Not according to what they said: It's not that they are using 'book' -- we have no complaint against Kelly Blue Book or others [...] However they feel that: Teachbook was unfairly riding on its coattails by using the suffix "book" to reference the larger site's established reputation.
Given that teachbook is a social networking site but for a specialized niche, I think it's fair to say that they are doing that.
In my opinion they should have that right, though. Trademark law makes sense - other companies shouldn't be able to impersonate yours, but that should be limited to there being an actual chance of confusion. Doing something similar as someone else, and profiting from an established market - well that's just capitalism. Facebook can always compete by having a better product.
Facebook argues: If others could freely use 'generic plus BOOK' [...] the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for [...] 'social networking services'
Again, I think that's probably true but that is how language works, and they should have to live with that.
Sockets are expensive (particularly BGA sockets), and putting something in a socket as part of the manufacturing process is also expensive. Also the danger that the drive actually breaks is relatively low. So I think manufacturers will solder this directly on the mainboard.
I can certainly see your point, but there is the danger that the current noise about Google street view will create the impression in people's minds, that they have somehow privacy rights related to photographs of their houses. Currently there are (very unspecific) discussions in Germany about making laws regarding street view - which (at least in principle) could impact the rights of photographers.
Something similar happened in the US with the right of photographers to make pictures of public buildings, harassment by police officers "for security reasons" is quite common.
Being a chip designer I quite frequently encounter articles which claim that there is going to be a "new way to design chips" coming soon. I'm admittedly a bit jaded hearing about another one.
Often these approaches overstate the problems of current methodologies quite significantly. This thesis too, seems to hit the old favorites. Here is an example: In clocked digital systems, speed and throughput is typically limited by worst case delays associated with the slowest module in the system.
This would be true if clocked digital systems would be restricted to a single clock. Some are, but the embedded devices I work on usually have half a dozen clocks or more. Some modules run with fairly high speeds, others at relatively low speeds - synchronizing them is not only a standard task, it's actually reasonably easy compared with other problems we face.
Very closely related another of their claims: The larger the area over which the same clock is shared, the more costly and difficult it is to distribute the clock signal.
Again - true in principle, but exaggerating the problem. It's not so difficult to distribute a clock over a large area if you allow skew between different areas. That might appear to defeat the purpose, but you really only need to interface reliably between those areas. Skew can even be helpful in some cases: if you send signal X from block A to be clocked-in by block B - then it helps if the clock arrives later at block B than at block A. Of course it's a disadvantage for a signal Y driven from B to A - but that signal might be faster (less logic to go through in block B). Modern design tools can automatically use clock skew to achieve better timing.
One more: Building in redundancy to avoid catastrophic failure is not a cost-effective option when manufacturing circuits on a silicon wafer
Well, we happen to do that regularly, it's cost-effective if you know what you are doing. There are parts of the chip which are much more likely to fail than others - RAMs are more prone to defects than ordinary digital logic. So as part of device testing defective areas of a RAM block can be mapped to a handful of spare cells. doubling every transistor as suggested in the thesis, is not necessary, obviously.
Any of these "fundamentally new" approaches have to compete with the evolutionary solutions which people find for the same problems. That's hard because some of these are at least as clever as the "fundamental" ones, and they are much easier to adapt in existing design flows. I'm not ruling out that at some point we'll switch to a completely different design methodology, just as I'm not excluding the possibility that lighter-than-air travel will at some point find a place in commercial aviation again. I'm just not holding my breath.
The law prohibits the distribution or public use of symbols of unconstitutional groups, in particular, flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans and forms of greeting. link
The number of things wrong with the article summary almost defies imagination.
What's actually wrong with the *summary*? It doesn't claim that the whole US could do exactly what Portugal does or anything like that. It talks about how "Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover". It doesn't even mention the US.
Well if two descendants of species X have the skill C, then it's a lot more likely that X also had C than it would be if only one of them had it. Of course it is possible for both descendants to develop C independently, but that would indicate that it might not be as hard to develop C. Those were the two options the GP pointed out.
