Well, the problem with that particular analogy is that you are assuming there is a way to "act responsibly" with a nuclear weapon. With a gun, you at least have many possible uses (hunting, collecting, sport, protection) other than committing a crime. A nuclear weapon is specifically designed for one purpose: to kill a lot of people quickly and severely injure a lot more people just as quickly. If you're going to say a country like Iran isn't allowed to have nuclear weapons, you should say the same thing about conventional military weapons.
Well, I sympathize with what you are saying. It does seem that way, but how many "religious people" do you actually know personally. Because I know quite a few and they don't act as you describe at all. It is true that there are politically motivated people that like being obnoxious, and they get a lot of attention from the media, but I wouldn't say they represent, or even compose a significant percentage of, all followers of every major religion.
I've been half-listening, mostly ignoring, this debate for years. I think the biggest problem is not the disparate views, but rather the tendency to generalize the opinions of a few hot air-spouting pundits to an entire demographic. Members of religious communities generalize the opinions of authors like Dawkins and claim that scientists are trying to disprove the existence of God and attacking religion, which is not the case. Likewise, the scientific community sees actions by special interests that influence school board decisions and claims that religionists are ignorant superstitious zealots that ignore science and prefer to live in an imaginary world, which is also not the case. Such publicized generalizations tend to make people defensive, and then they don't want to hear what you have to say at all. If you can't sit down and have a civil conversation with someone about their beliefs (scientific, religious, or otherwise), then you will never see an end to debates such as these.
FTA: I seem to hold a minority opinion. I've taken a lot of heat for it!
I think that's because the argument doesn't make any sense. The author is saying that open source projects suffer from some sort of ADD, and therefore they don't (implication: can't) focus on one idea long enough to make it good. The thing is, open source is an enabler; it allows for the free exchange of ideas. However, it is not a source of inspiration in and of itself. It's just a methodology. A jigsaw isn't going to help a person with no skill or imagination to create a work of art from a piece of wood. However, a person with imagination and creativity will be better able to create that work of art with a jigsaw than with just a chisel and a hammer.
In the closed source world, profit is simultaneously the inspiration and the cause for lack of inspiration. If investors see potential in an emerging market, they will pour money into development of an innovative product. But if there isn't sufficient profit motivation, innovation won't happen. There is not a singular source of inspiration in the open source world. I think mostly what we are seeing up until now is the motivation of replacing proprietary software. That results in the development of a lot of clones with similar functionality and interface design. If somebody were to come along, though, and say, "Here I have this awesome idea. Come help me out with it," open source allows that to happen much easier than closed source. There is some of that out there already. They just aren't among the high profile projects. Niche ideas are going to get minimal attention until other people discover them. That is one thing that proprietary software will always do better because their business model depends on it: marketing.
In all, my point (yes, I was getting to it in a roundabout way) is that business models based around free/absurdly cheap (read allofmp3) music are either unprofitable or wouldn't fly with shareholders of the major labels.
Maybe...maybe not. You can't really say that without actual sales data to back it up.
Let's say you need to make $5000 to break even. If you sell at $0.99 a song, you need to sell 5,000 songs to make a profit. That sounds like a pretty easy mark to it. Now reduce to price tenfold to $0.10 a song. You need to sell 50,000 songs to make a profit. Are ten times to number of people going to buy the song just because to reduced the price tenfold? Maybe, it's hard to know without some good test cases. How popular is the song? How easy is it to download? Is there DRM? Are there other options like multiple formats and bitrates to choose from?
There will always be people who won't buy something and will prefer to download it. You can't change that and, you're right, they will use any excuse to justify it. But the important question is, can you make a profit? If the answer is yes, why do you care who downloads it for free? Just like with every market, you have to find a balance between how many copies you can sell at a given price and how many copies you need to sell to make a profit. Who knows what that will be? Maybe it is $0.37/song for maximum profit. The point is, you have to do some actual market research to find out and can't just sit around and pontificate on Slashdot.
