It's hugely positive for the business types who keep pushing micropayments as the thing that will save the Internet, despite the fact that they've been tried several times before and have been a dismal failure. Since iPhone users tend to be used to shelling out small amounts of money frequently anyway with iTunes and the App store, it might be more successful there than it ever could be on the Internet at large, but it's not a positive development for the consumer no matter how you slice it.
Agreed. The OSI during the late 1990s went out of their way to try and make Open Source palatable to businesses, and did so in large part by trying to water down the "share and share alike" ethic of the Free Software movement. These are the people like Eric S Raymond and his ilk who went around urging companies to take in Open Source software. They sold it with the whole Cathedral and Bazaar thing, where these giant companies could leverage the productive power of a large group of developers without having to pay for a large group of developers. They intentionally glossed over and marginalized the FSF's idea that consumers of Free Software should contribute to and redistribute the code, and created a split between the "Free Software" and "Open Source" concepts. They "approved" a significant number of software licenses that were technically Open Source, but were entirely against the basic idea Free Software was built on. In return for all this kowtowing to corporations and putting their concerns above the basic ethos of Free Software, they were rewarded with board positions at high flying dot-com companies, and millions of now-worthless shares of inflated dot-com stock.
Now we complain that these corporations are taking advantage of Open Source software in exactly the way the OSI told them they could? Sure, some of them played lip service to "contributing back to the community," and some of them even do. But none of them will ever contribute back as much as they get, because the entire reason they went with Open Source in the first place was so they could get all the development work without having to pay for it.
This is what you get when you take a movement based on an ideal and pervert it to try and take "market share" for a free product. You get more people using the product, but you lose the ideal in the process.
I'd agree that 100 Mbit is far from obsolete in the home market, but who still has 100 Mbit in the data center? Unless your "data center" is a closet with 3 servers in it, you should have moved to gigabit years ago.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
There are already like 10 threads dedicated to that exact quote. It's been talked to death, and like most things in politics, no one is going to change their minds and everyone is being driven by their own ideology. It's pointless to start a new discussion of it here.
Only if there was an arrow on top of your head with the word "Contract!" written on it pointing at your other hand.
On the face of it, the ruling seems incorrect. However, I'm not familiar with all the details of it. Also, the ruling happened in 2002. We can assume she has become more familiar with the Internet since then. It would be interesting to hear her take on that ruling today.
We can't. The nomination of a Chief Justice is not in any way News for Nerds and would not fit anywhere on Slashdot except maybe the Politics section. However, the Slashdot editors also know that this discussion has been driving traffic through the roof at other discussion sites, and want in on the action. I'm guessing maybe a lot of people have the Politics section blocked, so they need to find a way to put it in another section to generate the maximum hit count. So, we now have "cyberlaw". I'm sure we'll eventually have "cyberidle" so samzenpus can get more of his lame stories out of the Idle section.
I suppose such projects will move to Google Code, but it's important to remember that choice is a good thing, and not everybody is happy with SourceForge.
I think a lot of things in those days were built without a really good understanding of engineering, so things were typically over-engineered. Things were built far stronger than they needed to be because people didn't have a good understanding of the strengths of the materials they were using or of the physics being employed in their designs. Likewise, without a lot of advanced chemical and metallurgical expertise, they weren't able to create materials specifically to meet the demands of the job like we can today.
The result is they had things that were much stronger, but took a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. Now, we have things that are designed specifically to try and hit the sweet spot between durability and cost, and that can be efficiently mass produced. As a result, our stuff doesn't last as long, but we can afford to buy a whole lot more stuff.
It had to end, it became too difficult to sustain the high level of humor while having their characters age normally and maintain a continual story arc through which the characters continue to evolve and get involved in new long-term situations.
In my opinion, it jumped the shark when Jamie was born. Sure, it was still pretty funny, but it was clear that the road they were going down was not sustainable forever. Add to that Frankie Muniz thinking he was a good enough actor to maintain a movie career, and you get a show that had to end before it got really bad.
Having said that, I do think it was a great show, and for a live-action show that has to deal with all the realities live action shows have to deal with (people growing up, etc), it managed to sustain the high quality much longer than most.
Lots of work? Normal weathering will destroy stone carvings, and many ancient carvings are either lost completely or so faded as to be unreadable simply because they were left out in the weather for a few thousand years. The well-preserved ones are the ones that were kept in big vaults like the pyramids and protected from the weather. Also, lots and lots of stone carvings have been deliberately destroyed throughout history for various reasons, including times when invading armies tried to destroy the relics of cultures they were attempting to subdue.
I don't think the bone of contention with ethanol has anything to do with how good a fuel it is. The issue is what the trade-off is. Because we are using so much corn for ethanol, we have less corn to sell as food, which mean corn prices go up. Increases in food prices, and especially scarcity, tend to hurt the poorest among us first. As a result, we have food shortages where none existed before, and people that were just barely getting by are now starving.
