I didn't know that... He must have been the inspiration for an episode of "Frasier" in which Frasier and Niles find some Shakespearean actor they both revered during childhood. He (the actor) was signing autographs at some sci-fi convention, having spent too many years on some low rent TV sci-fi series... and the brothers proceed to set the actor up for a one act play, a role the actor overacts in every ghastly way possible.
If the application was GPL in the first place, please explain how anyone can write a proprietary extension for it and then prevent you, the original author of the software or assignee of copyright for the code (?) from distributing those extensions. Either you're leaving something out or these people are off their rockers-- or maybe they think there will be a high rate of return on their investment in copyright lawyers.
BTW, would future authors of these sorts of "Ask Slashdot" questions, please do a little self-promotion and include the name of the software in question? These discussions are nearly worthless when I can't do some Googling for background info.
Do you have any primary sources that indicate that Tolkien's purpose in LotR was to write some Christian instructive fable? If yes, please post. If not, quit trolling.
um, you can run KDE with Mozilla instead of Konqueror.
And you can technically run Konqueror fine without a full-blown KDE desktop going, but it does rely on KDE services, so many of them get started. Which isn't any different from having all that code stuffed into one executable (i.e. Mozilla).
Um, the central story in LotR is about a hobbit named Frodo. And there is no mention of God in LotR. You appear to have J.R.R. Tolkien confused with another fabulous fantasy writer, namely C.S. Lewis.
That said, I prefer LotR in book form to Harry Potter in book form, but Harry Potter in movie form (based on the first movie from each set) is (so far) better than LotR. The Harry Potter folks seem to be sticking better to the book, and considering how LONG both movies were, the HP movies did a much better job of having fewer boring spots. Maybe the LotR people can cut about 30 minutes from the TT films by not having full minute pan shots in between each scene.
Hmmm. Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash laying around. From that fact alone I would deduce that their customers are already paying the right amount of money but that Microsoft is not actually doing the work they ought to be doing in this regard. But given that they are the only game in town for several values of "game in town", that's where monopoly pricing comes into play. So moreso than paying for quality, consumers end up paying to even be able to get on the playing field.
Before you Gentoo zealots get out here and plug your so-loved-distro, remember that even you don't have as much control as you could.
That's the dumbest comment I've seen today. It's Free Software. I have all the control I need because I have the source code available-- doesn't matter if I like Gentoo (which I do) or any other GNU/Linux distro or even Mac OS X. As to Gentoo, I'm pretty I can set an environment variable or tweak/etc/make.conf and get exactly the Mozilla I'm looking for-- in fact, I have to do this already as Mozilla + gtk2 doesn't do cut & paste right yet, so for that one application I have to do export USE="-gtk2".
Here's a sketch of how I do statistical filtering. I start with one corpus of spam and one of nonspam mail. At the moment each one has about 4000 messages in it. I scan the entire text, including headers and embedded html and javascript, of each message in each corpus. I currently consider alphanumeric characters, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs to be part of tokens, and everything else to be a token separator...
If you read the article at the link you provided you will find that this method would normally include evaluating the entire source of the email, and not just the body.
Nonsense. It's impossible. First of all, they don't have access to much of the mail I want to let through-- although my mailing list traffic certainly qualifies, so let's assume that's the only mail I get and that they know I am receiving it.
There will still need to be header information and actual spam content in the spams themselves for those mails simply to not be repeats or dada-esque cutups of posts to the mailing list. That is, there must be content unique to the spam that no normal sender on the list will include.
Because of this, and the fact that so-called Bayesian spam filtering works by scoring all the words in an email and then evaluating the email based only on the extremes, there is little likelihood-- since the spam must still contain spam words to have any point at all-- of those words not being on the extreme word list. After all, if the same words are appearing in both spam and not-spam mails, they will be given a spam-probability that is not extreme. So all those words in common will be ignored and only the spam words will be looked at-- and the spam will still be filtered.
Hmmm. Wonder if this is a convincing enough reason to start telecommuting... "boss, I can't possibly come in to the office. It takes four hours to four days for bacteria to die after someone touches the mens' room door. Do you really want me waiting in there that long, just to be on the safe side?"
Re:Open Source Pioneers? Or $$$ Saving?
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 1
By the way, I thought we hate the movie industry here, and now we laud them for use of open-source?
That's only when they're lobbying Congress to set the copyright on Mickey Mouse or to make it illegal to tell your friends about a movie without paying a fee or going after 2600 for publishing DeCSS code or whatever. When they are making the next Harry Potter, the next LotR, another Matrix (or Matrix wannabe), some cool anime, or something shiny, then we love them and can't hand over our money fast enough. We obviously don't get the connection between giving them money and their ability to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby and push for insane laws.
