to more natural state of affairs. I'm not worried.
I'm much more worried about people who want to turn back time and decrease our freedom under the under the motto "Will someone please think of the children!".
> A Superman who can push the Earth out of its orbit isn't fun for a writer to work with, any > more than it is for reader above the age of 5 to enjoy.
Peter David's Supergirl did meet the silver age Supergirl in his last arch. The silver age Supergirl was standing on her hands, and explaining that she was trying to push Earth away from an approaching comet. The modern Supergirl correctly pointed out that it didn't work (it was her world, and her laws of physics), and that even if it had worked, the consequences would be far worse than the comet.
It did annoy me that silver age Supergirl did not bore herself into the ground, she was clearly able to put on more pressure than the ground could carry.
Anyway, the power level itself is not about realism or physical plausibility. It is about what kind of stories you want to write.
> They tried doing something similar with "The Flash," where-as he pulls power from something > called the "Speed Force." This is also why he doesn't leave massive craters as he runs.
Wally West at one point also had to eat outragous amount of food to make of for the energy he spend.
Half of/.'s readers are from outside North America, and could easily fail a test that required specific American cultural knowledge. I wouldn't know what month the Superbowl is played, which is something I guess most Americans know, even those totally uninterested in sport.
But most websites wouldn't want to exclude half their audience, so maybe an interest area specific question, like "The name of the country where the founder of Linux was born". Or with the new, broader focus of/., "The name of Luke Skywalker's sister".
The point of the article isn't to make fun of B-movies. The point is to teach science in an entertaining way.
Decoupling kernel and distribution
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think it's ridiculous that people complain about how many BSDs there are when there are so many redundant Linux distros out there.
Maybe the largest procedural advatage Linux have over the BSD's is the decoupling of the kernel development from the os-distribution. The skills needed for the two are very different. Like all decoupling, it allows people to experiment with one, without affecting the other. And since the end-user product is the os-distribution, it allowed commercial interests to have their own unique distributions, without permanent forking of the kernel.
The bad luck of the free BSD's is that they all originate from the 386BSD distribution, which was bundled in the old Unix tradition.
I didn't see his argument for why NetBSD should be saved. Certainly, OpenBSD and Linux both provide "strong leadership", which is his major complaint.
Wouldn't it be more useful simply to ask NetBSD developers to start contributing to OpenBSD, Linux or DragonflyBSD, adding whatever they feel worth rescuing from NetBSD?
Swahili is a trade language. It has relatively few native speakers, but it is the secondary language for many in east Africa. So it is not really surprising that the native speakers alone wouldn't contribute a lot.
Most religions have no problem with evolution, it seems mostly confined to some protestant cults.
I think the basic problem is the "personal God" which can be reached by the individual through the Bible without the interference of professionals. It sound very nice idea (to get rid of the Church!), but it means that a 2000 year old book should be read by laymen, including people with little exposure to Literature. These people will have a hard time reading a multilayered text, and do the necessary transformations from a totally different society.
It seems likely that the ancestor we share with the other great apes would itself be caetgorized as an ape. So we evolved from apes, but technically, we still are a species of apes. The other great apes are not closer relate to each other than they are to us.
Your influence in free software depends on many things, such as the quantity and quality of your contributions, and your communication and people skills.
Actually, the GPL'ed output of bison it was considered a feature for some time. Enough time for byacc to gain ground. The exception was inserted because of the existence of byacc ment that the ability to use bison was no longer a incentive to release code as GPL.
The appropriate popularity comparison would be between byacc and bison.
It would be a good chance to introduce a better model of the solar system for the teaching purposes. The solar system consist of the Sun, the inner rocks, the asteroid belt, the gas giants, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud. This would probably give a better picture of the solar system, than the old model with a sun and nine planets. (For historical resons, the inner rocks, the gas giants, and the first discovered object in the Kuiper belt, are called planets).
> But, in what proportion compared to breathing, forest fires, cows, etc.
Breathing doesn't produce more CO2 than the plants you have eaten consumed when growing. It is for the same reason that an ethanol based car is theoretically CO2-neutral. The ethanol is produced from crops, which got their carbon from CO2 in the athmosphere.
Forest fires are not a problem if they are matched by a similar regrowth. Systematic deforestation can be a problem as it decrease the amount of carbound bound in the biomass. On the other hand, planting new forest on marginal land can be a way to bind carbon.
CO2 from vulcanic eruptions is more relevant, as this is "new" CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft did hold back the industry for about three decades, but they finally dropped the DOS based line of operating systems with XP.
We can still complain about their illegal and unethical business practises, and of course specific software glitches. But today, their OSes are as real as any other provider.
It was a good thing when it was only blue-collar jobs being outsourced. It meant cheaper goods for us. But now it is the jobs of the self-righteous and self-pitying American middle class being affected, making it an entirely different matter.
The GPL allows for "mere bundling" with propritary software.
Whether it is "mere bundling" or a derived work most likely depend not on the specific mechanism the two components use to communicate, but whether it happens through standard, predefined protocol.
If Jin already included a socket interface and a documented protocol for remote control, Maryanovsky has to live with the fact that someone used it (or he should have used the Alladin Licence).
If it was something Rabinovitch created for IChessU, he will have to pay up. He is not going to convince a judge it is "mere bundling".
Everything negative about Apple is automatically moderated down, the effect is far stronger than negative comments about Linux even here on /..
Apple does a lot of good, they produce some cool technology, and the contribute greatly to free software development.
But in this case, they are the Microsoft of online music sale. The problem is the tying between the iTunes store, and the iPod, which stiffle competition. If you have a new device you can't enter the market because you can't access the larger seller, iTunes. And if you have a new store you can't enter the market because you can't access the majority of devices. This is similar as what Microsoft is doing when they bundle software products.
