I too like the GIMP interface in many places, and use it exclusively for retouching my photographs (professionally published, as for instance in the Spaish edition of Rolling Stone). I export my results to a Photoshop.psd file, including a layer with the untouched photo for the editors to have a reference of what came out of the camera, and I send it to the photo editors. I don't miss CMYK or colour matching because, you know, they have that at the magazine.
However, it would be good to have a completely tweakable interface. I have already commented somewhere that right now many 3D modeling apps are configurable to work like other apps, and that you have a vi mode for Emacs and Emacs bindings for vi, and nobody finds it strange that people like it that way. Problem is, vi and Emacs are used by coders, and coders can build their damn interface themselves. Most users of GIMP (and certainly most advanced graphics manipulators) can't. But they are right in saying they work better the way they do. Users are not idiots, and they know how they work better. What we need is not really "reskinning the Gimp, and more", but just the ability to tweak what really matters to you.
Not all features are equally important, or used equally frequently. Right now one can reassign shortcuts and move menus around, but modificator keys (keys that act as a "shift" to active tools) are still hard-coded, or were last time I looked. (Caveat: I haven't tried to configure it in a Photoshop way in a long time, as I am already used to the GIMP's UI, so I don't miss Photoshop's that much).
The thing I would love to have in GIMP is the space-alt-ctrl trio of modificators to invoke the hand tool and the zoom-in and zoom-out tools while in any mode. This is so powerful a way of working that I am almost religious about it, despite having retrained my muscular memory not to hit the spacebar with my thumb every time I want to readjust the working area. Also, later versions of Photoshop has evolved really nifty docked option palletes for tools (like the search feature in Firefox) that I haven't really used (as I am now a GIMP user), but they look fantastic.
Finally, some of us liked the MDI interface behaviour: sometimes, when you are editing photos, it is all you are doing (see below for single-app computing), and the focus behaviour of Photoshop is much saner than the Gimp's in many places. I know this is not the Gimp but the X11/WindowManager combo that provides window management; maybe what some users need is a PhotoGimpWM.
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, some of us who ask for certain Photoshoppy-features in Gimp don't want a clone of Photoshop. What want is the ability to really customise the way we work in a Photoshop-like app (and, like it or not, Gimp is Photoshop-like, see below) in the features that matter to us. Other people would like a Gimp preference option that adds a complete "behaviour" of the most-used and learned photo editor in the world. Think PhotoGimp on steroids, and if I were a coder working on the Gimp (sadly I am only a punter), this would be my first feature to add for propietary-software refugees' sake. Free Software being coded by volunteers, we can't make them do what we want... but that doesn't make our needs and wishes irrelevant or wrong. Just unenforceable;)
I have worked in TV with people using the Quantel series of graphical pallettes (concretely the superb HAL), and their gestural interface had nothing to do with Photoshop and Gimp's WIMP paradigm. However I would love the Gimp to have support for its dedicated clicker [note] for my left hand while I work with the pen in my right hand. I wouldn't mind to try the HAL's gestural interface either: it seems like a right timesaver, although I don't know how it would fare in a multi-purpose computer running other programs at the same time. In non-windowed environments where the only thing running is the graphics editor, however, gestural interfaces to be the right thing for bringing up pallett
Otherwise, I completely agree. Animating faces is a Turing-complete (as in Turing's test, not Turing Machine) problem, that will only be achieved by machines when/if they achieve full humanlike intelligence.
> The Debian project puts ideals and arguments over them ahead of the people who just want to use the software.
That is false. By making sure that all software in Debian is free, Debian puts the interest of people who just want to use *free* software ahead of anything else.
For some users, the hard-line approach regarding copyrights might be the best protection. I am thinking of companies and administrations who need to put in a severe compliance policy for all their free and open source software. Using Debian might well be the way for them: they would know not only that their stable is rock solid, but also that their code and licenses have been scrutinised with a zeal otherwise reserved to IBM's lawyers flaying SCO's and Slasdhot users cutting hairs in four lenghtwise.
The same goes for users/developers that care that they are really contributing to Free and Open Source Software, and not contributing to copyright infringement. I think it is unfair to say of Debian that they are making things difficult; it is the copyright establishment that is making things difficult. Debian are only following the law.
