But, it is quite clear that the agenda is bigger than that. It is that there be no closed code at all.
Huh? You talk like this is some kind of hidden agenda....? RMS has made it perfectly clear that his long-term goal is to throw out software licenses. The GPL is just means to get there.
As I see it, GPL is first and foremost there to promote the ideas of free software, which will ultimately lead to that all software licenses will be abandoned.
BSD licenses are used to promote some specific piece of software, application or codec. If that is what you want to do, go with BSD, I have no problem with that.
But, you may also want to put your software in the public domain, if it is really ultimate freedom for all you have in mind. If you do, you would agree with RMS' ultimate goal, but rushing it there may hurt more than it's worth.
Why doesn't standard power supplies come with a small builtin UPS?
I lived at a place for a short time where the fuses blew now and then. It only took me a few seconds to fix it, but it caused loss of soem data and an unclean crash.
I only need, say, one-and-a-half minute. When the UPS looses power from the net, it waits a few seconds to see if it was transient, then alerts the user (the user probably knows, as the lights may have gone out). If power isn't restored within one minute, the system will begin to take down and save large processes. When, finally, the "I'm dying" signal comes, the system will do a clean shutdown.
While I know of a few internal UPSes, some of which seems neat, I only know about one such unit, Amsdell IPPS, but that company seems rather dead. I know they still exist, but I'm not sure they will ever power an Athlon.
Also, it comes with short cables, I need some long ones for my cabinet, and you need to take a wire out of the cabinet. I looked at my Mobo, and I have an SMBus, perhaps that could be used for this purpose?
I mean, this should be widespread...
I guess the answer to my question is that most people are so used to crashes, a crash because of power loss isn't such an issue...:-)
Oh, come on! Look at where the people who laid down the groundwork came from! Especially, look at what Tim Berners-Lee has said about the issue.
In his book, TimBL, very clearly said that software patents is the number one threat to technological progress in the software world.
Further TimBL has made it clear that the main reason for WWW's success was that CERN released it to the public domain. If they hadn't, there wouldn't have been any web.
Unfortunately, the US government has decided that profits are so important that technological progress must be sacrified for it. US corporations are using that for all that it is worth. European governments (I'm in Europe) is following suite, because they fear that if US corps can profit from undermining technological progress, European corporations will die.
What a great situation! But, unfortunately, the W3C can't turn the blind eye to all this. They have to work up a policy that takes software patents into account. Also, you know, if the W3C hadn't attempted to gather the big ones in the industry, the big ones wouldn't have listened to anybody anyway.
TimBL, Dan Weitzner, Jane Daly or the World Wide Web Consortium folks are not the enemies in this. The government bodies that allow patents that suck are the ones that needs to be blamed.
The W3C knows perfectly well that they are in a balancing act. If they accept patents too easily, M$ will take over the web with a few obvious, but well-chosen patents. If they don't work with M$ and the like over patents, M$ will take over the web by disregarding W3C alltogether.
But that is not to say that I don't agree that the web should remain in the public domain. In fact, I made a post to Shouldexist long ago forwarding the concept of Human Communications Carrier, where the basic point is that protocols that become popular for communication must be released to the public domain.
I may also agree that a fork may be needed if this gets out of hand. I have been thinking along the lines of making a high-quality network, where user agents will reject anything that doesn't validate, isn't digitally signed, etc. Also, protocols for making payments needs to be added very fast. Documents could be downloaded from anybody's cache, so that availability of a document is not impacted that much by the availability of a single server.
OK, let me round off by posting flamebait (yeah, I'm Karma Kapped, so don't even try modding me down!;-) ): Why don't we move the whole standards process to Europe, and just let the USians rot in their software-patents infected hole? Lets do it right now before software patents go through, and show the officials that patents hinder growth. So, when technology flourishes in Europe, USians can just sit by and watch, cause there are a few small little details they have to spend a few years in court deciding whether or not they are allowed to use.
Ok, I'll bite (though I even had moderator access, I could mod you...:-))
There is a lot that is wrong with software patents, not with patents in general.
The problem is that everyone can make a small contribution, and when you write software, your standing on other developers toes, not their shoulders.
