Is an open standard that is controlled by a company really an open standard though? Couldn't they change the standard on a whim, and break competitors products?
1st point maybe, but if the specs are published anybody could "know best" as well.
2nd point, open source has nothing to do with quality control, quit misinforming people.
3rd point, current binary drivers only let people use the hardware on a small subset of the systems supported by the kernel.
4th point, means nothing at all.
5th point, you can choose where you want to get your drivers from. But as far as I can tell from what I see with current linux drivers there are very few if any forks.
Wow, the expertise must overflow from this place. Software developers who can't figure out how to restrict access from things. Remind me to never outsource.
I agree. Somebody explain to me why open source implementations themselves with documentation have not become the new standards? A reference implementation, well defined, and no ambiguity all rolled into one.
You see the deal is, sometimes people have the same idea. Just because someone patents it, doesn't mean that the other person stole it. Ideas come and go very easily. Ideas are not inventions. Implementations ARE inventions, and thats why copyright exists. Software patents just mean that the government gives the patent owner the right to beat the crap out of some other guy for being equally smart. Why should our government enforce these monopolies? And why should they get a guaranteed return on investment when others are already clammoring to fill these voids. The open source movement makes patents unnecessary. We have a gigantic base of people willing to investigate implementation ideas, and who will fail and succeed based on the merits of their work, not based on who got to the patent office first. Our government should work for the benefit of humanity not for the lining of a greedy man's pocketbook.
Those are big words coming from someone who develops fingerpainting software..... yes they are.... such big words. Real world applications, even if you provide screen by screen instructions on how to do everything, ALWAYS need support in one form or another. If it was easy to do, a business wouldn't make money doing it. Additionally, businesses want tools that get the job done the way they want it. If a business has a programmer on payroll, then they can get things done using open source, contributing back to the main project where it doesn't necessarily give competitors and advantage, and harvesting the knowledge and work of other cooperating businesses. It works out quite nicely actually. So the question comes down to control. Does a business want absolute control over the direction their software takes, use open source. Does a business want to buy a generic boxed product that may or may not continue in the direction they need, and get locked into it in the process. Go proprietary.
You have to trust the software makers no matter what. Technically, this reduces the number of people you have to trust to just the developers, not the developers and packagers.
I don't. Share that info. The biggest terrorist the world has ever seen, is also the one that is trying to stop that information propogation. Coincidentally, it is also the only entity to use a nuclear bomb on another country. Have a nice day.
Yeah, I use dispatch-conf. I essentially want a framework that software devs would describe changes in config file syntax, security issues and junk like that for updating their conf files. There is only so much that the diff command can do. And I hate how comments get clumped in with config entries, etc. Mainly I just want something where I can answer the questions about the differences and then deploy the answers to all the other computers after installation.
There are a wide variety of./ers, but they all have a key characteristic which in fact defines the typical slashdotter: they like nerd related news and being a part of the community around it. Just as being a Mensan brings with it a defining characteristic: elitist appreciation for conversing with people who did good on a test and are paying monthly dues. That characteristic is THE defining trait of Mensa.
But actually I suppose the real problem here is the lack of a tool that non-destructively updates the config files for newer versions without requiring user input, or only requiring an easy Q&A sequence which can be scripted (oh that would be sweet). Really, my main concern with this stuff is easy administration on a large volume of servers/workstations without having to use something like cfengine (eeek).
I agree. But I definetely think that an alternate is needed severely. Elektra would work quite easily as long as they adopt a little extra policy that says inside each programs folder they need to have a subfolder for each installed version of the software. These subfolders could be symlinks to the other folders if they wanted to use the same conf in different versions. Additionally, I've seen a comment on Elektra's lack of a 'list' datatype as one of the available key/value pairs (Elektra currently only supports 'strings' and 'binary' datatypes). I think adding those two things would make it a workable framework.
Well, copyright I understand, and copyright applies to this as well. A written work is a large well defined entity. Patents, at least as far as software is concerned, make little sense as they usually cover fairly abstract building blocks necessary to define many larger concepts. Granted, this particular patent would seem to be very specific, and benign by nature but....
