Curse you for spouting common sense on Slashdot! Don't you know that this is the place for the "I'm smarter than everyone else because I'm self-absorbed" segment of society? This is no place for making sense! If you don't have a left-wing, liberal slant on the story, keep your opinion to yourself!
Since I'm married to one of them, it's pretty damn hard for me to ignore the other 50%. And, since this is/., I feel pretty safe playing the odds that the vast majority of people to whom I reply are male - just as you seem to have done (since you assumed that I'm one of the 50% that, generally speaking, doesn't search for dicks.)
And that is the problem that people have with Stallman and GPL3. It becomes more than a software license - it becomes some sort of software/hardware combination license that divides users into two distinct and most definitely unequal classes. If you are a user who is also a hardware developer, your rights become more limited than the user who is not a hardware developer.
GPL3 becomes something of an imitator of DRM in that it imposes limits on the use of intellectual property. In the case of DRM, the limitation is generally on the use of software. In the case of GPL3, the limitation is on the use of hardware. In both cases, the market should drive the use of the intellectual property - certainly in the case of DRM, that seems to be happening (non-DRM music versus the DRM-encumbered variety). The same case could be made for GPL2 versus GPL3. The market is capable of determining if there is a need. The problem seems to be that RMS, et al, are concerned that the market may not see things their way, so they'd rather create a more restrictive license than GPL2 - one that dictates how the software can be used on a piece of hardware.
Now, I agree, that it seems that calling GPL3 "more restrictive" may seem like some kind of corporate doublespeak, but it's not. GPL2 is a software license. It doesn't place any requirements on the way that hardware must interact with the software. It relies on the market to decide if a piece of software is appropriate for use on a piece of hardware. GPL3 places additional requirements on the hardware - even though it's a software license. It creates conditions that disallow the use of the software on certain pieces of hardware.
We talk about Tivoization as if Tivo is the only game in town. Obviously it's not, although it is the biggest game in town. Yet the same thing can be said about Apple versus, say some guy ripping CDs into MP3s. Apple's still the biggest game in town, but the market provides for "freer" alternatives.
The end result of GPL3 is that it makes a certain class of users more free, but makes another class more restricted. And by restricting the second class of users, it has the potential to restrict the availability of software/hardware combinations to yet a different class of users - the people who want a turnkey system and never plan to tinker with it.
However, the ultimate choice of GPL2 or GPL3 (or any license, for that matter) is up to the software developer. And I guess that we should all be thankful that there are enough licenses out there that we don't have to be stuck with a one size fits all solution.
Not only that, but is it possible that other countries besides the US launch "secret" satellites? Like, I don't know, the Chinese, the Russians...or the French?
Indeed - and it isn't even quoting US law. The author is attempting to twist a Supreme Court decision against a domestic company that influenced a domestic standards agency. And not just any standards agency, but the one that generates the standard electrical code that is at the heart of municipal building ordinances.
And, to boot, if a law was broken, it was not in the US. Maybe Swedish law is different in this regard, because I can't imagine that a US court will decide that it has jurisdiction over an incident that happened in another country.
That's not what I meant. The form factor problem is the one of being able to fit enough chips, passives and PCB into a 1.8" or 2.5" enclosure and still be able to have a decent amount of storage (and not burn up).
In your example, yes, CF will get the job done for now, but flash transfer rates are increasing rapidly, latencies are decreasing rapidly and we should be seeing SSDs by the end of next year that contain purpose-built components designed for high speed, low parasitic loading and low latencies. Even now a 32GB or 64GB SATA SSD is a much more elegant solution than a bunch of CF cards plugged into adapters. And in the case of a notebook, a 64GB drive can easily be the only mass storage device you need.
It's not special technology - it's existing technology. That's what happens in a USB thumb drive and it's what will happen in an SSD. We thought of the problem several years ago and made it go away. Distribution of data is not the problem in SSDs. Form factor and driver loading is the problem. But since those are proprietary issues, they're not going to be discussed here by anybody who knows anything.
