"Instead of complaining when someone develops something useful and doesn't give away years of their life's work and millions of dollars of investments away, how about you quit bitching, open your wallet, and donate to a charity that will buy the drug for people who can't afford it."
You seem to think that the only reason someone would be interested in finding a cure for AIDS is to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.
I would like to think that some people working for a cure are content with being comfortably off, but are working to relieve one of the largest causes of human misery.
When, in your later years, you look back and ask yourself what you've actually achieved in life, what greater pride and pleasure could there be than knowing you personally did more to relieve human suffering than almost anyone else in human history ?
Of course, that assumes you earn enough money to be comfortable.
"The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one"
Use copyright.
There are even, believe it or not, companies which don't release the source code for their commercial software, and this appears to be completely legal!
"At some point we need to admit to ourselves that our notions of intellectual property must change in an era where media can be so freely copied and exchanged."
Why?
"This would allow more people to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the few, while maintaining the authors in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed."
Greedy shit. The authors should live the lifestyle they deserve based on the amount of skill, training, experience and hard work they apply.
Yes, I am one of those authors. No-one owes me a living.
It's also appropriate, on occasion, to comment what you're NOT doing.
If you had to reject an alternative approach, one that might have appeared easier at first glance, for some obscure reason, say why.
This will save someone (possibly yourself) looking at the code much later and wondering why you didn't take that alternative approach. If that person has to extend or re-write that code, they may well use that alternative approach that you so-carefully avoided, and fall over the problem that you carefully foresaw.
(Slight OT) Re:Of course it's a slap on the wrist!
on
Sony Agrees to Stop Payola
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"In both cases, it's up to the people to truly solve the problem, the government can't do it for them."
But the whole reason for governments to exist (democratic governments, at least) is to solve the problems of the society they govern. That's why they exist. In order to do what they do, they levy taxes. That's why you pay taxes.
Yes, most governments may be very inefficient, and often corrupt, but what they are in a democracy is the expression of the way a society that society, rightly or wrongly, thinks it should be governed.
Put it this way - if the people of a country got together to choose a small group of people to represent their wishes and run the country the way they wish it to be run, what else would they have formed but a government?
"The only people with any guts now are the Lib Dems and they're able to be like that as they're unlikely to get elected in my lifetime anyway."
The biggest thing preventing them from being elected is the fact that millions of people around the country think it's not worth voting for them because they'll never get elected.
If those people got off their a**es and just voted for them anyway, they'd be much, much closer to being elected. So close in fact that people might just start voting for them.....
If only people here were less like sheep sometimes.
What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution. Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.
Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.
Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:
My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.
Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?
Aren't Nokia one of the major companies pressing for the legalisation of Software Patents in the EU ?
This would seem like a bit of PR aimed primarily at that process. They're trying to say to the EU politicians: "We (want | need | will-go-out-of-business-without) software patents, and we know you've had lots of complaints from the open-source crowd, but look, their little toy that is generating so much interest among you is safe from us. So if you can now please ignore the open-source crowd's complaints about Software Patents".
I've no personal experience of how well (or not) it works under Linux, but I thought I'd share their link because it's nice to see a hardware manufacturer acknowledge that Linux even exists.
"BTW, wonder if I get marked flaimbait, troll for a noticing this on the new release and commenting on it. Because you cant say anything negative these days without someone thinking you are being rude."
Then try making constructive criticism without saying things like 'what the fuck'.
"If you want a radio. Get one. Don't waste money on an mp3 player."
Yeah, why carry one portable music device around with you when you can carry two ? Paying for two sets of power circuitry, cases, amplifiers, headphones, etc. must be cheaper than paying for one.
"Further more if you use your player inside..... expect incredibly bad reception."
Yeah, that's why I've never known anyone have a radio inside their house.
"It also adds clutter to your player."
Not as cluttering as carrying around two portable music devices.
"Again determine your own needs. If you sometimes want to listen to the radio then fine look for it in your player."
Now you're disagreeing with yourself.
"Why do radio's in cars come with personal music players (cassetes)?"
Why do almost all car cassette players come with radios ?
Call me naive, but shouldn't a person's reward bear some resemblance to the amount of effort expended ?
