By not voting you are giving a green light to those who would call you lazy, ignorant, stupid, or whatever other juicy adjectives may come up...and they would be partly right. You do not send any sort of message by not voting. Show up at the polling station, take you ballot, and then send a message...spoil it. Write in Donald Duck or Hulk Hogan, check all the name, don't check any names at all, whatever just do SOMETHING! Spoiled ballots "count" as protests, sitting home and complaining over IRC does not.
I didn't read the article, but I bet RMS does know all about consoles, and doesn't see any reason why
they should be the way they are, and he's right.
That is a very dangerous statement. Like you said, you did not read the article and notice the part where RMS asks "what is a console?". Rejecting an argument based on the fact that you feel it is wrong without having any evidence is just wrong. This kind of blind adoration of RMS is dangerous.
Is was in Ontario at the time of the election and lived through the NDP government so I feel the need to refute your comments at least in part. The NDP was not elected because of their high horse morals. Their accidental victory was a combination of two factors:
1) An early election call by the Liberal premier at the time was seen by the media and select special interest groups as a great opportunity to discredit the party. The hope was that the PCs would benefit from the negative sentiment, a strategy that obviously failed miserably as the PCs ended the election with fewer seats than they had before the election.
2) The NDP recognised that the poorer elements of the population voted less as compared to the middle class and rich. Therefore they promised increases in welfare and spending on low income housing that were obviously not sustainable on any sort of long-term basis and were never really a part of their policy platform in such an extreme form at any time before the election, but that finally got the lower class out of their homes and into the polling stations. The NDP came to power solely on that new wave of voting.
As to the NDP being "voted out of existence on a national scale", that is simply not true. Saskatchewan has an NDP government with real policies as opposed to the Ontarian NDP policy of more or less directly buying votes, and that province has done fine with the NDP enjoying good support. British Columbia also elected an NDP government whose problems all stem from corruption and other sorts of personal problems rather than the party's policies. Finally, the NDP has been more successful in the past two national elections than the PC party, the party that was in power throughout the 80s and is now on the verge of self-destructing permanently.
nVidia's market cap is extremely inflated, mostly due to hype about their alliance with MS. When MS actually starts shipping their game console and investors realise how razor thin nVidia's margins are on that product the stock will tank faster than RHAT and CORL did.
If I need to get work done, I start blackbox and fire up half a dozen xterms. For development this cannot be
beat.
It all depends on your definition of work. Xterms are more than enough for some people, but for a large portion of computer users getting work done involves more than writing code. I could not live with just xterms, it would just be impossible for me to do what I need to do (which involves more than just putzing around), so I (and many users like me) need a different desktop solution than you do.
In fact if I am not mistaken Trolltech is actually doing the port themselves. It makes sense that they would use their own toolkit, gives them the consulting revenue and some good advertising.
How do you figure your statement to be true? It seems to me that they are doing a perfect job of setting the bait and now reeling in the fish. Where is the lack of intelligence? They know what their interests are and they are defending them.
What are you talking about? They apologized that the website was inconvenienced but they did not claim responsability. It was all done by someone else, not them.
And I particularily enjoyed the reply to giving out some free cards. Maybe the company would be able to find a hat or two... that is just a joke and people are falling for it, pathetic.
Coreldraw is not #2 in its field, or rather for a very long time it was #1 by far. Corel's problem is that its products are as you described them, and it has been bleeding money in every sector except the CorelDraw sector. They expanded too fast, stretched their resources and abused engineers way too thin, and ultimately every product has suffered and is slowly falling farther and farther behind. Corel's open source strategy has nothing to do with their failure, except for the fact that it costs money to hire programmers - money that the company simply does not have.
I strongly disagree that this book is 10/10. To be great, books must have great content and great style. This book has none of the latter. The writing is uninspired, the plot twists are predictable and mundane, and virtually all dialogs are so contrived that they are completely unbelievable. That having been said, I will admit that I have read this book twice. Once in high school where our teacher gave it to us as an example of how an author can start with a wonderful idea and situation and then proceed to completely ruin it. Once again several years later to see if I still agreed with that opinion (and I do, even more so than before).
