I've used all my mod points on "Offtopic" today. I was fine with the protest until Slashdot responded and opened a discussion area for it. Now, if you want to discuss beta, go to the beta article. Other people who care will be there, too. Maybe you can even effect positive change.
Spamming every single discussion is, quite obviously, now Offtopic and other people with mod points seem to agree with me.
>>The result it that some software turns into a hand-out for companies that, in the long term, are trying to make free software disappear. > > No company is trying to do that, especially not one that is relying on free software for their products.
Apple is.
Their current flagship platform is openly hostile to Free Software and even the concept of open systems where the end user has full control over the hardware.
Near as I can tell, Apple isn't doing anything to try to make Free software disappear. They are, however, creating many alternatives ever since GPLv3 made it unviable for them to continue to participate in that community as much. Even now, though, if you look at all the packages they use and contribute to as part of MacOS X (the core of which is all open source, although most of it isn't Free Software), there are many GPL packages among them: http://www.opensource.apple.co... . It does seem that with companies like Apple actively participating in Open Source but not as actively participating in Free Software, that to a certain degree it's proving many of the anti-GPL folks' points and probably really pissing off RMS.
There is no records of the romans having contact with China.
There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.
As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.
This attack is not an all-or-nothing thing, either. 51% is just the threshold to be able to guarantee success. Controlling 40% of the mining capacity is enough to be able to double-spend a transaction that's been confirmed 6 times with 50% confidence.
Here's a list of semiconductor manufacturing plants many of which are in the United States, including some of the most advanced fab lines in the world. It's true, as others have said, that assembly almost always happens in Asia now, though, but that's not a requirement if you're not price conscious. As for the capacitors and such, I think there's been less concern about them from a security standpoint.
- Access to affordable birth control. In third world countries, birth control isn't always affordable or easy to come by.
These predictions were made in 1964. "The pill" had just become available for birth control use in the United States a few years previous, but only in some states and only to married women... it wasn't generally available to any woman who wanted it in all states until the early 70's. Maybe it was because he was a male, but not realizing the impact this would have on the (developed) world seems to be one of his bigger oversights.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.
This makes no sense to me. First of all, G+ is a non-starter because Google is even worse than Facebook about collecting all the data they can on everyone who touches their services and trying to sell to them. If it ever were to catch on (however unlikely that may be), you'd see the exact same thing there or worse. The rest, well, if you can't monetize it somehow, who's going to pay the developers to develop it? A bunch of enthusiasts only gets you so far, and won't be able to keep up with an organization that has a revenue stream that's able to sustain a large development team. Apple's theory has been to tie their services to hardware and make money there, thus negating the need to track and spam, but it doesn't seem to produce great online services that way (and most geeks here seem to prefer Google monitoring their every move to Apple's model anyway). So basically, it's not going to become world-class if it can't be monetized, and while the only two models today (track and spam like FB and Google or tie to hardware like Apple and Samsung) each have significant issues, you don't seem to be proposing any alternate model that could be self-sustaining either.
The Matrix came out in 1999. Remember those switchblade phones they used? That was a Nokia 8110... state of the art in 2000. The PalmOS phones wouldn't come out for a few years after that, which are arguably one of the first mass-produced "smart" phones.
On this site a substantial number of readers use a phone whose OS is produced by a company that gets 95% of its revenue and profit from recording everything about you that it can, finding your weaknesses, and selling access to them to the highest bidder with zero oversight. Compared to that, what is the outrage over a Government agency sifting through metadata looking for people who want to hurt us and trying to stop them?
Yes and no. You do not have to include the high risk patients, and we do have a good reason to rule them out of that data. Just compare the patents that a competent midwife would of warned away from a home-birth.
"A competent midwife" is a loaded statement. In the UK most midwives have at least a 3-year degree or an additional set of courses on top of a nursing degree. In the US, many midwives are "self-taught" or taught by apprenticeship by others and there is little oversight. And, of course, the US does not have universal health care so many more pregnancies are higher risk with reduced prenatal care of the mother or child. I'm not sure where the study the parent poster was quoting was done, but it should certainly control for health care systems as well.
