Why spoil such a wonderful weekend? Can't we please have a one-day moratorium, a brief respite without the word "Bush" being so obsessive-compulsively uttered?
For so long, String Theory has been politically correct and unassailable. Now all of a sudden there is a flurry of anti-String sentiment. During either trend, if you disagree with the current mode, you are considered a dope and an ignorant Luddite.
Maybe after this period, people can be less childlike and some serious discussions about its strengths and weaknesses can begin.
I was about to say the same thing. If this thing works as he says, then it would not be according to the theories he quoted, but some new principle, theory, or model yet undiscovered.
I'm very doubtful of this. But if the thing really works, then wonderful. Remember, most science is a set of ideas describing observed behaviors in nature. This might be something yet unobserved.
What he is talking about is the innate nature of those older computers to encourage people to tinker and create things. New machines do everything they can to hide the machinery from the users. Older ones gloried in the mechanics of computing. You actually bought a computer for the sake of having one of those Universal Machines that the magazines extolled, rather than a plain, emasculated "desktop." When was the last time you saw a kid with wires and a soldering iron, instead of an off-the-shelf brain dead consumer electronics device?
If so, then he can use any license he wants. He could wrap it in the User Must Wear Chicken Suit License if he so desires.
The Debian side itself says in the message that Mr. Schilling's is the original upstream code, and that he has been very supportive of them in the past.
It almost sounds as if they wanted to dictate to him what the terms should be, and they are unhappy that he is not complying.
An IT guy is always skulking around the office (as far as non-techies are concerned), and messing with other people's desks and computers. So he has the burden of being not just scrupulous and honest, but obviously so. He can't risk all of the goodwill and trust he so badly needs, merely for a single bite of a stale and badly made sandwich. Now, corned beef on a bagel is another matter. ^^
"Xara vs Inkscape" is a silly notion. I have been a member of the Inkscape project for years now; since before it began. We have recently started collaborating with the Xara guys. Inkscape and Xara have a wonderful relationship. There is no "vs." We are basically attacking the problem from different angles, that's all.
In many of the energy-for-nothing schemes I have seen, the usual trick is to have a physical and math model of the system, and then apply that model incorrectly. What they often do is take observed behaviour, design a model formula for it, and then use it with unobserved parameters.
An example of this, if that paragraph is too vague, is the Zero Displacement Engine. The "inventor" took a simple formula for the output power from an internal combustion engine, and noticed that if you take one of the parameters of the formula, piston displacement, and reduced it to zero, the formula says that you still have power being produced. Get this to run for a period of time, and Voila! Power x time = free energy! Of course, that "running" part is the trick that still needs to be figured out.
However, people should not cast these inventions aside. Whether they work or not is really not important. What they do is brighten our lives a bit with an enjoyable look into human aspirations. How boring life would be if people restricted themselves to the mundane.
I can think of no single piece of software that has enabled more people to create wonderful things with only their imaginations and a bit of skill. Take all of the pieces of software you love, and divide them into two piles: "built by GCC" or "built by anything else." Then you will see how impressive it is. Although users never see it, they use it every day. How many terabytes of data are served daily on the net by GCC-built software? And even the scripting languages you love were likely themselves built by GCC. GCC is the invisible root of our information society.
I don't believe in adulterating the GPL to make a non-standard version of it. And I don't think for one second that if a military entity wanted to use GPU (unlikely) that a license would stop them.
However, a lot of posters think that the licensors are somehow restricting the rights of downstream developers and users. They are not. Remember that a GPL-like license starts with the idea that you have no rights at all. Then it generously gives you plenty of usage rights, with only a few stipulations. But the code does not belong to Humanity at Large. It still belongs to the authors.
Though I think the clause is silly, I fully respect their right and desires to use it. Had they wanted to add a clause like "no using this software while wearing chicken suits," (stealing an idea from the Far Side), they have every right to do so. More power to them.
I seem to recall this from several years ago. If so, then the balancing would be even tougher, as the bouncing motion would need to find convenient points of opposition on the floor, and plan the bounces to try to hit them.