In the particular case of Firefox vs Debian, read the archived Firefox-logo-trademark bugzilla discussion, and you will see that this is a problem with Mozilla's need to defend their trademarks rather than with Debian. Mozilla used to give Debian a dispensation, and now they aren't doing that. Mozilla needs to protect their trademarks (I don't think they are the bad guys, the law forces them to defend their Firefox trademark just as it has forced Debian to defend theirs in the past), and that protection is incompatible with the DFSG. So goes it.
Unfortunately, you can't pick and choose the law. Neither can Debian, or Mozilla. But don't blame Debian for picking the compromise that you wouldn't have. It is pretty much a forced choice once you run yourself by the DFSG.
Finally, I read the discussion again yesterday, and there were a couple of proposals on the table that had not been answered yet. One by Mike Hommey involved using a non-copyrighted Firefox logo with the trademark owners' permission. THis might work with the added proviso (pointed out in another comment) that the DFSG, which doesn't allow coyright licenses specific to Debian, would however allow trademark permissions specific to Debian. As far as I see it, the conversation hasn't ended yet. The "rename Firefox" is the currently winning solution, but nobody has been uncivil or thrown the towel.
Of course, hedging a headline and stating that "Debian and Mozilla in discussions about misuse of the Firefox Trademark" is not as dramatic as "Firefox to be renamed", and would not have attracted as much conversation.
Fame and prestige gets you better jobs in academia. If you invent an algorithm worth the paper it is written on, at least.
Software patents can also keep a large number of programmers from earning money. If you are a programmer, software patents mean you can't just write your code without worrying if any snippet is patented. Most likely some of them will be, look at the patented web shop that the FFII annotated. Programmers shouldn't have to pay rent on algorithms, never mind whether they are trivial or hard, learnt from a textbook or self-developed.
Software patents are just that: rent on mathematical ideas, expressed in a way we call "algorithms". I don't see any benefit in allowing some individuals to collect rent from all the others for a resource (ideas) that can be easily duplicated, has powerful positive externalities and very low negative internalities (their side-effects are enormously and they good cost comparatively little to produce).
The truth is that everybody needs money, and most people have to work for it. The government shouldn't give anyone monopoly powers unless they can prove society, and not the rent-seekers alone, will also benefit from the trade. Software patents benefit the limited number of people who can afford them, not the majority of society, so we should not have them. This way we can all (that includes you) have more wealth, or as you said, money.
> writing my daughter's birth announcement in C and GPLing it
Do you have a link? It sounds wonderfully weird and hipppy-hackerish, with a side order of baby smell (sometimes good, and sometimes bad, but babies are always smelly).
Unless you didn't really write such an announcement, in which case shame on you, and on me for biting.
> Patents are there so that if you invent something, someone else can't copy it and mass > produce it cheaper than you can, without having paid anything for the development.
Actually no. Patents are there to provide an incentive for disclosure. You don't get the monopoly powers of a patent in order to protect your invention, you get monopoly powers in exchange for advancing the common good by revealing your methods to everyone. That is why the law (European Patent Convention, article 52a doesn't allow business methods patents, or algorithm patents. Business methods are revealed by your executing them, so the monopoly would be in exchange for nothing. And mathematics (which is what algorithms are) have their own mechanism for disclosure, which is scholarly publication.
> If I invent a new software algorithm, and it is not patented, then someone can copy it > (not a copy of the code, but of the process) into their own software, which they have > far greater resources to distribute and undercut on price. > Why should I spend time inventing new algorithms, then?
The cost of inventing an algorithm (a really novel one, like the RSA encryption sheme, not bogus ones like the XOR patent for writing to screen memory) is low enough (one salary, paper, pencil, cofee) that the current system of incentives (fame as a mathematician/computer scientist, peer-reviewed publications, tenure track) is high enough to provide society with algorithms. This is not the case with physical-word inventions, where the cost of one working prototype is the price of all the physical resources that went into it, and the monopoly power of a patent, if well-tuned, can be a good incentive to publication of diescoveries that would otherwise remain trade secrets.
The software patent system does not promote investment in algorithm research, it promotes investment in patent lawyers.