1) You don't know what your calories out are. 2) You don't know what your calories in are. Asians are genetically different
Yes yes, those are all variables, and there are a ton more. But you're missing the point. The specific variables that determine an individual's metabolic rate and efficiency are important for accurate quantification, but irrelevant to simply monitoring your diet. Just look at your body and make comparisons every several months. Are you putting on muscle mass? Are you putting on weight? Are you losing hair? Do you feel sluggish during the day or are you energetic? Are you losing weight? These are all questions that can be easily answered qualitatively by someone who is paying attention. Then start looking at your diet and exercise. How much food are you eating? How much exercise are you getting? What kinds of food are you eating? What kinds of exercise are you doing? If something undesirable is happening (ex: gaining weight by storing fat), is it because your food intake has increased? Or has your diet changed? Or are you exercising less? Again, questions that can be easily answered by someone who is paying attention. Once you know the answers, you can take corrective action.
The metabolic details of what is going on is good to know, and research should continue in this area, but don't pretend appropriate corrective action can't be taken just because we don't know all of the details yet. The thing is, people want to talk their way out of the consequences of their behavioral choices. Yes, it is hard to start exercising if you aren't already in the habit of doing it. It is hard to stop eating McDonald's for dinner when you come home after work and are tired. But, simple corrective remedies have existed for ages, and if you just act on them you can live healthier. Is a low-carb diet better than a low-fat diet? Maybe. But that's a question that isn't going to be answered thoroughly for quite some time. In the meantime, start eating less and exercising more. Avoid things that are known to be very bad for you, like trans-fats, and use moderation when deciding what to eat. Some caffeine is ok. Too much is probably not. Some refined sugar is ok. Too much is probably not. Etc....
Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what this was when I first read it, and there isn't a lot of technical information on their website (at least within easy reach). Basically, from what I can gather, it looks like they have simplified methods for making custom bacterial strains. So whereas before, if you wanted E. coli to overproduce "your favorite protein" you had to make a knockout, and then construct a plasmid, and then transform, and then cross your fingers and hoped it worked the first time otherwise you had to try different plasmids/promoters/etc, now you can grab a couple of BioBricks and be fairly certain it will work the first time, which is kind of neat (yes, that was a run-on sentence).
This doesn't allow you, however, to make custom drugs/substances or engineer radical new viruses and proteins, which the summary seems to imply. Basically, this doesn't allow you to do anything you can't already do with conventional techniques, so if you want to express membrane proteins, best of luck to you! The problem with custom drugs is that we are beginning to understand how some of the gene clusters work, in the case of the polyketides, but we aren't capable yet of making custom gene clusters that create custom polyketides (at least complex ones). When we do get there, though, this will be neat technology for streamlining and scaling-up the process such that it could be useful in industrial applications.
I suggest posting some of your ideas here. They already have some analysis up on the first submissions. It seems like they are open to just about any new idea, but they are generally looking for a consensus among submissions. A lot of people complaining about toolbox clutter, for example, has prompted them to look into alternative ways of organizing it. I noticed a few people suggested a Blender-like gui, but I think that is pretty unlikely to be adopted. They might take some aspects from it, though.
Like many will say where is greater then 8bit support, where are the layer filters and so on. I won't lie for the average joe and minor tasks gimp is probably just fine.
Well, since you are about the tenth person to ask this, which gets brought up in every forum where Gimp is mentioned, I'll reply with the same answer that has been repeated time and again, but doesn't seem to stick....
GEGL is going to be the new image processing backend for Gimp. It will provide deep color support, more color spaces, and other niceties that will make things like adjustment layers easier to implement. Gegl has been slow to develop. It was decided that the work on Gimp 2.4 should be finished before shifting to Gegl. Now that 2.4 is out, the developers will be focusing on transitioning to Gegl for the Gimp 2.6 release.
I sympathize with your indignation. I don't see why people can't just recognize what you are trying to do and suggest a better way (if there is one). Ok, so chroot is not the equivalent of BSD "jails" or Solaris "containers." Is there an equivalent for linux? Shouldn't there be? It seems like these are important questions. Calling someone incompetent for wanting this functionality and not finding it is just an attempt to distract from deficiencies in linux.
