The point is simple: if you want certain special benefits in return for your money (and Intel clearly did), then you should be above-board and state them. There's nothing morally superior about "implicit" strings.
If they really want to give no-strings-attached funding -- meaning no strings attached, not "strings-attached-but-we-can-dance-around-and-look-selfless-for-marketing-purposes" -- then they're still perfectly free to do so.
I think in general improved transparency is a good thing, and wink-wink-nod-nod relationships with big corporations are not compatible with that. If companies care about certain things like avoiding excess patent licensing fees, they'll just specify those terms in grants; this is no different in effect than the "implicit" terms you seem to advocate, except that it is more transparent, and because of that, less subject to abuse or misinterpretation.
However, actions like this reduce the likelihood (to zero, I hear) of Intel giving no-strings-attached money to researchers. Which sucks as an outcome.
It sounds like Intel was arguing that there really were strings, it's just that they were invisible (and in practice, this is pretty much always the case, however subtly they're disguised)...
So in the future, they'll explicitly specify "if there are cool results we get to use them" in writing. That doesn't seem particularly onerous, especially if it's merely stating what was "understood" previously.
He's just a really skilled troll, and everyone always falls for him.
I would have to disagree, a troll is aware of his/her trolling, it is intentional.
Jack is like a troll, except for the fact that he is dead serious, and there is no "lol, trolled".
On usenet, the distinction is made between a "troll", and a "netkook"; their behavior is often strikingly similar, except that the former is doing it intentionally to incite reponses, whereas the latter actually believes what he's saying.
By the same token though, I don't understand the obsession that some people seem to have with keeping their textbooks pristine...
Clean books are nice, but so are the memory aids provided by one's own notes/bookmarks/etc.
I admit, I don't like others' notes in my books, because they always seem completely wrong, and are merely distracting, not useful.
I think notes and marks (and bookmark, etc) in books are mostly useful as pointers into your existing mental representation of the text, and sort of as a way of physically representing the act of reading -- e.g., it's easier to ensure you fully read the text instead of zoning out and skimming bits, if you're "actively" involved with it. [The same is true of keeping external notes, but that's even more work; which one prefers seems down to individual taste.]
An e-reader with a well-done touch-pen interface that allowed actually writing in the margins, saving the notes externally, keeping multiple note layers, adding cross references,... etc, might be even better than a physical book in some ways, but it doesn't sound like the kindle tech is up to it...
(the speed of things like page flipping is also an important issue -- I find I flip around much more often reading academic/technical material than e.g. fiction)
"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading."
Doesn't that pretty well describe the music industry to a T right now?
That, of course, is the joke, but I think even more silly is that the accusation doesn't make any sense in the case of BT. "Old business model"? Huh? If anything, it's the newest business model around.
One gets the impression that the music industry heard themselves accused of said offense, but are hoping to grab the initiative in the public eye.
I think it's actually a common propoganda technique: accuse your opponent of that which you are guilty of, and do it early, and often. If you're lucky, it will stick in the public eye, even if it doesn't make any sense; when the (uninformed) public hears your opponent making the same charge of you, they may think he's "just copying", and will dismiss the accusation, even if it actually makes sense in that case.
I love the Office ribbon and would be very happy to see this standard propagate into more user interfaces. I'd love to see it implemented in Firefox, but I see no such thing here.
In the screenshot, it looks like they removed the menu bar and replaced it with something smaller. That's good.
It's a web browser. It's not complicated. With a web browser, the main thing you want more room for the content. The various other tools and options are rarely used, and shouldn't be in your face. If this new interface reduces the space used by the non-content UI, then great, it could be very nice.
The office-style ribbon the other hand... well.... a huge bloated in-your-face MS-style toolbartastic mess may be the best interface for a huge bloated MS-style app like office, but it's the last thing you want for a web browser.
The writer would have experienced the same revelations of orientation with dashboard GPS.
You seem to be trying to play the crusty curmudgeon, but I think you're quite wrong.
The supposition is that having a "sensory" input attached full time in a way that it doesn't need conscious attention can actually make the brain start to process the information in a way similar to what happens with your normal senses -- after a while you start to "feel" it, instead of just "knowing" it. This is not a unique claim; the brain seems quite flexible in how it adapts to sensory input.
Whether you believe that or not, it is interesting.
women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map.
Any cites for this claim? On the face of it , it sounds like bullshit...
I'm male, and I navigate almost entirely by landmarks and "familiarity", and the impression I get is that most people do the same.