Space chips do have a few requirements that those on Earth don't. Ones that are exposed to the space environment need to be resistant to alpha particles (can cause bit flips). Power consumption must be as low as possible. And very important, especially in manned flight, is heat dissipation. Most common off-the-shelf laptops generate way too much heat to be used in a controlled life support system where heat must be carefully managed into and out of the system.
With the same logic, why use a laptop when a mainframe can do your word processing?
Being small and simple is precisely the point. Tiny stack machines give the opportunity for massive parallelism. Imagine hundreds or thousands of processors in a very small space, handling CPU intensive but relatively simple algorithms. How many such tiny processors could be printed onto a single chip?
Most computer users only consider the high-end chips that they use every day in their laptops and desktops. They are unaware of the amazing chip families at the other end of the spectrum; the new controllers and DSP's. IMHO, simple systems like FORTH will always have a role in ubiquitous computing.
I agree with what you say about common sense. Some people equate common sense with experience. But in this case, like many that we see every day, common sense is just a euphemism for an unreasoned conclusion.
I believe that journalists deserve protection, not for who they are, but for what they do. What must be protected are the freedoms of free press and free speech, not some elevated Fourth Estate, or some bohemian class of Observers. Rules for protecting press and speech need to be applied in a consistent manner, regardless of subject matter. But I do not think that extending protection to all of their endeavors is proper, if the only reason is some vague "chilling effect." It should be constrained to the act of reporting a news item itself. In the other aspects of their jobs and lives, they should live by the same laws as the rest of us.
Yet I have a bit of concern about both this case and the Judy Miller contempt case. In this one, prosecutors want evidence of a crime that is not part of a story. In the Judith Miller case, the secret information she reported was the crime. I'm not saying that either of the two should spend contempt-time in jail for not revealing their information. I really don't think they should have. Yet in both cases I can see the prosecutor's point of view. I don't agree with them, but I understand. Just as much as prosecutors should resist as much as possible the temptation to try to break a reporter's protection, so also should the reporter be very conservative in the invocation of that protection.
I personally have no concern about what one weird guy or the other thinks. I will use whichever license fits into my intentions for my code. I personally almost like the idea of anti-DRM. Why? If I am generous enough to let you use my code, then it would be unfair for you to use my code to be selfish to others. Simple as that. But beyond that, I really don't care. All I really want is the basic tenet of GPL: if I give it to you and you use it, then you should be willing to do the same for others.
Remember, GPL does not take rights away. It starts with the premise that you have no right at all to use my code. It then gives you generous rights under easy conditions. Not bad, really. If a person thinks that GPL is too onerous, then he does not need to use it. Remember, it's my code.
I have been working for months on ODF output from Inkscape. Although I am a great fan of ODF, it has become apparent to me that there is a weakness in technical specifications and programmer's references. The ODF project seems to be heavily biased in its efforts toward advocacy, with little energy left over to clean up the Oasis specification, provide application information, and most importantly, provide a test bed.
There really needs to be a reference renderer for ODF. Something independent from OpenOffice, with examples of all of the grammar and semantics in the spec.
He implies that this is a middle-ground solution, however, this "solution" is of the opinion that tabs are what are intended for formatting. So it's really not a compromise at all, but an evil Tabbist plot! (j/k) ^^
but it is hoped that many editors will be updated to support this new way of interpreting tab characters
Hoped by whom?
However, this type of formatting has been around for a while, in better language-sensitive editors, where you can adjust for formatting for the various coding contexts.
A better compromise would be to read any given code file for the given language, sense the coding style of the original document and interpret and display it on the editing widget in the manner you think the author wanted. Preserve the original document internally as a document tree and at save time, either save in exactly the same coding style as the original, or in the style the user wants. This would be similar to XML DOM readers that preserve an exact model of the original document in memory. And it is displayed according to its semantic meaning, not a tab or space count.