Seriously? You would happily pay 60% or more of your income for that? Consider just how much of your income goes to federal, state and local income taxes. What about sales tax? Oh, and part of your auto registration fee is a tax. Property tax, if you own some. Excise taxes on all sorts of commodities. Gas tax. I'm sure I left out a few. Now double it.
J+J apparently use the red cross on first aids to make them look like Red Cross first aid kids, so this is really really twisted
J&J licensed the symbol from the Red Cross in the late 1800s. I'd say that makes the case that the Red Cross wanted J&J's first aid kits to look like Red Cross first aid kits, particularly since J&J has been putting the symbol on bandages for, oh, about 120 years.
I've got a Cingular 8525. I really want to like it, especially since it wasn't exactly cheap (although the iPhone makes it seem that way). But I just don't. It does a lot of things, but none of them well. It's a passable, but inconvenient phone. It's a passable but inconvenient palmtop computer. It's a passable, but inconvenient internet appliance.
In the end, the 8525 sits in my desk drawer and I use my old Razr instead. It's a crappy Internet phone, has no chance at doing the palmtop thing, but it's an excellent telephone. And I can put it in my pocket without looking like I've got a really uncomfortable tumor.
Part of me would still like an iPhone, though. Thank god it's the part of me that doesn't control my wallet.
All the other places the heat flow is too low to be usable for anything else than house heating.
Which is ok. Heating with hot water means no heating with oil, gas or electricity. We've been doing it in my city for over a hundred years. It works very well and is a lot cheaper than the conventional alternatives.
Of course, AC in the summer kind of offsets the winter savings...
What I love is when you see a reporter riding around in a truck full of militants in Iraq/Afghanistan/*stan and the militants are firing mortars, RPGs and automatic weapons at people and the reporter is doing nothing. "Just covering the story, you know?"
But when it comes to something like accusing someone of being a pedophile then suddenly the reporters become law enforcement officers.
The difference between the two is that the first is covering the story and the second is creating the story (in the specific case of the Dateline situation.) It's not really a fine line.
Personally, I don't think that either case ought to happen, but I'm not running the world. At least not yet.
I'm not making a point that anyone is rushing to embrace Vista or Office 2007. You said that you had a long list. Four is short. Six is still short.
The same case could have been made about XP as compared to NT. As an example, the Fortune 500 company for which I work did not adopt XP over NT until months after SP2 had been released. Now, it may be that Vista will be the new ME, but that remains to be seen. A somewhat dubious list of six organizations that, in varying degrees, have made anti-Vista statements isn't really meaningful.
Processor speed limits come from heat generated by switching speeds, combined with heat from leakage current. Improved transistor density actually improves the heat generated by switching, but has to be balanced against the increased leakage current from a smaller lithography process.
Yes, that's true, but do not discount the effects of die capacitance. Each transistor presents a load to the signal, each interconnect presents a time delay and when you put them together, you have to overcome the problem of the edge rate of the signal either slowing down and failing to meet voltage margins or overshooting the voltage margins and damaging the transistors. The compromise must also meet the logic's setup and hold requirements and the interconnect has to be sufficiently short for the signal to transit in less than one bit period.
Heat is easy to deal with. Bigger heat sinks, more air flow. Moving signals from one side of the die to the other...that's hard. Parasitic capacitance, inductance and resistance make it harder.
Now, if you really want to make it hard, try moving those signals from the CPU to the memory controller, then out to the memory modules. If you thought that getting a high speed digital signal across a centimeter of silicon was hard, try moving it across six inches of PCB.
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Did you know that the word "gullible" is not in the dictionary?
What is this "Mac" company that you speak of?
Debian isn't aimed at grannies or the average corporate joe. Its primary user base is geeks and sysadmins who need rock-solid systems.
The title of www.debian.org: "Debian -- The Universal Operating System".
Nah, the big difference between /. and Digg is that on /., only a few morons control all the information.
Oh, and there's no self correction facility (Slash it?)
Curse you for spouting common sense on Slashdot! Don't you know that this is the place for the "I'm smarter than everyone else because I'm self-absorbed" segment of society? This is no place for making sense! If you don't have a left-wing, liberal slant on the story, keep your opinion to yourself!