Here is some more food for thought: if this is such a wonderful and classic book that warned us 30 years ago about the perils of censorship, then why is it that every year that goes by our reality gets closer and closer to Bradbury's fiction? (hint: it has something to do with the fact that posting opinions to slashdot does nothing to change to world... go out there and do something about it!)
I do not believe that current IBM copper technology uses SOI wafers. Those processes are still in development, and if I remember correctly were supposed to be rolled out in a year or two in their ASIC fabs, and later for powerpc etc.
Clearly they have some sort of business plan do they not? Are you saying that all that VC money they managed to acquire is just going to be thrown in the trash can? Obviously not, they either planned or are planning to add advertising or some sort of indirect payment scheme to this whole thing...
Re:Wishful and unrealistic thinking
on
Lineo Plans IPO
·
· Score: 1
This will be sped up by the next economic recession. During a recession, people will be more likely to choose the cheaper option. Open source IS cheaper, but that's the least of its benefits. The other benefits will be obvious to all by then. A recession probably will happen before 2005.
What exactly is cheaper? Big companies (with big $$$ site licenses) have a huge investment in terms of infrastructure, support staff, and user training. If a company suddenly decides to dump winXX from 1000 machines and replace it with linux, how much does that cost? (hint: no it's not 49.95 for the cost of the distro from compusa)
The rise of free and/or open source software will be slow and painful, and there are too many people who deceive themselves into thinking that Linux et al. are ready NOW to replace winXX in the marketplace. These are the people who went out and bought VA on the first day for $300. They are being punished by the market for their naivete.
I don't think their policy of self-destruction (which certainly exists) had much to do with the latest developments.
They were a company on the verge of bankruptcy (and still are) that was made to look solvent by mindless and europhic buying lacking any fundamentals. The company was extremely smart to go into a merger while the stock was high - it would have meant merging with a company that actually had cash flow. Luckily for Borland they waited long enough and the truth was revealed.
Red hat operates the same way - they are buying companies with real products and revenue streams, and paying for it with stock that is hardly worth the paper it is printed on.
Not really -- your analogy is incorrect. Downloading something you're 'not supposed to' is on par with walking into a bookstore, carefully reading a book (so as to not damage it in any way), and returning it to the shelf in no worse condition than you found it.
Well there is a subtle distinction to be made. If you visit a webpage, read whatever is there, and leave then your analogy is correct. However, what if the content that he is reading is some copyrighted material being improperly published? Then the publisher (ie. website creator) is like the person who stole the book from the bookstore and the person reading the page is like the friend to whom he lent the stolen book. My point is the following: if you (for example) see the MS Kerberos specs on slashdot, read them and go away... then fine. But slashdot has acted as an unauthorized library. If you read them and make a copy to which you will refer while programming, then you have stolen the book from the bookstore.
Production of a book incurs costs well beyond the original writing -- there are physical costs associated with everything from cutting down the tree to placing the finished book on the shelf. When you shoplift, you prevent those who incurred those costs from recovering them. None of this can be said for reading something online that should not have been posted there. That is part of why people believe (whether that belief is correct or not) that digital distribution fundamentally alters the whole notion of "ownership" of intellectual property.
Indeed, but these beliefs usually come from people who do not pay for the bandwidth. There are still costs associated with distributing the work - namely the cost of the internet connection at the supplier side. These costs are MUCH MUCH lower than the cost of trees and ink, but they still exist. Digital distribution should make everything more accessible since the overhead of publishing decreases drastically, but whether a published work travels by truck or by wire it should still be subject to traditional "protections"
I appreciate the emotion with which the article was written, and I certainly agree with the general spirit of the message. However, being emotional about a subject is not generally enough to be right about a subject.
It looks like I will be reiterating the words of other posters but perhaps they need to be said many times, because too many people are still missing the point.