European developers would still have access to US Vista, so I don't think a lack of distribution in Europe would harm them. The declarations pointed to the negative economic effects of European enterprises not upgrading next year. I am still dumfounded about that unless, of course, he means what he thinks: that it will be bad economic news for MIcrosoft's bottom line.
I am still running Windows 2000 in a 2001 desktop machine that does all I need from Windows and even runs Half-Life 2 with all the bells and whistles turned off. If I were still working at the corporate desk this box would still be overpowered, and I think the same applies to 99% of the corporate workforce in Europe.
Mine is going to be a Trolltech-designed Linux-Running Greenphone. Sooner or later someone will make a Palm clone interface for it (or even better, a Newton clone) and all will be golden. And it will run Python out of the box, so you should be happy with it too.
I will have to wait a bit, alas, for I just bought a Treo 650 three weeks ago. It hasn't crashed once since either, so I am quite happy with it. Now, if I could just find a cheap screenless bluetooth GPS unit to go with it...
In the Barcelona Conference, Stallman and Moglen pointed out that the compatibility clause wasn't done with any particular license in mind, but just to make it easier for people to share and mix code under GPL and *any other free licenses* that fulfill the proper set of criteria. Stallman, however, specified that the Apache license was one they were particularly interested in making compatible with the GPL v3. Moglen made the same comment later.
So yes, it can be safely said that compatibility with the Apache 2.0 license is an explicit goal, and will be achieved through the clause that allows added restrictions such as certain forms of patent retaliation clauses.
> To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers
Care to share some examples?
One that I love is the answer Jimmy Wales gave during the Q+A after a presentation at the CopyFIGHT festival last year in Barcelona: "Maybe kids should not be using Wikipedia for their school work. But they should definitely be discussing in wikipedia talk pages, and even writing wikipedia articles together with their teachers".
Stop reading if you havent't seen Terminator 2 or played Half Life: spoilers ahead.
UK movie critic Jim McClellan wrote about his wife watching Terminator 2 without having seen any trailer or advance warning. She thought Arine was still the baddie, and saw the scene at the mall (with the flowers and the shotgun and the second Terminator) the way it had been scripted: as a surprise, and as a revealing of a key plot element: namely that Arnie was this time a good "guy".
I experienced the same surprise in Half Life, as I went in and played it without reading much abut it first. About 1/5th into the game, when a scientist came to me and said "at last, the army is here!", I went down a staircase, and lo and behold, there was a soldier! Good news! And then he shot. A. Scientst. OMFG.
Call me naive, but I had read nothing about the game, and I did not expect that. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", they say, and less of all in a fucking action movie^W videogame, but hey, I was playing, I was kinda distracted (or well immersed into the suspension of incredulity), and it felt like it was happening to *me*. Not to Gordon Freeman, but to me. It really shocked me, unnerved me, and I felt the blood abandoning my skin. The definition of"disturbing".
I just met a top honcho at EA Europe who said in a casual conversation about developers: "this is how you hire people that give you titles with an 85+ score at Metacritic". Basically, they know that you know.
Jeez, man! Should he have written "'''impostor'''" so you could see that the word "impostor" was meant to be ironically entitled?
Malda's is a good and interesting account (ok, maybe not front page material for some, but I liked some of Jon Katz's rants too), and this particular point is not as bad as you make it out to be. The feeling of attachment to a nickname is very common.
I know about this feeling firsthand: I have been using the aka 'Candyman' in offline life since co-workers gave it to me (with a name like "Candeira", I was also called all the variations of "Candy*" during the years before Barker's film). I too feel like anyone who gets "Candyman" before me is some kind of impostor, as I am sure anyone who has been using the nickname and finds I have taken it before them feels I am the impostor.
If anything, CmdrTaco was stating the obvious from a personal perspective, but he was definitely not being contradictory, using some other person's nickname, or mispelling "impostor" as "imposter". As to hypocritical, you can call him that when he starts changing people's nicknames at whimsy or enacting Blizzard's braindead policy. Last time I looked, the anonymous coward posse was still there, as were a bunch of priest impersonators and unlicensed quacks.
