It loads fast but it displays dog slow. I have to use it occasionally for pages that Opera won't load and I'm always glad to get back to a full-speed page render afterwards.
In the very unlikely scenario that the GPL is "invalidated" for some reason, the software doesn't become public domain for Pete's sake!! That's just silly and wrong.
This is a public service procurement. If we did that for one potential supplier we'd have to do it for all of them, otherwise they'd sue when they lost the business.
It it at least possible for you to contact the author and ask if they are interested in tendering for the contract? I'd be surprised if they didn't put a lot of effort into addressing your concerns but not if s/he/they don't know you are looking at their system.
where was the part that showed MS Reader was beyond worthless?
That'll be the part where they had a version of the document that they could display and read but couldn't save. That's their own document that MSR would not allow them to save. That's called broken software where I come from.
Give it a few years, and publishers willing to issue non-DRM ebooks, and reading devices that go for days without being recharged and are as light as a paperback, and then we'll see...
We'll see nothing. Who's going to write books that are instant bit-torrents? When everyone's read your book but you have sales of 3 copies where does the money come from, you stupid, stupid man?
Most windows people I know *never* buy anything. They run their pre-installed OS and copy copy copy copy...
This is true; several Windows users have stated to me that there is no point in switching to Linux since they wouldn't save any money and wouldn't be able to play all the latest games for free either.
now you're saying that $.25 per download is unreasonable
It's only 25 cents if you download the max. Even if the service had every track you want there's only so long you could sustain that price point. Given that the music in question is not going to all appeal - entire genres might not interest you - then the base cost of $50 per month, if you only download 5-10 songs is way too high.
The idea that ever-increasing brute force can be held off by an almost flat line of inspiration is just a joke. But the result (that computers will be able to beat any human) will be no more vaild than entering a 1500cc Harley-Davidson in the olympic marathon: so the machine wins, big whoop!
All this tests is basically a typical Linux box with a single drive. I wouldn't base any decision to go from one filesystem to another based on these tests!
So you're saying that you don't want to see tests based on typical hardware? I can't think of anything better to test.
So would you have a "tool" for every variation on ellipse, rectangle, filter, select etc? The Gimp is too complex to hope that any UI that left room to view the image could cover everything. Given that the manual(s) are on-line there's no real need to go that far.
Absolutely. XML just boils down to "document your file format, mkay?" but written by a committee that seems to have been paid by the word. The irony is that XML is not actually a way of enforcing that since the "key" to your XML file is not embedded within it so it's perfectly possible, as MS has shown, to use XML and still make interoperation a pain in the arse.
Writes well long enough for me to lose it; costs so little I don't care when I do. I did go through a phase of using Rotring but they were fragile and expensive.
The original post put Windows up as an example. Given that Windows really moves the bar up from "large" to "humungous" I stand by what I said: someone will have done it somewhere. I'm amazed at the faith so many people have in human nature here. People cheat and bend the law all the time. Even in industries where the effects are life-or-death some people break the rules just to have a little less hassle in their own working lives. The idea that programmers are above this to the point where the tens of thousands of people that have worked on Windows does not include a single such person is laughable.
Would you be interesed in some Ocean-view property in Utah at all? Very resonable prices.
Well, since it's not a secret that the Windows TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, that's not saying much, is it?
If you're talking the chance of not including GPL code being zero, I believe you're on a lot of crack.
I can't believe that much code has been written by that many, often just-graduated, programmers without someone somewhere saying "to hell with it, who'll ever know?". I mean, this is humans we're talking about. I think you're asking too much for it not to have happened. And that's disregarding the fact that MS has been caught in the past copying closed source code.
Enough people (corps, students, warez groups) have the Windows source code now days that any 'dirty laundry' would have leaked out by now.
You underestimate the size of the task. No one's claiming that Windows is just Unix with a window manager slapped onto it. There will be some code that shouldn't be in there but it won't be huge or even all in one place.
If you concede that point, the intervention was hardly arbitrary.
It's arbitary in the sense of the reasons bandied about: that Saddam was a bad person and a dictator. Well, that covers a lot of people so why pick on him particularly? As to threatening the US: so what? He wasn't going to do anything about it, there's very little evidence that he had done much in the past beyond threatening. Most of the bigger terrorist attacks, including 9/11, came from Saudi Arabia or Palestine (who actually did the Lockerbie bomb) and some from Libya. More damage is done the US citizens by the actions of Columbian drug producers than by all three of these groups.