My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one
D670,286. Dotted lines are not part of the claimed patent. The only solid lines in that patent are: 1 rectangle with rounded corners. 1 rectangle inside the rounded one for the screen.
They simply show a diagram of an iPad and claim a design patent on anything that could be confused with it. "Rounded corners" does not appear in the claim list at all. One could create a new device whose corners were a different radius and it wouldn't infringe. (Plus, this patent has never been tested in court-- the Samsung trial used much more complete patented renderings, and claimed software similarities while this is a hardware design patent.)
My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one. (And Gore never claimed he was the inventor of the Internet, either.)
Not just that, but hotel chains do this because it's how businesses and the Government (apparently) like to pay them. They negotiate a fixed price for a room then reimburse employees for fees like parking, Internet, etc. If you go $1 over your allotted room rate you're in trouble, but $20 parking and $5/night internet? No problem.
Samsung's case hinged on a standards-essential patent they had agreed to license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms and was decided by the ITC. Apple's patent was not part of a standard and was decided by a US court of law. The cases aren't even remotely similar, no there's nothing "blatant" here.
What you are seeing is the liberal's strategy for staying in power. Get as many people as possible dependent on the government. Then nobody dare oppose them or they will threaten to take away the government teat like what is happening right now. Obamacare is their attempt to get the majority of the population dependent on government for medical care. Imagine the power they will wield when they can threaten to shut down the government and take away your health care.
Every point in your post is the complete opposite of the truth. It's the Republicans who repeatedly threaten to take away the Government when they don't get concession on top of concession. And most of the safety net programs are designed to keep you from becoming destitute and therefore remain employable instead of becoming a social burden. And the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is not Government health care; It's the opposite of that. You are required to take responsibility for yourself and get yourself insured so we don't have to pay for you when things go wrong, but beyond that it's up to you to make a deal with your own private insurer. They even provide an online free market system in which to do it. It's a Conservative wet dream, but they can't let Obama get credit for it. That's why they have no plan themselves, just repeal and go back to the old system.
So now they're demanding we bring back pre-existing conditions, re-enstate lifetime insurance caps, make it harder for low-income and working class women to control their fertility, make us pay for some uninsured YOLO's emergency room visit, keep graduate students or people starting their career from staying on previous insurance while they're getting on their feet, eliminate preventive care for diabetics and other high-risk individuals forcing them to go to the emergency room when things get bad, eliminate vaccination programs, allow insurers to raise rates to increase their profits arbitrarily, prevent individuals starting businesses to self-insure in an open competitive marketplaces or else they'll shut down the Government, refuse to negotiate a budget, and default on the debt. Yeah. That makes sense.
Why are you defining "Linux" as just the kernel? The original meaning was the entire OS, with the phrase "Linux kernel" referring to just the kernel. If you want to err on the side of brevity, "Linux" is accurate, "GNU/Linux" is what RMS wants everyone to call it, and "GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Canonical/RHEL/SUSE/Linux" would be more accurate. I'd advise ignoring the last two options and calling the OS by it's original name-- Linux.
The article is BS, because it assumes there are no legit technical reasons to go to ARM's 64-bit standard. To name a few: 1. Twice as many general purpose registers 2. Twice as wide general purpose registers (so 4x the number of bytes in the register file) 3. Twice as many SIMD registers 4. Double-precision SIMD 5. On-chip encryption 6. Sparse address space for security 7. Memory mapping huge files (49-bit virtual address space) 8. A64 cleaned up the old instruction set quite a bit
And yes, tablets will probably have 8GB of RAM in the next couple of years. The XBox One and PS4 will both have 8GB, and Apple is rumored to be gunning for the living room soon as well, so putting this in the 5s gives them economies of scale before they even release a product.
Besides, the iPhone Simulator has always run on the Mac in x86, so most iPhone software has already shown a high degree of Mac interoperability. In short, having the bittedness in common with the Mac is probably way, way down the list for why they went 64-bit so early.