This would respect the coding style of the original author, while giving options to the user of the editor. A much better compromise, I think.
This seems almost analogous to dark image analysis in astronomy. This started out as merely taking a photo of nothing, to find the aberrations of the collector. This dark image would be subtracted from the target image, to produce an improved version with a lot of the artifacts removed. It has since grown to basically modeling the environment, and judging what an image of nothing would look like according to the model.
This has become such an icon of the game industry, the company could put a blank CD in a box and still sell it, if the box was pretty enough. It need not have any intrinsic value. This would work in the same model as printed Enron shares, which, although worthless, sold quite well as souvenirs.
Any editor with good syntax highlighting would probably give you most of what you want. Nedit has long been my favorite. Simple, light, and with (last time I counted) 28 grammars.
Slashdot Mirror
Why spoil such a wonderful weekend? Can't we please have a one-day moratorium, a brief respite without the word "Bush" being so obsessive-compulsively uttered?
Maybe after this period, people can be less childlike and some serious discussions about its strengths and weaknesses can begin.
2x2=4. Doubling the resolution is 4 times the pixels ^^
But, yes, I am excited about Friday, too.
I'm very doubtful of this. But if the thing really works, then wonderful. Remember, most science is a set of ideas describing observed behaviors in nature. This might be something yet unobserved.
- Everything you say is all lies
- All of the events you quote were staged for the purpose of generating all lies
- Everything everyone else says is all lies, or, if it is true, is taken out of context in such a way as to become all lies
While I, of course, speak only the truth.What he is talking about is the innate nature of those older computers to encourage people to tinker and create things. New machines do everything they can to hide the machinery from the users. Older ones gloried in the mechanics of computing. You actually bought a computer for the sake of having one of those Universal Machines that the magazines extolled, rather than a plain, emasculated "desktop." When was the last time you saw a kid with wires and a soldering iron, instead of an off-the-shelf brain dead consumer electronics device?
The Debian side itself says in the message that Mr. Schilling's is the original upstream code, and that he has been very supportive of them in the past.
It almost sounds as if they wanted to dictate to him what the terms should be, and they are unhappy that he is not complying.
I have seen it on our local cable provider, Time Warner Cable in Houston. What's sad is how insulting this is to the intelligence of the audience.
An IT guy is always skulking around the office (as far as non-techies are concerned), and messing with other people's desks and computers. So he has the burden of being not just scrupulous and honest, but obviously so. He can't risk all of the goodwill and trust he so badly needs, merely for a single bite of a stale and badly made sandwich. Now, corned beef on a bagel is another matter. ^^
"Xara vs Inkscape" is a silly notion. I have been a member of the Inkscape project for years now; since before it began. We have recently started collaborating with the Xara guys. Inkscape and Xara have a wonderful relationship. There is no "vs." We are basically attacking the problem from different angles, that's all.
An example of this, if that paragraph is too vague, is the Zero Displacement Engine. The "inventor" took a simple formula for the output power from an internal combustion engine, and noticed that if you take one of the parameters of the formula, piston displacement, and reduced it to zero, the formula says that you still have power being produced. Get this to run for a period of time, and Voila! Power x time = free energy! Of course, that "running" part is the trick that still needs to be figured out.
However, people should not cast these inventions aside. Whether they work or not is really not important. What they do is brighten our lives a bit with an enjoyable look into human aspirations. How boring life would be if people restricted themselves to the mundane.
I can think of no single piece of software that has enabled more people to create wonderful things with only their imaginations and a bit of skill. Take all of the pieces of software you love, and divide them into two piles: "built by GCC" or "built by anything else." Then you will see how impressive it is. Although users never see it, they use it every day. How many terabytes of data are served daily on the net by GCC-built software? And even the scripting languages you love were likely themselves built by GCC. GCC is the invisible root of our information society.
However, a lot of posters think that the licensors are somehow restricting the rights of downstream developers and users. They are not. Remember that a GPL-like license starts with the idea that you have no rights at all. Then it generously gives you plenty of usage rights, with only a few stipulations. But the code does not belong to Humanity at Large. It still belongs to the authors.
