Nothing you write will stop you from being a stinking, dirty hun, with a diet of roast rat and domestos washed down with your own piss (or McEwans Lager. But I repeat myself). Where did you post this from? The local orange lodge's computer?
Here, "parasites" making copies of our work doesn't reduce our ability to use our own copies. (This is
one of the founding principles of the GPL, in fact.) Therefore, parasites aren't much like parasites at all.
Well, I think one description of a 'parasite' would be someone who takes without giving something back. In this respect, I think that open source (not just the GPL) help by increasing the common user's exposure to the internal workings of software development, thereby increasing the potential for them to become programmers themselves, or even send in coherent bug reports... also, the idea that there is a software community rather than a vendor suggests that users and developers can become friendly, rather than have to take an antagonistic supplier/consumer relationship. What do you think?
I have no interest in "stealing" GPVed code. I argue against the GPV, as I have done for a decade now, because I believe it's an
insidious deception worked on the public whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the software industry.
Oh for fuck's sake.
I work for a telecom's equipment vendor. I write software to keep their lovely hardware stable and featureful. I get paid to do that. There is absolutely no chance this work would be released under the GPL.
I then arrive at home and write compression software. I do this for pleasure. I want everyone to be able to use it. I release it under the GPL. With the GPL, everyone can use it. There are no restrictions on usage, or unmodified copying. I also like the idea that I play in a field of like-minded people who will openly share their work. It's a nice inducement, but I'd still be writing my free software anyway.
Now, if there were some commercial interests in my home written software, I'd like to be able to negotiate my position. I'm greedy and self-centred. If you don't like that, tough. With a ultra-free license like BSD, I've already given away all the crown jewels. Companies who want my code have choices
They can just use my code as a standalone executable (because there's no usage or unmodified copying restrictions)
They can clone the functionality of my code with their own programming staff (I'm not patenting it or anything)
They can give away whatever they want to use my code in to the free software community (which would be cool, but it's not likely to happen)
They can pay me off (cool!)
The GPL is as likely to bring down the software industry as home brewing is to bring down the brewing industry.
But by the end of the century, for the first time in the history of humanity it was possible to reproduce music without a
human being. First came the player piano (which had actually been invented over 50 years before, but never
perfected).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the music box arrived well before the piano player -- in 1776.
There's bound to be a reason behind this, and while most people think it's just the Open Motif authors being silly, perhaps it's because they're forced to? They might be thinking for all non-free OS vendors know they aren't allowed to call themselves UNIX(R) unless they use a licensed and approved XOpen implementation of Motif. Perhaps Open Motif are covering their asses?
It just so happens that BT's initial attempt at the web / email / phone combo was too expensive for most people. So right now, all BT's netphones are FREE for internet, email and text messaging. Which, predictably, makes them very popular. Presumably, BT wants to encourage use before re-applying the charge.
How can somebody make a profit selling below cost at all times?
Well, you know the idea of the loss leader. Amazon.com used to have this loss leader, called 'inventory'. They used it to promote the purchase of something else in the store, called 'shares in Amazon'. These were sold with huge profit margins.
Or was it just the byproduct of the "our stock price will go up no matter our business plan" sort of thing that just blew up these last months?
This article is titled 'Amazon tries to turn a profit' for a reason, y'know....
>The extension of this, is that if Microsoft needs a compression algorithm found in a popular piece of GPL code, they will have to
prove that they did not look at the popular code and hence have to open-source all their stuff, which they are not eager to do.
This is not necessarily so. Only if they take the code from the GPL'd source, and maybe adapt that a little, then they have to GPL their own
stuff. I doubt seeing a GPL'd algorithm, and afterwards reimplementing what that algorithm does would force them to open up their source. But
ofcourse, it's as good as impossible to see in the compiled binaries what code they took, so who knows, maybe their software is already filled
with GPL'd code. If you were a developer on a dead-line, and you knew what you needed was in a GPL'd app, and you also knew that
nobody would ever get to see your code, wouldn't you be extremely tempted to just take the GPL'd source?
Well, firstly, it's quite easy to see particular compression algorithims in binary code, for someone skilled in the art.
Secondly, most compression code, GPL'd or otherwise, is based on freely available compression research. If M$ wants a new compression algorithim, they go to the real source; compression researchers.
FACT: There are make-believe religions. (Scientology, Moonies, Islam, etc.)
FACT: There is true religion. (Christianity)
If you think that there's a difference between 'make-believe' religion and 'true' religion, I have a bridge in London you might want to buy.
By the way, I've informed the Taliban regime about your feelings on Islam. They're coming over to kick your ass right now. Run while you still have legs.
As I understand it (IANAPL), they've patented not only the server-end approximate matching algorithm (which I think is fair enough to patent), but they've patented the way a 'CD ID' is generated by the CD client and sent to the server in order for it to do the search.
This could be replaced with the client simply sending the CD track lengths to the server, rather than combining them at the client end using a patented ID generation algorithm.
They can't claim that the database freedb uses is theirs, it was GPLed, and freedb's database is built only with GPLed entries.
They're damn right about their patents, though. I think freedb should offer a client query method that isn't patented, in addition to the patented method. Therefore, those client authors who don't want Gracenote on their backs can be relieved. Eventually, I'd like to see freedb drop all patented-cddb-request support from their server. We don't actually need it, and it only serves to give gracenote a stick to beat us with.