Microsoft's complaint is PARTLY VALID. They released a document that was subject to an agreement. The agreement was present in the packaging of the document as well as present in the document itself. This right to control the distribution of this document rest with Microsoft, for better or for worse. This document was posted publically on Slashdot, and Microsoft is exercising their legal right to reclaim control over their property that was illegitimately published.
There are two things to remember
1) I am not commenting on the validity of their request to remove articles containing links to the document. This is a separate matter whose legal validity is very questionable.
2) Some people have been portraying this as some sort of new battle, pretending that the presence of the internet somehow invalidates all previous concepts of copyright and private property. That is simply false thinking. If you want to change property laws then change them, but do not pretend that downloading something that you are not supposed to download is completely different than for example walking into a bookstore and shoplifting. The result is the same, even if the method is not.
So what is the answer? Remove the posts containing the document, and fight microsoft in court for the right to link to whatever story you like. There is already a precendent for that and microsoft would certainly back down. And if you think that you are right and MS is wrong, then I will begin transcribing Jon Katz's books and posting them here for everyone to read FOR FREE. I welcome this opportunity to test the freeness of the moderation system.
Please remember, microsoft has nothing to lose in this battle. At worst they pay legal costs and open up the specification. That kind of loss is pocket change compared to the big picture. Imagine what they have to win however! They have a chance to show the government, the courts, and business everywhere how "bad" free software people really are. And the worse they are, the more bizarre the copyright laws they can force through...
The only reason this page was called a blueprint is because the borders on the left and top were blue.
This contains no useful information for hardware designers. People making compilers may find something to look at, but to say that the architecture has been open sourced is simply a complete lie. Once again the mainstream media has been used by one of the big companies to spread disinformation and hype either through their stupidity or by having simply been bought off.
I agree in general with the concept that open sourceing things is hard to do and a big drag when people are complaining.
However, when talking about Andover and VA and others, I think it is fair for the community to (politely) demand better behaviour. The officers and employees of these companies only have jobs and overvalued equity stakes because of open source/free software/etc. If it were not for this movement many people would not be multimillionaires at this moment. As such, it seems only fair that they should be held strictly accountable to the principles on whose back they made their fortune.
The constant routine of "do as I say not as I do" because a) "I'm sleepy" or b) "I provide a "free" website so leave me alone" is beginning to leave a sour taste in my mouth after hearing it from the same offenders 100 times over.
The repackaging that mp3.com does is certainly useful to people like you...
I do believe there is a loophole to the judge's verdict. The verdict is based on the fact that the copy you download is not the copy that you own. Why not replace the whole beaming concept with physical confirmation by mp3.com that you own the cd? It would work like this: you buy the cd, send it to them, they rip it and send it back. As long as they save the data in raw format (ie. NOT as an mp3), every copy they made should be identical. Therefore they only have to keep one copy around to make mp3s from (as they currently do). They could archive all of the raw copies from various people to prove that each disc passed through their hands and was copied from the person requesting the service.
This is in effect exactly what they do now, but beaming is replaced by physical manipulation. It is probably not a sustainable way of doing business because of the costs and inconveniences involved, but it would be an interesting legal test. I personally believe that the judge would have ruled in their favour had they used this technique. With a positive ruling they would be in better shape to move into new distributions forms and strategies. Without a legal victory at some point in the very near future, this company will be slowly but surely suffocated away.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't the material-safety data sheets HAVE to state it if the chemical is a known carcinogen? And seriously, is acetone all that carcinogenic? I used to wear nail polish, and I hate to think of how many tumors I caused myself while removing that stuff.
The answer is yes and no. Acetone alone is not particularily dangerous. Where things start to get dangerous is when you mix acetone with something else to make a very volatile cocktail. The example that first comes to mind is photoresist. Every photoresist out there today is very bad, all carcinogenic and some even nastier. If you use acetone to strip acetone or just clean an area of photoresist the fumes that you generate are very dangerous and require significant ventilation. MSDS mention the toxicity of photoresist but people often do not think about how things behave when mixed together...