In this month's National Geographic there's a lengthy story on food shortages, particularly how our ever-increasing population already demands more food than we can produce, and the problem is only getting worse. Without a revolution in food producing technology, we could be facing regular and ever more severe famines. Given this, is it really in our best interest to use our food crops to power personal automobiles?
There are better ways to produce energy in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. Ethanol was an idea that sounded okay at first, but clearly doesn't scale, and we need to stop screwing around with it and put our focus into things that show more promise.
If it was 1993, I would probably agree with you. However, the focus has been all about building market share for Linux for quite a long time now. Yes, many developers would work on it regardless of market share, but many others are working on it primarily because of its popularity. Personally, I think it's absurd to try and make Linux a Windows killer, but it seems like a large majority of the Linux community wants to make that happen. Sure, articles like these come along every so often when it's become obvious that Linux has once again failed to increase its share of the desktop market, but for the most part the community is still trying to beat Microsoft.
Linux is strong enough in the server market to allow me to make a living working with it. That's good enough for me. Yes, I use Linux on my own desktop (minus the Windows-clone desktop environments like Gnome and KDE), but I don't give a rip how many other people do. So long as Linux pays my bills, I'm happy. If everyone else wants to stick with Windows, that's fine by me. I still use Windows myself for things that require it, and I don't feel any kind of guilt for doing that.
The Wired article is already in English...the Swedish article is just a local take on the story. Presumably, you can get all the information you need from the Wired story. I wouldn't know of course, because as a Slashdotter I have a pathological aversion to reading the articles.
One could even argue that not designing the project to allow disabled individuals to perform the work is job discrimination.
I suppose one could, but one would be wrong. The job description is for someone to pedal this bike around so it can take pictures. Therefore, being able to pedal said bike is a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ). Your idea is interesting, but failing to implement it is not discriminatory on Google's part, at least not in any legally recognized way.
You're missing the point. The moral of the story is that if you make a browser that takes an average of 3 days to render a page and locks up the entire computer while doing it, it will be the most popular browser around!
Slashdot Mirror
It's hugely positive for the business types who keep pushing micropayments as the thing that will save the Internet, despite the fact that they've been tried several times before and have been a dismal failure. Since iPhone users tend to be used to shelling out small amounts of money frequently anyway with iTunes and the App store, it might be more successful there than it ever could be on the Internet at large, but it's not a positive development for the consumer no matter how you slice it.
Agreed. The OSI during the late 1990s went out of their way to try and make Open Source palatable to businesses, and did so in large part by trying to water down the "share and share alike" ethic of the Free Software movement. These are the people like Eric S Raymond and his ilk who went around urging companies to take in Open Source software. They sold it with the whole Cathedral and Bazaar thing, where these giant companies could leverage the productive power of a large group of developers without having to pay for a large group of developers. They intentionally glossed over and marginalized the FSF's idea that consumers of Free Software should contribute to and redistribute the code, and created a split between the "Free Software" and "Open Source" concepts. They "approved" a significant number of software licenses that were technically Open Source, but were entirely against the basic idea Free Software was built on. In return for all this kowtowing to corporations and putting their concerns above the basic ethos of Free Software, they were rewarded with board positions at high flying dot-com companies, and millions of now-worthless shares of inflated dot-com stock.
Now we complain that these corporations are taking advantage of Open Source software in exactly the way the OSI told them they could? Sure, some of them played lip service to "contributing back to the community," and some of them even do. But none of them will ever contribute back as much as they get, because the entire reason they went with Open Source in the first place was so they could get all the development work without having to pay for it.
This is what you get when you take a movement based on an ideal and pervert it to try and take "market share" for a free product. You get more people using the product, but you lose the ideal in the process.
I'd agree that 100 Mbit is far from obsolete in the home market, but who still has 100 Mbit in the data center? Unless your "data center" is a closet with 3 servers in it, you should have moved to gigabit years ago.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
AOL was responsible for Eternal September...so whatever the opposite of street cred is, that's what they've got.
Yah I know, I don't know what I was thinking there. I didn't even notice it until I re-read it like 4 times either. I think it's time to go home.
There are already like 10 threads dedicated to that exact quote. It's been talked to death, and like most things in politics, no one is going to change their minds and everyone is being driven by their own ideology. It's pointless to start a new discussion of it here.
Only if there was an arrow on top of your head with the word "Contract!" written on it pointing at your other hand.
On the face of it, the ruling seems incorrect. However, I'm not familiar with all the details of it. Also, the ruling happened in 2002. We can assume she has become more familiar with the Internet since then. It would be interesting to hear her take on that ruling today.
We can't. The nomination of a Chief Justice is not in any way News for Nerds and would not fit anywhere on Slashdot except maybe the Politics section. However, the Slashdot editors also know that this discussion has been driving traffic through the roof at other discussion sites, and want in on the action. I'm guessing maybe a lot of people have the Politics section blocked, so they need to find a way to put it in another section to generate the maximum hit count. So, we now have "cyberlaw". I'm sure we'll eventually have "cyberidle" so samzenpus can get more of his lame stories out of the Idle section.