Err, whoops, my mistake. That would be $3000 to be meet my energy usage (thought that was too low). Still, that's only 18 months to break even. You shouldn't start to see significant efficiency drops in the first two years of use. The whole battery thing...that has, in my opinion, always been the biggest problem with solar power. Harvesting the energy efficiently isn't the problem, it's getting it when you need it (ex: at night when you need to turn the lights on) that is the problem. Batteries, of course, add to the cost (as you pointed out), decrease the efficiency, and increase the environmental impact.
Hmmm...well, let's try a different tack. According to my electric bill, I used 929 kWh this month. If I spread that energy usage out evenly (assume 10 hours a day you are consuming energy like you did above), that's 929/720 = 3.1 kW of continuous consumption. To put up a solar panel that will meet these requirements, it would cost me $3, whereas my bill for this month was $165.
I think something was lost in your unit conversions because the cost you calculate seems too high. But mine also seems too low....
Well, my point was that he isn't ignoring the problems with gnome-screensaver as everybody seems to be claiming. He acknowledges that there are things that need to be fixed, but since there are a lot of complainers and not a lot of helpers, progress is slow.
As far as screensavers not being broken...Gnome never had a screensaver utility of its own. Xscreensaver was shipped with X11. It was never bundled with Gnome, but a lot of distributions installed it by default. You can still download and install it if you want to use it, until you feel the official gnome-screensaver is "usable" enough for you.
You just copy it to the hard disk. It will still be encrypted, but you can copy it. That's the funny thing about CSS. It is claimed to be for the prevention of piracy, but in fact it does no such thing. I can rip a thousand copies to my hard disk and distribute them to all my friends. All I need is a licensed player, like PowerDVD, to decrypt the stream and play it for me.
Huh, did you actually read through the whole thread that you linked? Here is a relevant post:
Comment #48 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22) 2006-09-26 17:08 UTC [reply]
Matthew and others:
There is really no reason to be rude or to encourage forking. In the FAQ, regarding creating or modifying themes, is says: "There is work to be done to make this simpler. Ask how you can help."
Not a single person has ever asked how they can help.
In the FAQ entry mentioned in comment #10 I added some information about technical issues that need to be addressed (ie. code written) before this can even be possible.
There are also cross-desktop compatability issues to be considered.
There have been various misreadings of what I have said about this issue. This probably has something to do with the brevity of some of my replies, due to lack of time, and I'm sorry for that. I'll try to summarize and explain a little better:
* My view is still that any screensaver theme that *requires* configuration is inherently broken. The key word here is requires. It means that the defaults should work in a reasonable way that no one should *have* to change them.
* I am not denying that some people may want to change the defaults and settings. I am saying that simply adding configurability like xscreensaver has is not a good solution and I've listed some reasons in the FAQ. Please notice that the original reporter asked for the "ability to configure individual screensavers like Xscreensaver". That simply won't work. We need a new way and that is going to take some actual work.
* I am saying that this isn't my highest priority and that if it is very important to someone they should help out.
Jeez, these comments are pretty disheartening to someone spending years of his own time on...
32 seconds? That certainly isn't the case for me, and I'm still using an old Athlon XP. Sounds like you are using a bad distribution, or else you've done something else to your system to make it so slow.
Unless you make it yourself, I think it is unlikely you have urea nitrate in your fertilizer. You probably have urea + potassium nitrate (or ammonium nitrate). To form urea nitrate, you need a strongly acidic conditions.
From the article, the "amazing" new molecule is just commercially available p-dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde. The chemistry involved is already well-known. It is used for, among other things, indirectly detecting biotin (by way of the urea in the molecule). Basically you mix your urea-containing compound with a strong acid (sulfuric acid works), which promotes enol tautomerization and makes the normally unreactive nitrogens of the urea reactive toward electrophiles. One of the nitrogens will react with the aldehyde to form an imine, and due to the availability of a quinoid resonance contributor, turn color (red in the case of dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde and yellow in the case of dimethylaminobenzaldehyde).
What's special here, and why this won't result in a thousand false positives from detection of any urea-containing compound, is that urea nitrate is a stable salt and acidic enough on its own to react with dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde without the addition of acid. So a wipe test, drop it in isopropanol, add some of the aldehyde and see if it changes color. It's a fairly elegant application of old chemistry to forensic analysis.