Or Wipeout 2097, as it was known in Europe. You could connect two Playstations with two TVs and play head-on games, and the racing/combat balance was ever so perfect. Wipeout 3 was OK, Wipeout Fusion for the PS2 suffered from the oh wow syndrome, and I really want to see what comes out of Wipeout Pure for the PSP, but... XL/2097 was the it.
Well, but maybe this guy is thinking bigger. In other countries, Spain for instance (IANAL, etc), trademarks are said to be constitutive, which means the act of obtaining a trademark from the office does not recognise a previous right to use it, but establishes the right to use it. Previous use by others notwithstanding, who registers a trademark owns it, fullstop.
I don't know in how many other countries this is so, but this could be a big piece of the action in the long run. Some funny guy registered the Puma trademark in Spain a long time ago. He made a fortune selling it back to Puma, IIRC.
And how can it be possible that the Spanish EU rep can misrepresent the Spanish Senate decision for Spain?
Well, the decision was arrived at only this week. Nevertheless, the Spanish representative was the only one that voted against the Council's proposal last May. Abstention counted as votes against, but Spain was the only country that voted no. So rather than misrepresent the decision, the Spanish rep foreshadowed it.
If anything, the Spanish representatives in the EU have done as much as the Polish ones for the fight against software patents.
In any case, the Senate's decision is not such, but only a recommendation to the Government. The Spanish Senate has no decision powers, but is a merely consultive body in this matter. It is more a case of all political groups (unanimous vote!) standing for the public good and reminding the Executive of their duty towards their constituents.
Yes, I completely agree, the PowerBook has the best keyboard on any laptop that does not have a 'del' key. Otherwise, I am very happy with my Toshiba 3500's), whose "end" and "del" keys are slightly weirdly placed but very sensibly *not left out* or *consigned to shift-chords.
The enter key on powerbooks is also a bit on the smallish side, but I guess that is something one can get used to (I don't own one, I just occasionally use one). But yes, keeping a 12" keyboard on the 15" and the 17" is borderline-retarded IMNSHO too.
And since I am at it, the Powerbook and iBook also share the best touchpad (the scrolling with two fingers idea is very nifty, really!) on any laptop from a manufacturer that thinks "one button should be enough". The usual "two-button mice for Mac OS have been available for yonks" comments will probably and conveniently fail to realise that many laptop users actually like using their touchpads instead of external mice.
> Think! I said 'immigrants' because they can't speak fucking English!
Then you should have said "non-English-speaking immigrannts".
This is no fucking liberal paradise either, so we can't read your mind. We can read your words nicely, though. And you maybe you didn't mean what you wrote, but that is your fault, not Echnin's.
Bitterness, testiness and swearing is no substitute for solid, rational discurse.
Think! yourself.
PS. And no, I am no fucking prude, and swear words do not offend me. But they should be an addition to solid, rational discurse, not a substitute for it.
The ratio of female-to-male in IRC channels and MUDs is much higher than 2-to-400. So the "differently social" argument does not hold water.
And university graduates, professors and researchers in technical endeavours are slowly filling their numbers with more women (although still far from 50/50 representation). So the "differently intelligent" does not account for the difference in participation, or at least is not the only factor.
The reason for kernel hackers to be predominantly male has more to do, I think, with male bravado, testosterone levels increasing hard-headed will and also with the mechanism of displacement that Freud called sublimation.
Camille Paglia said it better: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper". She also goes on about genius being a product of "male aggresion and teenage lust". I happen to agree with this.
Whichever way you look at it, there are far fewer woman obsessives than man obsessives.
But better check out the meaning of collusion: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
There is no need to secretly agree or to cooperate in order to decide not to pay for overpriced technology that may not bring a significant benefit. When the American public failed in to buy Edsels in droves, there was no collusion involved. They just wouldn't touch the shit out of common sense.
Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by good judgment.
Slashdot Mirror
I too like the GIMP interface in many places, and use it exclusively for retouching my photographs (professionally published, as for instance in the Spaish edition of Rolling Stone). I export my results to a Photoshop .psd file, including a layer with the untouched photo for the editors to have a reference of what came out of the camera, and I send it to the photo editors. I don't miss CMYK or colour matching because, you know, they have that at the magazine.