There are only a few things that are big enough to be patented. For example, the Web. But the web wouldn't have existed if it had been patented. TimBL has made this very clear, over and over. And TimBL has also made it very clear that you're wrong: It's the common standards that encourage growth, because it makes it possible for everybody to compete on a level playing field.
Software patents had been OK if they costed no more than $100 to get (so that everybody could get them), took a week to get granted, and expired after a month.
That's what it takes for software patents to hinder continued development. However, this is completely unrealistic, so better drop them.
OTOH, I'd like you to come up with good examples of software patents that encouraged growth. And we'll see how important they were compared to e.g. the Internet and the Web.
Unfortunately not, according to the folks at FSF. It is kind of weird, because many other licenses are based on this way of doing it. If I understand FSF correctly, it is not really valid according to US Copyright law.
However, I'm in Norway, so I could find out whether it would be sufficient according to Norwegian copyright law.
I think that the FDL is the Free Documentation License which is most clearly formulated, so it is unlikely that one will run into trouble if using it.
However, it has it's problems too. My project is mostly about making tutorials, and one important part of it is to encourage people to make printed booklets and distribute freely.
The problem is that the FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with any copy you make. That would defeat the purpose of the booklet: You can't make a 4-page booklet if you would have to include a 4-page copy of the license.
That's the main problem with the FDL. I've been communicating with FSF on this, and apparently, it is not really a problem with FDL, but with copyright law. You have to include a license, or people would have to assume the worst (i.e. you only have fair use rights. Besides, most people don't think they have fair use rights either, because of all the propaganda, so they will not make a copy even if you tell them to...)
The FSF's best suggestion is that I, as the copyright holder, grant an individual license to everyone who wants to make a booklet. I think this is a sub-optimal solution, because the people who join me in making content needs predictability too. They need to know under what conditions the stuff they write will be distributed.
Take, as an example, the GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO. It links the FDL. When I organized a keysigning party, I handed out a paper copy of parts of the HOWTO to every participant, without a copy of the licence. In doing that, I think I broke the FDL (I plead "not guilty" your honor, I didn't understand the FDL at that time!:-) ). But, I think that is how everyone would do it, and in fact, I think it is how the author intended it to be. Actually, I don't think the author followed the instructions in the FDL either.
I guess I have made this point: The FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with every copy you make, but nobody is going to do that with simple handouts.
BTW, I'm having a bit of problem hosting this project for the next couple of months... Anybody have a web server with a little bandwidth to spare?
The general idea is to charge readers a few cents for every page they view, or as McCloud put it, to charge "for initial travel through the gate," with the ultimate goal being a subscription.
Comics is exactly the kind of thing I would use micropayments for. I would never consider a subscription. If they try to fool me into making a subscription, they will loose me. It's as simple as that.
"Web users are not wanting to pay for what they're already getting for free," warned Strazewski.
I wouldn't be so sure about that either. I would gladly pay for good, accessible products, that doesn't infringe on my privacy, take away my fair use rights, doesn't try to abuse my trust in any way, and make available a convientent method for making payments.
Right now, that doesn't exist, and it seems the industry isn't going to make it happen. All the industry care about it making offers that sucks, infringe on my privacy, take away my fair use rights, and abuse my trust in every way. In addition, they all stand behind their little sand castles shouting at each other trying to make different ways of making payments that are not going to work. Instead, they should come together and agree on common, open standards.
Variable bit-rate, if I have understood it correctly, is about say that you have a period in the sound file that is very quiet, then you don't need many bits to represent it well. Therefore, you don't use many bits per sample, and you save some space.
You still sample regularily, for example, if you sample with a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, then you take a sample every 0.023 milliseconds, exactly.
This stuff is different. Instead of taking a sample with exactly the same interval, you sample at random, or you sample every now and then. The number of bits you have for each sample is a completely different matter, that may or may not be variable.
The funny thing is that you can actually use this to reconstruct the signal much better in many cases, which is pretty counterintuitive when you think about it! (until you've thought much about it, because then it makes a lot of sense...:-) )
Ah, I'm starting to get rather sick of this! It's just rumors! Perhaps Alan was trying to say something to the effect of "don't believe rumors!" and then another thread starts, with exactly the same discussions that has been on through the weekend.