This is because the really bright white LEDs are actually monochrome blue, they have a phosphor that converts some of that blue light into other colours, but not normally enough for a nice (sun like) colour.
There are other techniques that seem to convert the frequencies better; or they could use the old trick of putting different colour LEDs in one bulb. But for the moment if you want highest efficiency you're stuck with lots of blue in the light and a "cold" feel.
One point though, white LEDs are normally closer to the spectrum of the sun than incandescents, it's just that the blue spike is in the opposite direction to the very reduced blues you get from a incandescent. This is a known problem, so the conversions will continue to get better.
Still, they're much better than any fluorescent light I've ever seen, no matter what the florescent claims to be simulating... Did you ever see the spectrum of a typical florescent light? Insane weird spiky shit; LEDs are not exactly like an incandescent, but they're an awful lot closer...
This has to be some legalistic crap. Anybody who has ever done so knows
that aerobic exercise feels good. If you're working too hard, you feel breathless. The
military have a good way to evaluate this, when they run and sing a cadence.
I've found that having a quantitative measure like heart-rate displayed helps me push myself. I can decide "Ok, keep pulse rate above 150, even if I feel miserable", and it works: even though I feel like I'm dying and have a hard time thinking straight, I can focus on that single little number and keeping above the threshold.
Without any quantitative measure, I have a tendency to unconsciously slow down until I'm more in my comfort zone, which is not what I want. [Strenuous exercise seems to make it harder to think rationally, so any kind of complex goal or nuanced judgment goes right out the window...]
By the way, I'm sorry that most of the folks who have posted so far are unsympathetic and unthinking creeps. It's your job to watch out for your child, and such thinking is hardly paranoid.
"Unsympathetic and unthinking creeps"?!
For simply pointing out how silly and unreasonable the fear here was? Yes, there are general privacy issues which could be usefully discussed in relation to it, but that doesn't make the specific fear any less absurd.
Of course parents need to watch out for their kid, but there's also a tendency these days for parents to be overly risk averse, sometimes an absurd degree. This stuff needs to be pointed out, because in many ways such paranoia is far more harmful -- to the kids, to the parents, and to society in general -- than the imagined fears.
Parents: you should not drive little Muffin two blocks to school; let him walk. It's OK to give him a bit of freedom before he's 21.
am I the only person who actually read The Hobbit, thought it was a great book, read Lord of the Rings and thought it was good, if long-winded, and then absolutely hated the films?
I can't say I hated the films, but I do think the adulation heaped on them was excessive. The LotR is the sort of book which is very hard to film (and LotR fan culture doesn't help); Peter Jackson made a journeyman-like attempt to do something difficult, but in the end I think he fell short.
While Jackson's films captured many of the plot elements of the book (of course not enough to satisfy the hardest core fanboys, but it's very hard to stuff all of a long book into even three films..), they never really seemed to capture the spirit or the magic. The book certainly was was long-winded, but it definitely had a magic about much of it.
Guillermo del Toro seems a much better choice than Jackson to direct this sort of material, and the Hobbit better suited to film adaptation, so I have hopes that it will achieve what the LotR films didn't.
Actually this looks like a nifty way to get people into Sketchup design and such. I hope it is a success.
I dunno, the whole sketchup thing seems a bit dodgy. From what I can see, they get people to donate models to them, but seem to be trying hard to keep the model format proprietary (by "they" I guess it's the company who originally made it, which google bought). I couldn't find any freely available (non-NDA) documentation on the format, and while they make an SDK available, it's not FOSS [and is written in Ruby, which is probably not what most people want to use].
Personally, while I love the idea of an active community of people creating models, I also don't want to spend any effort making models for free if they end up only being usable by proprietary software!
Maybe I missed something, and there is freely available documentation, or a FOSS library for reading sketchup models; if anyone knows of anything, please respond!
In the dark or in smoke it was a lot easier to keep your finger in a single digit on a rotary dial (once you'd found the right one obviously). The same probably applies to a lesser extent for touch tone phones. Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
"1" is much quicker to dial on a rotary dial -- a "9" seems to take forever, whereas a "1" is almost instant -- thus the use of "11" as the last two digits. However, "1" has special meaning as a first digit in the American phone system, so they couldn't use that as the first digit (and in the days of mechanical exchanges, such behavior was probably quite difficult to change).
I don't know why they chose 9 over other non-1 numbers, but choosing the other end of the dial makes a bit of sense, as it probably is easier to remember, especially if you're under stress.