How much work goes into "an idea" ?
Now in the case of hardware inventions, the actual idea might not take very long to come up with. But designing and building prototypes, testing them, re-designing, re-testing, raising the finance to build/rent a factory and tooling, building, marketing and selling your inventions is a long, difficult process. I can see the usefulness of patents here for small inventors.
The amount of effort and money needed to achieve these things in software is much, much less. It is quite viable for one person to come up with viable software "inventions". Witness the number of single-developer projects on SourceForge, for instance.
Your invention is also "protected" firstly by not needing to give away your source code, and secondly, by copyright. Reverse engineering (decompiling, etc.) is possible, but very difficult and time-consuming, and much more difficult than is the case with many more-traditional hardware "inventions".
So why is twenty years of "protection" anywhere near appropriate ?
If they think the best way to make money is by screwing their customers over, then many of them will do it.
But if a large corporation thinks it can make more money using a different approach, it will.
Free and open source software is the biggest movement in the software industry today, and is likely to be so for a long time. IBM is riding the wave, so to speak, but is smart enough to realise it's got to give a little as well as take. And it can still make lots of money doing so.
It's also in its interest to support a movement in which many people (but not all) have a strong dislike of several of their major competitors: Microsoft (deservedly so, I would say), Sun (a little harshly, in my opinion) and, increasingly it would seem, HP.
Trying running "x11perf -all" sometime to give you an idea of just how fast an X-server is at executing basic operations.
Obviously, these don't illustrate what the overall end-user experience is going to be like, but they do show how fast the underlying X-server is working.
"And guess what? 999 out of 1,000, it's some megacorp."
And 990 out of 1,000, it's some American megacorp.
Now I've not got anything against American companies as such, but one of the reasons for the formation of the EU is to unite Europe into a trading bloc to match the size of the USA, to be able to compete with it on equal terms.
So why should the EU pass laws that would tend to favour large American companies to the detriment of (often smaller) European ones ?
Sadly, there is a reason why it might - political corruption. Witness the EU software patent debate.
How to prevent it ?
Make your views known to the decision-makers concerned, let them hear an alternative view to the lobbying by vested interests, and ensure they are aware of the level of scrutiny their decisions are receiving. Politicians are less likely to try and slip things through the back door if they know there is a large crowd of people - voters - watching what they're up to, and willing to make a fuss about it to an even larger crowd of people.
Unfortunately, the EU's democratic accountability is far from what it should be.
"Science is not about consensus, it's about fact. Politics is about consensus."
So what should a large proportion of the world's climatologists do if they seriously believe that mankind is in danger of causing seriously climatic damage ?
Maybe the MPAA's next trick is to publicise some scheme they're thinking of using, letting it get published to Slashdot, reading what Slashdotters have to say, and using this to help decide on its viability, before investing any serious amount of money in it.
Free technical review.
Doesn't anybody else here think that occasionally someone from the "usual suspects" (Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, etc) might read what some of their "opponents" are saying about them ? Especially when people here openly post how they will get round what the organisations concerned are trying to achieve (rightly or wrongly).
Maybe the kernel is freezing for a while, rather than the startup scripts.
Just on the off-chance......got a motherboard that supports serial-ATA ? My kernel would hang for 30 seconds trying to detect a (non-existant) second ATA disk. Adding "hdg=noprobe" to the kernel boot line (/boot/grub/menu.lst in my case, maybe something like/etc/lilo.conf in yours) cures this for me.
"It will zip up to a point, then spend 95% of the time stuck there, and then zip to the end."
"On a somewhat unrelated note, I have also not figured out why Mandrake 10.1 takes far longer to boot up on a much more powerful computer than my Mandrake 10.0 system."
Somewhat unrelated ???!!!
Why don't you try pressing Escape just before the progress bar gets stuck, and find out which particular part of the boot process is causing all the delay. Mandrake may well be trying to set up some service or some piece of hardware that you don't actually use. If so, you can remove the item in question from you setup configuration. This probably explains why Mandrake 10.1 boots slower than 10.0 for you.
"While I don't think he'll ever say it directly,..."
Since when has Linus Torvalds been afraid of being direct ?