The subject is exhausted! Dead. It's nothing more to be said before something more gets out. Then, we can start it all over again.
Hm, not really, you see, irregulary sampled data isn't a problem, it's a Good Thing[tm], and it has been realized long ago that it is a Good Thing[tm]. Obviously, Fourier transforms is an important part of this.
So, really, what is new about this is still kinda fuzzy...:-)
The article was really short on details, I think, so I found it very hard to understand what was new about this. Some time ago, Prof Jaan Pelt (who is also going to be the referee of my thesis), gave a really mind-blowing lecture about non-uniform sampling. Shortly thereafter, I posted a message to the Vorbis-dev mailing list about this stuff.
In fact, you're not limited by the Nyquist frequency when you are sampling non-uniformly, so it has some strengths in that respect. However, it has to be more to it than this for it to be news. Can anybody who understands this better than I provide any insights?
They argue that the left-right is very simplistic, so they introduce "totalitarian" vs. "libertarian" as well. Of course it is better, but it still doesn't go a long way.
It's a test on the web site to help classify yourself. If I remember correctly, I got the score (-6, -6) which means rather leftist and rather libertarian.
Wonder what it would look like if you plotted all/.ers in there...
Did you know that there is a whole online community of older women trading sewing patterns, sewing geeks who trade their files (sewing and knitting patterns) just like any other geeks do? and they are running into the same issues of trading that Napster did, but with the pattern publishers?
BTW, my girlfriend just bought this really advanced BERNINA machine (I think that's the one), which can connect to a computer's serial port. It needs a windoze OS, and there is never going to be a windoze OS on any of my machines (and except for this, she's cool about that).
Anybody know of any hacks that has been done on the BERNINA machines? It would be great if we could use it with Linux.
I suggested she drop BERNINA an e-mail asking for specs, and if they didn't give her the specs, start reverse engineering the thing. After all, she's the one who is an electronics student, I'm just an astronomer.
Well, I don't know much about cryptology, but I figured that if you use symmetric cipher, and the keys are distributed based physical contact between the devices. Then, you only allow devices to connect based on signatures made with the keys that have been in physical contact, would that be feasible?
How come that it is always what they say when you prove that you can break in...? You actually have to do some real damage for these people to wake up, and obviously, you can't.
The last thing I removed from my thesis...:
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 2
It's kind of fun, the last thing I removed from my thesis, two days ago, before submitting it to a referee today was
In this work, I shall assume that the black hole model [of AGN central engine] is essentially
correct.
The reason wasn't that I'm particulary skeptical about black hole theory, but that I figured I really didn't need to assume anything about it, as long as all the other assumptions I make hold (which they won't, but that's an entirely different matter:-) ). The central engine of quasars can be whatever it likes...:-)
My knee-jerk reaction to the article posted was that it seems like the gravastar isn't allowed to grow, and it has to grow, right? However, skimming the researcher's preprint, it seems like they are addressing the issue, so it is probably just something I've missed. Besides, there'll be enough knee-jerk postings here...:-)
Hm, I had the same thought, but reading their preprint (link posted by somebody else), I think they address this specific problem, but I didn't understand the argument by just skimming (nor should you expect anybody to do that). So, I think you need to hold off on your fire a bit longer.
Thanks a lot! Saved me the trouble of searching!:-) However, it should be emphasized that this is a pre-print, it could have changed substantially when going through peer-review.
Also, folks, don't slashdot the site unless you know a bit about cosmology (if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "line element" forget it) - this is a site that is very important for physicists in their daily work.
Well, the problem is, there exists no implementation for a large number of platforms, including that I use mostly for computing, a Tru64 Alpha. Besides, what guarantee do you have Macromedia isn't going to do something nasty?
I'm hoping SVG+DOM+SMIL+Ecmascript will provide an alternative...
Yeah, I was at the Lillehammer Olympics. I lived in a tent outside of the city, and we had a really good time. Usually I don't spend a lot of time watching sports, if I have time off, I like doing it instead (ski-orienteering, orienteering, xc-skiing, climbing, mountainbiking, stuff like that), but the days I were there were just great.