Fair enough. But I think the situation would still be ambiguous enough to be arguable in court. To me it seems that's a lot of work to get around the GPL. Why not just follow the terms of the license (or write your own software or use something with a different license or pay the developers of the GPL'd software for a commercial license) and make things easier for everyone?
Since the manufacturer (ex: Tivo) is actually making the device, the doctrine of first sale is irrelevant. First sale doctrine applies to customers who bought the device and then want to give away or resell it. If Tivo buys the firmware from a third-party, it is true, Tivo is not beholden to the software license, but the third-party supplier is. No matter how many times the software changes hands and you have to step up the ladder to find the original source, somewhere a derived work was made, and at that point of distribution the terms of the GPL apply.
You know, when I read some of these comments, I get the impression of a cardiologist standing on a street-corner next to McDonald's saying, "Hey, you better not eat that, it isn't good for you." The response is, of course, "shut up and leave me alone, you don't know anything," as they hobble down the street to eat their heart attack in peace.
Ah...selective memory. The issue with Bitkeeper wasn't that it wasn't open source. Hell, if Linus wanted to develop in Visual Studio, a lot of people would probabaly laugh at him, but otherwise not care. The problem was the terms of the license Linus was allowed to use Bitkeeper under. Linus didn't seem to care, but a lot of people (many of them kernel developers) did care about the "no compete" clauses in the license (which are in the commercial license too, btw), the apparent temperament of the tool's owner (which turned out the be quite hostile), and the "hostage situation" with respect to version tracking and Bitmover's servers. When Linus lost the license to use Bitkeeper, he also lost all of the version information that was stored in the Bitkeeper tree, and he had to rebuild it from scratch to put into Git. A lot of people warned Linus that he would get burned by this and he didn't listen. He did get burned and he still doesn't seem to think there was anything wrong with the situation. If only "those hackers" hadn't screwed things up....
but nothing stops you from incorporating such copies that you receive from some third party into such a device.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here...if you distribute hardware that runs GPL'd software (whatever, call it firmware), then you are also distributing that software and you have to follow the terms of the GPL. GPLv3 isn't trying to change the rules here, which is what you seem to be implying.
(at leat for consumer products, apparently businesses have greater rights than consumers in what features they are allowed to seek in products incorporating GPL software)
reference?
You may not be able to do so on the particular hardware instance you received,
More so than that. You can't run the software on any hardware instance of a particular class, the class that the software happens to have been distributed with. What is the point of being able to modify the Tivo code (say, to tweak the scaling algorithms), if I can't run that code on my Tivo?
but then I can change the code on any particular piece of read-only media and use that media to run the modified code, either.
Very bad analogy. We're not talking about read-only access to the hardware. We are talking about hardware refusing to run modified code. The whole purpose of being able to modify the code is to be able to run it. If you can't run it, what's the point. The "key-sharing" clause of GPLv3 is very much in line with spirit of the original GPL.
It would be more consistent with the spirit of the GPL pre-v3 to simply require that any hardware product incorporating GPL code have an open specification licensed on GPL-like terms (the precise terms for a hardware-specification license would have to be developed, of course) that allowed re-implementation of the hardware;
I don't see how that is the case at all. The GPL isn't and has never been interested in the hardware. It is only interested in the software that runs on the hardware. GPLv3 introduces new hardware exceptions only because certain hardware configurations can prevent "software from being free."
Whoever told you that is wrong. If GSA uses GPL'd software (I'm not sure if it does), it has to distribute source with the binaries upon request. They don't have to give the source away for free to everyone, but they do have to give you the source changes if you purchase a binary. It also depends on how they are using the GPL'd software. If they haven't modified it and are just bundling it, they don't have to provide source for their closed application. They only have to provide source if they link against it or modify it for use in their application.
Uh, no. The GPL (any version) does not restrict usage at all. The only thing it requires is distribution of source code changes when distributing binaries (and in v3 anything that is required to make the source changes usable, ex: signing keys to allow it to run on hardware that requires signed binaries).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem with that particular analogy is that you are assuming there is a way to "act responsibly" with a nuclear weapon. With a gun, you at least have many possible uses (hunting, collecting, sport, protection) other than committing a crime. A nuclear weapon is specifically designed for one purpose: to kill a lot of people quickly and severely injure a lot more people just as quickly. If you're going to say a country like Iran isn't allowed to have nuclear weapons, you should say the same thing about conventional military weapons.
