Grad students. Doing their thesis on a topic, use archival data to support.
To elaborate on that, at my (old) institute people are discouraged from disembarking on a thesis that requires them to obtain original data, it is too risky.
To get observation time, you would have to write a really good proposal; most major observatories have at least three times as many applications as they have time for. If you're lucky enough to get time, it is maybe half a year into the future, and you're getting three nights to complete everything.
You spend that time preparing everything, just to come down to the observatory, and you're in the fog for three nights! Tough luck, you've spent all that time preparing, and you're now one year behind schedule...
I did three observation runs during my thesis work , two as Observing Astronomer (who is kind of the guy deciding what to look at when and for how long when at the telescope, the PI is the guy who decides what the project is about). My own thesis was purely theoretical, and I was happy about that, because we experienced having a total of ten nights (it is rare to get so many nights, it was a world-wide collaboration), and we got one full night + 3 hours on two other nights worth of observation. It's extremely frustrating to sit there getting nothing because of humidity, I can tell you, and if that had been a part of my thesis, I'd be in deep trouble.
IAAABDTTALA (I Am An Astronomer, But Don't Take This As Legal Advice), and I doubt that they are actually aiming this at the layman. What they are doing is opening it up to everyone, and everyone is free to use it and learn how to use it, but really, you expect mainly professional astronomers to use it.
That being said, there are a number of amateur astronomers who are extremely dedicated and are willing to obtain the skill needed to use such a system, even if there is a tough learning curve. These can be considered "laymen", but they are actually very good at what they do. That's the kind of "laymen" you would expect to use it. Not Joe Sixpack, but the people who are dedicated enough to learn how to use it.
Well, as it was recently shouted on debian-security, the 2.2-series had the same security flaw that allowed any local user to crash a computer. So, if you have untrusted local users, you should upgrade.
My router uses a floppy-based distro and that has the 2.2 kernel, and I really see no reason why I would want 2.4 on that old box. It isn't broken, so it doesn't need an upgrade to 2.4. You could say that it isn't very vulnerable to the mentioned problem either, because if someone got access to it, I would have a far bigger problem than them crashing my router. Others may have other uses for 2.2, so a fix of the mentioned problem is definately a Good Thing[tm] and nice news.
Hehe, not me... There's a reason why I hardly ever write by hand anymore. Handwriting is a pain.
But if I get a small PDA-gadget with lots of stuff, and has completely different text-entry UIs (speech recognition, dasher with some pointing device), then I'll consider it.
Well, I'm in Norway, and it would have quite fun to have gotten something like this. We have pretty strong laws against spam, but usually, the difficulty is figuring out who really sent it. So I could respond:
"Thank you for taking responsibility of this abuse. If you ever come under Norwegian jurisdiction, you will face heavy fines and up to six years in prison."
Well, I'm an astronomer, and I'm not american, but from my perspective it seems like the Apollo missions is still today what drives the hard sciences in America. There are many very strong institutions that are doing excellent science, and they are well funded, also with public money. From my perspective, it seems like they have a unique position in America, and they got this position because of the Apollo program.
If they hadn't gotten this position back then, they would too have degraded to the "corporations-are-the-basis-for-all" thinking. There would have been very little science done, and because of that, very little technology drive. Basically, you guys are world leaders because of the Apollo program!
Now, I only wish that you had used it for better than get a bunch of religious morons into office.
Uhm, well, TimBL said that the main reason why gopher died was that they self-FUDded themselves by saying "it's free now, but we may charge for it in the future". And I think he's right, and in that case, gopher is much less in the spirit of the internet than the web.
Hm, I read that they've got a 250 Mbits/s link now, and I was going to respond "hey, let's stress-test it!" But www.kernel.org was very slow to me, in spite of that
Current bandwidth utilization 57.87 Mbit/s
That's actually rather weird, because it is not that uncommon to have that load. If this number is correct, there has to be something wrong with the server. But probably, they are getting more traffic.
Well me? I went directly to a mirror after getting the announcement from the announcement list this morning and downloaded it from there before reading/.
The new kernel fixes the lcall DoS. While I have no untrusted users on my system, things like that is always good to have out of the way.
No, you are a troll. Sincere Choice promotes the idea that people should have a choice. Software Choice promotes the idea that the best choice is proprietary software. That's their choice, but they shouldn't pretend that a policy that promotes that idea is the best for my needs.
I agree completely, it is spam. However, if you have to have any success in regulating this, you have to take one thing at a time. What should be done is regulating business-to-consumer spam, like we have in Norway. If enforced, it could be effective for other types of spam too.
From reading the FSF position, I think the only real fix is to revise the patent system. Clearly, the patents wouldn't be worth a lot to those holding it if they would not be able to restrict anything.