OTOH, commercialism is destroying a lot, the IOC is very corrupt, that's true, and then there's dope.
Well, you know, I wouldn't think too highly of Ukraina's government, and RIAA was probably right in one thing they said in their response to Gilmore the last time this was posted: This has nothing to do with bravery, and a lot to do with corruption.
That being said, I find the thought that every media has a serial number scary and is traceable. Very scary, because it pretty much makes it impossible to be an anonymous whistle-blower, on that media. You can still use paper, unless you copy it on a color copier, you might be able to use old-style film, but say you have a video clip, and you want to distribute it on CDs, you can't do that.
And what Ukraina needs are definitely more anonymous whistle-blowers.
Hehe, well, you know this is kinda funny, because if consumer software came with only weak encryption, and the suits start using encryption, thinking they will be safe, you'll have lots and lots of sooper-sikrit business documents that can be cracked in five days by anybody. Not that it matters, judging from the Sircam documents they sent to me...:-)
OTOH, can you imagine the market for Beowulf clusters for cracking weak encryption? I mean, most big corps are in a really cutthroat situation, and they wouldn't mind cracking the competition's biznis documents if they could get away with it, so you'll see a Beowulf cluster in every back room, dedicated to cracking documents...
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? You talk like this is some kind of hidden agenda....? RMS has made it perfectly clear that his long-term goal is to throw out software licenses. The GPL is just means to get there.
As I see it, GPL is first and foremost there to promote the ideas of free software, which will ultimately lead to that all software licenses will be abandoned.
BSD licenses are used to promote some specific piece of software, application or codec. If that is what you want to do, go with BSD, I have no problem with that.
But, you may also want to put your software in the public domain, if it is really ultimate freedom for all you have in mind. If you do, you would agree with RMS' ultimate goal, but rushing it there may hurt more than it's worth.
Why doesn't standard power supplies come with a small builtin UPS?
I lived at a place for a short time where the fuses blew now and then. It only took me a few seconds to fix it, but it caused loss of soem data and an unclean crash.
I only need, say, one-and-a-half minute. When the UPS looses power from the net, it waits a few seconds to see if it was transient, then alerts the user (the user probably knows, as the lights may have gone out). If power isn't restored within one minute, the system will begin to take down and save large processes. When, finally, the "I'm dying" signal comes, the system will do a clean shutdown.
While I know of a few internal UPSes, some of which seems neat, I only know about one such unit, Amsdell IPPS, but that company seems rather dead. I know they still exist, but I'm not sure they will ever power an Athlon. Also, it comes with short cables, I need some long ones for my cabinet, and you need to take a wire out of the cabinet. I looked at my Mobo, and I have an SMBus, perhaps that could be used for this purpose?
I mean, this should be widespread...
I guess the answer to my question is that most people are so used to crashes, a crash because of power loss isn't such an issue... :-)
In his book, TimBL, very clearly said that software patents is the number one threat to technological progress in the software world.
Further TimBL has made it clear that the main reason for WWW's success was that CERN released it to the public domain. If they hadn't, there wouldn't have been any web.
Unfortunately, the US government has decided that profits are so important that technological progress must be sacrified for it. US corporations are using that for all that it is worth. European governments (I'm in Europe) is following suite, because they fear that if US corps can profit from undermining technological progress, European corporations will die.
What a great situation! But, unfortunately, the W3C can't turn the blind eye to all this. They have to work up a policy that takes software patents into account. Also, you know, if the W3C hadn't attempted to gather the big ones in the industry, the big ones wouldn't have listened to anybody anyway.
TimBL, Dan Weitzner, Jane Daly or the World Wide Web Consortium folks are not the enemies in this. The government bodies that allow patents that suck are the ones that needs to be blamed.
The W3C knows perfectly well that they are in a balancing act. If they accept patents too easily, M$ will take over the web with a few obvious, but well-chosen patents. If they don't work with M$ and the like over patents, M$ will take over the web by disregarding W3C alltogether.
But that is not to say that I don't agree that the web should remain in the public domain. In fact, I made a post to Shouldexist long ago forwarding the concept of Human Communications Carrier, where the basic point is that protocols that become popular for communication must be released to the public domain.