And while we're at it, why don't we start electricity services which allows everyone to pull down their maximum Wattage 24x7? I think it's completely reasonable to have a very fast connection for when I need it, but cap it so it's not abused. Netflix is essentially a subsidized service these days, and everyone expects to get it for some small fee each month, but the infrastructure can't support that yet.
I am aware of that list. The operating system itself is not on that list, specifically the kernel as well. Consider that OpenDarwin shut down for the express reason that they couldn't get the code off Apple, I don't see what you are talking about.
The entire "operating system" isn't there, but the XNU kernel and UNIX user space are all there up to the latest MacOS X point release. Enough to get a bootable OS with shell and a full suite of UNIX utilities. Honest. Here's some instructions for building the kernel that you can then swap in. Then you can download all the userspace packages and build and swap them in as well. What isn't provided is a nice set of changelogs, package installers, open bug database, etc. But the code is available and BSD licensed.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Certified" is not a general intensifier. It has meaning. Don't sprinkle it on your sentences like some verbal MSG.
Yes, it does. Are you asserting some meaning other than having been certified as a Open Brand UNIX 03 registered product, which MacOS X has been since version 10.5?
MacOS X's core OS is open source. You can download the kernel and recompile it and swap yours in if you want to, and all the standard user space stuff is basically FreeBSD.
Also, it is a certified UNIX 03 operating system, so it is more "UNIX" than Linux, which is what I assume you're comparing it to.
The biggest UNIX vendor in the world-- Apple, Inc.-- has had its UNIX laptops increase in market share in almost every quarter for the last 5 years. And although it's not certified UNIX like its desktop sibling, iOS is based on the same core... not sure what value differentiating this specific market segment offers. In the server, Linux seems to be doing just fine, and is close enough to UNIX for it not to matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used all my mod points on "Offtopic" today. I was fine with the protest until Slashdot responded and opened a discussion area for it. Now, if you want to discuss beta, go to the beta article. Other people who care will be there, too. Maybe you can even effect positive change.
Spamming every single discussion is, quite obviously, now Offtopic and other people with mod points seem to agree with me.
>>The result it that some software turns into a hand-out for companies that, in the long term, are trying to make free software disappear.
>
> No company is trying to do that, especially not one that is relying on free software for their products.
Apple is.
Their current flagship platform is openly hostile to Free Software and even the concept of open systems where the end user has full control over the hardware.
Near as I can tell, Apple isn't doing anything to try to make Free software disappear. They are, however, creating many alternatives ever since GPLv3 made it unviable for them to continue to participate in that community as much. Even now, though, if you look at all the packages they use and contribute to as part of MacOS X (the core of which is all open source, although most of it isn't Free Software), there are many GPL packages among them: http://www.opensource.apple.co... . It does seem that with companies like Apple actively participating in Open Source but not as actively participating in Free Software, that to a certain degree it's proving many of the anti-GPL folks' points and probably really pissing off RMS.
There is no records of the romans having contact with China.
There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.
As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.
This attack is not an all-or-nothing thing, either. 51% is just the threshold to be able to guarantee success. Controlling 40% of the mining capacity is enough to be able to double-spend a transaction that's been confirmed 6 times with 50% confidence.
Here's a list of semiconductor manufacturing plants many of which are in the United States, including some of the most advanced fab lines in the world. It's true, as others have said, that assembly almost always happens in Asia now, though, but that's not a requirement if you're not price conscious. As for the capacitors and such, I think there's been less concern about them from a security standpoint.
- Access to affordable birth control. In third world countries, birth control isn't always affordable or easy to come by.
These predictions were made in 1964. "The pill" had just become available for birth control use in the United States a few years previous, but only in some states and only to married women... it wasn't generally available to any woman who wanted it in all states until the early 70's. Maybe it was because he was a male, but not realizing the impact this would have on the (developed) world seems to be one of his bigger oversights.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.