Yeah, it's always better to reinvent the same wheel halfway (i.e. "hack" something together) rather than building on existing projects, especially when it's for something trivial like school administration.
Hmmm. I guess you've never used or seen a cracked binary before. It's certainly a little harder, but not remotely impossible to trojan a binary-- just less people would know how to do it.
In this case, the real question isn't "how hard was it to add this code to the source tree" but "how is it projects have their web pages so thoroughly hacked and no one notices?"
What I find interesting/horrifying/scary-- and much more problematic than this case-- is the situation in my local library, where librarians themselves (usually the people who do their best to protest censorship) are asking for some sort of "protection" against explicit imagery on the grounds that it creates a hostile work environment. So if the Right don't get you, the Left will.
More info on Minneapolis libraries and smut. I find it truly incredible that seeing some pictures on a screen across the room is considered suffering and that such so-called victims require monetary compensation that is more than twice their likely annual take-home pay. I wonder if these folks are compensated for damages if they read any of the filth one can often find in a public library (like Anne Rice novels, the average Harlequin romance, horror novels, the Holy Bible, etc)... heck, just a couple of weeks ago I checked out some Neon Genesis Evangelion graphic novels from the teen section of this library and it had illustrated depictions of unclothed minors in it!
Good encapsulation. So basically, they are taxing the citizens (i.e. taking our money), then giving that money back only to those citizens willing to trade some freedom of speech in return for the funds? Sounds like they are doing an end-run around the Constitution to me.
Yeah, because asking them to please shut the hell up about movies and then not talking to them would be too much work compared to immediately resorting to pretty extreme interpersonal violence. Sheesh!
And my point was that you are unfairly dinging Free software for a quality problem which is mostly related to the maturity of the package in question. If you had the same level of investment, maturity, etc, the Free package would be inherently better because it is Free.
Is that the same reason they use Windows over Linux? Or Outlook over KMail? Or IE over Mozilla? Whether software is Free or proprietary has no impact on its overall quality-- except that proprietary software almost certainly has less possibility to become higher quality unless its owners make it so. Almost every example you can name of a successful proprietary package has two things a corresponding Free package won't: 1) unified support for proprietary protocols (things like device drivers, etc), 2) maturity-- most Free Software packages just haven't been around that long. Give them time (and a similar budget-- yes, we must pay programmers to write Free code) and they'll get there. Then we'll have good software and freedom.
Screw the bundled apps. This is a Linux machine. You can do stuff with it that you can only dream about doing on a Palm... examples: run ruby, run perl, run Python (the real thing, not pippy), compile applications using gcc, etc-- it does come bundled with a mini-Office-like suite, the Opera web browser and a Java VM. Apps I've got that I like so far: media player (for mp3s), konqueror web browser, "today" application (which presents a snapshot of the day, a feature the PIM on Palm doesn't do well, and even the improved Visor version has only marginal support for), Pac-Man, NetHack, frotz (to play interactive fiction), VIM (text editor), konsole, ssh...
And it does know what it is: Personal Mobile Tool. Says it right there on the case.
Way to read the article! Hell, even the posting above says "Linux" right in there. And yes, the Zaurus runs not only Linux, but offers easy ways to flash out the supplied "distro" and flash in your own. Debian has an ARM port which runs on this device, and there is a great system called OpenZaurus that is available. There is a proliferation of GUIs out there, as the device comes with Qt embedded, which is pretty slick, but can run X as well. There is also something called PicoGUI, but I haven't found any compelling reason to use it yet. You can download SDKs from TrollTech and write your own apps. You could even load gcc on the Zaurus and do your development right on the handheld.
As to the new model (the 5600): other than getting included speakers/microphone and a better battery, I'm not sure the memory changes are that big an improvement (although if you stick to the default "distro" from Sharp, I suppose they are)... running OpenZaurus on the 5500 with all 64mb of the internal memory as RAM (there is also a 16mb flash partition where you store your main binaries), then having a 64mb SD card in the SD slot and using that for all the add-ons, you have quite a bit of RAM and quite a bit of "disk" space. Much better than the default installation. I suppose the faster CPU would be worth quite a bit of the extra $100+ you'll pay for the newer device, but it's a handheld... how fast does it need to be?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know that... He must have been the inspiration for an episode of "Frasier" in which Frasier and Niles find some Shakespearean actor they both revered during childhood. He (the actor) was signing autographs at some sci-fi convention, having spent too many years on some low rent TV sci-fi series... and the brothers proceed to set the actor up for a one act play, a role the actor overacts in every ghastly way possible.