"...this is as clear as he ever needs to be when it comes to his opinion of RMS."
Are you really sure this was aimed directly at RMS ?
RMS isn't just a "person with a vision" - he got off his a*se to do something about the problem he saw (i.e. founding GNU, writing GCC, Emacs, and others), with the aim of helping what were (at that time) everyday computer users.
I really don't see why so many people get off on attacking RMS so often. Maybe it's just because the guy has a different point of view to many people (although, to be fair, RMS appears to have difficulty accepting points of view different to his own).
RMS and Bill Gates both represent extreme viewpoints in the world of software. They remind me of old Tom and Jerry cartoons, where Tom's trying to decide what to do, and a little angel and a little devil come and hover above each shoulder. The angel is all prissy, telling him to do the "right" thing and be pure and good, whereas the devil tells him to be greedy and do whatever he wants. OK, ignore the religious significance (that's really not the point I'm trying to make), but I'm sure you can guess which is which.
It's useful to listen to both points of view, and the arguments on both sides, to decide exactly where your own opinions lie.
Slashdot Mirror
"and really, Solaris wasn't really all that thrilling on Sparc. (I spent my entire undergrad shackled to it.)"
People who use computers running things like Solaris use them as tools to do a job.
No-one gets "thrilled" about a hammer or a drill. They just want something which performs reliably, and consistently well.
"Why should I leave my comfortable XP or Debian or Red Hat or SuSE for Solaris?"
Because there might just be some jobs for which Solaris on x86 is the better tool.
"Instead of complaining when someone develops something useful and doesn't give away years of their life's work and millions of dollars of investments away, how about you quit bitching, open your wallet, and donate to a charity that will buy the drug for people who can't afford it."
You seem to think that the only reason someone would be interested in finding a cure for AIDS is to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams.
I would like to think that some people working for a cure are content with being comfortably off, but are working to relieve one of the largest causes of human misery.
When, in your later years, you look back and ask yourself what you've actually achieved in life, what greater pride and pleasure could there be than knowing you personally did more to relieve human suffering than almost anyone else in human history ?
Of course, that assumes you earn enough money to be comfortable.
But, as someone famous once said:
Q: How much money is enough ?
A: Just a little bit more.....
"The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one"
Use copyright.
There are even, believe it or not, companies which don't release the source code for their commercial software, and this appears to be completely legal!
"At some point we need to admit to ourselves that our notions of intellectual property must change in an era where media can be so freely copied and exchanged."
Why?
"This would allow more people to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the few, while maintaining the authors in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed."
Greedy shit. The authors should live the lifestyle they deserve based on the amount of skill, training, experience and hard work they apply.
Yes, I am one of those authors. No-one owes me a living.
It's also appropriate, on occasion, to comment what you're NOT doing.
If you had to reject an alternative approach, one that might have appeared easier at first glance, for some obscure reason, say why.
This will save someone (possibly yourself) looking at the code much later and wondering why you didn't take that alternative approach. If that person has to extend or re-write that code, they may well use that alternative approach that you so-carefully avoided, and fall over the problem that you carefully foresaw.
"In both cases, it's up to the people to truly solve the problem, the government can't do it for them."
But the whole reason for governments to exist (democratic governments, at least) is to solve the problems of the society they govern. That's why they exist. In order to do what they do, they levy taxes. That's why you pay taxes.
Yes, most governments may be very inefficient, and often corrupt, but what they are in a democracy is the expression of the way a society that society, rightly or wrongly, thinks it should be governed.
Put it this way - if the people of a country got together to choose a small group of people to represent their wishes and run the country the way they wish it to be run, what else would they have formed but a government?
"The only people with any guts now are the Lib Dems and they're able to be like that as they're unlikely to get elected in my lifetime anyway."
The biggest thing preventing them from being elected is the fact that millions of people around the country think it's not worth voting for them because they'll never get elected.
If those people got off their a**es and just voted for them anyway, they'd be much, much closer to being elected. So close in fact that people might just start voting for them.....
If only people here were less like sheep sometimes.
Did you actually read some of those links ?
From this link:
What mankind is doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.
Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe. This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy, productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued, expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth. The reality is that global poverty and death would be the result of Kyoto's rationing of hydrocarbons.
Hardly seems a considered scientific opinion to me. You may, of course, think differently.
And considering this link:
Try reading something about the person who wrote it, in his own words, on the same site, here:
My esteem for my peers became replaced by contempt, and planted the seed of suspicion in my mind that my whole community was of the same calibre foolish cowards. A notion that experience rarely confounded but often confirmed, so insensibly I became a social exile. This was just as well, for in a declining community any citizen who retains respect for the truth must become alienated from the majority of his fellow citizens because they hate the truth.
Is this really the sort of considered scientific opinion you consider valuable ?
Aren't Nokia one of the major companies pressing for the legalisation of Software Patents in the EU ?
This would seem like a bit of PR aimed primarily at that process. They're trying to say to the EU politicians: "We (want | need | will-go-out-of-business-without) software patents, and we know you've had lots of complaints from the open-source crowd, but look, their little toy that is generating so much interest among you is safe from us. So if you can now please ignore the open-source crowd's complaints about Software Patents".
I know you asked for a list, but here's one I found that actually advertises that their hardware works with Linux:
AverMedia AVerTV DVB-T USB2.0
I've no personal experience of how well (or not) it works under Linux, but I thought I'd share their link because it's nice to see a hardware manufacturer acknowledge that Linux even exists.
Yeah, just like old planes used to have a large fan on the front to keep them cool ;)
"BTW, wonder if I get marked flaimbait, troll for a noticing this on the new release and commenting on it. Because you cant say anything negative these days without someone thinking you are being rude."
Then try making constructive criticism without saying things like 'what the fuck'.
"Sorry, but I guess I liked the Hitchhiker's series enough that I'll go see it anyway."
Thanks, mate.
People like you are the reason that Hollywood doesn't need to bother making good films any more.
"If you want a radio. Get one. Don't waste money on an mp3 player."
..... expect incredibly bad reception."
Yeah, why carry one portable music device around with you when you can carry two ? Paying for two sets of power circuitry, cases, amplifiers, headphones, etc. must be cheaper than paying for one.
"Further more if you use your player inside
Yeah, that's why I've never known anyone have a radio inside their house.
"It also adds clutter to your player."
Not as cluttering as carrying around two portable music devices.
"Again determine your own needs. If you sometimes want to listen to the radio then fine look for it in your player."
Now you're disagreeing with yourself.
"Why do radio's in cars come with personal music players (cassetes)?"
Why do almost all car cassette players come with radios ?
Call me naive, but shouldn't a person's reward bear some resemblance to the amount of effort expended ?
How much work goes into "an idea" ?
Now in the case of hardware inventions, the actual idea might not take very long to come up with. But designing and building prototypes, testing them, re-designing, re-testing, raising the finance to build/rent a factory and tooling, building, marketing and selling your inventions is a long, difficult process. I can see the usefulness of patents here for small inventors.
The amount of effort and money needed to achieve these things in software is much, much less. It is quite viable for one person to come up with viable software "inventions". Witness the number of single-developer projects on SourceForge, for instance.
Your invention is also "protected" firstly by not needing to give away your source code, and secondly, by copyright. Reverse engineering (decompiling, etc.) is possible, but very difficult and time-consuming, and much more difficult than is the case with many more-traditional hardware "inventions".
So why is twenty years of "protection" anywhere near appropriate ?
"...I'd wager it was the headchopping assholes who actually got shit done."
Isn't that what assholes are for ?
Rockbox for the iRiver isn't finished yet, but it's coming on nicely.
The status page for the porting effort is here.
All corporations want it money.
Lots and lots and lots of money.
But that's it. Nothing else.
If they think the best way to make money is by screwing their customers over, then many of them will do it.
But if a large corporation thinks it can make more money using a different approach, it will.
Free and open source software is the biggest movement in the software industry today, and is likely to be so for a long time. IBM is riding the wave, so to speak, but is smart enough to realise it's got to give a little as well as take. And it can still make lots of money doing so.
It's also in its interest to support a movement in which many people (but not all) have a strong dislike of several of their major competitors: Microsoft (deservedly so, I would say), Sun (a little harshly, in my opinion) and, increasingly it would seem, HP.