Do you feel the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam, who was killing them at a rate of 21,000-odd a year?
No, they were not. But then who put Saddam in place? One thing that the current administration seems to simply not understand is that if you lock someone in a cell for 20+ years with a maniac that tortures and abuses them, they are unlikely to be on very good terms with you just because you eventually let them out again.
The question is not "should Saddam have been left in power?" since that is an obvious "no", but rather, "was there a better way to get him out?" Perhaps there was, perhaps there wasn't but Bush et al did not have the patience to try anything else. Now they want help and are discovering that they've burnt their bridges by forcing a war against the wishes of many countries and people using faked and exagerated evidence.
The only person on the planet even remotely similar to Saddam is Kim Jong Il of North Korea.
Mugabwe is at least as bad as either at least from the point of view of his own people and there are half a dozen others in Africa who are not far behind him. But, their human rights don't come attached to US economic interests so they don't count. Again, "arbitary" as opposed to "just".
As a result, I feel he represented a genuine threat, even if it was not immediate.
To Israel perhaps, to the US itself? Nah.
Hugo Chavez' nasty Veneuzelian government
Define "nasty". The last time I looked Chavez was feeding his people in the face of massive opposition from people like Bush (who tried to have him assassinated) and Exxon (who tried to have him deposed). I know he gets a bad press in the US but that may not be unconnected to the fact that is country in the largest single producer of US oil imports and he won't bend the knee and do what he's told by outsiders.
The problem I have with your stance, which is a common enough one, is that it revolves around the question of whether a dictator is threatening America. From a humanitarian point of view (which is the POV you used in the question about the Iraqis being better off now) what does that matter? The Chinese government is every bit as bad as the North Koreans if you are unlucky to be a native Tibetan or a prisioner in one of their political gulags (sp?). Starving Africans take very little comfort from the thought that their hunger is at least not a military worry for the occupant of the White House.
If the objective of the current US foreign policy is to root out evil and free the world's poor and oppressed then it has my whole-hearted support. If on the other hand it is simply an excuse to allow (rich) Americans to expand their political influence and control across the globe in order to line their own pockets with no thought for the effects on the various vassel states created by this process then they can go to hell with my blessing.
what are the chances that in a big closed source project (like Windows for example), that some developer hasn't used some open source code at one point or another?
Zero
How do you protect against this?
Only through wistle-blowers
Is there a process to audit big companies code?
Not unless you're a big company
MS threatens me with audits to check my license compliance, can I audit them to check that no open source code is in their products?
It is to laugh!
If GPL'd code was found in a product like Windows, would Microsoft be forced to open source the entire thing?
Historically companies have been allowed to replace the code instead. Generally speaking the Open Source movement understands that a large company can fall foul of a single person, or even team, that cheats. If the company shows willing then there's no point in getting mediaeval on them. Even if it did come to a fight I think most courts would allow a company off with an unknowing violation. The fight with SCO that is now brewing is that they are knowingly in breach of the GPL, and therefore in breach of copyright law and are publicly stating that they don't care and the law can go fuck itself.
Project for the New American Century" whatever the hell that is.
If you don't know what that is or what its aims are then you don't know squat about the current cabinet. It's also not a secret; in this1998 document signed by, for example, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, you can see the whole sorry plan for the current mess in Iraq: the ludicrous overstatement of Saddam's threat, the insistance that the UN need not be heeded if it gives the wrong answer, and the ever-present concern about oil. Total bullshit from start to end but it's bullshit written by the people now running your country.
Cheney is just a stooge, he has no ability or area of intrest beyond geting contracts for the people that put him in place.
Rumsfeld is slightly different in that he really is just an evil bastard. After shaking hands with Saddam he then helped arm him with various biological and chemical weapons. There is a copy of Saddam's shopping list at the end of this Congressional transcript but the original Senate Banking Committee report used to be available on line, but seems to have become buried beneath Google results to references to it. Rumsfeld lied in the above transcript when he said he had no knowledge of all this. In fact, he arranged the loans from the US to Iraq to pay for the bioweapons (which is where the Senate Banking Committee comes into it). The reason this was done was to help Saddam kill Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, it was not even pretended that this would be a deterent: this was for actual use in the current conflict. The CIA later sent over specialists in biological warfare to help "calibrate" the weapons.