There is not much to do about that, other than throw out the whole software-patents system.
For one thing, those more nasty of companies seems to have a lot more say in OASIS and ISO than in W3C. Nor can I look upon XML as a subset of SGML, but maybe I'm totally wrong about that.
In ISO, it seems like that cross-licensing of patents is done to shut smaller companies out of the process. OASIS too has RAND licensing and as usual, makes no attempt to define what is "reasonable" or "non-discriminatory":
OASIS.IPR.3.3 Determination of Reasonable and Non-discriminatory Terms
The OASIS Board of Directors will not make any explicit determination that the assurance of reasonable and non-discriminatory terms for the use of a technology has been fulfilled in practice. It will instead use the normal requirements for the advancement of OASIS specifications to verify that the terms for use are reasonable.
This is contrary to how hard W3C has worked to ensure royalty-free patents.
I'm not saying that James Clark's stuff isn't better, it may well be, he is certainly among the foremost in this field. But this bashing of W3C seems highly undeserved.
I have thought about buying one, but they aren't good enough for my needs. I think it is several years into the future before I'm going to get one.
Text-entry interfaces: I really don't want to use handwriting. My handwriting is terrible, so text-entry by handwriting on the screen is out. I could use a keyboard. Keyboards are ok, but not small ones, and I can bring around a big keyboard, so that's out too. It needs something different. I would like to have speech recognition that works well, so that I can talk to it. In addition, for noisy or for quiet places, it needs another interface, something like Dasher
and the ability to chose between them with one click.
Decent bandwidth. That pretty much means UMTS, and while the city where I'm sitting is covered, it isn't open to the public yet.
Really tough units. I really don't want to say "sorry guys, I can go climbing today, because I can't afford the risk of breaking my PDA". I don't want the gadgets I have to control what I can do, then I'll rather do without.
I want everything to be in it. Phone, Ogg-player, etc. Yeah, I'm aware of the "if one thing breaks"-argument, but it is nice to have a single gadget rather than many different.
Meanwhile, I think I'll go for Siemens ME45 mobile phone. It should be pretty rough, it has a simple calendar that I can syncronize with KOrganizer. I'll use that until PDAs get good enough.
Well, the CEO of Opera has exclaimed loudly many times that if M$ wanted to buy Opera, the prize would be the whole value of M$ + 1 buck...:-)
Opera has been at open war with MS for quite some time now. For some time, they didn't talk too much about it, but after MS attempted to close them out of MSN, that pretty much was a declaration of war. Since then, the CTO, Håkon Wium Lie (aka Howcome), who has always been very anti-MS, has had free hands to fight MS as loudly as he can.
This has in fact included demonstrations where a hundred geeks in blue t-shirts protested against MS, organized by Electronic Frontier Norway and lead by Howcome.
After emptying the Trusted Publishers list, if I do see a warning saying that a web site or an HTML mail wants to download a control, how can I decide whether to let it proceed?
The best criterion to use is whether you trust the web site or the sender of the HTML mail. If you don't trust the web site offering the control, cancel the download.
So, who want to bet that the e-mails we will soon see circulating will have something like:
From: billg@microsoft.com
Subject: You can safely trust me
<html><body>
Please read this e-mail carefully and make sure you download the provided control.
Asking people to decide whether or not they trust somebody based on, uh, well, whatever, that's asking for disaster. People will do that based on what they see in the From-field, most likely...
Well, admittedly, I haven't touched a windows machine in a long time, so I might be totally off here...:-)
You're welcome! Me... well, I'm not going back to Brazil with the treatment we had on Sao Paulo's airport on the way back from Peru. Basically, you're not allowed to leave the airport unless you're there for more than 24 hours. So, they kept us in the corner of the airport by a couple of gates for 8 hours. I had an Internet friend who had translated some of my pages to Portuguese waiting for me outside, and I was not even allowed to pass a message to him to tell him I was not coming...:-(
The world is a big place, and it is hard enough to visit all countries in a lifetime. So, I'm not going back to those that confront me with outright hostility. But I'll definately go back to Peru.:-)
Well, I don't know, looking from outside, I can't really see much freedom anymore either, especially with this Total Information Awareness stuff.
I think my country (Norway) is pretty free, but we're having a struggle here too.
Actually, if I were to break up and go somewhere else, I would go to a place I could really make a difference. Like Peru.
Everybody knows about the really clued congressman down there. Then, I visited Peru this summer, climbing mostly (made it to about 20000 feet), and it is a really beautiful place, and the Cusco region has the best food I've ever tasted. There are lots of things to do if you're into extreme sports, really good rafting, climbing, mountain biking etc. You would not get bored... It is a rather noisy society though, and from looking at the traffic, it seems the big guys get to go first.
