You don't have the "right" to force Tivo to make you happy, especially when Tivo is following the wording of your licensing agreement to the letter.
And if you don't like it that they're violating the spirit of the agreement while keeping to the letter, you change the letter, so that they can't do it again. All in your rights.
For a business, it is not interesting if somebody contributes back to the community. What is important is that if a competitor's contribution is relevant to their business, they contribute it to them!
I think the point of forcing competitors to follow your lead and open source what they are doing makes a whole lot of sense when you are adding features. Yes, others can still sell it, but if they themselves add value to their offering, you get access to their work. This levels the playing field, making freeloading is more difficult. With BSD license this is not the case. If you add features to BSD, there is no guarantee that others that add features to the offering will let you have access. No tit-for-tat.
Take for example IBM. They have added a whole lot of features to the linux offering in the hope that the services around linux would more than make up for their efforts. If they would have done this on BSD (and why wouldn't they have, you wonder. Didn't they think this through? BSD is so much more business friendly?), any other company could use their enhancements, add their own code, pack it up and sell the enhanced offering with exclusive services around it. IBM would have a reduced offering compared to their competition as the competition has everything IBM has done (and is still doing), but have kept their enhancements private. IBM would always have a worse offering than this competition, forcing it instantly to adding features. tit for tat.
As for Apple's BSD contributions. Apologies (also to the other siblings of this post pointing that out). I was not clear: I was thinking about features, not bugfixes. It of course makes a whole lot of sense that when building upon something, you would contribute bugfixes back to the upstream to minimize maintainance. However, how many actual features have been added by Apple to BSD? How many drivers? Does FreeBSD now runs flawless on Mac hardware due to the presence of up-to-date drivers to all hardware Apple is selling? Is OpenGL support at an all time high? Does the videocam work under freeBSD? Can I get Aqua for FreeBSD, without running Os-X? How much of Apple's 'intellectual property' can now be found in BSD? I don't really know, and it could be that Apple has transformed FreeBSD in the desktop unix of choice (at the expense of OSX), but color me a bit sceptical.
It is indeed amazing that Microsoft has never figured out how to do indexing. Every day, scan the harddisk once. Don't do it when on battery. Allow the user to manually run the indexing service when looking for something new. That's all. My slocate/updatedb configuration have been doing this for quite some time, and I have no problem finding files. Doing more advanced indexing can be built on top of things. The user is usually looking for stuff that he has misplaced a while ago. Stuff misplaced last minute is of lesser importance.
Just for fun, the following argument. I work at a software company. We live off license sales from the software we create, we don't live of services like IBM. So, the GPL is not for us as we don't open source our code (even though we do give it to our customers, for their eyes only). We love BSD/Apache style licenses and use it all over the place. This saves us lots of work, and cuts down on the number of developers required to get stuff off the ground immensely. It helps our bottom line to have as few developers as possible on the job. In other words, BSD style licenses help our companies to hire fewer developers! So is BSD hurting your changes to be employed in IT?
And your point is? There is a reason that companies are backing GPL more than they do BSD. Companies hate it when their efforts are taken, a different logo put onto it, closed up and resold without them seeing a penny. With GPL this is not possible, with BSD it is. How much has Apple contributed back to BSD after taking the kernel and making money off it? Do they allow that anybody takes Mac OsX and compiles it for their own platform? The answer is a resounding no. Apple has contributed back to kde (via Safari), simply because it is GPL-ed, and they have to. They've not done a thing for BSD. Why should they? Apple is not interested in open source. That's why they use BSD.
GPL will survive as long as there is an interest in working at open source for companies. It is the only license out there that allows companies to use open source and protect their investment in it by disallowing their competitors to close-source it and run. More stringent controls on that scheme will not deter these companies. More likely it will encourage them. BSD is not such a beast. Companies love it because they can take what they want. These are not open source companies.
Hmm, okay. So you think google should start of their search results with a few flash-based advertisements, 'blink' tags, and hide the real results somewhere in a small corner? Sorry, that's been tried, and it wasn't helpful.
Yes, people might get confused by the top sponsered links. If they get more experience with the tool, that might change. If it doesn't change, they should apply for a Darwin award.