Since I'm married to one of them, it's pretty damn hard for me to ignore the other 50%. And, since this is /., I feel pretty safe playing the odds that the vast majority of people to whom I reply are male - just as you seem to have done (since you assumed that I'm one of the 50% that, generally speaking, doesn't search for dicks.)
Work on that sense of humor.
You're searching for dicks?
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
And that is the problem that people have with Stallman and GPL3. It becomes more than a software license - it becomes some sort of software/hardware combination license that divides users into two distinct and most definitely unequal classes. If you are a user who is also a hardware developer, your rights become more limited than the user who is not a hardware developer.
GPL3 becomes something of an imitator of DRM in that it imposes limits on the use of intellectual property. In the case of DRM, the limitation is generally on the use of software. In the case of GPL3, the limitation is on the use of hardware. In both cases, the market should drive the use of the intellectual property - certainly in the case of DRM, that seems to be happening (non-DRM music versus the DRM-encumbered variety). The same case could be made for GPL2 versus GPL3. The market is capable of determining if there is a need. The problem seems to be that RMS, et al, are concerned that the market may not see things their way, so they'd rather create a more restrictive license than GPL2 - one that dictates how the software can be used on a piece of hardware.
Now, I agree, that it seems that calling GPL3 "more restrictive" may seem like some kind of corporate doublespeak, but it's not. GPL2 is a software license. It doesn't place any requirements on the way that hardware must interact with the software. It relies on the market to decide if a piece of software is appropriate for use on a piece of hardware. GPL3 places additional requirements on the hardware - even though it's a software license. It creates conditions that disallow the use of the software on certain pieces of hardware.
We talk about Tivoization as if Tivo is the only game in town. Obviously it's not, although it is the biggest game in town. Yet the same thing can be said about Apple versus, say some guy ripping CDs into MP3s. Apple's still the biggest game in town, but the market provides for "freer" alternatives.
The end result of GPL3 is that it makes a certain class of users more free, but makes another class more restricted. And by restricting the second class of users, it has the potential to restrict the availability of software/hardware combinations to yet a different class of users - the people who want a turnkey system and never plan to tinker with it.
However, the ultimate choice of GPL2 or GPL3 (or any license, for that matter) is up to the software developer. And I guess that we should all be thankful that there are enough licenses out there that we don't have to be stuck with a one size fits all solution.
Not only that, but is it possible that other countries besides the US launch "secret" satellites? Like, I don't know, the Chinese, the Russians...or the French?
Indeed - and it isn't even quoting US law. The author is attempting to twist a Supreme Court decision against a domestic company that influenced a domestic standards agency. And not just any standards agency, but the one that generates the standard electrical code that is at the heart of municipal building ordinances.
And, to boot, if a law was broken, it was not in the US. Maybe Swedish law is different in this regard, because I can't imagine that a US court will decide that it has jurisdiction over an incident that happened in another country.
That's not what I meant. The form factor problem is the one of being able to fit enough chips, passives and PCB into a 1.8" or 2.5" enclosure and still be able to have a decent amount of storage (and not burn up).
In your example, yes, CF will get the job done for now, but flash transfer rates are increasing rapidly, latencies are decreasing rapidly and we should be seeing SSDs by the end of next year that contain purpose-built components designed for high speed, low parasitic loading and low latencies. Even now a 32GB or 64GB SATA SSD is a much more elegant solution than a bunch of CF cards plugged into adapters. And in the case of a notebook, a 64GB drive can easily be the only mass storage device you need.
It's not special technology - it's existing technology. That's what happens in a USB thumb drive and it's what will happen in an SSD. We thought of the problem several years ago and made it go away. Distribution of data is not the problem in SSDs. Form factor and driver loading is the problem. But since those are proprietary issues, they're not going to be discussed here by anybody who knows anything.
Seriously? You would happily pay 60% or more of your income for that? Consider just how much of your income goes to federal, state and local income taxes. What about sales tax? Oh, and part of your auto registration fee is a tax. Property tax, if you own some. Excise taxes on all sorts of commodities. Gas tax. I'm sure I left out a few. Now double it.