This is the real reason they were so sure Saddam had WMD: Rumsfeld had seen the receipts. The assumtion was that he would never have got rid of them, whereas the reality was that he had, probably because he knew the inspectors would one day have to be let back in and he thought that the US would have to listen to those UN inspectors even if it didn't believe what it was hearing. He was wrong!
Before you vote next time, perhaps you should find out about the people involved. Its not that hard if you are actually interested in looking.
Slashdot Mirror
It loads fast but it displays dog slow. I have to use it occasionally for pages that Opera won't load and I'm always glad to get back to a full-speed page render afterwards.
TWW
It's also what SCO are claiming.
TWW
It it at least possible for you to contact the author and ask if they are interested in tendering for the contract? I'd be surprised if they didn't put a lot of effort into addressing your concerns but not if s/he/they don't know you are looking at their system.
TWW
That'll be the part where they had a version of the document that they could display and read but couldn't save. That's their own document that MSR would not allow them to save. That's called broken software where I come from.
TWW
We'll see nothing. Who's going to write books that are instant bit-torrents? When everyone's read your book but you have sales of 3 copies where does the money come from, you stupid, stupid man?
TWW
This is true; several Windows users have stated to me that there is no point in switching to Linux since they wouldn't save any money and wouldn't be able to play all the latest games for free either.
TWW
It's only 25 cents if you download the max. Even if the service had every track you want there's only so long you could sustain that price point. Given that the music in question is not going to all appeal - entire genres might not interest you - then the base cost of $50 per month, if you only download 5-10 songs is way too high.
TWW
And other stupid sayings.
The idea that ever-increasing brute force can be held off by an almost flat line of inspiration is just a joke. But the result (that computers will be able to beat any human) will be no more vaild than entering a 1500cc Harley-Davidson in the olympic marathon: so the machine wins, big whoop!
TWW
So you're saying that you don't want to see tests based on typical hardware? I can't think of anything better to test.
TWW
TWW
Personally, I guessed based on the way the selection tools work. That's known as a consistant UI. Also, you could read the manual.
TWW
TWW
Hmmm. Bit warm tonight?
TWW
TWW
They're selling nuclear weapons to Charlton Heston?! Damn them. Damn them all to hell!
TWW
That's exactly what we need. Unfortunately, it's impossible.
TWW
The original post put Windows up as an example. Given that Windows really moves the bar up from "large" to "humungous" I stand by what I said: someone will have done it somewhere. I'm amazed at the faith so many people have in human nature here. People cheat and bend the law all the time. Even in industries where the effects are life-or-death some people break the rules just to have a little less hassle in their own working lives. The idea that programmers are above this to the point where the tens of thousands of people that have worked on Windows does not include a single such person is laughable.
Would you be interesed in some Ocean-view property in Utah at all? Very resonable prices.
TWW
BSD-licensed code
Well, since it's not a secret that the Windows TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, that's not saying much, is it? If you're talking the chance of not including GPL code being zero, I believe you're on a lot of crack.
I can't believe that much code has been written by that many, often just-graduated, programmers without someone somewhere saying "to hell with it, who'll ever know?". I mean, this is humans we're talking about. I think you're asking too much for it not to have happened. And that's disregarding the fact that MS has been caught in the past copying closed source code.
TWW
You underestimate the size of the task. No one's claiming that Windows is just Unix with a window manager slapped onto it. There will be some code that shouldn't be in there but it won't be huge or even all in one place.
But it will be there; people are just like that.
TWW
It's arbitary in the sense of the reasons bandied about: that Saddam was a bad person and a dictator. Well, that covers a lot of people so why pick on him particularly? As to threatening the US: so what? He wasn't going to do anything about it, there's very little evidence that he had done much in the past beyond threatening. Most of the bigger terrorist attacks, including 9/11, came from Saudi Arabia or Palestine (who actually did the Lockerbie bomb) and some from Libya. More damage is done the US citizens by the actions of Columbian drug producers than by all three of these groups.
Do you feel the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam, who was killing them at a rate of 21,000-odd a year?
No, they were not. But then who put Saddam in place? One thing that the current administration seems to simply not understand is that if you lock someone in a cell for 20+ years with a maniac that tortures and abuses them, they are unlikely to be on very good terms with you just because you eventually let them out again.