I suppose such projects will move to Google Code, but it's important to remember that choice is a good thing, and not everybody is happy with SourceForge.
So SourceForge will just buy Google!
I think a lot of things in those days were built without a really good understanding of engineering, so things were typically over-engineered. Things were built far stronger than they needed to be because people didn't have a good understanding of the strengths of the materials they were using or of the physics being employed in their designs. Likewise, without a lot of advanced chemical and metallurgical expertise, they weren't able to create materials specifically to meet the demands of the job like we can today.
The result is they had things that were much stronger, but took a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. Now, we have things that are designed specifically to try and hit the sweet spot between durability and cost, and that can be efficiently mass produced. As a result, our stuff doesn't last as long, but we can afford to buy a whole lot more stuff.
It had to end, it became too difficult to sustain the high level of humor while having their characters age normally and maintain a continual story arc through which the characters continue to evolve and get involved in new long-term situations.
In my opinion, it jumped the shark when Jamie was born. Sure, it was still pretty funny, but it was clear that the road they were going down was not sustainable forever. Add to that Frankie Muniz thinking he was a good enough actor to maintain a movie career, and you get a show that had to end before it got really bad.
Having said that, I do think it was a great show, and for a live-action show that has to deal with all the realities live action shows have to deal with (people growing up, etc), it managed to sustain the high quality much longer than most.
Lots of work? Normal weathering will destroy stone carvings, and many ancient carvings are either lost completely or so faded as to be unreadable simply because they were left out in the weather for a few thousand years. The well-preserved ones are the ones that were kept in big vaults like the pyramids and protected from the weather. Also, lots and lots of stone carvings have been deliberately destroyed throughout history for various reasons, including times when invading armies tried to destroy the relics of cultures they were attempting to subdue.
I don't think the bone of contention with ethanol has anything to do with how good a fuel it is. The issue is what the trade-off is. Because we are using so much corn for ethanol, we have less corn to sell as food, which mean corn prices go up. Increases in food prices, and especially scarcity, tend to hurt the poorest among us first. As a result, we have food shortages where none existed before, and people that were just barely getting by are now starving.
In this month's National Geographic there's a lengthy story on food shortages, particularly how our ever-increasing population already demands more food than we can produce, and the problem is only getting worse. Without a revolution in food producing technology, we could be facing regular and ever more severe famines. Given this, is it really in our best interest to use our food crops to power personal automobiles?
There are better ways to produce energy in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. Ethanol was an idea that sounded okay at first, but clearly doesn't scale, and we need to stop screwing around with it and put our focus into things that show more promise.
If it was 1993, I would probably agree with you. However, the focus has been all about building market share for Linux for quite a long time now. Yes, many developers would work on it regardless of market share, but many others are working on it primarily because of its popularity. Personally, I think it's absurd to try and make Linux a Windows killer, but it seems like a large majority of the Linux community wants to make that happen. Sure, articles like these come along every so often when it's become obvious that Linux has once again failed to increase its share of the desktop market, but for the most part the community is still trying to beat Microsoft.
Linux is strong enough in the server market to allow me to make a living working with it. That's good enough for me. Yes, I use Linux on my own desktop (minus the Windows-clone desktop environments like Gnome and KDE), but I don't give a rip how many other people do. So long as Linux pays my bills, I'm happy. If everyone else wants to stick with Windows, that's fine by me. I still use Windows myself for things that require it, and I don't feel any kind of guilt for doing that.
The Wired article is already in English...the Swedish article is just a local take on the story. Presumably, you can get all the information you need from the Wired story. I wouldn't know of course, because as a Slashdotter I have a pathological aversion to reading the articles.
I think samzenpus was hired to make kdawson look competent by comparison.
Then, a search for "Angelina Jolie nude" resulted in Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. Hmmmmm.
Wolfram|Alpha is a Slashdotter??
One could even argue that not designing the project to allow disabled individuals to perform the work is job discrimination.
I suppose one could, but one would be wrong. The job description is for someone to pedal this bike around so it can take pictures. Therefore, being able to pedal said bike is a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ). Your idea is interesting, but failing to implement it is not discriminatory on Google's part, at least not in any legally recognized way.
but I DID have it on my computer in a text file
This is a problem, because anyone who got access to your computer would have access to your CC number.
To avoid this security hole, rather than keeping my CC number in my computer, I keep it on a small plastic card in my wallet.
Surely this should be:
In Soviet Russia, the KGB releases its cold war files to YOU!
This is Texas we're talking about, we already need RAID in massive quantities around here.
insects which tend to bread much more vociferously.
Insects don't make staple food from baking baking a dough of flour and water. And they don't do it loudly, either...
Tell that to the cockroaches in my walls. All I hear all night is constant chatter, and the whole house smells like freshly baked bread constantly.
You're missing the point. The moral of the story is that if you make a browser that takes an average of 3 days to render a page and locks up the entire computer while doing it, it will be the most popular browser around!
The letter I is nowhere in "lazy susan". I was envisioning someone having some sort of involuntary spasm while trying to type the word.