I may also agree that a fork may be needed if this gets out of hand. I have been thinking along the lines of making a high-quality network, where user agents will reject anything that doesn't validate, isn't digitally signed, etc. Also, protocols for making payments needs to be added very fast. Documents could be downloaded from anybody's cache, so that availability of a document is not impacted that much by the availability of a single server.
OK, let me round off by posting flamebait (yeah, I'm Karma Kapped, so don't even try modding me down! ;-) ): Why don't we move the whole standards process to Europe, and just let the USians rot in their software-patents infected hole? Lets do it right now before software patents go through, and show the officials that patents hinder growth. So, when technology flourishes in Europe, USians can just sit by and watch, cause there are a few small little details they have to spend a few years in court deciding whether or not they are allowed to use.
There is a lot that is wrong with software patents, not with patents in general.
The problem is that everyone can make a small contribution, and when you write software, your standing on other developers toes, not their shoulders.
There are only a few things that are big enough to be patented. For example, the Web. But the web wouldn't have existed if it had been patented. TimBL has made this very clear, over and over. And TimBL has also made it very clear that you're wrong: It's the common standards that encourage growth, because it makes it possible for everybody to compete on a level playing field.
Software patents had been OK if they costed no more than $100 to get (so that everybody could get them), took a week to get granted, and expired after a month.
That's what it takes for software patents to hinder continued development. However, this is completely unrealistic, so better drop them.
OTOH, I'd like you to come up with good examples of software patents that encouraged growth. And we'll see how important they were compared to e.g. the Internet and the Web.
However, I'm in Norway, so I could find out whether it would be sufficient according to Norwegian copyright law.
I think that the FDL is the Free Documentation License which is most clearly formulated, so it is unlikely that one will run into trouble if using it.
However, it has it's problems too. My project is mostly about making tutorials, and one important part of it is to encourage people to make printed booklets and distribute freely.
The problem is that the FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with any copy you make. That would defeat the purpose of the booklet: You can't make a 4-page booklet if you would have to include a 4-page copy of the license.
That's the main problem with the FDL. I've been communicating with FSF on this, and apparently, it is not really a problem with FDL, but with copyright law. You have to include a license, or people would have to assume the worst (i.e. you only have fair use rights. Besides, most people don't think they have fair use rights either, because of all the propaganda, so they will not make a copy even if you tell them to...)
The FSF's best suggestion is that I, as the copyright holder, grant an individual license to everyone who wants to make a booklet. I think this is a sub-optimal solution, because the people who join me in making content needs predictability too. They need to know under what conditions the stuff they write will be distributed.
Take, as an example, the GnuPG Keysigning Party HOWTO. It links the FDL. When I organized a keysigning party, I handed out a paper copy of parts of the HOWTO to every participant, without a copy of the licence. In doing that, I think I broke the FDL (I plead "not guilty" your honor, I didn't understand the FDL at that time! :-) ). But, I think that is how everyone would do it, and in fact, I think it is how the author intended it to be. Actually, I don't think the author followed the instructions in the FDL either.
I guess I have made this point: The FDL requires that you include a full copy of the License with every copy you make, but nobody is going to do that with simple handouts.
BTW, I'm having a bit of problem hosting this project for the next couple of months... Anybody have a web server with a little bandwidth to spare?
Comics is exactly the kind of thing I would use micropayments for. I would never consider a subscription. If they try to fool me into making a subscription, they will loose me. It's as simple as that.
I wouldn't be so sure about that either. I would gladly pay for good, accessible products, that doesn't infringe on my privacy, take away my fair use rights, doesn't try to abuse my trust in any way, and make available a convientent method for making payments.
Right now, that doesn't exist, and it seems the industry isn't going to make it happen. All the industry care about it making offers that sucks, infringe on my privacy, take away my fair use rights, and abuse my trust in every way. In addition, they all stand behind their little sand castles shouting at each other trying to make different ways of making payments that are not going to work. Instead, they should come together and agree on common, open standards.
Variable bit-rate, if I have understood it correctly, is about say that you have a period in the sound file that is very quiet, then you don't need many bits to represent it well. Therefore, you don't use many bits per sample, and you save some space.