That's just not their business model. They don't have the bandwidth to do all sorts of different form factors because they are just one company - if they want to deliver quality products they need to restrict themselves to a small number of models. Besides they always determine "the one best way" to handle things and that becomes basically religion amongst their fans - it helps to evangelize people if you have a consistent message. They don't make the products I want, but their products make good business sense for them.
That really depends on the lecturer. This presentation by Prof James Duane is quite frequently linked-to in slashdot comments: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865
In my opinion - quite apart from the content - it's a very good lecture despite being fast, and he's using PowerPoint.
I would agree that some teachers would produce much better results by abstaining from PowerPoint. However for others it's a valuable and efficient tool.
It really wouldn't be a good example. For despite what MikeV said Apple is not "about creating neat and new stuffs". They were not the first with desktop interfaces, mp3 players or tablet computers. They are however good at taking other's ideas and creating a relatively solid and usually quite stylish product. They are also extremely good at marketing - their customers feel that they are getting a cool product, not just one which does what they'd like to do. (You can see how big the influence of their advertising is when comparing their market share in US and elsewhere in the world.)
That's by no means a slam, because there is a lot of value in implementing a good idea well, prototypes may be more innovative but they are usually not so nice to use. I'm not a fan of their products since I prefer more control over the equipment I own, but they raise expectations about the user interface and we all profit from that.
He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.
He might not be wrong, but I think his attempt is doomed. Nepomuk and Akonadi are not applications, so to the user they are meaningless. However KDE4 is generating messages about them, so that's confusing at least - usually annoying, too. On top of that there seem to be no applications which actually use them in a way which would get the user interested - he states himself that he turned off Nepomuk on his own system, so apparently he hasn't found a use for it either.
The KDE developers want these services available to applications, and that makes a certain amount of sense. However they cause problems and eat a lot of resources which leads to user complaints. Instead of starting the services by default (and using a setup which consumes lots of memory and CPU) they should default to off. Then when an application is first started which uses these services, that should start a wizard which lets you configure the services. Then you could decide which service to run and control the resource requirements. The user would understand what the services are for in this context. Right now he needs to find out what they are for by noticing the high system load and identifying the process which eats up all the resources - that's not a good experience.
Well there is now a KDE3 fork called Trinity:
http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ - they've maintained a KDE3 repository for Ubuntu for a while now, and want to start fixing bugs and making minor enhancements in the next stage.
The only other alternative would have been a blockade, resulting in mass starvation of the civilian population.
Well, not the only alternative. It would also have been possible to enter peace negotiations rather than pushing for unconditional surrender. It's possible to win a war without the other side surrendering.
No Zune team, the problem ain't Ballmer, the problem is YOU! The MS staff, those 100.000 people who couldn't come up with an original thought if it bid them on the ass because you are to busy watching the stock market.
Well, if a single programmer doesn't succeed, then it might well be his own fault. If a whole development team fails to achieve results, you might want to look at the managment structure - wrong hiring strategy, unrealistic goals, poor planning, are likely candidates. If the whole company has a bad culture - then you need to look at the people who are running the company. You don't get thousands of people conspiring to do a bad job, if their performance is bad in then there has to be a reason.
I have. Of course some people are offended merely because someone else dares to disagree with them, it's easy to lose perspective in that way. But sticking to your guns is not the same as being impolite. Why don't you just link to something which supports your point? There is lots of stuff from him on youtube, so it shouldn't be hard.
Well, even if the code is GPL - there is nothing preventing them from selling it, potentially including support, helping you with the setup, informing you of updates etc. They just can't stop any of their customers to fork the product or to give it to someone else for free. If they don't go crazy with the amount of money they charge they probably won't have a problem.
I've seen this work in Taiwan quite recently: at a nightmarket there is a stand selling bootleg porn DVDs - nobody watches the stand, there is just a box where the customers put the money in, and they take the DVD they want. The procedure is necessary, because selling the stuff is obviously not legal, but ironically: the honor principle works... There is no reason that it couldn't work for these guys, too.