Well, I sympathize with what you are saying. It does seem that way, but how many "religious people" do you actually know personally. Because I know quite a few and they don't act as you describe at all. It is true that there are politically motivated people that like being obnoxious, and they get a lot of attention from the media, but I wouldn't say they represent, or even compose a significant percentage of, all followers of every major religion.
I've been half-listening, mostly ignoring, this debate for years. I think the biggest problem is not the disparate views, but rather the tendency to generalize the opinions of a few hot air-spouting pundits to an entire demographic. Members of religious communities generalize the opinions of authors like Dawkins and claim that scientists are trying to disprove the existence of God and attacking religion, which is not the case. Likewise, the scientific community sees actions by special interests that influence school board decisions and claims that religionists are ignorant superstitious zealots that ignore science and prefer to live in an imaginary world, which is also not the case. Such publicized generalizations tend to make people defensive, and then they don't want to hear what you have to say at all. If you can't sit down and have a civil conversation with someone about their beliefs (scientific, religious, or otherwise), then you will never see an end to debates such as these.
FTA: I seem to hold a minority opinion. I've taken a lot of heat for it!
I think that's because the argument doesn't make any sense. The author is saying that open source projects suffer from some sort of ADD, and therefore they don't (implication: can't) focus on one idea long enough to make it good. The thing is, open source is an enabler; it allows for the free exchange of ideas. However, it is not a source of inspiration in and of itself. It's just a methodology. A jigsaw isn't going to help a person with no skill or imagination to create a work of art from a piece of wood. However, a person with imagination and creativity will be better able to create that work of art with a jigsaw than with just a chisel and a hammer.
In the closed source world, profit is simultaneously the inspiration and the cause for lack of inspiration. If investors see potential in an emerging market, they will pour money into development of an innovative product. But if there isn't sufficient profit motivation, innovation won't happen. There is not a singular source of inspiration in the open source world. I think mostly what we are seeing up until now is the motivation of replacing proprietary software. That results in the development of a lot of clones with similar functionality and interface design. If somebody were to come along, though, and say, "Here I have this awesome idea. Come help me out with it," open source allows that to happen much easier than closed source. There is some of that out there already. They just aren't among the high profile projects. Niche ideas are going to get minimal attention until other people discover them. That is one thing that proprietary software will always do better because their business model depends on it: marketing.
In all, my point (yes, I was getting to it in a roundabout way) is that business models based around free/absurdly cheap (read allofmp3) music are either unprofitable or wouldn't fly with shareholders of the major labels.
Maybe...maybe not. You can't really say that without actual sales data to back it up.
Let's say you need to make $5000 to break even. If you sell at $0.99 a song, you need to sell 5,000 songs to make a profit. That sounds like a pretty easy mark to it. Now reduce to price tenfold to $0.10 a song. You need to sell 50,000 songs to make a profit. Are ten times to number of people going to buy the song just because to reduced the price tenfold? Maybe, it's hard to know without some good test cases. How popular is the song? How easy is it to download? Is there DRM? Are there other options like multiple formats and bitrates to choose from?
There will always be people who won't buy something and will prefer to download it. You can't change that and, you're right, they will use any excuse to justify it. But the important question is, can you make a profit? If the answer is yes, why do you care who downloads it for free? Just like with every market, you have to find a balance between how many copies you can sell at a given price and how many copies you need to sell to make a profit. Who knows what that will be? Maybe it is $0.37/song for maximum profit. The point is, you have to do some actual market research to find out and can't just sit around and pontificate on Slashdot.
1) You don't know what your calories out are.
2) You don't know what your calories in are.