Really, I'd contact the congressman's office and see if it is possible to found a high-tech center somewhere around Cusco (actually, I saw a signpost by the road as we travelled from Cusco, I may have been to this small town where he's from, and that is close to Cusco). Perhaps find a few highly educated geeks who are sick and tired of the politics in their own countries, move down there together, get good contacts with local universities. It's probably going to be a struggle, but at least you could make a real difference.
IANAL, but I think in my jurisdiction, if they were not published, then it would not be copyright violation, but trade secret law that comes into play, or something like that. Copyright is for something that is published.
I was out at 5 o'clock this morning, and it was absolutely great. At that time, we passed through the 1767 band, which is less dense than the 1866 band USians will see. In addition, we had full moon and a humid atmosphere, so conditions were far from good. Yet I saw so many nice meteors this may indicate that the boldest predictions have been correct.
And what about when your kids go to school? Unless they attend one in a very small minority they'll be using a different platform and will be behind the other kids.
No way! They'll be so far ahead that the teacher will just hand all the teaching over to them, and let them get the school over on Linux.
When we got our first computer, it was a really big and horrendous computer. But, contrary to what all my friends had, it couldn't play games. So, I started to program instead. The story was pretty much the same with the other geek in my class. Allthough most kids in my class quite soon would have the same equipment at home as they did at school, they would never catch up with the two of us who had to use harder equipment. Nor could the teachers.
The basic point here is that kids adapt and learn very fast, and few games, well, find something else that's cool, programming for example. And once they've learned some essential concepts, they can very well use any other system, including MS Windows. Like I did, they're just going to find it frustrating to use dumber systems.
Actually, my advice to this parent would be just to drop MS Windows. The kids will figure out cool things to do on Linux, you can bet on it. It may not be the same things they do now, but they'll be more creative.
...or someone giving us a wake-up call... Even though the free software community is better in many respects, there's much room for improvement, and this is a field where we should improve, so perhaps we should just thank the bastard who did this...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, you're right. That was rather silly phrased. I had to write something, right...?
RTFA (or rather RFTL), it is all spelled out there.
To elaborate on that, at my (old) institute people are discouraged from disembarking on a thesis that requires them to obtain original data, it is too risky.
To get observation time, you would have to write a really good proposal; most major observatories have at least three times as many applications as they have time for. If you're lucky enough to get time, it is maybe half a year into the future, and you're getting three nights to complete everything.
You spend that time preparing everything, just to come down to the observatory, and you're in the fog for three nights! Tough luck, you've spent all that time preparing, and you're now one year behind schedule...
I did three observation runs during my thesis work , two as Observing Astronomer (who is kind of the guy deciding what to look at when and for how long when at the telescope, the PI is the guy who decides what the project is about). My own thesis was purely theoretical, and I was happy about that, because we experienced having a total of ten nights (it is rare to get so many nights, it was a world-wide collaboration), and we got one full night + 3 hours on two other nights worth of observation. It's extremely frustrating to sit there getting nothing because of humidity, I can tell you, and if that had been a part of my thesis, I'd be in deep trouble.
There are lots of databases that follows this philosophy allready, the NASA Astrophysics Data System, the Digitized Sky Survey, not to speak of the larger arxiv.org. You can all grab whatever you like from there.
That being said, there are a number of amateur astronomers who are extremely dedicated and are willing to obtain the skill needed to use such a system, even if there is a tough learning curve. These can be considered "laymen", but they are actually very good at what they do. That's the kind of "laymen" you would expect to use it. Not Joe Sixpack, but the people who are dedicated enough to learn how to use it.
My router uses a floppy-based distro and that has the 2.2 kernel, and I really see no reason why I would want 2.4 on that old box. It isn't broken, so it doesn't need an upgrade to 2.4. You could say that it isn't very vulnerable to the mentioned problem either, because if someone got access to it, I would have a far bigger problem than them crashing my router. Others may have other uses for 2.2, so a fix of the mentioned problem is definately a Good Thing[tm] and nice news.
But if I get a small PDA-gadget with lots of stuff, and has completely different text-entry UIs (speech recognition, dasher with some pointing device), then I'll consider it.
"Thank you for taking responsibility of this abuse. If you ever come under Norwegian jurisdiction, you will face heavy fines and up to six years in prison."
If they hadn't gotten this position back then, they would too have degraded to the "corporations-are-the-basis-for-all" thinking. There would have been very little science done, and because of that, very little technology drive. Basically, you guys are world leaders because of the Apollo program!
Now, I only wish that you had used it for better than get a bunch of religious morons into office.
It's there allready! It's called the Global Technology Policy Institute and is headed by Bruce Perens.
Uhm, well, TimBL said that the main reason why gopher died was that they self-FUDded themselves by saying "it's free now, but we may charge for it in the future". And I think he's right, and in that case, gopher is much less in the spirit of the internet than the web.