Also, with the higher digits (e.g., 9) you really shouldn't keep your finger in the hole as the dial rotates automatically to send the pulses; doing so has an annoying tendency to screw up the pulse timing if your finger drags as it turns, resulting in misdials -- something which is not good for an emergency number! So "999" on a rotary dial is only easier to remember, not to dial, and the speed advantage of "911" probably won out over the slight memory advantage of "999".
You can't disable it - thats the debacle. A lot of people don't like it, but the Firefox devs have essentially told us to shut up and live with it.
C'mon, they haven't really said that -- you can actually config it in various ways, e.g., setting "browser.urlbar.matchbehavior" to 3 (using about:config), and using "browser.urlbar.maxrichresults" to control the display. There's also some more configuration being added in newer versions, e.g., see this bug.
I never really understood Linus' handling of Con in the past
Linux kernel development is all about "playing well with others": a very important part of the process is being able to handle criticism constructively and fix the problems it addresses, or show that it is wrong; that's the way progress is made. You need to do this again and again and again. Most criticism is very technical and can be quite insightful, but can also be strong and relentless -- people will point out every single little flaw, and possible flaws, and unclear points, and whitespace inconsistencies, and... To be a successful linux developer you need to be able to deal with this constructively, and the more important and core the area you're dealing with, the more important this becomes.
The impression I've gotten from reading various past "Con threads", is that while he tries in the beginning, Con doesn't deal well with this process; he can't keep his ego submerged, gets frustrated, and everything (perhaps including Con himself last time I read one of these threads) ends up unravelling. The same thing has derailed other big projects too (i.e., reiser4, when Reiser himself was still involved).
It's a shame when this happens, but basically the process is more important that specific pieces of technology -- technology can be replaced, but the process is what makes linux as good as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is simple: if you want certain special benefits in return for your money (and Intel clearly did), then you should be above-board and state them. There's nothing morally superior about "implicit" strings.
If they really want to give no-strings-attached funding -- meaning no strings attached, not "strings-attached-but-we-can-dance-around-and-look-selfless-for-marketing-purposes" -- then they're still perfectly free to do so.
I think in general improved transparency is a good thing, and wink-wink-nod-nod relationships with big corporations are not compatible with that. If companies care about certain things like avoiding excess patent licensing fees, they'll just specify those terms in grants; this is no different in effect than the "implicit" terms you seem to advocate, except that it is more transparent, and because of that, less subject to abuse or misinterpretation.
However, actions like this reduce the likelihood (to zero, I hear) of Intel giving no-strings-attached money to researchers. Which sucks as an outcome.
It sounds like Intel was arguing that there really were strings, it's just that they were invisible (and in practice, this is pretty much always the case, however subtly they're disguised)...
So in the future, they'll explicitly specify "if there are cool results we get to use them" in writing. That doesn't seem particularly onerous, especially if it's merely stating what was "understood" previously.
He's just a really skilled troll, and everyone always falls for him.
I would have to disagree, a troll is aware of his/her trolling, it is intentional. Jack is like a troll, except for the fact that he is dead serious, and there is no "lol, trolled".
On usenet, the distinction is made between a "troll", and a "netkook"; their behavior is often strikingly similar, except that the former is doing it intentionally to incite reponses, whereas the latter actually believes what he's saying.
Jack, I gather, is more of a kook than a troll...
Will the legacy of environmental disaster that was George W. Bush's presidency never end?
He's not dead yet!
Same approach that NASA's "Deep Impact" mission took in 2005. I got to see that one ...
Er, so what did it look like...?
By the same token though, I don't understand the obsession that some people seem to have with keeping their textbooks pristine...
Clean books are nice, but so are the memory aids provided by one's own notes/bookmarks/etc.
I admit, I don't like others' notes in my books, because they always seem completely wrong, and are merely distracting, not useful.
I think notes and marks (and bookmark, etc) in books are mostly useful as pointers into your existing mental representation of the text, and sort of as a way of physically representing the act of reading -- e.g., it's easier to ensure you fully read the text instead of zoning out and skimming bits, if you're "actively" involved with it. [The same is true of keeping external notes, but that's even more work; which one prefers seems down to individual taste.]
An e-reader with a well-done touch-pen interface that allowed actually writing in the margins, saving the notes externally, keeping multiple note layers, adding cross references, ... etc, might be even better than a physical book in some ways, but it doesn't sound like the kindle tech is up to it...
(the speed of things like page flipping is also an important issue -- I find I flip around much more often reading academic/technical material than e.g. fiction)
Don't be silly.
Carl Sagan is always on topic on Slashdot.
Cosmos was as profound and inspiring as TV gets, and a defining moment for an entire generation of nerds; any excuse to talk about it is welcome.