Asians are genetically different
Yes yes, those are all variables, and there are a ton more. But you're missing the point. The specific variables that determine an individual's metabolic rate and efficiency are important for accurate quantification, but irrelevant to simply monitoring your diet. Just look at your body and make comparisons every several months. Are you putting on muscle mass? Are you putting on weight? Are you losing hair? Do you feel sluggish during the day or are you energetic? Are you losing weight? These are all questions that can be easily answered qualitatively by someone who is paying attention. Then start looking at your diet and exercise. How much food are you eating? How much exercise are you getting? What kinds of food are you eating? What kinds of exercise are you doing? If something undesirable is happening (ex: gaining weight by storing fat), is it because your food intake has increased? Or has your diet changed? Or are you exercising less? Again, questions that can be easily answered by someone who is paying attention. Once you know the answers, you can take corrective action.
The metabolic details of what is going on is good to know, and research should continue in this area, but don't pretend appropriate corrective action can't be taken just because we don't know all of the details yet. The thing is, people want to talk their way out of the consequences of their behavioral choices. Yes, it is hard to start exercising if you aren't already in the habit of doing it. It is hard to stop eating McDonald's for dinner when you come home after work and are tired. But, simple corrective remedies have existed for ages, and if you just act on them you can live healthier. Is a low-carb diet better than a low-fat diet? Maybe. But that's a question that isn't going to be answered thoroughly for quite some time. In the meantime, start eating less and exercising more. Avoid things that are known to be very bad for you, like trans-fats, and use moderation when deciding what to eat. Some caffeine is ok. Too much is probably not. Some refined sugar is ok. Too much is probably not. Etc....
Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what this was when I first read it, and there isn't a lot of technical information on their website (at least within easy reach). Basically, from what I can gather, it looks like they have simplified methods for making custom bacterial strains. So whereas before, if you wanted E. coli to overproduce "your favorite protein" you had to make a knockout, and then construct a plasmid, and then transform, and then cross your fingers and hoped it worked the first time otherwise you had to try different plasmids/promoters/etc, now you can grab a couple of BioBricks and be fairly certain it will work the first time, which is kind of neat (yes, that was a run-on sentence).
This doesn't allow you, however, to make custom drugs/substances or engineer radical new viruses and proteins, which the summary seems to imply. Basically, this doesn't allow you to do anything you can't already do with conventional techniques, so if you want to express membrane proteins, best of luck to you! The problem with custom drugs is that we are beginning to understand how some of the gene clusters work, in the case of the polyketides, but we aren't capable yet of making custom gene clusters that create custom polyketides (at least complex ones). When we do get there, though, this will be neat technology for streamlining and scaling-up the process such that it could be useful in industrial applications.
I suggest posting some of your ideas here. They already have some analysis up on the first submissions. It seems like they are open to just about any new idea, but they are generally looking for a consensus among submissions. A lot of people complaining about toolbox clutter, for example, has prompted them to look into alternative ways of organizing it. I noticed a few people suggested a Blender-like gui, but I think that is pretty unlikely to be adopted. They might take some aspects from it, though.
Like many will say where is greater then 8bit support, where are the layer filters and so on. I won't lie for the average joe and minor tasks gimp is probably just fine.
Well, since you are about the tenth person to ask this, which gets brought up in every forum where Gimp is mentioned, I'll reply with the same answer that has been repeated time and again, but doesn't seem to stick....
GEGL is going to be the new image processing backend for Gimp. It will provide deep color support, more color spaces, and other niceties that will make things like adjustment layers easier to implement. Gegl has been slow to develop. It was decided that the work on Gimp 2.4 should be finished before shifting to Gegl. Now that 2.4 is out, the developers will be focusing on transitioning to Gegl for the Gimp 2.6 release.
There. Now, can we stop asking about this?
I realize this wasn't your point, but you should have a look at kerberized ftp and ftpd.
I sympathize with your indignation. I don't see why people can't just recognize what you are trying to do and suggest a better way (if there is one). Ok, so chroot is not the equivalent of BSD "jails" or Solaris "containers." Is there an equivalent for linux? Shouldn't there be? It seems like these are important questions. Calling someone incompetent for wanting this functionality and not finding it is just an attempt to distract from deficiencies in linux.
Err, whoops, my mistake. That would be $3000 to be meet my energy usage (thought that was too low). Still, that's only 18 months to break even. You shouldn't start to see significant efficiency drops in the first two years of use. The whole battery thing...that has, in my opinion, always been the biggest problem with solar power. Harvesting the energy efficiently isn't the problem, it's getting it when you need it (ex: at night when you need to turn the lights on) that is the problem. Batteries, of course, add to the cost (as you pointed out), decrease the efficiency, and increase the environmental impact.