Hmm, what's this mystery ingredient? Anyone know? Who did the studies? Why is a lawyer being quoted on the subject of whether or not something causes cancer?
I have seen cutting fluids containing trichloroethane. This is very nasty and carcinogenic stuff and should not be taken lightly. The bottle that I looked at did mention that it must be used in a well ventilated area. I assume that it can be sold without restriction as long as the percent composition of the offending substance is below some threshold. I personally never open a bottle of this particular chemical unless under a fumehood wearing proper solvent gloves.
I think that I am going to start buying his books, scanning them in page by page, and posting them for everyone to download. Then what will you do Jon? Will you write an article praising me for opening up a whole new world of thought to all the 11 year olds out there? I didn't think so...
Until you develop the bravery to open source all of your work, and until you can prove to the community that you would not go after one of us with Andover's team of lawyers if someone started to freely distribute your work, you have no right at all to criticize other artists, especially not when the are acting within the law.
Indeed, ATI's upcoming announcement will be very interesting for two reasons.
1) They have in the past half year or so announced many commitments to provide support for their cards in Linux, not just in terms of video drivers but also things like DVD playback.
2) This is their first entry in a long time into the really high end of graphics. They are positioning this to be THE fastest card out their, not an also-ran like the MAXX. If they can succeed in getting a toehold, this will really help their profit margins and make their investors happy!
A lot has been said about XBox and NVidia, but ATI is getting ready to make a huge move...Rage 6, STBs, Nintendo's upcoming Dolphin....
Does anyone have comments about the Agfa camera that uses Iomega Clik disks for storage? This seems to me to be a very good option, the disks hold 40 MB and cost $10 or less when bought in larger packs, certainly MUCH MUCH less than a flash memory. There also exist PCMCIA drives for the disks, and now just recently a USB docking station for the drives so that you can use them with your desktop computer.
In my opinion, this seems to be as close to a "roll of film" as we can get at the moment - the storage is cheap and not volatile, just keep the pictures on the disks, no need to clutter up your hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
By not voting you are giving a green light to those who would call you lazy, ignorant, stupid, or whatever other juicy adjectives may come up...and they would be partly right. You do not send any sort of message by not voting. Show up at the polling station, take you ballot, and then send a message...spoil it. Write in Donald Duck or Hulk Hogan, check all the name, don't check any names at all, whatever just do SOMETHING! Spoiled ballots "count" as protests, sitting home and complaining over IRC does not.
I didn't read the article, but I bet RMS does know all about consoles, and doesn't see any reason why they should be the way they are, and he's right.
That is a very dangerous statement. Like you said, you did not read the article and notice the part where RMS asks "what is a console?". Rejecting an argument based on the fact that you feel it is wrong without having any evidence is just wrong. This kind of blind adoration of RMS is dangerous.
Is was in Ontario at the time of the election and lived through the NDP government so I feel the need to refute your comments at least in part. The NDP was not elected because of their high horse morals. Their accidental victory was a combination of two factors:
1) An early election call by the Liberal premier at the time was seen by the media and select special interest groups as a great opportunity to discredit the party. The hope was that the PCs would benefit from the negative sentiment, a strategy that obviously failed miserably as the PCs ended the election with fewer seats than they had before the election.
2) The NDP recognised that the poorer elements of the population voted less as compared to the middle class and rich. Therefore they promised increases in welfare and spending on low income housing that were obviously not sustainable on any sort of long-term basis and were never really a part of their policy platform in such an extreme form at any time before the election, but that finally got the lower class out of their homes and into the polling stations. The NDP came to power solely on that new wave of voting.