We don't store the hundred megapixel data. At least normal people don't. Our memories are fudgy things, quite often wrong instead of right. What our brains seem to be very capable of is to lossy compress things, store it, and associate it with other things in a compressed (or lossy decompressed) state. This is necessary as the brain's hardware is limited as well.
To state that the brain is a near infinite storage engine is probably not true. It has limits, and has methods to do well within those limits.
Hmm, okay. So the masterplan is to put microphones in every location on earth where people might be talking, monitor that and all will be well? Sounds like a great idea!
Hey Ali!
Wassup, Mohammed.
You know, the dinner we planned next Friday? It's gonna be postponed a week. Can you still come?
Sure.
Okay, Fatima will be pleased. Bye to you and your family.
Will lead to JFK airport being shut down two Fridays from now.
What this means to ME, is that it takes a high-profile case such as this to mobilize enough people to use technology to help out. After this case, maybe some people will make a habit out of checking out some search&rescue operation and try to lend a hand in order to find some nobody.
Remember, in this case, it is the PUBLIC that is helping out, not the government in particular. They're helping out simply because the guy is well known, and the technology is there. The government didn't create the technology, the people did. After this case, the technology will still be there, and there will still be people helping out. Remember, the glass is half-full, and maybe Fosset's (possible) death will help some unfortunates in coming years.
There is indeed no reason to believe that we can't design computers to outperform us on any given task. There is still however the huge gap of designing computers that can first identify tasks to be solved, and subsequently create a program that solves that task. This first step has not been tackled yet, and until that one is solved, there's no super-intelligent computer to be had; just more fancy programming languages.
So everyone has to waste time doing hungarian notation so that our otherwise enabled brethren might more easily grok the code?
Hell, next time, you would suggest to code so that a North-American Business Analyst can understand it? (Yes, that's a separate category of users from where I work).
Nobody said that global economy is good for the individual, it's good for the corporations.
I'm sure many Indians and Chinese will completely agree with that. Imagine, having an actual job that pays money and gives a career perspective versus abject poverty. Down with globalisation they say, give us death before money!
Oh, you were talking about Americans? Tough luck, you reap what you sow.
At least Wall Street will be happy. Outsource to India: good for the bottom line, no matter how the deal is structured. You know Wall Street? Richest people on the block, how could they be wrong?
Wow, that is one hopeless site. Not only do you have to know up front what 'vociferous' means, but it presupposes that everyone is aware of the abbreviation EAV in various postings. I was going there, hoping to get some actual information about the myths that perpetrate relation data management. Unfortunately, I need to be a convert, and 'in the know', before I can be expected to understand the information provided.
The authors of that site should really take a look at the meaning of debunking: it is not 'putting an extra floor on my ivory tower'.
The big thing lacking in an RDBMS is a proper way to steer it from an application. Currently, there's a gap, where strings are fired into the RDBMS, which will respond with an exception if something goes wrong. Nice for independence, lousy for productivity. There is no common interface that lets the application programmer figure out errors that are deducible from static information. If you know the schema (should be definable in the application language), many errors can be statically caught by the compiler. If the schema in the application does not match the schema in the database, the application should fail with a linker error. It should not be possible (from a statically typed language) to even attempt to write a string in an integer.
Currently such interfaces can be build (viz. Hibernate), but it still needs be implemented by the very very slow process of: firing strings to the RDBMS, parsing the string in the RDBMS, creating an execution plan, executing the plan, wrapping the result in strings, sending back the strings, unwrapping the strings, looping over the result set, putting the row strings into cells, putting the cells into the applications primitive types, and resume execution. With native RDBMS support for working together (instead of against) programming languages, dynamic linking to tables/views, strong type checking, possibly static constraint checking, you might be able to imagine that the whole world of hurt that is writing database applications might become easier over time. Instead, we're at a standstill of over 30 years.
Ouch. And this exactly why SQL should die as the primary interface to the RDMBS. How the hell is my compiler going to help me find simple typing errors when the interface to use the RDBMS is built upon... strings! You are generating code from code, that's not integration, that's a hack! It's useful, as there is no sound other way to approach an rdbms, but it's not a pretty sight.
