Re:If I was one of them fancy "dot-com" rich fella
on
X Prize Race Heats Up
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· Score: 1
Researching fundamentally new forms of energy is expensive, even out of the range of most billionares. Stretching current technology to the limits of human ingenuity, on the other hand, is relatively cheap.
If someone offered ten million for the first demonstration of an energy producing fusion reactor, it's unlikely anybody would be motivated who wasn't working on it already.
I never liked the Laffer curve. I'm not against the idea that tax cuts can stimulate the economy, or that sufficiently high tax rates will discourage people from producing.
But the problem with the Laffer curve is that it's only extrapolating from three data points. We know that both a 0% and a 100% tax rate will yield $0, and that our current tax rate (somewhere between the two) yields a net revenue. From there, Laffer extrapolated a smooth curve, and decided that there was one optimal tax rate between 0 and 100.
Even if we assume that the curve changes according to economic conditions, it's still too simplistic because it doesn't take into account what is being done with the dollars. For example, if you raise the tax rate to undertake a project like the Interstate Highway System, it's going to result in a stronger economy and higher tax revenues than taking that same increase and using it to teach ants to sort tiny screws in space.
But I don't think the deficit spending of the 80's, justified or not, can accurately show whether the idea behind the Laffer curve are actually valid. Had Reagan and Congress cut taxes and spending, then maybe the picture would be clearer.
I would point out that spending more than you earn invariably makes your personal economy look much rosier than it really is. Attributing the economic improvement solely to tax cuts doesn't seem proper.
Umm, excuse me? "No memory of those events" refers to the Iran-Contra hearings, not to Reagan's Alzheimers. I guess many Republicans have scrubbed their brains of those events.
The whole goddamn story is actually a call for us to lust after spiffy new military hardware. Though the choice in naming is just one of an inordinate number of projects being named after our fortieth president. Some have called it "the Reaganization of America."
If you don't like Michael's stories, Slashdot has made it very easy to block stories on a per-editor basis. This was a great story, and the worst that can be said is that the "from the * department" comment was unnecessarily distracting. It wasn't even in poor taste.
RedHat's patents represent some sort of huge threat to the world of Linux: Disagreed. If there is a buyout of Redhat by $EVIL_CORP, there are two scenarios. If the patent was used within RedHat's GPL'ed code, then recipients of that code are allowed to distribute said code on a royalty-free basis. On the other hand, if the patents weren't used in code, they represent no more threat than any other patent out there. That threat may be substantial, but most patents can be worked around.
"You're only borrowing [open source code] until the owner decides he wants it back." Absolutely false. Show me one single instance where a copyright holder GPL'ed his or her own work, and later went back and wrote Cease and Desist letters to the people using the code. That's not what is happening in the SCO case; if IBM really did commit SCO's code to GPL, then they did so fraudulently. It didn't happen with WASTE either. As far as I know, it has never happened.
If you receive GPL'ed code, the code is yours and will continue to be yours so long as you do not violate the terms of the GPL. The only caveat is that the code be licensed by someone who is authorized to do so.
Next topic: Do I believe that Sun or IBM could, if they so desired, build the mother-of-all-distros? Absolutely. Can they un-GPL anything that anybody else has received under the GPL? Absolutely not. Sure, they could buy a proprietary version of Mozilla or OpenOffice, but they can't stop anyone else who has the code from maintaining their own fork. If either company started playing games with its users, that code would still be there to fall back on.
Your company is its code base. Fine. Red Hat's company is its experience, its service programs, and a small smattering of IP. As you said, there's nothing there that some other company couldn't replicate. But look at how many businesses are out there, doing things that could easily be replicated. Barber shops, retail outlets, custom web design companies... the point is, unique IP isn't necessary to turn a profit. There's no secret to cutting hair.
Until IBM can offer all possible Linux services at unbeatable prices, there is ample room for competitors. The GPL keeps code free by design. SCO is trying to override that fact, and they will fail.
So long as anybody can grab the code and roll their own distro, the idea that the market will only bear one or two is simply ludicrous.
As to your idea that your company is guaranteeing its survival by keeping all rights to its code, take an honest look at these products you're building. Ask yourself: If IBM wanted to build products that would have our customers scrambling to switch, could they? Even if your code base is top notch, the mere fact that it was written by human beings guarantees that somebody else could reimplement it with sufficient effort.
If anything, you're undermining your own position: intellectual property, as a business model, is a dead end.
...will be bored college students knocking on each others doors, with USB hard drives full of MP3s. Nodes can be linked via CD-ROM and DVD media. What's the point of buying CDs when you already have literally months worth of music that you haven't even sorted through?