Could it be that there's something not quite right here in America?
Yes, our taxes are too damn low!
The original copper network was a private/public compromise built on private property seized by the government with its power of immanent domain.
I wouldn't call a utility easement a property seizure by "immanent" domain. Nothing was taken.
So that they can be just as misinformed as you appear to be?
I think that you have the ARC confused with the ICRC. They're not the same.
Also, you're simplifying a very complex problem.
J+J apparently use the red cross on first aids to make them look like Red Cross first aid kids, so this is really really twisted
J&J licensed the symbol from the Red Cross in the late 1800s. I'd say that makes the case that the Red Cross wanted J&J's first aid kits to look like Red Cross first aid kits, particularly since J&J has been putting the symbol on bandages for, oh, about 120 years.
except that J&J stole that symbol for use as their own trademark?
Clara Barton licensed the symbol to J&J exclusively, as the article says.
I've got a Cingular 8525. I really want to like it, especially since it wasn't exactly cheap (although the iPhone makes it seem that way). But I just don't. It does a lot of things, but none of them well. It's a passable, but inconvenient phone. It's a passable but inconvenient palmtop computer. It's a passable, but inconvenient internet appliance.
In the end, the 8525 sits in my desk drawer and I use my old Razr instead. It's a crappy Internet phone, has no chance at doing the palmtop thing, but it's an excellent telephone. And I can put it in my pocket without looking like I've got a really uncomfortable tumor.
Part of me would still like an iPhone, though. Thank god it's the part of me that doesn't control my wallet.
All the other places the heat flow is too low to be usable for anything else than house heating.
Which is ok. Heating with hot water means no heating with oil, gas or electricity. We've been doing it in my city for over a hundred years. It works very well and is a lot cheaper than the conventional alternatives.
Of course, AC in the summer kind of offsets the winter savings...
What I love is when you see a reporter riding around in a truck full of militants in Iraq/Afghanistan/*stan and the militants are firing mortars, RPGs and automatic weapons at people and the reporter is doing nothing. "Just covering the story, you know?"
But when it comes to something like accusing someone of being a pedophile then suddenly the reporters become law enforcement officers.
The difference between the two is that the first is covering the story and the second is creating the story (in the specific case of the Dateline situation.) It's not really a fine line.
Personally, I don't think that either case ought to happen, but I'm not running the world. At least not yet.
I'm not making a point that anyone is rushing to embrace Vista or Office 2007. You said that you had a long list. Four is short. Six is still short.
The same case could have been made about XP as compared to NT. As an example, the Fortune 500 company for which I work did not adopt XP over NT until months after SP2 had been released. Now, it may be that Vista will be the new ME, but that remains to be seen. A somewhat dubious list of six organizations that, in varying degrees, have made anti-Vista statements isn't really meaningful.
You need to point out the long list of organizations rejecting both Office 2007 and Vista...
Your list is comprised of BBC, Oracle, FAA and DOT. That's not long.
If the school district wants to be in step with government and business, it needs to hold off and consider migrating to gnu/linux.
You're kidding, right? I mean, you meant to be sarcastic, didn't you?
Processor speed limits come from heat generated by switching speeds, combined with heat from leakage current. Improved transistor density actually improves the heat generated by switching, but has to be balanced against the increased leakage current from a smaller lithography process.
Yes, that's true, but do not discount the effects of die capacitance. Each transistor presents a load to the signal, each interconnect presents a time delay and when you put them together, you have to overcome the problem of the edge rate of the signal either slowing down and failing to meet voltage margins or overshooting the voltage margins and damaging the transistors. The compromise must also meet the logic's setup and hold requirements and the interconnect has to be sufficiently short for the signal to transit in less than one bit period.
Heat is easy to deal with. Bigger heat sinks, more air flow. Moving signals from one side of the die to the other...that's hard. Parasitic capacitance, inductance and resistance make it harder.
Now, if you really want to make it hard, try moving those signals from the CPU to the memory controller, then out to the memory modules. If you thought that getting a high speed digital signal across a centimeter of silicon was hard, try moving it across six inches of PCB.