I think the real patent analogue of the GPL would be a system whereby you could use the patent royalty-free in a product only if all other patents used in the product were "Free".
That is, the restriction is tied to the product, not the organization.
The idea of dealing only with Gilmore patent companies seems wrong to me. Companies are bought, merged, or sold. Inventing a system to maintain these Gilmore patents sensibly, across all potential acquisitions, mergers, deals, etc. seems excessively complicated.
It's also much easier to convince an existing "closed" company to release a single "open" product than it is to change their licensing/patents for all existing products.
Come on. The generator tag is "Our Lord, Jesus Christ, Who hath generated all"? That's *way* too geeky for the tone of the article. This has got to be a hoax.
I can't believe he thinks that Stockwell Day is Canada's answer to Mario Cuomo. That's one of the most ridiculous comparisons since Quayle's Kennedy comment.
Membership in ALSO would have been "based on individual domain name holders".
This doesn't mean "one domain name, one vote", right? If it does, I'd agree with ICANN that this isn't the "best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users".
We don't need to provide yet another incentive for evildoers and corporations with vast financial resources to grab up unclaimed domains.
However, this may be a misinterpretation of the text.
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty, and I don't see why.NET would be harder to support than, say, TCP/IP or HTTP. I mean, Emacs was written in LISP; if they can do that, is.NET such a challenge?
Perhaps I've misunderstood the claim; in that case, perhaps it would've been useful for the poster to include a link detailing the rationale behind the claim that functional languages wouldn't work.
The story about the young student Gauss coming up with the means of summing 1 to n (a task his teacher had set his class as an exercise in time-wasting) is available here.
(Given that you know enough math to solve the problem as you describe it, I'm actually kind of surprised you've never heard the story, but I guess I did have instructors that liked math history.)
Yeah, it sucks that nobody seems to understand what you said (i.e. the distinction between sum of integers and sum of their decimal digits), but hey, it is Slashdot. Did you expect better?
Well, I won't bother with further experiments, but let's assume your data is representative, and that the increase in size obeys the linear equation y=mx+b, where b is some fixed-cost and m is some cost per unit of compressed data.
Solving this linear system I get
m = 1.000150150 and b = 27.84984985.
The value for m, an expansion ratio of 0.015015%, matches almost perfectly the claim in the gzip man page:
The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files.
Apparently, the "few bytes for the gzip file header" averages out to about 28 (for this data set, anyway).
In any case, it's way too small a sample to draw conclusions, but it's neat to see gzip's claims verified in practise.
This is not true. Gzip always compresses, and there will be an increase for some files, because of the need to "escape" special characters (as suggsted by another poster. From the gzip man page:
Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly larger than the original. The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files. Note that the actual number of used disk blocks almost never increases. gzip preserves the mode, ownership and timestamps of files when compressing or decompressing.
So the file is always compressed, and is at most 0.015% larger than the original.
Because it's vaguely on topic and vaguely in season, here for your reading amusement is an Old English translation of the wonderful old Christmas chestnut:
Have a look at Engineers Without Borders. It's a nonprofit group, only recently started, whose purpose is to bring the technical skills of professionals in the developed world to help solve problems in developing countries.
EWB is growing quite fast, and it has already set up international placements in some Third World countries (India, Nepal, Chile). I'm sure they could use whatever support you can provide.
Not that I don't think this is a generous offer on Red Hat's part, but it'll be interesting to see if all the posters who ranted at Microsoft's arrogance yesterday say the same thing today about Redhat.
"The Economist is running an article about a program that takes gang members
in Milwaukee, sends them through rehab, and teaches them web development."
Dude, watch your terminology! At least where I come from,
gang bangers != gang members
Gang bangers are people who take part in a gangbang, which can mean anything from n-guys-and-one-girl consensual sex to group rape. Either way, it's probably not what you meant.
I find this jihad of criticism of the Post to be inappropriate.
While I'm not trying to advocate self-censorship, perhaps all of us (incl. Zimmerman and Bush) should be rather careful about how we use the terms "jihad" and "crusade" for a while.