Honestly, I think RIAA would do well to back off. If they manage to kill off P2P trading, it will only be replaced by something much, much worse.
These are people responding to an internet poll. It doesn't matter what sort of business decisions the respondents control. Polls taken over the Internet have zero scientific validity. They can be rigged. They can be stuffed with ballots. People who vote will forward the poll to people who see the issue the way they do.
Above all, they aren't taking a random sample of the relevant population. People self-select. Even barring all the other problems, this one alone destroys the validity of the poll.
If you're trying to use this poll to figure out how SCO is doing in the court of public opinion, you may as well fall back on tea leaves.
I think it will run something like this: Linux is important to SCO's business. Even though they discovered violations in linux, they had to continue to release linux or suffer grave damage to their business. They should not be made to suffer for the malicious actions of IBM, and they did not voluntarily release their own source code, so the GPL should not apply to their proprietary code that somehow found its way into linux.
I cannot imagine this working quite the way you envision. If I'm running a newspaper, and I discover that one of my reporters has been stealing stories off the news wire and calling them his own, can I keep publishing his stories because they're a vital part of my business? Or if I'm making glazed doughnuts, and find out that my glaze supplier is watering the glaze down with lead-based paint, would I be legally justified in using up the rest of my stock while suing the bejeebers off my supplier?
Of course, not using the stock might mean that doughnut production could screech to a halt for a few days, seriously harming my business. Somehow, I don't think the courts would care.
No matter how vital Linux was to their buisness--even if ceasing distribution would tank the company--it didn't give them permission to ignore the GPL and continue distributing code. They don't want their code distributed under the GPL? Then they should have taken the steps to ensure that it wouldn't be as soon as the first whiff of infringement came along.
I don't think that they'll lose rights to any of the allegedly infringing code. But I think their continued distribution will seriously limit their ability to claim damages. But that's just my own speculation.
The way it was explained to me, SOAP is just a communication protocol implemented over HTTP. In other words, it communicates over an application protocol layered on top of another communication protocol.
After that, I decided it was overly and unnecessarily redundant and lost interest.
You're absolutely right. Instead of saying "megahertz," we should say "three billion individual operations every second." Instead of "MP3 file," we should say "pirated Metallica songs." Instead of "Bluetooth," we should say "magic." Finally, "PVR" should be replaced "illegal content theft enabler."
Wow, I'm understanding this technology...er, I mean, "nifty stuff I can spend money on"... already.:: end sarcasm::
Beneath a certain critical threshold, I have to stop blaming the experts, and start blaming the masses who refuse to make any effort to educate themselves about the devices.
As far as the medical profession goes, sure there are many doctors who think that using thick jargon makes them sound smart--and therefore trustworthy. It's a bad strategy. But if someone doesn't know what basic medical terms like "pancreas," "antibody," "virus," and "cell" mean, there's not a whole lot a doctor can do to communicate with them. At that point, it's the patient who is putting his/her own life at risk.
Re:What about teachin them some math, physics and
on
Wi-Fi Woods
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· Score: 1
See, the trick is to get them lost in the woods for three weeks, with only their native wits and their trusty PDA. Using their wits they can do things like hunt down game, build fires, and navigate using the stars and tree moss as guides. With their PDAs they can... er... um... schedule their day of hunting and fire-building.
Valuable life lesson: When push comes to shove, technology counts for jack. Sure, it's drastic. But I can't think of any other way to drive the lesson home.
Most of the posts I've seen claim that this new feature is useless, because the non-standard disks won't read on other drives.
But what if manufacturers decided to jump on the bandwagon, and start supporting these "overcooked" CDs. If other drives started coming out, claiming the ability to read anything below 300% or 500%[*], you've got a new contender to DVD-RW as a backup medium.
We've dealt with backwards compatability issues before--remember when CD-RW came out? People will accept that, to read a 140% disk, they need a 140% or better reader, and life will go on. The problem is, if the specs are kept proprietary, I doubt any demand will be there for this technology.
It may come to nothing, like back when somebody found a way to cram 30 megs of data on an ordinary floppy. But I think the market fragmentation would be worth it if something like this took off.
* Assuming, of course, such a feat is even possible.
My only experience with WinXP has been in the computer labs at school. Explorer crashes constantly, and the whole machine locked up the two times I tried to copy a 70 meg file onto my Zip disk. So I can't say that I'm thrilled with the current stability of the Redmond offering. The joke isn't dead yet.
On the other hand, my Red Hat 9 install leaks memory like a sieve, and after a few hours of web browsing, it's hitting the swap partition for everything, and I have to reboot.