When North Korea torpedoed a South Korean vessel, the US and South Korea wanted to hold a joined naval exercise - a rather measured response to an unprovoked attack. But of course China can't let the chance pass to interfere. They are aiming to expand both their military influence and their territory. It's important to them that neighboring countries will not have the means to counter a Chinese threat.
Question is whether the US can allow an already powerful authoritarian regime to expand in this manner. If they succeed in swallowing Taiwan, they'll control most of the world's chip production.
Also: China delivers arms to Sudan, Burma and Iran - they don't care whether anyone in the west likes that or not. Is there a particular reason why the US should stop arms sales to democratic countries, just to please China?
Slashdot Mirror
Given that teachbook is a social networking site but for a specialized niche, I think it's fair to say that they are doing that. In my opinion they should have that right, though. Trademark law makes sense - other companies shouldn't be able to impersonate yours, but that should be limited to there being an actual chance of confusion. Doing something similar as someone else, and profiting from an established market - well that's just capitalism. Facebook can always compete by having a better product.
Facebook argues: If others could freely use 'generic plus BOOK' [...] the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for [...] 'social networking services'
Again, I think that's probably true but that is how language works, and they should have to live with that.
Well, IIRC dpkg is available on SuSE at least, I presume for applications like that. But if ar works, use ar. :-)
% mkdir ~/temp
% dpkg -x somepackage.deb ~/temp/
Then move stuff to wherever you need it?
Sockets are expensive (particularly BGA sockets), and putting something in a socket as part of the manufacturing process is also expensive. Also the danger that the drive actually breaks is relatively low. So I think manufacturers will solder this directly on the mainboard.
Something similar happened in the US with the right of photographers to make pictures of public buildings, harassment by police officers "for security reasons" is quite common.
Yes, but where is the connection with what I wrote?
Often these approaches overstate the problems of current methodologies quite significantly. This thesis too, seems to hit the old favorites. Here is an example: In clocked digital systems, speed and throughput is typically limited by worst case delays associated with the slowest module in the system.
This would be true if clocked digital systems would be restricted to a single clock. Some are, but the embedded devices I work on usually have half a dozen clocks or more. Some modules run with fairly high speeds, others at relatively low speeds - synchronizing them is not only a standard task, it's actually reasonably easy compared with other problems we face.
Very closely related another of their claims: The larger the area over which the same clock is shared, the more costly and difficult it is to distribute the clock signal.
Again - true in principle, but exaggerating the problem. It's not so difficult to distribute a clock over a large area if you allow skew between different areas. That might appear to defeat the purpose, but you really only need to interface reliably between those areas. Skew can even be helpful in some cases: if you send signal X from block A to be clocked-in by block B - then it helps if the clock arrives later at block B than at block A. Of course it's a disadvantage for a signal Y driven from B to A - but that signal might be faster (less logic to go through in block B). Modern design tools can automatically use clock skew to achieve better timing.
One more: Building in redundancy to avoid catastrophic failure is not a cost-effective option when manufacturing circuits on a silicon wafer
Well, we happen to do that regularly, it's cost-effective if you know what you are doing. There are parts of the chip which are much more likely to fail than others - RAMs are more prone to defects than ordinary digital logic. So as part of device testing defective areas of a RAM block can be mapped to a handful of spare cells. doubling every transistor as suggested in the thesis, is not necessary, obviously.
Any of these "fundamentally new" approaches have to compete with the evolutionary solutions which people find for the same problems. That's hard because some of these are at least as clever as the "fundamental" ones, and they are much easier to adapt in existing design flows. I'm not ruling out that at some point we'll switch to a completely different design methodology, just as I'm not excluding the possibility that lighter-than-air travel will at some point find a place in commercial aviation again. I'm just not holding my breath.
The law prohibits the distribution or public use of symbols of unconstitutional groups, in particular, flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans and forms of greeting. link
But with the advent of litigation-only companies that defense does no longer work.
What's actually wrong with the *summary*? It doesn't claim that the whole US could do exactly what Portugal does or anything like that. It talks about how "Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover". It doesn't even mention the US.