;)
However, it would be good to have a completely tweakable interface. I have already commented somewhere that right now many 3D modeling apps are configurable to work like other apps, and that you have a vi mode for Emacs and Emacs bindings for vi, and nobody finds it strange that people like it that way. Problem is, vi and Emacs are used by coders, and coders can build their damn interface themselves. Most users of GIMP (and certainly most advanced graphics manipulators) can't. But they are right in saying they work better the way they do. Users are not idiots, and they know how they work better. What we need is not really "reskinning the Gimp, and more", but just the ability to tweak what really matters to you.
Not all features are equally important, or used equally frequently. Right now one can reassign shortcuts and move menus around, but modificator keys (keys that act as a "shift" to active tools) are still hard-coded, or were last time I looked. (Caveat: I haven't tried to configure it in a Photoshop way in a long time, as I am already used to the GIMP's UI, so I don't miss Photoshop's that much).
The thing I would love to have in GIMP is the space-alt-ctrl trio of modificators to invoke the hand tool and the zoom-in and zoom-out tools while in any mode. This is so powerful a way of working that I am almost religious about it, despite having retrained my muscular memory not to hit the spacebar with my thumb every time I want to readjust the working area. Also, later versions of Photoshop has evolved really nifty docked option palletes for tools (like the search feature in Firefox) that I haven't really used (as I am now a GIMP user), but they look fantastic.
Finally, some of us liked the MDI interface behaviour: sometimes, when you are editing photos, it is all you are doing (see below for single-app computing), and the focus behaviour of Photoshop is much saner than the Gimp's in many places. I know this is not the Gimp but the X11/WindowManager combo that provides window management; maybe what some users need is a PhotoGimpWM.
Contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, some of us who ask for certain Photoshoppy-features in Gimp don't want a clone of Photoshop. What want is the ability to really customise the way we work in a Photoshop-like app (and, like it or not, Gimp is Photoshop-like, see below) in the features that matter to us. Other people would like a Gimp preference option that adds a complete "behaviour" of the most-used and learned photo editor in the world. Think PhotoGimp on steroids, and if I were a coder working on the Gimp (sadly I am only a punter), this would be my first feature to add for propietary-software refugees' sake. Free Software being coded by volunteers, we can't make them do what we want... but that doesn't make our needs and wishes irrelevant or wrong. Just unenforceable
I have worked in TV with people using the Quantel series of graphical pallettes (concretely the superb HAL), and their gestural interface had nothing to do with Photoshop and Gimp's WIMP paradigm. However I would love the Gimp to have support for its dedicated clicker [note] for my left hand while I work with the pen in my right hand. I wouldn't mind to try the HAL's gestural interface either: it seems like a right timesaver, although I don't know how it would fare in a multi-purpose computer running other programs at the same time. In non-windowed environments where the only thing running is the graphics editor, however, gestural interfaces to be the right thing for bringing up pallett
> People have been trained since birth to observe human faces and we're experts. It makes us very aware of anything that's unnatural.
Apparently recognising facial expressions is not learned, but innate, and males and females have evolved different strategies to recognise emotional faces.
Otherwise, I completely agree. Animating faces is a Turing-complete (as in Turing's test, not Turing Machine) problem, that will only be achieved by machines when/if they achieve full humanlike intelligence.
> The Debian project puts ideals and arguments over them ahead of the people who just want to use the software.
That is false. By making sure that all software in Debian is free, Debian puts the interest of people who just want to use *free* software ahead of anything else.
For some users, the hard-line approach regarding copyrights might be the best protection. I am thinking of companies and administrations who need to put in a severe compliance policy for all their free and open source software. Using Debian might well be the way for them: they would know not only that their stable is rock solid, but also that their code and licenses have been scrutinised with a zeal otherwise reserved to IBM's lawyers flaying SCO's and Slasdhot users cutting hairs in four lenghtwise.
The same goes for users/developers that care that they are really contributing to Free and Open Source Software, and not contributing to copyright infringement. I think it is unfair to say of Debian that they are making things difficult; it is the copyright establishment that is making things difficult. Debian are only following the law.