In either case, I'm a bit dissatisfied on the stability front.
What do these two situations have in common? Well... er... me!
I'm cursed. QED.
Re:Lines of code still in GNUmeric...
on
Gnumeric Turns 5
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· Score: 1
I've found some other lines that have survived:/*** Drunk. Fix later. ***//*** Something in here is causing segfaults ***//*** The next 300 lines of code "borrowed" from SCO Unix. They won't miss it. ***/
No, no. For god's sake, do *not* take the tram. That monstrosity is a waste of time for anyone with two good legs and fewer than three hefty carry-on bags.
I had to hop a connecting flight at DFW once. At a brisk walk, I got to the other end of the airport a full ten minutes ahead of the tram.
Why does everyone get so uptight here? Yes, Asimov also used the same idea in a couple of his Robot books. In fact, when I read "The Roads Must Roll," my first thought was, hey, just like Asimov.
Am I the only one who doesn't have trouble standing up in a 25 mph headwind? It seems to me that the only problems at such speeds could be countered with hairspray.
I think you--or possibly I--misunderstand the intentions of this system. Using this to enforce huge swaths of "restricted airspace" is certainly stupid, but I don't think that's what they intend for it. Having relatively small enforced areas around clusters of skyscrapers seems to be perfectly sensible. You could fly over the skyscrapers, or pass within a mile or so without noticing the walls.
I honestly can't think of a valid reason for a pilot to decide to get within a mile of a skyscraper, so all the talk of pilots relinquishing critical control strikes me as contrived.
Not true. Even if the "tacking" thing is incorrect, you should be able to use the mirror to change your orbit. For example, reflecting the photons so that the force is in the direction of your orbit will slow you, letting you fall into a lower orbit.
Another way is to use the mirror to take you a good distance from the sun (in a highly elliptical orbit) and then let the goddess of gravity pull you into her tender embrace. Not only do you get into the inner solar system, but you do it at ludicrous speed.
Just try to avoid the big, shiny thing in the middle.:)
Great idea. Then we'll get the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland to hold hands and sing songs. After that, maybe find a way to convince the gun-toting, constitution-hanging-by-a-thread, right wing zealots and the left wing, "all economic activity is rape of Mother Earth" tree-spikers that everything is just peachy keen. Then all that's left is... well, appeasing every other group that is happy to use violence as a political tool.
Despite the difficulties, I admire your lateral thinking. But you can never please everybody, and I think other countermeasures will still be necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Researching fundamentally new forms of energy is expensive, even out of the range of most billionares. Stretching current technology to the limits of human ingenuity, on the other hand, is relatively cheap.
If someone offered ten million for the first demonstration of an energy producing fusion reactor, it's unlikely anybody would be motivated who wasn't working on it already.
I never liked the Laffer curve. I'm not against the idea that tax cuts can stimulate the economy, or that sufficiently high tax rates will discourage people from producing.
But the problem with the Laffer curve is that it's only extrapolating from three data points. We know that both a 0% and a 100% tax rate will yield $0, and that our current tax rate (somewhere between the two) yields a net revenue. From there, Laffer extrapolated a smooth curve, and decided that there was one optimal tax rate between 0 and 100.
Even if we assume that the curve changes according to economic conditions, it's still too simplistic because it doesn't take into account what is being done with the dollars. For example, if you raise the tax rate to undertake a project like the Interstate Highway System, it's going to result in a stronger economy and higher tax revenues than taking that same increase and using it to teach ants to sort tiny screws in space.
But I don't think the deficit spending of the 80's, justified or not, can accurately show whether the idea behind the Laffer curve are actually valid. Had Reagan and Congress cut taxes and spending, then maybe the picture would be clearer.
I would point out that spending more than you earn invariably makes your personal economy look much rosier than it really is. Attributing the economic improvement solely to tax cuts doesn't seem proper.
Umm, excuse me? "No memory of those events" refers to the Iran-Contra hearings, not to Reagan's Alzheimers. I guess many Republicans have scrubbed their brains of those events.
The whole goddamn story is actually a call for us to lust after spiffy new military hardware. Though the choice in naming is just one of an inordinate number of projects being named after our fortieth president. Some have called it "the Reaganization of America."
If you don't like Michael's stories, Slashdot has made it very easy to block stories on a per-editor basis. This was a great story, and the worst that can be said is that the "from the * department" comment was unnecessarily distracting. It wasn't even in poor taste.
You paint an unnecessarily bleak picture.
Corporations are dumb and evil. Agreed.