Though I think the clause is silly, I fully respect their right and desires to use it. Had they wanted to add a clause like "no using this software while wearing chicken suits," (stealing an idea from the Far Side), they have every right to do so. More power to them.
Here is a paper about it.
I seem to recall this from several years ago. If so, then the balancing would be even tougher, as the bouncing motion would need to find convenient points of opposition on the floor, and plan the bounces to try to hit them.
Space chips do have a few requirements that those on Earth don't. Ones that are exposed to the space environment need to be resistant to alpha particles (can cause bit flips). Power consumption must be as low as possible. And very important, especially in manned flight, is heat dissipation. Most common off-the-shelf laptops generate way too much heat to be used in a controlled life support system where heat must be carefully managed into and out of the system.
Being small and simple is precisely the point. Tiny stack machines give the opportunity for massive parallelism. Imagine hundreds or thousands of processors in a very small space, handling CPU intensive but relatively simple algorithms. How many such tiny processors could be printed onto a single chip?
Most computer users only consider the high-end chips that they use every day in their laptops and desktops. They are unaware of the amazing chip families at the other end of the spectrum; the new controllers and DSP's. IMHO, simple systems like FORTH will always have a role in ubiquitous computing.
I believe that journalists deserve protection, not for who they are, but for what they do. What must be protected are the freedoms of free press and free speech, not some elevated Fourth Estate, or some bohemian class of Observers. Rules for protecting press and speech need to be applied in a consistent manner, regardless of subject matter. But I do not think that extending protection to all of their endeavors is proper, if the only reason is some vague "chilling effect." It should be constrained to the act of reporting a news item itself. In the other aspects of their jobs and lives, they should live by the same laws as the rest of us.
Yet I have a bit of concern about both this case and the Judy Miller contempt case. In this one, prosecutors want evidence of a crime that is not part of a story. In the Judith Miller case, the secret information she reported was the crime. I'm not saying that either of the two should spend contempt-time in jail for not revealing their information. I really don't think they should have. Yet in both cases I can see the prosecutor's point of view. I don't agree with them, but I understand. Just as much as prosecutors should resist as much as possible the temptation to try to break a reporter's protection, so also should the reporter be very conservative in the invocation of that protection.
Remember, GPL does not take rights away. It starts with the premise that you have no right at all to use my code. It then gives you generous rights under easy conditions. Not bad, really. If a person thinks that GPL is too onerous, then he does not need to use it. Remember, it's my code.
There is a brief mention of MySpace having problems here. No conspiracy.
There really needs to be a reference renderer for ODF. Something independent from OpenOffice, with examples of all of the grammar and semantics in the spec.
However, this type of formatting has been around for a while, in better language-sensitive editors, where you can adjust for formatting for the various coding contexts.
A better compromise would be to read any given code file for the given language, sense the coding style of the original document and interpret and display it on the editing widget in the manner you think the author wanted. Preserve the original document internally as a document tree and at save time, either save in exactly the same coding style as the original, or in the style the user wants. This would be similar to XML DOM readers that preserve an exact model of the original document in memory. And it is displayed according to its semantic meaning, not a tab or space count.
This would respect the coding style of the original author, while giving options to the user of the editor. A much better compromise, I think.
This seems almost analogous to dark image analysis in astronomy. This started out as merely taking a photo of nothing, to find the aberrations of the collector. This dark image would be subtracted from the target image, to produce an improved version with a lot of the artifacts removed. It has since grown to basically modeling the environment, and judging what an image of nothing would look like according to the model.
This has become such an icon of the game industry, the company could put a blank CD in a box and still sell it, if the box was pretty enough. It need not have any intrinsic value. This would work in the same model as printed Enron shares, which, although worthless, sold quite well as souvenirs.
Any editor with good syntax highlighting would probably give you most of what you want. Nedit has long been my favorite. Simple, light, and with (last time I counted) 28 grammars.