This makes no sense to me. First of all, G+ is a non-starter because Google is even worse than Facebook about collecting all the data they can on everyone who touches their services and trying to sell to them. If it ever were to catch on (however unlikely that may be), you'd see the exact same thing there or worse. The rest, well, if you can't monetize it somehow, who's going to pay the developers to develop it? A bunch of enthusiasts only gets you so far, and won't be able to keep up with an organization that has a revenue stream that's able to sustain a large development team. Apple's theory has been to tie their services to hardware and make money there, thus negating the need to track and spam, but it doesn't seem to produce great online services that way (and most geeks here seem to prefer Google monitoring their every move to Apple's model anyway). So basically, it's not going to become world-class if it can't be monetized, and while the only two models today (track and spam like FB and Google or tie to hardware like Apple and Samsung) each have significant issues, you don't seem to be proposing any alternate model that could be self-sustaining either.
The Matrix came out in 1999. Remember those switchblade phones they used? That was a Nokia 8110... state of the art in 2000. The PalmOS phones wouldn't come out for a few years after that, which are arguably one of the first mass-produced "smart" phones.
On this site a substantial number of readers use a phone whose OS is produced by a company that gets 95% of its revenue and profit from recording everything about you that it can, finding your weaknesses, and selling access to them to the highest bidder with zero oversight. Compared to that, what is the outrage over a Government agency sifting through metadata looking for people who want to hurt us and trying to stop them?
> The default cipher list for Java 7 was updated, but Android is stuck using JDK 6 and a default cipher list over a decade old.
The Android platform did not upgrade. How is that Oracle's fault? Next we will be blaming vendors for vulnerabilities that were patched years ago.
It can't possibly be Google's fault; this is Slashdot. It must be Oracle's fault that Google copied badly from Java.
Yes and no. You do not have to include the high risk patients, and we do have a good reason to rule them out of that data.
Just compare the patents that a competent midwife would of warned away from a home-birth.
"A competent midwife" is a loaded statement. In the UK most midwives have at least a 3-year degree or an additional set of courses on top of a nursing degree. In the US, many midwives are "self-taught" or taught by apprenticeship by others and there is little oversight. And, of course, the US does not have universal health care so many more pregnancies are higher risk with reduced prenatal care of the mother or child. I'm not sure where the study the parent poster was quoting was done, but it should certainly control for health care systems as well.
My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one
D670,286. Dotted lines are not part of the claimed patent. The only solid lines in that patent are: 1 rectangle with rounded corners. 1 rectangle inside the rounded one for the screen.
They simply show a diagram of an iPad and claim a design patent on anything that could be confused with it. "Rounded corners" does not appear in the claim list at all. One could create a new device whose corners were a different radius and it wouldn't infringe. (Plus, this patent has never been tested in court-- the Samsung trial used much more complete patented renderings, and claimed software similarities while this is a hardware design patent.)
My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one. (And Gore never claimed he was the inventor of the Internet, either.)
Not just that, but hotel chains do this because it's how businesses and the Government (apparently) like to pay them. They negotiate a fixed price for a room then reimburse employees for fees like parking, Internet, etc. If you go $1 over your allotted room rate you're in trouble, but $20 parking and $5/night internet? No problem.
Samsung's case hinged on a standards-essential patent they had agreed to license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms and was decided by the ITC. Apple's patent was not part of a standard and was decided by a US court of law. The cases aren't even remotely similar, no there's nothing "blatant" here.
What you are seeing is the liberal's strategy for staying in power. Get as many people as possible dependent on the government. Then nobody dare oppose them or they will threaten to take away the government teat like what is happening right now. Obamacare is their attempt to get the majority of the population dependent on government for medical care. Imagine the power they will wield when they can threaten to shut down the government and take away your health care.
Every point in your post is the complete opposite of the truth. It's the Republicans who repeatedly threaten to take away the Government when they don't get concession on top of concession. And most of the safety net programs are designed to keep you from becoming destitute and therefore remain employable instead of becoming a social burden. And the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is not Government health care; It's the opposite of that. You are required to take responsibility for yourself and get yourself insured so we don't have to pay for you when things go wrong, but beyond that it's up to you to make a deal with your own private insurer. They even provide an online free market system in which to do it. It's a Conservative wet dream, but they can't let Obama get credit for it. That's why they have no plan themselves, just repeal and go back to the old system.