If the application was GPL in the first place, please explain how anyone can write a proprietary extension for it and then prevent you, the original author of the software or assignee of copyright for the code (?) from distributing those extensions. Either you're leaving something out or these people are off their rockers-- or maybe they think there will be a high rate of return on their investment in copyright lawyers.
BTW, would future authors of these sorts of "Ask Slashdot" questions, please do a little self-promotion and include the name of the software in question? These discussions are nearly worthless when I can't do some Googling for background info.
Wow. You totally missed something... and apparently haven't read the Harry Potter books. Because most of what you're saying is way off.
Do you have any primary sources that indicate that Tolkien's purpose in LotR was to write some Christian instructive fable? If yes, please post. If not, quit trolling.
And in a split second you would have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the issue... and your blind faith in so-called free markets.
um, you can run KDE with Mozilla instead of Konqueror.
And you can technically run Konqueror fine without a full-blown KDE desktop going, but it does rely on KDE services, so many of them get started. Which isn't any different from having all that code stuffed into one executable (i.e. Mozilla).
Um, the central story in LotR is about a hobbit named Frodo. And there is no mention of God in LotR. You appear to have J.R.R. Tolkien confused with another fabulous fantasy writer, namely C.S. Lewis.
That said, I prefer LotR in book form to Harry Potter in book form, but Harry Potter in movie form (based on the first movie from each set) is (so far) better than LotR. The Harry Potter folks seem to be sticking better to the book, and considering how LONG both movies were, the HP movies did a much better job of having fewer boring spots. Maybe the LotR people can cut about 30 minutes from the TT films by not having full minute pan shots in between each scene.
Hmmm. Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash laying around. From that fact alone I would deduce that their customers are already paying the right amount of money but that Microsoft is not actually doing the work they ought to be doing in this regard. But given that they are the only game in town for several values of "game in town", that's where monopoly pricing comes into play. So moreso than paying for quality, consumers end up paying to even be able to get on the playing field.
Hey, if you have that big a problem with MS, maybe you should stop using their operating system. Just a thought.
Before you Gentoo zealots get out here and plug your so-loved-distro, remember that even you don't have as much control as you could.
/etc/make.conf and get exactly the Mozilla I'm looking for-- in fact, I have to do this already as Mozilla + gtk2 doesn't do cut & paste right yet, so for that one application I have to do export USE="-gtk2".
That's the dumbest comment I've seen today. It's Free Software. I have all the control I need because I have the source code available-- doesn't matter if I like Gentoo (which I do) or any other GNU/Linux distro or even Mac OS X. As to Gentoo, I'm pretty I can set an environment variable or tweak
Here's a sketch of how I do statistical filtering. I start with one corpus of spam and one of nonspam mail. At the moment each one has about 4000 messages in it. I scan the entire text, including headers and embedded html and javascript, of each message in each corpus. I currently consider alphanumeric characters, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs to be part of tokens, and everything else to be a token separator...
If you read the article at the link you provided you will find that this method would normally include evaluating the entire source of the email, and not just the body.
Nonsense. It's impossible. First of all, they don't have access to much of the mail I want to let through-- although my mailing list traffic certainly qualifies, so let's assume that's the only mail I get and that they know I am receiving it.
There will still need to be header information and actual spam content in the spams themselves for those mails simply to not be repeats or dada-esque cutups of posts to the mailing list. That is, there must be content unique to the spam that no normal sender on the list will include.
Because of this, and the fact that so-called Bayesian spam filtering works by scoring all the words in an email and then evaluating the email based only on the extremes, there is little likelihood-- since the spam must still contain spam words to have any point at all-- of those words not being on the extreme word list. After all, if the same words are appearing in both spam and not-spam mails, they will be given a spam-probability that is not extreme. So all those words in common will be ignored and only the spam words will be looked at-- and the spam will still be filtered.
Hmmm. Wonder if this is a convincing enough reason to start telecommuting... "boss, I can't possibly come in to the office. It takes four hours to four days for bacteria to die after someone touches the mens' room door. Do you really want me waiting in there that long, just to be on the safe side?"
By the way, I thought we hate the movie industry here, and now we laud them for use of open-source?
That's only when they're lobbying Congress to set the copyright on Mickey Mouse or to make it illegal to tell your friends about a movie without paying a fee or going after 2600 for publishing DeCSS code or whatever. When they are making the next Harry Potter, the next LotR, another Matrix (or Matrix wannabe), some cool anime, or something shiny, then we love them and can't hand over our money fast enough. We obviously don't get the connection between giving them money and their ability to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby and push for insane laws.