Microsoft are temporarily on the side of the angels here, when someone elses proprietary technology is the market leader, Microsoft is a proponent of open and interchangable solutions. This last until they themselves become dominant.
Oh, and "DRM is evil" isn't the issue here. "Using DRM to lock out competition is evil" is the issue.
I enter text in Wikipedia, and it is automatically improved, especially with regard to spelling and grammar. Maybe it is done by a million monkeys, I don't care.
Occasionally I'm one of the monkeys, and fix mistakes that are obvious even to me. I don't see that as a big problem either.
...but in practice, it seems like the articles on prominent controversial topics tend to be excellent. The people who complain are usually people who have a strong partisan interest in the subject
The problem isn't 20 idiots. The problem is 1 idiot. The low quality articles are mostly in areas that doresn't have the wide interest, and thus have very few authors.
In order to properly use Wikipedia, you need to look at the history and talk page.
Only in the last couple of centuries have we had a protected childhood where children lived in a seperate world from the adults. If kids grow up faster today, and I think it might be the case that increased access to information about the world adults live in might do that, it is just a return to more natural state of affairs. I'm not worried.
I'm much more worried about people who want to turn back time and decrease our freedom under the under the motto "Will someone please think of the children!".
> A Superman who can push the Earth out of its orbit isn't fun for a writer to work with, any
> more than it is for reader above the age of 5 to enjoy.
Peter David's Supergirl did meet the silver age Supergirl in his last arch. The silver age Supergirl was standing on her hands, and explaining that she was trying to push Earth away from an approaching comet. The modern Supergirl correctly pointed out that it didn't work (it was her world, and her laws of physics), and that even if it had worked, the consequences would be far worse than the comet.
It did annoy me that silver age Supergirl did not bore herself into the ground, she was clearly able to put on more pressure than the ground could carry.
Anyway, the power level itself is not about realism or physical plausibility. It is about what kind of stories you want to write.
> They tried doing something similar with "The Flash," where-as he pulls power from something
> called the "Speed Force." This is also why he doesn't leave massive craters as he runs.
Wally West at one point also had to eat outragous amount of food to make of for the energy he spend.
Half of /.'s readers are from outside North America, and could easily fail a test that required specific American cultural knowledge. I wouldn't know what month the Superbowl is played, which is something I guess most Americans know, even those totally uninterested in sport.
/., "The name of Luke Skywalker's sister".
But most websites wouldn't want to exclude half their audience, so maybe an interest area specific question, like "The name of the country where the founder of Linux was born". Or with the new, broader focus of
The point of the article isn't to make fun of B-movies. The point is to teach science in an entertaining way.
Maybe the largest procedural advatage Linux have over the BSD's is the decoupling of the kernel development from the os-distribution. The skills needed for the two are very different. Like all decoupling, it allows people to experiment with one, without affecting the other. And since the end-user product is the os-distribution, it allowed commercial interests to have their own unique distributions, without permanent forking of the kernel.
The bad luck of the free BSD's is that they all originate from the 386BSD distribution, which was bundled in the old Unix tradition.
I didn't see his argument for why NetBSD should be saved. Certainly, OpenBSD and Linux both provide "strong leadership", which is his major complaint.
Wouldn't it be more useful simply to ask NetBSD developers to start contributing to OpenBSD, Linux or DragonflyBSD, adding whatever they feel worth rescuing from NetBSD?
Swahili is a trade language. It has relatively few native speakers, but it is the secondary language for many in east Africa. So it is not really surprising that the native speakers alone wouldn't contribute a lot.
The statistics seems rather arbitrary, though.
Most religions have no problem with evolution, it seems mostly confined to some protestant cults.
I think the basic problem is the "personal God" which can be reached by the individual through the Bible without the interference of professionals. It sound very nice idea (to get rid of the Church!), but it means that a 2000 year old book should be read by laymen, including people with little exposure to Literature. These people will have a hard time reading a multilayered text, and do the necessary transformations from a totally different society.
It seems likely that the ancestor we share with the other great apes would itself be caetgorized as an ape. So we evolved from apes, but technically, we still are a species of apes. The other great apes are not closer relate to each other than they are to us.
... its like you are stealing TV!
It might be their business model, but it is not our obligation to make it work.
Your influence in free software depends on many things, such as the quantity and quality of your contributions, and your communication and people skills.
The program need to be suid or run by root (on "hostile" input") for a local exploit to be relevant.
Of course, amanda probably run as root on "hostile" input, so local exploits can be relevant.
It is from memory, presumably discussions at gnu.misc.discuss at the time.
Actually, the GPL'ed output of bison it was considered a feature for some time. Enough time for byacc to gain ground. The exception was inserted because of the existence of byacc ment that the ability to use bison was no longer a incentive to release code as GPL.
The appropriate popularity comparison would be between byacc and bison.
It would be a good chance to introduce a better model of the solar system for the teaching purposes.
The solar system consist of the Sun, the inner rocks, the asteroid belt, the gas giants, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud.
This would probably give a better picture of the solar system, than the old model with a sun and nine planets.
(For historical resons, the inner rocks, the gas giants, and the first discovered object in the Kuiper belt, are called planets).
Does CNN has fans?
> But, in what proportion compared to breathing, forest fires, cows, etc.
Breathing doesn't produce more CO2 than the plants you have eaten consumed when growing. It is for the same reason that an ethanol based car is theoretically CO2-neutral. The ethanol is produced from crops, which got their carbon from CO2 in the athmosphere.
Forest fires are not a problem if they are matched by a similar regrowth. Systematic deforestation can be a problem as it decrease the amount of carbound bound in the biomass. On the other hand, planting new forest on marginal land can be a way to bind carbon.
CO2 from vulcanic eruptions is more relevant, as this is "new" CO2.