While this use is perfectly safe, I think that if such terms are used merely for effect, while they still carry associations with their respective origins, there is a significant danger of being misunderstood.
(I'm speaking specifically about Bush's use of the word "crusade" to describe the upcoming war, but it goes for "jihad" too.)
ObPedantry:
This isn't begging the question at all.
"Begging the question", otherwise known as circular reasoning, refers to the (fallacious) practice of assuming the truth of conclusion in an argument in the content of the argument.
"Marc Garneau, first Canadian in space and current Executive Vice-President of the Agence Spatiale Canadienne, announced in Montréal that the CSA intends a major space exploration effort..."
Why do you insist, in an English article, on using the French name of the CSA ("Agence Spatiale Canadienne")? Just call it the Canadian Space Agency, for God's sake! These saddening stabs at an international air just make you look desperate.
In addition, you then introduce the abbreviation "CSA", as yet undefined, and expect everyone to figure out it's the same organization!
Finally, if you must be pretentious and use French names unnecessarily, at least do it correctly. Don't mix definite articles across languages (use "le" rather than "the") and only capitalize the first word: l'Agence spatiale canadienne. You'd see that if you followed your own link.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, when James T. Kirk did an analogous thing, he got commended for it. Props to the hackers for proving you can't define security problems away.
I think the real patent analogue of the GPL would be a system whereby you could use the patent royalty-free in a product only if all other patents used in the product were "Free".
That is, the restriction is tied to the product, not the organization.
The idea of dealing only with Gilmore patent companies seems wrong to me. Companies are bought, merged, or sold. Inventing a system to maintain these Gilmore patents sensibly, across all potential acquisitions, mergers, deals, etc. seems excessively complicated.
It's also much easier to convince an existing "closed" company to release a single "open" product than it is to change their licensing/patents for all existing products.
<HEAD>
Come on. The generator tag is "Our Lord, Jesus Christ, Who hath generated all"? That's *way* too geeky for the tone of the article. This has got to be a hoax.<TITLE>OBJECTIVE: Creation Education: Evolutionism Propaganda</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="How Evolutionists spread their false doctrine">
<META name="keywords" content="God, Jesus, creation, creationism,
evolutionism, dinosaur, man, moon, eye, Darwin, irreducible complexity, flood,
thermodynamics, second law">
<META name="author" content="Jim Carlson">
<META name="generator" content="Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath generated all">
<LINK href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</HEAD>
Yes. And here is an example of the most brutally inappropriate site design, and use of Flash, I've yet seen:
http://www.awortho.net/
Argh... and I used up all my mod points just a few hours before...
Please, someone, mod this AC up.
I didn't believe this until I looked it up myself. God damn! Moriarty is a Stockwell Day supporter!
I can't believe he thinks that Stockwell Day is Canada's answer to Mario Cuomo. That's one of the most ridiculous comparisons since Quayle's Kennedy comment.
This doesn't mean "one domain name, one vote", right? If it does, I'd agree with ICANN that this isn't the "best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users".
We don't need to provide yet another incentive for evildoers and corporations with vast financial resources to grab up unclaimed domains. However, this may be a misinterpretation of the text.
A friend of mine wrote a paper on this topic:
Limitations of Colour Management.
What basis for thinking this would anybody have?
.NET would be harder to support than, say, TCP/IP or HTTP. I mean, Emacs was written in LISP; if they can do that, is .NET such a challenge?
As long as the language is Turing-complete, it should be possible; the question is in the level of difficulty, and I don't see why
Perhaps I've misunderstood the claim; in that case, perhaps it would've been useful for the poster to include a link detailing the rationale behind the claim that functional languages wouldn't work.
How is that at all ironic?
For irony, you need juxtaposition: if White Male History Month was the shortest month, maybe that would be ironic.
In fact, the only thing ironic here is the meta-irony of your claiming this is ironic. Stop listening to Alanis Morissette.