What about: nerds are generally sloppy thinkers that try to find a quick technological fix for complex issues. Getting rid of government is such a quick and easy fix. Nerds are satisfied with technological solutions that leave gaps, wide enough to sail a fleet of battleships through.
(Question for libertarians: what is worse than a government run monopoly? Answer: a privately run one. As long as there's no solution to curtail privately run monopolies, the Libertarian approach is just plain silly)
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong -- H.L. Mencken
The facts of evolution are irrefutable. They're carefully collected observations, and often reproducible. The theory of evolution is indeed refutable, otherwise it wouldn't be a good theory. There are many possible observations that would falsify the theory, yet none have been found. Yet.
There are theories of evolution (origin of species), and facts of evolution supporting the theory. Without the theory, the facts are useless. This is one of these situations where correct usage of terms diminishes the power of rhetoric.
Parts of the theory of evolution as we think we understand it now can be wrong. Some parts can't, as they have been observed (i.e., allele frequency changes due to selection pressure). It is most likely that the current theory of evolution will remain largely intact, just as much as Newtonian mechanics has remained intact, after it was corrected by relativity theory. What has not been left intact however are pre-scientific theories about the nature of Earth as the center of the universe, its relation to the other celestial bodies and things like that. The same also holds for intelligent design. Evolution has slaughtered it completely.
The dogmatic belief you observe is not about evolution, it is about science. With the advent of a scientific theory of life (evolution), creationist thinking has become an assault on the scientific method itself, and the scientific method is, indeed and rightfully so, a dogma. People criticizing evolution from a creationist point of reference, will get the hackles up because they are attempting to discredit the scientific method as a whole. Criticizing evolution within science, using observations and theory, is however common and fully accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
For a business, it is not interesting if somebody contributes back to the community. What is important is that if a competitor's contribution is relevant to their business, they contribute it to them!
Take for example IBM. They have added a whole lot of features to the linux offering in the hope that the services around linux would more than make up for their efforts. If they would have done this on BSD (and why wouldn't they have, you wonder. Didn't they think this through? BSD is so much more business friendly?), any other company could use their enhancements, add their own code, pack it up and sell the enhanced offering with exclusive services around it. IBM would have a reduced offering compared to their competition as the competition has everything IBM has done (and is still doing), but have kept their enhancements private. IBM would always have a worse offering than this competition, forcing it instantly to adding features. tit for tat.
As for Apple's BSD contributions. Apologies (also to the other siblings of this post pointing that out). I was not clear: I was thinking about features, not bugfixes. It of course makes a whole lot of sense that when building upon something, you would contribute bugfixes back to the upstream to minimize maintainance. However, how many actual features have been added by Apple to BSD? How many drivers? Does FreeBSD now runs flawless on Mac hardware due to the presence of up-to-date drivers to all hardware Apple is selling? Is OpenGL support at an all time high? Does the videocam work under freeBSD? Can I get Aqua for FreeBSD, without running Os-X? How much of Apple's 'intellectual property' can now be found in BSD? I don't really know, and it could be that Apple has transformed FreeBSD in the desktop unix of choice (at the expense of OSX), but color me a bit sceptical.
It is indeed amazing that Microsoft has never figured out how to do indexing. Every day, scan the harddisk once. Don't do it when on battery. Allow the user to manually run the indexing service when looking for something new. That's all. My slocate/updatedb configuration have been doing this for quite some time, and I have no problem finding files. Doing more advanced indexing can be built on top of things. The user is usually looking for stuff that he has misplaced a while ago. Stuff misplaced last minute is of lesser importance.
Just for fun, the following argument. I work at a software company. We live off license sales from the software we create, we don't live of services like IBM. So, the GPL is not for us as we don't open source our code (even though we do give it to our customers, for their eyes only). We love BSD/Apache style licenses and use it all over the place. This saves us lots of work, and cuts down on the number of developers required to get stuff off the ground immensely. It helps our bottom line to have as few developers as possible on the job. In other words, BSD style licenses help our companies to hire fewer developers! So is BSD hurting your changes to be employed in IT?