As to the NDP being "voted out of existence on a national scale", that is simply not true. Saskatchewan has an NDP government with real policies as opposed to the Ontarian NDP policy of more or less directly buying votes, and that province has done fine with the NDP enjoying good support. British Columbia also elected an NDP government whose problems all stem from corruption and other sorts of personal problems rather than the party's policies. Finally, the NDP has been more successful in the past two national elections than the PC party, the party that was in power throughout the 80s and is now on the verge of self-destructing permanently.
nVidia's market cap is extremely inflated, mostly due to hype about their alliance with MS. When MS actually starts shipping their game console and investors realise how razor thin nVidia's margins are on that product the stock will tank faster than RHAT and CORL did.
If I need to get work done, I start blackbox and fire up half a dozen xterms. For development this cannot be beat.
It all depends on your definition of work. Xterms are more than enough for some people, but for a large portion of computer users getting work done involves more than writing code. I could not live with just xterms, it would just be impossible for me to do what I need to do (which involves more than just putzing around), so I (and many users like me) need a different desktop solution than you do.
In fact if I am not mistaken Trolltech is actually doing the port themselves. It makes sense that they would use their own toolkit, gives them the consulting revenue and some good advertising.
How do you figure your statement to be true? It seems to me that they are doing a perfect job of setting the bait and now reeling in the fish. Where is the lack of intelligence? They know what their interests are and they are defending them.
What are you talking about? They apologized that the website was inconvenienced but they did not claim responsability. It was all done by someone else, not them.
And I particularily enjoyed the reply to giving out some free cards. Maybe the company would be able to find a hat or two... that is just a joke and people are falling for it, pathetic.
Coreldraw is not #2 in its field, or rather for a very long time it was #1 by far. Corel's problem is that its products are as you described them, and it has been bleeding money in every sector except the CorelDraw sector. They expanded too fast, stretched their resources and abused engineers way too thin, and ultimately every product has suffered and is slowly falling farther and farther behind. Corel's open source strategy has nothing to do with their failure, except for the fact that it costs money to hire programmers - money that the company simply does not have.
I strongly disagree that this book is 10/10. To be great, books must have great content and great style. This book has none of the latter. The writing is uninspired, the plot twists are predictable and mundane, and virtually all dialogs are so contrived that they are completely unbelievable. That having been said, I will admit that I have read this book twice. Once in high school where our teacher gave it to us as an example of how an author can start with a wonderful idea and situation and then proceed to completely ruin it. Once again several years later to see if I still agreed with that opinion (and I do, even more so than before).
Here is some more food for thought: if this is such a wonderful and classic book that warned us 30 years ago about the perils of censorship, then why is it that every year that goes by our reality
gets closer and closer to Bradbury's fiction? (hint: it has something to do with the fact that posting opinions to slashdot does nothing to change to world... go out there and do something about it!)
I do not believe that current IBM copper technology uses SOI wafers. Those processes are still in development, and if I remember correctly were supposed to be rolled out in a year or two in their ASIC fabs, and later for powerpc etc.
Clearly they have some sort of business plan do they not? Are you saying that all that VC money they managed to acquire is just going to be thrown in the trash can? Obviously not, they either planned or are planning to add advertising or some sort of indirect payment scheme to this whole thing...
What exactly is cheaper? Big companies (with big $$$ site licenses) have a huge investment in terms of infrastructure, support staff, and user training. If a company suddenly decides to dump winXX from 1000 machines and replace it with linux, how much does that cost? (hint: no it's not 49.95 for the cost of the distro from compusa)
The rise of free and/or open source software will be slow and painful, and there are too many people who deceive themselves into thinking that Linux et al. are ready NOW to replace winXX in the marketplace. These are the people who went out and bought VA on the first day for $300. They are being punished by the market for their naivete.
I don't think their policy of self-destruction (which certainly exists) had much to do with the latest developments.
They were a company on the verge of bankruptcy (and still are) that was made to look solvent by mindless and europhic buying lacking any fundamentals. The company was extremely smart to go into a merger while the stock was high - it would have meant merging with a company that actually had cash flow. Luckily for Borland they waited long enough and the truth was revealed.
Red hat operates the same way - they are buying companies with real products and revenue streams, and paying for it with stock that is hardly worth the paper it is printed on.