Lets postulate for a second that software patents were never enacted as a recognized "invention", and software was still under the domain of copyright law as was the case until the late 1990s (which I might add was an era with a whole hell of a lot of innovation). OK, so there are no software patents, companys develop software for themselves, and keep their implementation methods as trade secrets. They develop ideas in complete secrecy. They implement the ideas in complete secrecy. They then release their software products without giving details as to how they do what they are doing. Their software is still covered by copyright law, so they have a pretty comfortable amount of time before the competition comes up with the same or functionally equivalent implementation (because most of these patented "brilliant ideas" are just an obvious next step not a revolution). Unless, they happen to be working on the same thing at the same time (which could easily happen as the competing companies are usually looking at the same problem set that needs to be rectified), in which case they would be at the mercy of the market and the better implementation will win. This is true for any other market. Truly, innovative ideas get backing by customers who see that those companies are innovative. So the net effect is: it forces companies to be innovative to stay alive, and therefore the consumer and society in general benefits.
So what about reverse engineering? Well, reverse engineering is not free. If the creating company used some kind of code obfuscation (which is another area that would really be innovated upon if everyone knows that their software is going to be reverse engineered) then the reverse engineering efforts will come at their expense of time, effort, and lots of money. And then the competition would still have to take the reverse engineered implementation and implement in the context of their software.
I don't know. I only see damage when I see software patents. I see threats, lawyers, and little guys getting squashed by the big guys patent portfolios.
No that is capitalism AT ITS HEART. Competition is capitalism. Capitalism in its purest form grants no guaranteed return. What, do you think governmental enforcement of a monopoly based on the premise of earliest discovery would be a better idea? If I start up a business I have no guarantees it will succeed, and thats the way it should be. Why should discoveries be an exception?
Why would that even be cool? Who cares. If you have an OS then use it. And as far this 'Tray and Play' being a long time coming. Yeah, it is about time that the PC caught up with Commodore 64 technology.
I have a AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz, which I wouldn't call high end by any means, and it runs fine. It does like the RAM though. I found performance to be roughly comparable to when I was running W2k on this same machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Is an open standard that is controlled by a company really an open standard though? Couldn't they change the standard on a whim, and break competitors products?
So trade Microsoft lock in for Adobe lock in?
Where's the theora link?
1st point maybe, but if the specs are published anybody could "know best" as well. 2nd point, open source has nothing to do with quality control, quit misinforming people. 3rd point, current binary drivers only let people use the hardware on a small subset of the systems supported by the kernel. 4th point, means nothing at all. 5th point, you can choose where you want to get your drivers from. But as far as I can tell from what I see with current linux drivers there are very few if any forks.
Wow, the expertise must overflow from this place. Software developers who can't figure out how to restrict access from things. Remind me to never outsource.
I agree. Somebody explain to me why open source implementations themselves with documentation have not become the new standards? A reference implementation, well defined, and no ambiguity all rolled into one.
You see the deal is, sometimes people have the same idea. Just because someone patents it, doesn't mean that the other person stole it. Ideas come and go very easily. Ideas are not inventions. Implementations ARE inventions, and thats why copyright exists. Software patents just mean that the government gives the patent owner the right to beat the crap out of some other guy for being equally smart.
Why should our government enforce these monopolies? And why should they get a guaranteed return on investment when others are already clammoring to fill these voids. The open source movement makes patents unnecessary. We have a gigantic base of people willing to investigate implementation ideas, and who will fail and succeed based on the merits of their work, not based on who got to the patent office first. Our government should work for the benefit of humanity not for the lining of a greedy man's pocketbook.
Aren't you explicitly required to include a specific copy of the license?
Those are big words coming from someone who develops fingerpainting software..... yes they are .... such big words. Real world applications, even if you provide screen by screen instructions on how to do everything, ALWAYS need support in one form or another. If it was easy to do, a business wouldn't make money doing it. Additionally, businesses want tools that get the job done the way they want it. If a business has a programmer on payroll, then they can get things done using open source, contributing back to the main project where it doesn't necessarily give competitors and advantage, and harvesting the knowledge and work of other cooperating businesses. It works out quite nicely actually. So the question comes down to control. Does a business want absolute control over the direction their software takes, use open source. Does a business want to buy a generic boxed product that may or may not continue in the direction they need, and get locked into it in the process. Go proprietary.
Uhhh, you sure you want to be bragging about how many holes your kernel has? Update.