Hmmm...well, let's try a different tack. According to my electric bill, I used 929 kWh this month. If I spread that energy usage out evenly (assume 10 hours a day you are consuming energy like you did above), that's 929/720 = 3.1 kW of continuous consumption. To put up a solar panel that will meet these requirements, it would cost me $3, whereas my bill for this month was $165.
I think something was lost in your unit conversions because the cost you calculate seems too high. But mine also seems too low....
Well, my point was that he isn't ignoring the problems with gnome-screensaver as everybody seems to be claiming. He acknowledges that there are things that need to be fixed, but since there are a lot of complainers and not a lot of helpers, progress is slow.
As far as screensavers not being broken...Gnome never had a screensaver utility of its own. Xscreensaver was shipped with X11. It was never bundled with Gnome, but a lot of distributions installed it by default. You can still download and install it if you want to use it, until you feel the official gnome-screensaver is "usable" enough for you.
You just copy it to the hard disk. It will still be encrypted, but you can copy it. That's the funny thing about CSS. It is claimed to be for the prevention of piracy, but in fact it does no such thing. I can rip a thousand copies to my hard disk and distribute them to all my friends. All I need is a licensed player, like PowerDVD, to decrypt the stream and play it for me.
Huh, did you actually read through the whole thread that you linked? Here is a relevant post:
Comment #48 from William Jon McCann (gnome-screensaver developer, points: 22)
2006-09-26 17:08 UTC [reply]
Matthew and others:
There is really no reason to be rude or to encourage forking. In the FAQ,
regarding creating or modifying themes, is says:
"There is work to be done to make this simpler. Ask how you can help."
Not a single person has ever asked how they can help.
In the FAQ entry mentioned in comment #10 I added some information about
technical issues that need to be addressed (ie. code written) before this can
even be possible.
There are also cross-desktop compatability issues to be considered.
Here are a couple of the issues:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355488
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354811
There have been various misreadings of what I have said about this issue. This
probably has something to do with the brevity of some of my replies, due to
lack of time, and I'm sorry for that. I'll try to summarize and explain a
little better:
* My view is still that any screensaver theme that *requires* configuration is
inherently broken. The key word here is requires. It means that the defaults
should work in a reasonable way that no one should *have* to change them.
* I am not denying that some people may want to change the defaults and
settings. I am saying that simply adding configurability like xscreensaver has
is not a good solution and I've listed some reasons in the FAQ. Please notice
that the original reporter asked for the "ability to configure individual
screensavers like Xscreensaver". That simply won't work. We need a new way
and that is going to take some actual work.
* I am saying that this isn't my highest priority and that if it is very
important to someone they should help out.
Jeez, these comments are pretty disheartening to someone spending years of his
own time on...
Thank you.
32 seconds? That certainly isn't the case for me, and I'm still using an old Athlon XP. Sounds like you are using a bad distribution, or else you've done something else to your system to make it so slow.
Unless you make it yourself, I think it is unlikely you have urea nitrate in your fertilizer. You probably have urea + potassium nitrate (or ammonium nitrate). To form urea nitrate, you need a strongly acidic conditions.
From the article, the "amazing" new molecule is just commercially available p-dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde. The chemistry involved is already well-known. It is used for, among other things, indirectly detecting biotin (by way of the urea in the molecule). Basically you mix your urea-containing compound with a strong acid (sulfuric acid works), which promotes enol tautomerization and makes the normally unreactive nitrogens of the urea reactive toward electrophiles. One of the nitrogens will react with the aldehyde to form an imine, and due to the availability of a quinoid resonance contributor, turn color (red in the case of dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde and yellow in the case of dimethylaminobenzaldehyde).
What's special here, and why this won't result in a thousand false positives from detection of any urea-containing compound, is that urea nitrate is a stable salt and acidic enough on its own to react with dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde without the addition of acid. So a wipe test, drop it in isopropanol, add some of the aldehyde and see if it changes color. It's a fairly elegant application of old chemistry to forensic analysis.