RedHat's patents represent some sort of huge threat to the world of Linux: Disagreed. If there is a buyout of Redhat by $EVIL_CORP, there are two scenarios. If the patent was used within RedHat's GPL'ed code, then recipients of that code are allowed to distribute said code on a royalty-free basis. On the other hand, if the patents weren't used in code, they represent no more threat than any other patent out there. That threat may be substantial, but most patents can be worked around.
"You're only borrowing [open source code] until the owner decides he wants it back." Absolutely false. Show me one single instance where a copyright holder GPL'ed his or her own work, and later went back and wrote Cease and Desist letters to the people using the code. That's not what is happening in the SCO case; if IBM really did commit SCO's code to GPL, then they did so fraudulently. It didn't happen with WASTE either. As far as I know, it has never happened.
If you receive GPL'ed code, the code is yours and will continue to be yours so long as you do not violate the terms of the GPL. The only caveat is that the code be licensed by someone who is authorized to do so.
Next topic: Do I believe that Sun or IBM could, if they so desired, build the mother-of-all-distros? Absolutely. Can they un-GPL anything that anybody else has received under the GPL? Absolutely not. Sure, they could buy a proprietary version of Mozilla or OpenOffice, but they can't stop anyone else who has the code from maintaining their own fork. If either company started playing games with its users, that code would still be there to fall back on.
Your company is its code base. Fine. Red Hat's company is its experience, its service programs, and a small smattering of IP. As you said, there's nothing there that some other company couldn't replicate. But look at how many businesses are out there, doing things that could easily be replicated. Barber shops, retail outlets, custom web design companies... the point is, unique IP isn't necessary to turn a profit. There's no secret to cutting hair.
Until IBM can offer all possible Linux services at unbeatable prices, there is ample room for competitors. The GPL keeps code free by design. SCO is trying to override that fact, and they will fail.
So long as anybody can grab the code and roll their own distro, the idea that the market will only bear one or two is simply ludicrous.
As to your idea that your company is guaranteeing its survival by keeping all rights to its code, take an honest look at these products you're building. Ask yourself: If IBM wanted to build products that would have our customers scrambling to switch, could they? Even if your code base is top notch, the mere fact that it was written by human beings guarantees that somebody else could reimplement it with sufficient effort.
If anything, you're undermining your own position: intellectual property, as a business model, is a dead end.
Okay, it's lame that this joke keeps getting posted, and keeps getting run up to +4 or +5.
:)
But how can you accuse Anonymous Coward of karma whoring?
...will be bored college students knocking on each others doors, with USB hard drives full of MP3s. Nodes can be linked via CD-ROM and DVD media. What's the point of buying CDs when you already have literally months worth of music that you haven't even sorted through?
Honestly, I think RIAA would do well to back off. If they manage to kill off P2P trading, it will only be replaced by something much, much worse.
What? You've never had a dropped packet before?
Note: I'm flaming, but not at you personally.
These are people responding to an internet poll. It doesn't matter what sort of business decisions the respondents control. Polls taken over the Internet have zero scientific validity. They can be rigged. They can be stuffed with ballots. People who vote will forward the poll to people who see the issue the way they do.
Above all, they aren't taking a random sample of the relevant population. People self-select. Even barring all the other problems, this one alone destroys the validity of the poll.
If you're trying to use this poll to figure out how SCO is doing in the court of public opinion, you may as well fall back on tea leaves.
Of course, not using the stock might mean that doughnut production could screech to a halt for a few days, seriously harming my business. Somehow, I don't think the courts would care.
No matter how vital Linux was to their buisness--even if ceasing distribution would tank the company--it didn't give them permission to ignore the GPL and continue distributing code. They don't want their code distributed under the GPL? Then they should have taken the steps to ensure that it wouldn't be as soon as the first whiff of infringement came along.
I don't think that they'll lose rights to any of the allegedly infringing code. But I think their continued distribution will seriously limit their ability to claim damages. But that's just my own speculation.
The way it was explained to me, SOAP is just a communication protocol implemented over HTTP. In other words, it communicates over an application protocol layered on top of another communication protocol.
After that, I decided it was overly and unnecessarily redundant and lost interest.
I meant to say "gigahertz." I really did.
You're absolutely right. Instead of saying "megahertz," we should say "three billion individual operations every second." Instead of "MP3 file," we should say "pirated Metallica songs." Instead of "Bluetooth," we should say "magic." Finally, "PVR" should be replaced "illegal content theft enabler."
:: end sarcasm ::
Wow, I'm understanding this technology...er, I mean, "nifty stuff I can spend money on"... already.