In the particular case of Firefox vs Debian, read the archived Firefox-logo-trademark bugzilla discussion, and you will see that this is a problem with Mozilla's need to defend their trademarks rather than with Debian. Mozilla used to give Debian a dispensation, and now they aren't doing that. Mozilla needs to protect their trademarks (I don't think they are the bad guys, the law forces them to defend their Firefox trademark just as it has forced Debian to defend theirs in the past), and that protection is incompatible with the DFSG. So goes it.
Unfortunately, you can't pick and choose the law. Neither can Debian, or Mozilla. But don't blame Debian for picking the compromise that you wouldn't have. It is pretty much a forced choice once you run yourself by the DFSG.
Finally, I read the discussion again yesterday, and there were a couple of proposals on the table that had not been answered yet. One by Mike Hommey involved using a non-copyrighted Firefox logo with the trademark owners' permission. THis might work with the added proviso (pointed out in another comment) that the DFSG, which doesn't allow coyright licenses specific to Debian, would however allow trademark permissions specific to Debian. As far as I see it, the conversation hasn't ended yet. The "rename Firefox" is the currently winning solution, but nobody has been uncivil or thrown the towel.
Of course, hedging a headline and stating that "Debian and Mozilla in discussions about misuse of the Firefox Trademark" is not as dramatic as "Firefox to be renamed", and would not have attracted as much conversation.
You are mighty funny. Good work.
Fame and prestige gets you better jobs in academia. If you invent an algorithm worth the paper it is written on, at least.
Software patents can also keep a large number of programmers from earning money. If you are a programmer, software patents mean you can't just write your code without worrying if any snippet is patented. Most likely some of them will be, look at the patented web shop that the FFII annotated. Programmers shouldn't have to pay rent on algorithms, never mind whether they are trivial or hard, learnt from a textbook or self-developed.
Software patents are just that: rent on mathematical ideas, expressed in a way we call "algorithms". I don't see any benefit in allowing some individuals to collect rent from all the others for a resource (ideas) that can be easily duplicated, has powerful positive externalities and very low negative internalities (their side-effects are enormously and they good cost comparatively little to produce).
The truth is that everybody needs money, and most people have to work for it. The government shouldn't give anyone monopoly powers unless they can prove society, and not the rent-seekers alone, will also benefit from the trade. Software patents benefit the limited number of people who can afford them, not the majority of society, so we should not have them. This way we can all (that includes you) have more wealth, or as you said, money.
> writing my daughter's birth announcement in C and GPLing it
Do you have a link? It sounds wonderfully weird and hipppy-hackerish, with a side order of baby smell (sometimes good, and sometimes bad, but babies are always smelly).
Unless you didn't really write such an announcement, in which case shame on you, and on me for biting.
> Patents are there so that if you invent something, someone else can't copy it and mass
> produce it cheaper than you can, without having paid anything for the development.
Actually no. Patents are there to provide an incentive for disclosure. You don't get the monopoly powers of a patent in order to protect your invention, you get monopoly powers in exchange for advancing the common good by revealing your methods to everyone. That is why the law (European Patent Convention, article 52a doesn't allow business methods patents, or algorithm patents. Business methods are revealed by your executing them, so the monopoly would be in exchange for nothing. And mathematics (which is what algorithms are) have their own mechanism for disclosure, which is scholarly publication.
> If I invent a new software algorithm, and it is not patented, then someone can copy it
> (not a copy of the code, but of the process) into their own software, which they have
> far greater resources to distribute and undercut on price.
> Why should I spend time inventing new algorithms, then?
The cost of inventing an algorithm (a really novel one, like the RSA encryption sheme, not bogus ones like the XOR patent for writing to screen memory) is low enough (one salary, paper, pencil, cofee) that the current system of incentives (fame as a mathematician/computer scientist, peer-reviewed publications, tenure track) is high enough to provide society with algorithms. This is not the case with physical-word inventions, where the cost of one working prototype is the price of all the physical resources that went into it, and the monopoly power of a patent, if well-tuned, can be a good incentive to publication of diescoveries that would otherwise remain trade secrets.
The software patent system does not promote investment in algorithm research, it promotes investment in patent lawyers.