Yeah, it's always better to reinvent the same wheel halfway (i.e. "hack" something together) rather than building on existing projects, especially when it's for something trivial like school administration.
Oh, so you were joking? I feel sorry for someone who thinks that sort of thing is funny.
Hmmm. I guess you've never used or seen a cracked binary before. It's certainly a little harder, but not remotely impossible to trojan a binary-- just less people would know how to do it.
In this case, the real question isn't "how hard was it to add this code to the source tree" but "how is it projects have their web pages so thoroughly hacked and no one notices?"
I agree.
What I find interesting/horrifying/scary-- and much more problematic than this case-- is the situation in my local library, where librarians themselves (usually the people who do their best to protest censorship) are asking for some sort of "protection" against explicit imagery on the grounds that it creates a hostile work environment. So if the Right don't get you, the Left will.
More info on Minneapolis libraries and smut. I find it truly incredible that seeing some pictures on a screen across the room is considered suffering and that such so-called victims require monetary compensation that is more than twice their likely annual take-home pay. I wonder if these folks are compensated for damages if they read any of the filth one can often find in a public library (like Anne Rice novels, the average Harlequin romance, horror novels, the Holy Bible, etc)... heck, just a couple of weeks ago I checked out some Neon Genesis Evangelion graphic novels from the teen section of this library and it had illustrated depictions of unclothed minors in it!
Good encapsulation. So basically, they are taxing the citizens (i.e. taking our money), then giving that money back only to those citizens willing to trade some freedom of speech in return for the funds? Sounds like they are doing an end-run around the Constitution to me.
Yeah, because asking them to please shut the hell up about movies and then not talking to them would be too much work compared to immediately resorting to pretty extreme interpersonal violence. Sheesh!
And my point was that you are unfairly dinging Free software for a quality problem which is mostly related to the maturity of the package in question. If you had the same level of investment, maturity, etc, the Free package would be inherently better because it is Free.
Is that the same reason they use Windows over Linux? Or Outlook over KMail? Or IE over Mozilla? Whether software is Free or proprietary has no impact on its overall quality-- except that proprietary software almost certainly has less possibility to become higher quality unless its owners make it so. Almost every example you can name of a successful proprietary package has two things a corresponding Free package won't: 1) unified support for proprietary protocols (things like device drivers, etc), 2) maturity-- most Free Software packages just haven't been around that long. Give them time (and a similar budget-- yes, we must pay programmers to write Free code) and they'll get there. Then we'll have good software and freedom.
It has those. Feel free to avoid using the actual keyboard all you like.
You have got to be kidding right?
Screw the bundled apps. This is a Linux machine. You can do stuff with it that you can only dream about doing on a Palm... examples: run ruby, run perl, run Python (the real thing, not pippy), compile applications using gcc, etc-- it does come bundled with a mini-Office-like suite, the Opera web browser and a Java VM. Apps I've got that I like so far: media player (for mp3s), konqueror web browser, "today" application (which presents a snapshot of the day, a feature the PIM on Palm doesn't do well, and even the improved Visor version has only marginal support for), Pac-Man, NetHack, frotz (to play interactive fiction), VIM (text editor), konsole, ssh...
And it does know what it is: Personal Mobile Tool. Says it right there on the case.
Way to read the article! Hell, even the posting above says "Linux" right in there. And yes, the Zaurus runs not only Linux, but offers easy ways to flash out the supplied "distro" and flash in your own. Debian has an ARM port which runs on this device, and there is a great system called OpenZaurus that is available. There is a proliferation of GUIs out there, as the device comes with Qt embedded, which is pretty slick, but can run X as well. There is also something called PicoGUI, but I haven't found any compelling reason to use it yet. You can download SDKs from TrollTech and write your own apps. You could even load gcc on the Zaurus and do your development right on the handheld.
As to the new model (the 5600): other than getting included speakers/microphone and a better battery, I'm not sure the memory changes are that big an improvement (although if you stick to the default "distro" from Sharp, I suppose they are)... running OpenZaurus on the 5500 with all 64mb of the internal memory as RAM (there is also a 16mb flash partition where you store your main binaries), then having a 64mb SD card in the SD slot and using that for all the add-ons, you have quite a bit of RAM and quite a bit of "disk" space. Much better than the default installation. I suppose the faster CPU would be worth quite a bit of the extra $100+ you'll pay for the newer device, but it's a handheld... how fast does it need to be?