The question is not "should Saddam have been left in power?" since that is an obvious "no", but rather, "was there a better way to get him out?" Perhaps there was, perhaps there wasn't but Bush et al did not have the patience to try anything else. Now they want help and are discovering that they've burnt their bridges by forcing a war against the wishes of many countries and people using faked and exagerated evidence.
The only person on the planet even remotely similar to Saddam is Kim Jong Il of North Korea.
Mugabwe is at least as bad as either at least from the point of view of his own people and there are half a dozen others in Africa who are not far behind him. But, their human rights don't come attached to US economic interests so they don't count. Again, "arbitary" as opposed to "just".
As a result, I feel he represented a genuine threat, even if it was not immediate.
To Israel perhaps, to the US itself? Nah.
Hugo Chavez' nasty Veneuzelian government
Define "nasty". The last time I looked Chavez was feeding his people in the face of massive opposition from people like Bush (who tried to have him assassinated) and Exxon (who tried to have him deposed). I know he gets a bad press in the US but that may not be unconnected to the fact that is country in the largest single producer of US oil imports and he won't bend the knee and do what he's told by outsiders.
The problem I have with your stance, which is a common enough one, is that it revolves around the question of whether a dictator is threatening America. From a humanitarian point of view (which is the POV you used in the question about the Iraqis being better off now) what does that matter? The Chinese government is every bit as bad as the North Koreans if you are unlucky to be a native Tibetan or a prisioner in one of their political gulags (sp?). Starving Africans take very little comfort from the thought that their hunger is at least not a military worry for the occupant of the White House.
If the objective of the current US foreign policy is to root out evil and free the world's poor and oppressed then it has my whole-hearted support. If on the other hand it is simply an excuse to allow (rich) Americans to expand their political influence and control across the globe in order to line their own pockets with no thought for the effects on the various vassel states created by this process then they can go to hell with my blessing.
TWW
Zero
How do you protect against this?
Only through wistle-blowers
Is there a process to audit big companies code?
Not unless you're a big company
MS threatens me with audits to check my license compliance, can I audit them to check that no open source code is in their products?
It is to laugh!
If GPL'd code was found in a product like Windows, would Microsoft be forced to open source the entire thing?
Historically companies have been allowed to replace the code instead. Generally speaking the Open Source movement understands that a large company can fall foul of a single person, or even team, that cheats. If the company shows willing then there's no point in getting mediaeval on them. Even if it did come to a fight I think most courts would allow a company off with an unknowing violation. The fight with SCO that is now brewing is that they are knowingly in breach of the GPL, and therefore in breach of copyright law and are publicly stating that they don't care and the law can go fuck itself.
TWW
If you don't know what that is or what its aims are then you don't know squat about the current cabinet. It's also not a secret; in this 1998 document signed by, for example, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, you can see the whole sorry plan for the current mess in Iraq: the ludicrous overstatement of Saddam's threat, the insistance that the UN need not be heeded if it gives the wrong answer, and the ever-present concern about oil. Total bullshit from start to end but it's bullshit written by the people now running your country.
Cheney is just a stooge, he has no ability or area of intrest beyond geting contracts for the people that put him in place.
Rumsfeld is slightly different in that he really is just an evil bastard. After shaking hands with Saddam he then helped arm him with various biological and chemical weapons. There is a copy of Saddam's shopping list at the end of this Congressional transcript but the original Senate Banking Committee report used to be available on line, but seems to have become buried beneath Google results to references to it. Rumsfeld lied in the above transcript when he said he had no knowledge of all this. In fact, he arranged the loans from the US to Iraq to pay for the bioweapons (which is where the Senate Banking Committee comes into it). The reason this was done was to help Saddam kill Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, it was not even pretended that this would be a deterent: this was for actual use in the current conflict. The CIA later sent over specialists in biological warfare to help "calibrate" the weapons.
This is the real reason they were so sure Saddam had WMD: Rumsfeld had seen the receipts. The assumtion was that he would never have got rid of them, whereas the reality was that he had, probably because he knew the inspectors would one day have to be let back in and he thought that the US would have to listen to those UN inspectors even if it didn't believe what it was hearing. He was wrong!
Before you vote next time, perhaps you should find out about the people involved. Its not that hard if you are actually interested in looking.
TWW
Look out, there's a Gnostic about!
TWW
What if you're a Satanist?
I hoped someone would get the joke; I assumed the /. editors wouldn't when I put it in.