European developers would still have access to US Vista, so I don't think a lack of distribution in Europe would harm them. The declarations pointed to the negative economic effects of European enterprises not upgrading next year. I am still dumfounded about that unless, of course, he means what he thinks: that it will be bad economic news for MIcrosoft's bottom line.
I am still running Windows 2000 in a 2001 desktop machine that does all I need from Windows and even runs Half-Life 2 with all the bells and whistles turned off. If I were still working at the corporate desk this box would still be overpowered, and I think the same applies to 99% of the corporate workforce in Europe.
I think he meant onus (literally, "burden"), that is: the ball is not on the EU's court, but on Microsoft.
How working on last year's Office suite can curtail Europe's productivity escapes me completely.
Mine is going to be a Trolltech-designed Linux-Running Greenphone. Sooner or later someone will make a Palm clone interface for it (or even better, a Newton clone) and all will be golden. And it will run Python out of the box, so you should be happy with it too.
I will have to wait a bit, alas, for I just bought a Treo 650 three weeks ago. It hasn't crashed once since either, so I am quite happy with it. Now, if I could just find a cheap screenless bluetooth GPS unit to go with it...
In the Barcelona Conference, Stallman and Moglen pointed out that the compatibility clause wasn't done with any particular license in mind, but just to make it easier for people to share and mix code under GPL and *any other free licenses* that fulfill the proper set of criteria. Stallman, however, specified that the Apache license was one they were particularly interested in making compatible with the GPL v3. Moglen made the same comment later.
So yes, it can be safely said that compatibility with the Apache 2.0 license is an explicit goal, and will be achieved through the clause that allows added restrictions such as certain forms of patent retaliation clauses.
> To be fair, while I was working for a school district, I saw some really creative uses of computers
Care to share some examples?
One that I love is the answer Jimmy Wales gave during the Q+A after a presentation at the CopyFIGHT festival last year in Barcelona: "Maybe kids should not be using Wikipedia for their school work. But they should definitely be discussing in wikipedia talk pages, and even writing wikipedia articles together with their teachers".
Stop reading if you havent't seen Terminator 2 or played Half Life: spoilers ahead.
UK movie critic Jim McClellan wrote about his wife watching Terminator 2 without having seen any trailer or advance warning. She thought Arine was still the baddie, and saw the scene at the mall (with the flowers and the shotgun and the second Terminator) the way it had been scripted: as a surprise, and as a revealing of a key plot element: namely that Arnie was this time a good "guy".
I experienced the same surprise in Half Life, as I went in and played it without reading much abut it first. About 1/5th into the game, when a scientist came to me and said "at last, the army is here!", I went down a staircase, and lo and behold, there was a soldier! Good news! And then he shot. A. Scientst. OMFG.
Call me naive, but I had read nothing about the game, and I did not expect that. "Abuse of power comes as no surprise", they say, and less of all in a fucking action movie^W videogame, but hey, I was playing, I was kinda distracted (or well immersed into the suspension of incredulity), and it felt like it was happening to *me*. Not to Gordon Freeman, but to me. It really shocked me, unnerved me, and I felt the blood abandoning my skin. The definition of"disturbing".
Half Life is that good a game.
Designed for animators, by animators.
Translated, what you just wrote is that the peering exchange is now at Equinox, not at MAE-East.
I just met a top honcho at EA Europe who said in a casual conversation about developers: "this is how you hire people that give you titles with an 85+ score at Metacritic". Basically, they know that you know.
Jeez, man! Should he have written "'''impostor'''" so you could see that the word "impostor" was meant to be ironically entitled?
Malda's is a good and interesting account (ok, maybe not front page material for some, but I liked some of Jon Katz's rants too), and this particular point is not as bad as you make it out to be. The feeling of attachment to a nickname is very common.
I know about this feeling firsthand: I have been using the aka 'Candyman' in offline life since co-workers gave it to me (with a name like "Candeira", I was also called all the variations of "Candy*" during the years before Barker's film). I too feel like anyone who gets "Candyman" before me is some kind of impostor, as I am sure anyone who has been using the nickname and finds I have taken it before them feels I am the impostor.