Some random musicians the music industry could bribe/fool into supporting their position publicly.
Ok, George Michael used to be quite famous for his permanent five-o'clock shadow...
"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading."
Doesn't that pretty well describe the music industry to a T right now?
That, of course, is the joke, but I think even more silly is that the accusation doesn't make any sense in the case of BT. "Old business model"? Huh? If anything, it's the newest business model around.
One gets the impression that the music industry heard themselves accused of said offense, but are hoping to grab the initiative in the public eye.
I think it's actually a common propoganda technique: accuse your opponent of that which you are guilty of, and do it early, and often. If you're lucky, it will stick in the public eye, even if it doesn't make any sense; when the (uninformed) public hears your opponent making the same charge of you, they may think he's "just copying", and will dismiss the accusation, even if it actually makes sense in that case.
But many of the original BIND 9 developers work at Nominum, and the author of the ISC DHCP server (me) works there too.
So maybe you can give an insider's perspective: What's with the silly and clueless FUD they're spewing? Marketing gone amok?
I love the Office ribbon and would be very happy to see this standard propagate into more user interfaces. I'd love to see it implemented in Firefox, but I see no such thing here.
In the screenshot, it looks like they removed the menu bar and replaced it with something smaller. That's good.
It's a web browser. It's not complicated. With a web browser, the main thing you want more room for the content. The various other tools and options are rarely used, and shouldn't be in your face. If this new interface reduces the space used by the non-content UI, then great, it could be very nice.
The office-style ribbon the other hand... well.... a huge bloated in-your-face MS-style toolbartastic mess may be the best interface for a huge bloated MS-style app like office, but it's the last thing you want for a web browser.
The writer would have experienced the same revelations of orientation with dashboard GPS.
You seem to be trying to play the crusty curmudgeon, but I think you're quite wrong.
The supposition is that having a "sensory" input attached full time in a way that it doesn't need conscious attention can actually make the brain start to process the information in a way similar to what happens with your normal senses -- after a while you start to "feel" it, instead of just "knowing" it. This is not a unique claim; the brain seems quite flexible in how it adapts to sensory input.
Whether you believe that or not, it is interesting.
women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map.
Any cites for this claim? On the face of it , it sounds like bullshit...
I'm male, and I navigate almost entirely by landmarks and "familiarity", and the impression I get is that most people do the same.
This is because the really bright white LEDs are actually monochrome blue, they have a phosphor that converts some of that blue light into other colours, but not normally enough for a nice (sun like) colour.
There are other techniques that seem to convert the frequencies better; or they could use the old trick of putting different colour LEDs in one bulb. But for the moment if you want highest efficiency you're stuck with lots of blue in the light and a "cold" feel.
One point though, white LEDs are normally closer to the spectrum of the sun than incandescents, it's just that the blue spike is in the opposite direction to the very reduced blues you get from a incandescent. This is a known problem, so the conversions will continue to get better.
Still, they're much better than any fluorescent light I've ever seen, no matter what the florescent claims to be simulating... Did you ever see the spectrum of a typical florescent light? Insane weird spiky shit; LEDs are not exactly like an incandescent, but they're an awful lot closer...
Otherwise known as C-octothorpe.
This has to be some legalistic crap. Anybody who has ever done so knows that aerobic exercise feels good. If you're working too hard, you feel breathless. The military have a good way to evaluate this, when they run and sing a cadence.
I've found that having a quantitative measure like heart-rate displayed helps me push myself. I can decide "Ok, keep pulse rate above 150, even if I feel miserable", and it works: even though I feel like I'm dying and have a hard time thinking straight, I can focus on that single little number and keeping above the threshold.
Without any quantitative measure, I have a tendency to unconsciously slow down until I'm more in my comfort zone, which is not what I want. [Strenuous exercise seems to make it harder to think rationally, so any kind of complex goal or nuanced judgment goes right out the window...]
By the way, I'm sorry that most of the folks who have posted so far are unsympathetic and unthinking creeps. It's your job to watch out for your child, and such thinking is hardly paranoid.
"Unsympathetic and unthinking creeps"?!
For simply pointing out how silly and unreasonable the fear here was? Yes, there are general privacy issues which could be usefully discussed in relation to it, but that doesn't make the specific fear any less absurd.
Of course parents need to watch out for their kid, but there's also a tendency these days for parents to be overly risk averse, sometimes an absurd degree. This stuff needs to be pointed out, because in many ways such paranoia is far more harmful -- to the kids, to the parents, and to society in general -- than the imagined fears.