You still sample regularily, for example, if you sample with a 44.1 kHz sampling frequency, then you take a sample every 0.023 milliseconds, exactly.
This stuff is different. Instead of taking a sample with exactly the same interval, you sample at random, or you sample every now and then. The number of bits you have for each sample is a completely different matter, that may or may not be variable.
The funny thing is that you can actually use this to reconstruct the signal much better in many cases, which is pretty counterintuitive when you think about it! (until you've thought much about it, because then it makes a lot of sense... :-) )
Anyway, try a better search.
But of course, it depends on what you mean by "problem".
The subject is exhausted! Dead. It's nothing more to be said before something more gets out. Then, we can start it all over again.
So, really, what is new about this is still kinda fuzzy... :-)
In fact, you're not limited by the Nyquist frequency when you are sampling non-uniformly, so it has some strengths in that respect. However, it has to be more to it than this for it to be news. Can anybody who understands this better than I provide any insights?
They argue that the left-right is very simplistic, so they introduce "totalitarian" vs. "libertarian" as well. Of course it is better, but it still doesn't go a long way.
It's a test on the web site to help classify yourself. If I remember correctly, I got the score (-6, -6) which means rather leftist and rather libertarian.
Wonder what it would look like if you plotted all /.ers in there...
BTW, my girlfriend just bought this really advanced BERNINA machine (I think that's the one), which can connect to a computer's serial port. It needs a windoze OS, and there is never going to be a windoze OS on any of my machines (and except for this, she's cool about that).
Anybody know of any hacks that has been done on the BERNINA machines? It would be great if we could use it with Linux.
I suggested she drop BERNINA an e-mail asking for specs, and if they didn't give her the specs, start reverse engineering the thing. After all, she's the one who is an electronics student, I'm just an astronomer.
Well, I don't know much about cryptology, but I figured that if you use symmetric cipher, and the keys are distributed based physical contact between the devices. Then, you only allow devices to connect based on signatures made with the keys that have been in physical contact, would that be feasible?
How come that it is always what they say when you prove that you can break in...? You actually have to do some real damage for these people to wake up, and obviously, you can't.
The reason wasn't that I'm particulary skeptical about black hole theory, but that I figured I really didn't need to assume anything about it, as long as all the other assumptions I make hold (which they won't, but that's an entirely different matter :-) ). The central engine of quasars can be whatever it likes... :-)
My knee-jerk reaction to the article posted was that it seems like the gravastar isn't allowed to grow, and it has to grow, right? However, skimming the researcher's preprint, it seems like they are addressing the issue, so it is probably just something I've missed. Besides, there'll be enough knee-jerk postings here... :-)
Hm, I had the same thought, but reading their preprint (link posted by somebody else), I think they address this specific problem, but I didn't understand the argument by just skimming (nor should you expect anybody to do that). So, I think you need to hold off on your fire a bit longer.
Also, folks, don't slashdot the site unless you know a bit about cosmology (if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "line element" forget it) - this is a site that is very important for physicists in their daily work.
I'm hoping SVG+DOM+SMIL+Ecmascript will provide an alternative...
Other than that, I agree completely: Two levels of WCAG should be the standard for a page like that.
OTOH, commercialism is destroying a lot, the IOC is very corrupt, that's true, and then there's dope.
Yeah, but the Frameset DTD is deprecated. (Hm, the W3C site was down for me right now...)
Frames are dead. It was a really bad idea, and it should go.
That being said, I find the thought that every media has a serial number scary and is traceable. Very scary, because it pretty much makes it impossible to be an anonymous whistle-blower, on that media. You can still use paper, unless you copy it on a color copier, you might be able to use old-style film, but say you have a video clip, and you want to distribute it on CDs, you can't do that.
And what Ukraina needs are definitely more anonymous whistle-blowers.
OTOH, can you imagine the market for Beowulf clusters for cracking weak encryption? I mean, most big corps are in a really cutthroat situation, and they wouldn't mind cracking the competition's biznis documents if they could get away with it, so you'll see a Beowulf cluster in every back room, dedicated to cracking documents...
gotta love it... ;-)
But then, I don't know if the CEOs love it.