The story about the young student Gauss coming up with the means of summing 1 to n (a task his teacher had set his class as an exercise in time-wasting) is available here.
(Given that you know enough math to solve the problem as you describe it, I'm actually kind of surprised you've never heard the story, but I guess I did have instructors that liked math history.)
Yeah, it sucks that nobody seems to understand what you said (i.e. the distinction between sum of integers and sum of their decimal digits), but hey, it is Slashdot. Did you expect better?
Well, I won't bother with further experiments, but let's assume your data is representative, and that the increase in size obeys the linear equation y=mx+b, where b is some fixed-cost and m is some cost per unit of compressed data.
Solving this linear system I get m = 1.000150150 and b = 27.84984985.
The value for m, an expansion ratio of 0.015015%, matches almost perfectly the claim in the gzip man page:
The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files.
Apparently, the "few bytes for the gzip file header" averages out to about 28 (for this data set, anyway). In any case, it's way too small a sample to draw conclusions, but it's neat to see gzip's claims verified in practise.
Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly larger than the original. The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the gzip file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files. Note that the actual number of used disk blocks almost never increases. gzip preserves the mode, ownership and timestamps of files when compressing or decompressing.
So the file is always compressed, and is at most 0.015% larger than the original.
Because it's vaguely on topic and vaguely in season, here for your reading amusement is an Old English translation of the wonderful old Christmas chestnut:
http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/rudolph.html
Merry Christmas!
Long live the Uberpatch.
MSIE is a thing to be overcome, and I have overcome him.
Have a look at Engineers Without Borders. It's a nonprofit group, only recently started, whose purpose is to bring the technical skills of professionals in the developed world to help solve problems in developing countries.
EWB is growing quite fast, and it has already set up international placements in some Third World countries (India, Nepal, Chile). I'm sure they could use whatever support you can provide.
Not that I don't think this is a generous offer on Red Hat's part, but it'll be interesting to see if all the posters who ranted at Microsoft's arrogance yesterday say the same thing today about Redhat.
What you say?
Steve
"The Economist is running an article about a program that takes gang members in Milwaukee, sends them through rehab, and teaches them web development."
Dude, watch your terminology! At least where I come from,
gang bangers != gang members
Gang bangers are people who take part in a gangbang, which can mean anything from n-guys-and-one-girl consensual sex to group rape. Either way, it's probably not what you meant.
...plug the RJ45 cable into the back of your network card.
Steve
While I'm not trying to advocate self-censorship, perhaps all of us (incl. Zimmerman and Bush) should be rather careful about how we use the terms "jihad" and "crusade" for a while.
While this use is perfectly safe, I think that if such terms are used merely for effect, while they still carry associations with their respective origins, there is a significant danger of being misunderstood.
(I'm speaking specifically about Bush's use of the word "crusade" to describe the upcoming war, but it goes for "jihad" too.)
Steve
ObPedantry: This isn't begging the question at all.
"Begging the question", otherwise known as circular reasoning, refers to the (fallacious) practice of assuming the truth of conclusion in an argument in the content of the argument.
Here's a reference.
Steve
Why do you insist, in an English article, on using the French name of the CSA ("Agence Spatiale Canadienne")? Just call it the Canadian Space Agency, for God's sake! These saddening stabs at an international air just make you look desperate.
In addition, you then introduce the abbreviation "CSA", as yet undefined, and expect everyone to figure out it's the same organization!
Finally, if you must be pretentious and use French names unnecessarily, at least do it correctly. Don't mix definite articles across languages (use "le" rather than "the") and only capitalize the first word: l'Agence spatiale canadienne. You'd see that if you followed your own link. :)
Peace in complexity,
Steve
--
B.Math (PM/CS), University of Waterloo
"æs ofereode, isses swa mæg." - Deor
Y'all got my hopes up for nothing. *Sniff*.
Steve
--
Stephen Forrest
4N PM/CS, University of Waterloo
"æs ofereode, isses swa mæg." - The Complaint of Deor