If anything, CmdrTaco was stating the obvious from a personal perspective, but he was definitely not being contradictory, using some other person's nickname, or mispelling "impostor" as "imposter". As to hypocritical, you can call him that when he starts changing people's nicknames at whimsy or enacting Blizzard's braindead policy. Last time I looked, the anonymous coward posse was still there, as were a bunch of priest impersonators and unlicensed quacks.
Or Wipeout 2097, as it was known in Europe. You could connect two Playstations with two TVs and play head-on games, and the racing/combat balance was ever so perfect. Wipeout 3 was OK, Wipeout Fusion for the PS2 suffered from the oh wow syndrome, and I really want to see what comes out of Wipeout Pure for the PSP, but... XL/2097 was the it.
Well, but maybe this guy is thinking bigger. In other countries, Spain for instance (IANAL, etc), trademarks are said to be constitutive, which means the act of obtaining a trademark from the office does not recognise a previous right to use it, but establishes the right to use it. Previous use by others notwithstanding, who registers a trademark owns it, fullstop.
I don't know in how many other countries this is so, but this could be a big piece of the action in the long run. Some funny guy registered the Puma trademark in Spain a long time ago. He made a fortune selling it back to Puma, IIRC.
And how can it be possible that the Spanish EU rep can misrepresent the Spanish Senate decision for Spain?
Well, the decision was arrived at only this week. Nevertheless, the Spanish representative was the only one that voted against the Council's proposal last May. Abstention counted as votes against, but Spain was the only country that voted no. So rather than misrepresent the decision, the Spanish rep foreshadowed it.
If anything, the Spanish representatives in the EU have done as much as the Polish ones for the fight against software patents.
In any case, the Senate's decision is not such, but only a recommendation to the Government. The Spanish Senate has no decision powers, but is a merely consultive body in this matter. It is more a case of all political groups (unanimous vote!) standing for the public good and reminding the Executive of their duty towards their constituents.
Yes, I completely agree, the PowerBook has the best keyboard on any laptop that does not have a 'del' key. Otherwise, I am very happy with my Toshiba 3500's), whose "end" and "del" keys are slightly weirdly placed but very sensibly *not left out* or *consigned to shift-chords.
The enter key on powerbooks is also a bit on the smallish side, but I guess that is something one can get used to (I don't own one, I just occasionally use one). But yes, keeping a 12" keyboard on the 15" and the 17" is borderline-retarded IMNSHO too.
And since I am at it, the Powerbook and iBook also share the best touchpad (the scrolling with two fingers idea is very nifty, really!) on any laptop from a manufacturer that thinks "one button should be enough". The usual "two-button mice for Mac OS have been available for yonks" comments will probably and conveniently fail to realise that many laptop users actually like using their touchpads instead of external mice.
> Think! I said 'immigrants' because they can't speak fucking English!
Then you should have said "non-English-speaking immigrannts".
This is no fucking liberal paradise either, so we can't read your mind. We can read your words nicely, though. And you maybe you didn't mean what you wrote, but that is your fault, not Echnin's.
Bitterness, testiness and swearing is no substitute for solid, rational discurse.
Think! yourself.
PS. And no, I am no fucking prude, and swear words do not offend me. But they should be an addition to solid, rational discurse, not a substitute for it.
Agreed.
The ratio of female-to-male in IRC channels and MUDs is much higher than 2-to-400. So the "differently social" argument does not hold water.
And university graduates, professors and researchers in technical endeavours are slowly filling their numbers with more women (although still far from 50/50 representation). So the "differently intelligent" does not account for the difference in participation, or at least is not the only factor.
The reason for kernel hackers to be predominantly male has more to do, I think, with male bravado, testosterone levels increasing hard-headed will and also with the mechanism of displacement that Freud called sublimation.
Camille Paglia said it better: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper". She also goes on about genius being a product of "male aggresion and teenage lust". I happen to agree with this.
Whichever way you look at it, there are far fewer woman obsessives than man obsessives.
> have expressed their dislike of patents
> in the past
Got URLs to back up that statement? Would love to read them!
But better check out the meaning of collusion:
secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
There is no need to secretly agree or to cooperate in order to decide not to pay for overpriced technology that may not bring a significant benefit. When the American public failed in to buy Edsels in droves, there was no collusion involved. They just wouldn't touch the shit out of common sense.
Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by good judgment.