"Anecdotes != Data"
Trying running "x11perf -all" sometime to give you an idea of just how fast an X-server is at executing basic operations.
Obviously, these don't illustrate what the overall end-user experience is going to be like, but they do show how fast the underlying X-server is working.
Practise, practise, practise.
Man, you shoulda seen Hendrix back in the day.
His 4.357 x log(25.4e3.1) / PI live was quite something.
"And guess what? 999 out of 1,000, it's some megacorp."
And 990 out of 1,000, it's some American megacorp.
Now I've not got anything against American companies as such, but one of the reasons for the formation of the EU is to unite Europe into a trading bloc to match the size of the USA, to be able to compete with it on equal terms.
So why should the EU pass laws that would tend to favour large American companies to the detriment of (often smaller) European ones ?
Sadly, there is a reason why it might - political corruption. Witness the EU software patent debate.
How to prevent it ?
Make your views known to the decision-makers concerned, let them hear an alternative view to the lobbying by vested interests, and ensure they are aware of the level of scrutiny their decisions are receiving. Politicians are less likely to try and slip things through the back door if they know there is a large crowd of people - voters - watching what they're up to, and willing to make a fuss about it to an even larger crowd of people.
Unfortunately, the EU's democratic accountability is far from what it should be.
"Science is not about consensus, it's about fact. Politics is about consensus."
So what should a large proportion of the world's climatologists do if they seriously believe that mankind is in danger of causing seriously climatic damage ?
Pretend they're in a minority ?
Maybe the MPAA's next trick is to publicise some scheme they're thinking of using, letting it get published to Slashdot, reading what Slashdotters have to say, and using this to help decide on its viability, before investing any serious amount of money in it.
Free technical review.
Doesn't anybody else here think that occasionally someone from the "usual suspects" (Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, etc) might read what some of their "opponents" are saying about them ? Especially when people here openly post how they will get round what the organisations concerned are trying to achieve (rightly or wrongly).
Maybe the kernel is freezing for a while, rather than the startup scripts.
/etc/lilo.conf in yours) cures this for me.
Just on the off-chance......got a motherboard that supports serial-ATA ? My kernel would hang for 30 seconds trying to detect a (non-existant) second ATA disk. Adding "hdg=noprobe" to the kernel boot line (/boot/grub/menu.lst in my case, maybe something like
"It will zip up to a point, then spend 95% of the time stuck there, and then zip to the end."
"On a somewhat unrelated note, I have also not figured out why Mandrake 10.1 takes far longer to boot up on a much more powerful computer than my Mandrake 10.0 system."
Somewhat unrelated ???!!!
Why don't you try pressing Escape just before the progress bar gets stuck, and find out which particular part of the boot process is causing all the delay. Mandrake may well be trying to set up some service or some piece of hardware that you don't actually use. If so, you can remove the item in question from you setup configuration. This probably explains why Mandrake 10.1 boots slower than 10.0 for you.
"While I don't think he'll ever say it directly, ..."
Since when has Linus Torvalds been afraid of being direct ?
"...this is as clear as he ever needs to be when it comes to his opinion of RMS."
Are you really sure this was aimed directly at RMS ?
RMS isn't just a "person with a vision" - he got off his a*se to do something about the problem he saw (i.e. founding GNU, writing GCC, Emacs, and others), with the aim of helping what were (at that time) everyday computer users.
I really don't see why so many people get off on attacking RMS so often. Maybe it's just because the guy has a different point of view to many people (although, to be fair, RMS appears to have difficulty accepting points of view different to his own).
RMS and Bill Gates both represent extreme viewpoints in the world of software. They remind me of old Tom and Jerry cartoons, where Tom's trying to decide what to do, and a little angel and a little devil come and hover above each shoulder. The angel is all prissy, telling him to do the "right" thing and be pure and good, whereas the devil tells him to be greedy and do whatever he wants. OK, ignore the religious significance (that's really not the point I'm trying to make), but I'm sure you can guess which is which.
It's useful to listen to both points of view, and the arguments on both sides, to decide exactly where your own opinions lie.