So now they're demanding we bring back pre-existing conditions, re-enstate lifetime insurance caps, make it harder for low-income and working class women to control their fertility, make us pay for some uninsured YOLO's emergency room visit, keep graduate students or people starting their career from staying on previous insurance while they're getting on their feet, eliminate preventive care for diabetics and other high-risk individuals forcing them to go to the emergency room when things get bad, eliminate vaccination programs, allow insurers to raise rates to increase their profits arbitrarily, prevent individuals starting businesses to self-insure in an open competitive marketplaces or else they'll shut down the Government, refuse to negotiate a budget, and default on the debt. Yeah. That makes sense.
Why are you defining "Linux" as just the kernel? The original meaning was the entire OS, with the phrase "Linux kernel" referring to just the kernel. If you want to err on the side of brevity, "Linux" is accurate, "GNU/Linux" is what RMS wants everyone to call it, and "GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Canonical/RHEL/SUSE/Linux" would be more accurate. I'd advise ignoring the last two options and calling the OS by it's original name-- Linux.
The article is BS, because it assumes there are no legit technical reasons to go to ARM's 64-bit standard. To name a few:
1. Twice as many general purpose registers
2. Twice as wide general purpose registers (so 4x the number of bytes in the register file)
3. Twice as many SIMD registers
4. Double-precision SIMD
5. On-chip encryption
6. Sparse address space for security
7. Memory mapping huge files (49-bit virtual address space)
8. A64 cleaned up the old instruction set quite a bit
And yes, tablets will probably have 8GB of RAM in the next couple of years. The XBox One and PS4 will both have 8GB, and Apple is rumored to be gunning for the living room soon as well, so putting this in the 5s gives them economies of scale before they even release a product.
Besides, the iPhone Simulator has always run on the Mac in x86, so most iPhone software has already shown a high degree of Mac interoperability. In short, having the bittedness in common with the Mac is probably way, way down the list for why they went 64-bit so early.
And while we're at it, why don't we start electricity services which allows everyone to pull down their maximum Wattage 24x7? I think it's completely reasonable to have a very fast connection for when I need it, but cap it so it's not abused. Netflix is essentially a subsidized service these days, and everyone expects to get it for some small fee each month, but the infrastructure can't support that yet.
I am aware of that list. The operating system itself is not on that list, specifically the kernel as well. Consider that OpenDarwin shut down for the express reason that they couldn't get the code off Apple, I don't see what you are talking about.
The entire "operating system" isn't there, but the XNU kernel and UNIX user space are all there up to the latest MacOS X point release. Enough to get a bootable OS with shell and a full suite of UNIX utilities. Honest. Here's some instructions for building the kernel that you can then swap in. Then you can download all the userspace packages and build and swap them in as well. What isn't provided is a nice set of changelogs, package installers, open bug database, etc. But the code is available and BSD licensed.
OS X is a fully certified Unix
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Certified" is not a general intensifier. It has meaning. Don't sprinkle it on your sentences like some verbal MSG.
Yes, it does. Are you asserting some meaning other than having been certified as a Open Brand UNIX 03 registered product, which MacOS X has been since version 10.5?
MacOS X's core OS is open source. You can download the kernel and recompile it and swap yours in if you want to, and all the standard user space stuff is basically FreeBSD.
Also, it is a certified UNIX 03 operating system, so it is more "UNIX" than Linux, which is what I assume you're comparing it to.
The biggest UNIX vendor in the world-- Apple, Inc.-- has had its UNIX laptops increase in market share in almost every quarter for the last 5 years. And although it's not certified UNIX like its desktop sibling, iOS is based on the same core... not sure what value differentiating this specific market segment offers. In the server, Linux seems to be doing just fine, and is close enough to UNIX for it not to matter.