Well, thats SuperC I believe. Original contra was Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-(select* )-start
You have to trust the software makers no matter what. Technically, this reduces the number of people you have to trust to just the developers, not the developers and packagers.
I don't. Share that info. The biggest terrorist the world has ever seen, is also the one that is trying to stop that information propogation. Coincidentally, it is also the only entity to use a nuclear bomb on another country. Have a nice day.
But I might add that I do think it is retarded to try to force religious morals on a nation that is supposed to have freedom of religion.
I know what you're talking about. I hate politically correctness. Hey I know lets talk about niggers now.
Yeah, I use dispatch-conf. I essentially want a framework that software devs would describe changes in config file syntax, security issues and junk like that for updating their conf files. There is only so much that the diff command can do. And I hate how comments get clumped in with config entries, etc. Mainly I just want something where I can answer the questions about the differences and then deploy the answers to all the other computers after installation.
There are a wide variety of ./ers, but they all have a key characteristic which in fact defines the typical slashdotter: they like nerd related news and being a part of the community around it. Just as being a Mensan brings with it a defining characteristic: elitist appreciation for conversing with people who did good on a test and are paying monthly dues. That characteristic is THE defining trait of Mensa.
But actually I suppose the real problem here is the lack of a tool that non-destructively updates the config files for newer versions without requiring user input, or only requiring an easy Q&A sequence which can be scripted (oh that would be sweet). Really, my main concern with this stuff is easy administration on a large volume of servers/workstations without having to use something like cfengine (eeek).
You mean like Elektra. Like what the article linked to?
I agree. But I definetely think that an alternate is needed severely. Elektra would work quite easily as long as they adopt a little extra policy that says inside each programs folder they need to have a subfolder for each installed version of the software. These subfolders could be symlinks to the other folders if they wanted to use the same conf in different versions. Additionally, I've seen a comment on Elektra's lack of a 'list' datatype as one of the available key/value pairs (Elektra currently only supports 'strings' and 'binary' datatypes). I think adding those two things would make it a workable framework.
Well, copyright I understand, and copyright applies to this as well. A written work is a large well defined entity. Patents, at least as far as software is concerned, make little sense as they usually cover fairly abstract building blocks necessary to define many larger concepts. Granted, this particular patent would seem to be very specific, and benign by nature but....
Lets postulate for a second that software patents were never enacted as a recognized "invention", and software was still under the domain of copyright law as was the case until the late 1990s (which I might add was an era with a whole hell of a lot of innovation). OK, so there are no software patents, companys develop software for themselves, and keep their implementation methods as trade secrets. They develop ideas in complete secrecy. They implement the ideas in complete secrecy. They then release their software products without giving details as to how they do what they are doing. Their software is still covered by copyright law, so they have a pretty comfortable amount of time before the competition comes up with the same or functionally equivalent implementation (because most of these patented "brilliant ideas" are just an obvious next step not a revolution). Unless, they happen to be working on the same thing at the same time (which could easily happen as the competing companies are usually looking at the same problem set that needs to be rectified), in which case they would be at the mercy of the market and the better implementation will win. This is true for any other market. Truly, innovative ideas get backing by customers who see that those companies are innovative. So the net effect is: it forces companies to be innovative to stay alive, and therefore the consumer and society in general benefits.
So what about reverse engineering? Well, reverse engineering is not free. If the creating company used some kind of code obfuscation (which is another area that would really be innovated upon if everyone knows that their software is going to be reverse engineered) then the reverse engineering efforts will come at their expense of time, effort, and lots of money. And then the competition would still have to take the reverse engineered implementation and implement in the context of their software.
I don't know. I only see damage when I see software patents. I see threats, lawyers, and little guys getting squashed by the big guys patent portfolios.
No that is capitalism AT ITS HEART. Competition is capitalism. Capitalism in its purest form grants no guaranteed return. What, do you think governmental enforcement of a monopoly based on the premise of earliest discovery would be a better idea? If I start up a business I have no guarantees it will succeed, and thats the way it should be. Why should discoveries be an exception?
Why would that even be cool? Who cares. If you have an OS then use it. And as far this 'Tray and Play' being a long time coming. Yeah, it is about time that the PC caught up with Commodore 64 technology.
It can
I have a AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz, which I wouldn't call high end by any means, and it runs fine. It does like the RAM though. I found performance to be roughly comparable to when I was running W2k on this same machine.