Not really -- your analogy is incorrect. Downloading something you're 'not supposed to' is on par with walking into a bookstore, carefully reading a book (so as to not damage it in any way), and returning it to the shelf in no worse condition than you found it.
Well there is a subtle distinction to be made. If you visit a webpage, read whatever is there, and leave then your analogy is correct. However, what if the content that he is reading is some copyrighted material being improperly published? Then the publisher (ie. website creator) is like the person who stole the book from the bookstore and the person reading the page is like the friend to whom he lent the stolen book. My point is the following: if you (for example) see the MS Kerberos specs on slashdot, read them and go away... then fine. But slashdot has acted as an unauthorized library. If you read them and make a copy to which you will refer while programming, then you have stolen the book from the bookstore.
Production of a book incurs costs well beyond the original writing -- there are physical costs associated with everything from cutting down the tree to placing the finished book on the shelf. When you shoplift, you prevent those who incurred those costs from recovering them. None of this can be said for reading something online that should not have been posted there. That is part of why people believe (whether that belief is correct or not) that digital distribution fundamentally alters the whole notion of "ownership" of intellectual property.
Indeed, but these beliefs usually come from people who do not pay for the bandwidth. There are still costs associated with distributing the work - namely the cost of the internet connection at the supplier side. These costs are MUCH MUCH lower than the cost of trees and ink, but they still exist. Digital distribution should make everything more accessible since the overhead of publishing decreases drastically, but whether a published work travels by truck or by wire it should still be subject to traditional "protections"
I appreciate the emotion with which the article was written, and I certainly agree with the general spirit of the message. However, being emotional about a subject is not generally enough to be right about a subject.
It looks like I will be reiterating the words of other posters but perhaps they need to be said many times, because too many people are still missing the point.
Microsoft's complaint is PARTLY VALID. They released a document that was subject to an agreement. The agreement was present in the packaging of the document as well as present in the document itself. This right to control the distribution of this document rest with Microsoft, for better or for worse. This document was posted publically on Slashdot, and Microsoft is exercising their legal right to reclaim control over their property that was illegitimately published.
There are two things to remember
1) I am not commenting on the validity of their request to remove articles containing links to the document. This is a separate matter whose legal validity is very questionable.
2) Some people have been portraying this as some sort of new battle, pretending that the presence of the internet somehow invalidates all previous concepts of copyright and private property. That is simply false thinking. If you want to change property laws then change them, but do not pretend that downloading something that you are not supposed to download is completely different than for example walking into a bookstore and shoplifting. The result is the same, even if the method is not.
So what is the answer? Remove the posts containing the document, and fight microsoft in court for the right to link to whatever story you like. There is already a precendent for that and microsoft would certainly back down. And if you think that you are right and MS is wrong, then I will begin transcribing Jon Katz's books and posting them here for everyone to read FOR FREE. I welcome this opportunity to test the freeness of the moderation system.
Please remember, microsoft has nothing to lose in this battle. At worst they pay legal costs and open up the specification. That kind of loss is pocket change compared to the big picture. Imagine what they have to win however! They have a chance to show the government, the courts, and business everywhere how "bad" free software people really are. And the worse they are, the more bizarre the copyright laws they can force through...
Live to fight another day....
The only reason this page was called a blueprint is because the borders on the left and top were blue.
This contains no useful information for hardware designers. People making compilers may find something to look at, but to say that the architecture has been open sourced is simply a complete lie. Once again the mainstream media has been used by one of the big companies to spread disinformation and hype either through their stupidity or by having simply been bought off.
I agree in general with the concept that open sourceing things is hard to do and a big drag when people are complaining.
However, when talking about Andover and VA and others, I think it is fair for the community to (politely) demand better behaviour. The officers and employees of these companies only have jobs and overvalued equity stakes because of open source/free software/etc. If it were not for this movement many people would not be multimillionaires at this moment. As such, it seems only fair that they should be held strictly accountable to the principles on whose back they made their fortune.