That's actually rather weird, because it is not that uncommon to have that load. If this number is correct, there has to be something wrong with the server. But probably, they are getting more traffic.
Well me? I went directly to a mirror after getting the announcement from the announcement list this morning and downloaded it from there before reading /.
The new kernel fixes the lcall DoS. While I have no untrusted users on my system, things like that is always good to have out of the way.
No, you are a troll. Sincere Choice promotes the idea that people should have a choice. Software Choice promotes the idea that the best choice is proprietary software. That's their choice, but they shouldn't pretend that a policy that promotes that idea is the best for my needs.
I agree completely, it is spam. However, if you have to have any success in regulating this, you have to take one thing at a time. What should be done is regulating business-to-consumer spam, like we have in Norway. If enforced, it could be effective for other types of spam too.
There is not much to do about that, other than throw out the whole software-patents system.
For one thing, those more nasty of companies seems to have a lot more say in OASIS and ISO than in W3C. Nor can I look upon XML as a subset of SGML, but maybe I'm totally wrong about that.
In ISO, it seems like that cross-licensing of patents is done to shut smaller companies out of the process. OASIS too has RAND licensing and as usual, makes no attempt to define what is "reasonable" or "non-discriminatory":
This is contrary to how hard W3C has worked to ensure royalty-free patents.
I'm not saying that James Clark's stuff isn't better, it may well be, he is certainly among the foremost in this field. But this bashing of W3C seems highly undeserved.
Meanwhile, I think I'll go for Siemens ME45 mobile phone. It should be pretty rough, it has a simple calendar that I can syncronize with KOrganizer. I'll use that until PDAs get good enough.
Opera has been at open war with MS for quite some time now. For some time, they didn't talk too much about it, but after MS attempted to close them out of MSN, that pretty much was a declaration of war. Since then, the CTO, Håkon Wium Lie (aka Howcome), who has always been very anti-MS, has had free hands to fight MS as loudly as he can.
This has in fact included demonstrations where a hundred geeks in blue t-shirts protested against MS, organized by Electronic Frontier Norway and lead by Howcome.
From MS02-065:
So, who want to bet that the e-mails we will soon see circulating will have something like:
From: billg@microsoft.com
Subject: You can safely trust me
<html><body> Please read this e-mail carefully and make sure you download the provided control.
Asking people to decide whether or not they trust somebody based on, uh, well, whatever, that's asking for disaster. People will do that based on what they see in the From-field, most likely...
Well, admittedly, I haven't touched a windows machine in a long time, so I might be totally off here... :-)
The world is a big place, and it is hard enough to visit all countries in a lifetime. So, I'm not going back to those that confront me with outright hostility. But I'll definately go back to Peru. :-)
I think my country (Norway) is pretty free, but we're having a struggle here too.
Actually, if I were to break up and go somewhere else, I would go to a place I could really make a difference. Like Peru.
Everybody knows about the really clued congressman down there. Then, I visited Peru this summer, climbing mostly (made it to about 20000 feet), and it is a really beautiful place, and the Cusco region has the best food I've ever tasted. There are lots of things to do if you're into extreme sports, really good rafting, climbing, mountain biking etc. You would not get bored... It is a rather noisy society though, and from looking at the traffic, it seems the big guys get to go first.
Really, I'd contact the congressman's office and see if it is possible to found a high-tech center somewhere around Cusco (actually, I saw a signpost by the road as we travelled from Cusco, I may have been to this small town where he's from, and that is close to Cusco). Perhaps find a few highly educated geeks who are sick and tired of the politics in their own countries, move down there together, get good contacts with local universities. It's probably going to be a struggle, but at least you could make a real difference.
IANAL, but I think in my jurisdiction, if they were not published, then it would not be copyright violation, but trade secret law that comes into play, or something like that. Copyright is for something that is published.
So enjoy!
No way! They'll be so far ahead that the teacher will just hand all the teaching over to them, and let them get the school over on Linux.
When we got our first computer, it was a really big and horrendous computer. But, contrary to what all my friends had, it couldn't play games. So, I started to program instead. The story was pretty much the same with the other geek in my class. Allthough most kids in my class quite soon would have the same equipment at home as they did at school, they would never catch up with the two of us who had to use harder equipment. Nor could the teachers.
The basic point here is that kids adapt and learn very fast, and few games, well, find something else that's cool, programming for example. And once they've learned some essential concepts, they can very well use any other system, including MS Windows. Like I did, they're just going to find it frustrating to use dumber systems.
Actually, my advice to this parent would be just to drop MS Windows. The kids will figure out cool things to do on Linux, you can bet on it. It may not be the same things they do now, but they'll be more creative.
What does this question mean for what we understand by "Open Source"?