Fair enough. But I think the situation would still be ambiguous enough to be arguable in court. To me it seems that's a lot of work to get around the GPL. Why not just follow the terms of the license (or write your own software or use something with a different license or pay the developers of the GPL'd software for a commercial license) and make things easier for everyone?
Since the manufacturer (ex: Tivo) is actually making the device, the doctrine of first sale is irrelevant. First sale doctrine applies to customers who bought the device and then want to give away or resell it. If Tivo buys the firmware from a third-party, it is true, Tivo is not beholden to the software license, but the third-party supplier is. No matter how many times the software changes hands and you have to step up the ladder to find the original source, somewhere a derived work was made, and at that point of distribution the terms of the GPL apply.
You know, when I read some of these comments, I get the impression of a cardiologist standing on a street-corner next to McDonald's saying, "Hey, you better not eat that, it isn't good for you." The response is, of course, "shut up and leave me alone, you don't know anything," as they hobble down the street to eat their heart attack in peace.
Ah...selective memory. The issue with Bitkeeper wasn't that it wasn't open source. Hell, if Linus wanted to develop in Visual Studio, a lot of people would probabaly laugh at him, but otherwise not care. The problem was the terms of the license Linus was allowed to use Bitkeeper under. Linus didn't seem to care, but a lot of people (many of them kernel developers) did care about the "no compete" clauses in the license (which are in the commercial license too, btw), the apparent temperament of the tool's owner (which turned out the be quite hostile), and the "hostage situation" with respect to version tracking and Bitmover's servers. When Linus lost the license to use Bitkeeper, he also lost all of the version information that was stored in the Bitkeeper tree, and he had to rebuild it from scratch to put into Git. A lot of people warned Linus that he would get burned by this and he didn't listen. He did get burned and he still doesn't seem to think there was anything wrong with the situation. If only "those hackers" hadn't screwed things up....
but nothing stops you from incorporating such copies that you receive from some third party into such a device.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here...if you distribute hardware that runs GPL'd software (whatever, call it firmware), then you are also distributing that software and you have to follow the terms of the GPL. GPLv3 isn't trying to change the rules here, which is what you seem to be implying.
(at leat for consumer products, apparently businesses have greater rights than consumers in what features they are allowed to seek in products incorporating GPL software)
reference?
You may not be able to do so on the particular hardware instance you received,
More so than that. You can't run the software on any hardware instance of a particular class, the class that the software happens to have been distributed with. What is the point of being able to modify the Tivo code (say, to tweak the scaling algorithms), if I can't run that code on my Tivo?
but then I can change the code on any particular piece of read-only media and use that media to run the modified code, either.
Very bad analogy. We're not talking about read-only access to the hardware. We are talking about hardware refusing to run modified code. The whole purpose of being able to modify the code is to be able to run it. If you can't run it, what's the point. The "key-sharing" clause of GPLv3 is very much in line with spirit of the original GPL.
It would be more consistent with the spirit of the GPL pre-v3 to simply require that any hardware product incorporating GPL code have an open specification licensed on GPL-like terms (the precise terms for a hardware-specification license would have to be developed, of course) that allowed re-implementation of the hardware;
I don't see how that is the case at all. The GPL isn't and has never been interested in the hardware. It is only interested in the software that runs on the hardware. GPLv3 introduces new hardware exceptions only because certain hardware configurations can prevent "software from being free."
Maybe the ability to keep his damned mouth shut when he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say?
Wait wait...are you sure we are talking about the same Linus?
Whoever told you that is wrong. If GSA uses GPL'd software (I'm not sure if it does), it has to distribute source with the binaries upon request. They don't have to give the source away for free to everyone, but they do have to give you the source changes if you purchase a binary. It also depends on how they are using the GPL'd software. If they haven't modified it and are just bundling it, they don't have to provide source for their closed application. They only have to provide source if they link against it or modify it for use in their application.
Uh, no. The GPL (any version) does not restrict usage at all. The only thing it requires is distribution of source code changes when distributing binaries (and in v3 anything that is required to make the source changes usable, ex: signing keys to allow it to run on hardware that requires signed binaries).
I met Alex four years ago at Brandeis. He tried to mate with my arm... :(