The constant routine of "do as I say not as I do" because a) "I'm sleepy" or b) "I provide a "free" website so leave me alone" is beginning to leave a sour taste in my mouth after hearing it from the same offenders 100 times over.
The repackaging that mp3.com does is certainly useful to people like you...
I do believe there is a loophole to the judge's verdict. The verdict is based on the fact that the copy you download is not the copy that you own. Why not replace the whole beaming concept with physical confirmation by mp3.com that you own the cd? It would work like this: you buy the cd, send it to them, they rip it and send it back. As long as they save the data in raw format (ie. NOT as an mp3), every copy they made should be identical. Therefore they only have to keep one copy around to make mp3s from (as they currently do). They could archive all of the raw copies from various people to prove that each disc passed through their hands and was copied from the person requesting the service.
This is in effect exactly what they do now, but beaming is replaced by physical manipulation. It is probably not a sustainable way of doing business because of the costs and inconveniences involved, but it would be an interesting legal test. I personally believe that the judge would have ruled in their favour had they used this technique. With a positive ruling they would be in better shape to move into new distributions forms and strategies. Without a legal victory at some point in the very near future, this company will be slowly but surely suffocated away.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't the material-safety data sheets HAVE to state it if the chemical is a known carcinogen? And seriously, is acetone all that carcinogenic? I used to wear nail polish, and I hate to think of how many tumors I caused myself while removing that stuff.
The answer is yes and no. Acetone alone is not particularily dangerous. Where things start to get dangerous is when you mix acetone with something else to make a very volatile cocktail. The example that first comes to mind is photoresist. Every photoresist out there today is very bad, all carcinogenic and some even nastier. If you use acetone to strip acetone or just clean an area of photoresist the fumes that you generate are very dangerous and require significant ventilation. MSDS mention the toxicity of photoresist but people often do not think about how things behave when mixed together...
Hmm, what's this mystery ingredient? Anyone know? Who did the studies? Why is a lawyer being quoted on the subject of whether or not something causes cancer?
I have seen cutting fluids containing trichloroethane. This is very nasty and carcinogenic stuff and should not be taken lightly. The bottle that I looked at did mention that it must be used in a well ventilated area. I assume that it can be sold without restriction as long as the percent composition of the offending substance is below some threshold. I personally never open a bottle of this particular chemical unless under a fumehood wearing proper solvent gloves.
You have hit the nail exactly on the head.
I think that I am going to start buying his books, scanning them in page by page, and posting them for everyone to download. Then what will you do Jon? Will you write an article praising me for opening up a whole new world of thought to all the 11 year olds out there? I didn't think so...
Until you develop the bravery to open source all of your work, and until you can prove to the community that you would not go after one of us with Andover's team of lawyers if someone started to freely distribute your work, you have no right at all to criticize other artists, especially not when the are acting within the law.
Indeed, ATI's upcoming announcement will be very interesting for two reasons.
1) They have in the past half year or so announced many commitments to provide support for their cards in Linux, not just in terms of video drivers but also things like DVD playback.
2) This is their first entry in a long time into the really high end of graphics. They are positioning this to be THE fastest card out their, not an also-ran like the MAXX. If they can succeed in getting a toehold, this will really help their profit margins and make their investors happy!
A lot has been said about XBox and NVidia, but ATI is getting ready to make a huge move...Rage 6, STBs, Nintendo's upcoming Dolphin....
Does anyone have comments about the Agfa camera that uses Iomega Clik disks for storage? This seems to me to be a very good option, the disks hold 40 MB and cost $10 or less when bought in larger packs, certainly MUCH MUCH less than a flash memory. There also exist PCMCIA drives for the disks, and now just recently a USB docking station for the drives so that you can use them with your desktop computer.
In my opinion, this seems to be as close to a "roll of film" as we can get at the moment - the storage is cheap and not volatile, just keep the pictures on the disks, no need to clutter up your hard drive.