GPL will survive as long as there is an interest in working at open source for companies. It is the only license out there that allows companies to use open source and protect their investment in it by disallowing their competitors to close-source it and run. More stringent controls on that scheme will not deter these companies. More likely it will encourage them. BSD is not such a beast. Companies love it because they can take what they want. These are not open source companies.
Yes, people might get confused by the top sponsered links. If they get more experience with the tool, that might change. If it doesn't change, they should apply for a Darwin award.
To state that the brain is a near infinite storage engine is probably not true. It has limits, and has methods to do well within those limits.
Why do you think massively parallel is necessary? We know it is sufficient, but why necessary?
Hey Ali!
Wassup, Mohammed.
You know, the dinner we planned next Friday? It's gonna be postponed a week. Can you still come?
Sure.
Okay, Fatima will be pleased. Bye to you and your family.
Will lead to JFK airport being shut down two Fridays from now.
Remember, in this case, it is the PUBLIC that is helping out, not the government in particular. They're helping out simply because the guy is well known, and the technology is there. The government didn't create the technology, the people did. After this case, the technology will still be there, and there will still be people helping out. Remember, the glass is half-full, and maybe Fosset's (possible) death will help some unfortunates in coming years.
There is indeed no reason to believe that we can't design computers to outperform us on any given task. There is still however the huge gap of designing computers that can first identify tasks to be solved, and subsequently create a program that solves that task. This first step has not been tackled yet, and until that one is solved, there's no super-intelligent computer to be had; just more fancy programming languages.
And even worse, I don't see any reason why we will build a non-sociopath AI.
Hell, next time, you would suggest to code so that a North-American Business Analyst can understand it? (Yes, that's a separate category of users from where I work).
Oh, you were talking about Americans? Tough luck, you reap what you sow.
At least Wall Street will be happy. Outsource to India: good for the bottom line, no matter how the deal is structured. You know Wall Street? Richest people on the block, how could they be wrong?
The authors of that site should really take a look at the meaning of debunking: it is not 'putting an extra floor on my ivory tower'.
Currently such interfaces can be build (viz. Hibernate), but it still needs be implemented by the very very slow process of: firing strings to the RDBMS, parsing the string in the RDBMS, creating an execution plan, executing the plan, wrapping the result in strings, sending back the strings, unwrapping the strings, looping over the result set, putting the row strings into cells, putting the cells into the applications primitive types, and resume execution. With native RDBMS support for working together (instead of against) programming languages, dynamic linking to tables/views, strong type checking, possibly static constraint checking, you might be able to imagine that the whole world of hurt that is writing database applications might become easier over time. Instead, we're at a standstill of over 30 years.
Currently, he state of affairs is still pathetic.
Ouch. And this exactly why SQL should die as the primary interface to the RDMBS. How the hell is my compiler going to help me find simple typing errors when the interface to use the RDBMS is built upon ... strings! You are generating code from code, that's not integration, that's a hack! It's useful, as there is no sound other way to approach an rdbms, but it's not a pretty sight.
(Question for libertarians: what is worse than a government run monopoly? Answer: a privately run one. As long as there's no solution to curtail privately run monopolies, the Libertarian approach is just plain silly)
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong -- H.L. Mencken
Bravo!
$ arch
Should do the trick.
The facts of evolution are irrefutable. They're carefully collected observations, and often reproducible. The theory of evolution is indeed refutable, otherwise it wouldn't be a good theory. There are many possible observations that would falsify the theory, yet none have been found. Yet.
There are theories of evolution (origin of species), and facts of evolution supporting the theory. Without the theory, the facts are useless. This is one of these situations where correct usage of terms diminishes the power of rhetoric.
The dogmatic belief you observe is not about evolution, it is about science. With the advent of a scientific theory of life (evolution), creationist thinking has become an assault on the scientific method itself, and the scientific method is, indeed and rightfully so, a dogma. People criticizing evolution from a creationist point of reference, will get the hackles up because they are attempting to discredit the scientific method as a whole. Criticizing evolution within science, using observations and theory, is however common and fully accepted.