Beneath a certain critical threshold, I have to stop blaming the experts, and start blaming the masses who refuse to make any effort to educate themselves about the devices.
As far as the medical profession goes, sure there are many doctors who think that using thick jargon makes them sound smart--and therefore trustworthy. It's a bad strategy. But if someone doesn't know what basic medical terms like "pancreas," "antibody," "virus," and "cell" mean, there's not a whole lot a doctor can do to communicate with them. At that point, it's the patient who is putting his/her own life at risk.
See, the trick is to get them lost in the woods for three weeks, with only their native wits and their trusty PDA. Using their wits they can do things like hunt down game, build fires, and navigate using the stars and tree moss as guides. With their PDAs they can... er... um... schedule their day of hunting and fire-building.
Valuable life lesson: When push comes to shove, technology counts for jack. Sure, it's drastic. But I can't think of any other way to drive the lesson home.
Most of the posts I've seen claim that this new feature is useless, because the non-standard disks won't read on other drives.
But what if manufacturers decided to jump on the bandwagon, and start supporting these "overcooked" CDs. If other drives started coming out, claiming the ability to read anything below 300% or 500%[*], you've got a new contender to DVD-RW as a backup medium.
We've dealt with backwards compatability issues before--remember when CD-RW came out? People will accept that, to read a 140% disk, they need a 140% or better reader, and life will go on. The problem is, if the specs are kept proprietary, I doubt any demand will be there for this technology.
It may come to nothing, like back when somebody found a way to cram 30 megs of data on an ordinary floppy. But I think the market fragmentation would be worth it if something like this took off.
* Assuming, of course, such a feat is even possible.
My only experience with WinXP has been in the computer labs at school. Explorer crashes constantly, and the whole machine locked up the two times I tried to copy a 70 meg file onto my Zip disk. So I can't say that I'm thrilled with the current stability of the Redmond offering. The joke isn't dead yet.
On the other hand, my Red Hat 9 install leaks memory like a sieve, and after a few hours of web browsing, it's hitting the swap partition for everything, and I have to reboot.
In either case, I'm a bit dissatisfied on the stability front.
What do these two situations have in common? Well... er... me!
I'm cursed. QED.
I've found some other lines that have survived: /*** Drunk. Fix later. ***/ /*** Something in here is causing segfaults ***/ /*** The next 300 lines of code "borrowed" from SCO Unix. They won't miss it. ***/
This is such horrible advice.
Better advice would be: Read it, but make sure you've already read every other worthwhile book first.
No, no. For god's sake, do *not* take the tram. That monstrosity is a waste of time for anyone with two good legs and fewer than three hefty carry-on bags.
I had to hop a connecting flight at DFW once. At a brisk walk, I got to the other end of the airport a full ten minutes ahead of the tram.
Why does everyone get so uptight here? Yes, Asimov also used the same idea in a couple of his Robot books. In fact, when I read "The Roads Must Roll," my first thought was, hey, just like Asimov.
I think Heinlein did it first, but who cares?
Am I the only one who doesn't have trouble standing up in a 25 mph headwind? It seems to me that the only problems at such speeds could be countered with hairspray.
I think you--or possibly I--misunderstand the intentions of this system. Using this to enforce huge swaths of "restricted airspace" is certainly stupid, but I don't think that's what they intend for it. Having relatively small enforced areas around clusters of skyscrapers seems to be perfectly sensible. You could fly over the skyscrapers, or pass within a mile or so without noticing the walls.
I honestly can't think of a valid reason for a pilot to decide to get within a mile of a skyscraper, so all the talk of pilots relinquishing critical control strikes me as contrived.
Not true. Even if the "tacking" thing is incorrect, you should be able to use the mirror to change your orbit. For example, reflecting the photons so that the force is in the direction of your orbit will slow you, letting you fall into a lower orbit.
:)
Another way is to use the mirror to take you a good distance from the sun (in a highly elliptical orbit) and then let the goddess of gravity pull you into her tender embrace. Not only do you get into the inner solar system, but you do it at ludicrous speed.
Just try to avoid the big, shiny thing in the middle.
Great idea. Then we'll get the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland to hold hands and sing songs. After that, maybe find a way to convince the gun-toting, constitution-hanging-by-a-thread, right wing zealots and the left wing, "all economic activity is rape of Mother Earth" tree-spikers that everything is just peachy keen. Then all that's left is... well, appeasing every other group that is happy to use violence as a political tool.
Despite the difficulties, I admire your lateral thinking. But you can never please everybody, and I think other countermeasures will still be necessary.