Parents: you should not drive little Muffin two blocks to school; let him walk. It's OK to give him a bit of freedom before he's 21.
Terrorists found in Beijing and Shanghai, U.S. Troops invade.
Immediately get stuck in traffic. Nobody notices.
am I the only person who actually read The Hobbit, thought it was a great book, read Lord of the Rings and thought it was good, if long-winded, and then absolutely hated the films?
I can't say I hated the films, but I do think the adulation heaped on them was excessive. The LotR is the sort of book which is very hard to film (and LotR fan culture doesn't help); Peter Jackson made a journeyman-like attempt to do something difficult, but in the end I think he fell short.
While Jackson's films captured many of the plot elements of the book (of course not enough to satisfy the hardest core fanboys, but it's very hard to stuff all of a long book into even three films..), they never really seemed to capture the spirit or the magic. The book certainly was was long-winded, but it definitely had a magic about much of it.
Guillermo del Toro seems a much better choice than Jackson to direct this sort of material, and the Hobbit better suited to film adaptation, so I have hopes that it will achieve what the LotR films didn't.
Actually this looks like a nifty way to get people into Sketchup design and such. I hope it is a success.
I dunno, the whole sketchup thing seems a bit dodgy. From what I can see, they get people to donate models to them, but seem to be trying hard to keep the model format proprietary (by "they" I guess it's the company who originally made it, which google bought). I couldn't find any freely available (non-NDA) documentation on the format, and while they make an SDK available, it's not FOSS [and is written in Ruby, which is probably not what most people want to use].
Personally, while I love the idea of an active community of people creating models, I also don't want to spend any effort making models for free if they end up only being usable by proprietary software!
Maybe I missed something, and there is freely available documentation, or a FOSS library for reading sketchup models; if anyone knows of anything, please respond!
I've got one argument against it: People on the street going "Ha-haa! Cripple!"
On the other hand, you can then rip their limbs off.
In the dark or in smoke it was a lot easier to keep your finger in a single digit on a rotary dial (once you'd found the right one obviously). The same probably applies to a lesser extent for touch tone phones. Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
"1" is much quicker to dial on a rotary dial -- a "9" seems to take forever, whereas a "1" is almost instant -- thus the use of "11" as the last two digits. However, "1" has special meaning as a first digit in the American phone system, so they couldn't use that as the first digit (and in the days of mechanical exchanges, such behavior was probably quite difficult to change).
I don't know why they chose 9 over other non-1 numbers, but choosing the other end of the dial makes a bit of sense, as it probably is easier to remember, especially if you're under stress.
Also, with the higher digits (e.g., 9) you really shouldn't keep your finger in the hole as the dial rotates automatically to send the pulses; doing so has an annoying tendency to screw up the pulse timing if your finger drags as it turns, resulting in misdials -- something which is not good for an emergency number! So "999" on a rotary dial is only easier to remember, not to dial, and the speed advantage of "911" probably won out over the slight memory advantage of "999".
I don't want to configure it in various ways, I want to disable it entirely. Wheres that option?
Perhaps "browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled"
[Go into about:config and type "urlbar" in the filter box; you'll see a bunch of related options.]
You can't disable it - thats the debacle. A lot of people don't like it, but the Firefox devs have essentially told us to shut up and live with it.
C'mon, they haven't really said that -- you can actually config it in various ways, e.g., setting "browser.urlbar.matchbehavior" to 3 (using about:config), and using "browser.urlbar.maxrichresults" to control the display. There's also some more configuration being added in newer versions, e.g., see this bug.
I never really understood Linus' handling of Con in the past
Linux kernel development is all about "playing well with others": a very important part of the process is being able to handle criticism constructively and fix the problems it addresses, or show that it is wrong; that's the way progress is made. You need to do this again and again and again. Most criticism is very technical and can be quite insightful, but can also be strong and relentless -- people will point out every single little flaw, and possible flaws, and unclear points, and whitespace inconsistencies, and... To be a successful linux developer you need to be able to deal with this constructively, and the more important and core the area you're dealing with, the more important this becomes.
The impression I've gotten from reading various past "Con threads", is that while he tries in the beginning, Con doesn't deal well with this process; he can't keep his ego submerged, gets frustrated, and everything (perhaps including Con himself last time I read one of these threads) ends up unravelling. The same thing has derailed other big projects too (i.e., reiser4, when Reiser himself was still involved).
It's a shame when this happens, but basically the process is more important that specific pieces of technology -- technology can be replaced, but the process is what makes linux as good as it is.