Well if two descendants of species X have the skill C, then it's a lot more likely that X also had C than it would be if only one of them had it. Of course it is possible for both descendants to develop C independently, but that would indicate that it might not be as hard to develop C. Those were the two options the GP pointed out.
That's just not their business model. They don't have the bandwidth to do all sorts of different form factors because they are just one company - if they want to deliver quality products they need to restrict themselves to a small number of models. Besides they always determine "the one best way" to handle things and that becomes basically religion amongst their fans - it helps to evangelize people if you have a consistent message. They don't make the products I want, but their products make good business sense for them.
I would agree that some teachers would produce much better results by abstaining from PowerPoint. However for others it's a valuable and efficient tool.
That's by no means a slam, because there is a lot of value in implementing a good idea well, prototypes may be more innovative but they are usually not so nice to use. I'm not a fan of their products since I prefer more control over the equipment I own, but they raise expectations about the user interface and we all profit from that.
He might not be wrong, but I think his attempt is doomed. Nepomuk and Akonadi are not applications, so to the user they are meaningless. However KDE4 is generating messages about them, so that's confusing at least - usually annoying, too. On top of that there seem to be no applications which actually use them in a way which would get the user interested - he states himself that he turned off Nepomuk on his own system, so apparently he hasn't found a use for it either.
The KDE developers want these services available to applications, and that makes a certain amount of sense. However they cause problems and eat a lot of resources which leads to user complaints. Instead of starting the services by default (and using a setup which consumes lots of memory and CPU) they should default to off. Then when an application is first started which uses these services, that should start a wizard which lets you configure the services. Then you could decide which service to run and control the resource requirements. The user would understand what the services are for in this context. Right now he needs to find out what they are for by noticing the high system load and identifying the process which eats up all the resources - that's not a good experience.
Well there is now a KDE3 fork called Trinity: http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ - they've maintained a KDE3 repository for Ubuntu for a while now, and want to start fixing bugs and making minor enhancements in the next stage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Novara_(1513) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marignano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_the_Old_Swiss_Confederacy
Well, not the only alternative. It would also have been possible to enter peace negotiations rather than pushing for unconditional surrender. It's possible to win a war without the other side surrendering.
No you are thinking of Greece. Norway is a land-locked country in the mediterranean.
No.
Well, if a single programmer doesn't succeed, then it might well be his own fault. If a whole development team fails to achieve results, you might want to look at the managment structure - wrong hiring strategy, unrealistic goals, poor planning, are likely candidates. If the whole company has a bad culture - then you need to look at the people who are running the company. You don't get thousands of people conspiring to do a bad job, if their performance is bad in then there has to be a reason.
I have. Of course some people are offended merely because someone else dares to disagree with them, it's easy to lose perspective in that way. But sticking to your guns is not the same as being impolite. Why don't you just link to something which supports your point? There is lots of stuff from him on youtube, so it shouldn't be hard.
No he hasn't. He has many objections to religion, but these are well-founded and well-argued. He is also polite to people who don't share his opinion.
Don't complain about people being "dickwads" when your own arguments are nothing but hand waving and ad hominem.
I've seen this work in Taiwan quite recently: at a nightmarket there is a stand selling bootleg porn DVDs - nobody watches the stand, there is just a box where the customers put the money in, and they take the DVD they want. The procedure is necessary, because selling the stuff is obviously not legal, but ironically: the honor principle works... There is no reason that it couldn't work for these guys, too.
When North Korea torpedoed a South Korean vessel, the US and South Korea wanted to hold a joined naval exercise - a rather measured response to an unprovoked attack. But of course China can't let the chance pass to interfere. They are aiming to expand both their military influence and their territory. It's important to them that neighboring countries will not have the means to counter a Chinese threat.
Question is whether the US can allow an already powerful authoritarian regime to expand in this manner. If they succeed in swallowing Taiwan, they'll control most of the world's chip production. Also: China delivers arms to Sudan, Burma and Iran - they don't care whether anyone in the west likes that or not. Is there a particular reason why the US should stop arms sales to democratic countries, just to please China?