Magnequench have a handy guide to their own patents. Bonus points awarded to those who post hyperlinks to US Patents 4496395, 4851058, 4802931, 5411608, 4902361, etc. Magnequench! Leading innovation in Nd-Fe-B magnets, because only we own the license to innovate!
Will they get both right second time around?
on
Akira Game for PS2?
·
· Score: 4
From what I remember of the Akira game for the Amiga, it was complete rubbish. I'm sure they can improve on that, even if it does end up as a mix of NeoTokyo Road Rash and Nursery DOOM.
However, I also remember seeing Akira for the first time on BBC2, subtitled with a decent, rich translation of the story. The subsequent Manga Video release did a hatchet job on the subtitles, very much in the "We get signal! What!" style. So: please oh please oh please let the Akira rerelease have a decent translation. As good as, if not better, than the BBC version.
If you think SUV's run inefficient, you should see the waste figures for a fleet of busses running near empty to and from the suburbs to the
central cities.
And if you think *that's* inefficent, you should see how much waste 50 SUVs make compared to the 50 occupants being on one full bus. Or how much 400 SUVs idling in traffic make compared to the 400 occupants sitting on a train. The train doesn't get stuck in traffic, either.
Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women,
the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.
Don't worry Jamie, your government didn't go to war to defend the Kuwait government, it went to defend its oil interests.
Human rights atrocities are fine by us (and the UK will even supply the torture equipment!) but mess with the fuel chain and we'll blitz you. We didn't walk out on the Kyoto agreement for nothing, you know! We demand our right to cheap fuel for our SUVs to run inefficiently on while sitting idle in traffic jams!
of course it would take a hell of a lot more skill to build a fully autonomous robot then it does to build a fancy rc car
Apples and oranges. In Robot Wars, you have a lot of engineering work to do. Consider material stresses and tolerances, operating parameters for your industrial-strength batteries, motors and cylinders, Newtonian physics (A spike punch is useless! What part of "equal and opposite reaction" don't they get?), interior design, redundancy (so your robot can't be disabled with a tap in one little place), safety, and, of course, how to be strong against a large variety of opponents without vastly changing the design of the robot.
In short, if you're building an RC car for Robot Wars, you've got the wrong idea. If you're writing any software for your robot, you've severely got the wrong idea; it's an engineering contest, not a computing one.
Am I the only one that is a little sick of the remote controlled battle bots, admit it, it would be interesting to see a couple fully autonomous bots going at it, completely independent of
any external control.
I agree that such a thing would be interesting. However, I also think computing Bayesian belief networks is fun. I don't believe either would make good TV.
I think that kids fighting each other with robots they built themselves is good TV. It's a battle. It's gladitorial combat. It's war. It's real. It's the clashing of metallic bone and sinew. You're not watching two AI computer programs at work, completely ignorant to the skill and ingenuity of thought processes that went on to build them.
Heck 99% of the fun would be trying to build one of these.
Indeed. Only 1% of the fun could be shared with the viewers.
If you want a program which was carefully constructed to share the joy of constructing machines to do some task, Junkyard Wars / Scrapheap Challenge is what you want to watch.
Vanessa: Maintaining multiple versions of source code in a distributed project, that's you in a nutshell.
CVS: No, this is me in a nutshell; "Help! I'm in a nutshell! What kind of nut has such a big
nutshell? How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell?"
Slashdot Mirror
Hello, John. Give some credit, damnit.
Here, "parasites" making copies of our work doesn't reduce our ability to use our own copies. (This is one of the founding principles of the GPL, in fact.) Therefore, parasites aren't much like parasites at all.
Well, I think one description of a 'parasite' would be someone who takes without giving something back. In this respect, I think that open source (not just the GPL) help by increasing the common user's exposure to the internal workings of software development, thereby increasing the potential for them to become programmers themselves, or even send in coherent bug reports... also, the idea that there is a software community rather than a vendor suggests that users and developers can become friendly, rather than have to take an antagonistic supplier/consumer relationship. What do you think?
Oh for fuck's sake.
I work for a telecom's equipment vendor. I write software to keep their lovely hardware stable and featureful. I get paid to do that. There is absolutely no chance this work would be released under the GPL.
I then arrive at home and write compression software. I do this for pleasure. I want everyone to be able to use it. I release it under the GPL. With the GPL, everyone can use it. There are no restrictions on usage, or unmodified copying. I also like the idea that I play in a field of like-minded people who will openly share their work. It's a nice inducement, but I'd still be writing my free software anyway.
Now, if there were some commercial interests in my home written software, I'd like to be able to negotiate my position. I'm greedy and self-centred. If you don't like that, tough. With a ultra-free license like BSD, I've already given away all the crown jewels. Companies who want my code have choices
The GPL is as likely to bring down the software industry as home brewing is to bring down the brewing industry.
But by the end of the century, for the first time in the history of humanity it was possible to reproduce music without a human being. First came the player piano (which had actually been invented over 50 years before, but never perfected).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the music box arrived well before the piano player -- in 1776.
What about Full-geeks? They'll want real PSX programming docs. Because they're not five year old kids.
I've been trying for a couple of days to get this file. I only have 300k so far. Has anyone managed to download the whole thing yet?
:)
Tried getting it with 'wget' or any other download manager? That way you can resume part way through a broken download...
I am using wget!
I've been trying for a couple of days to get this file. I only have 300k so far. Has anyone managed to download the whole thing yet?
There's bound to be a reason behind this, and while most people think it's just the Open Motif authors being silly, perhaps it's because they're forced to? They might be thinking for all non-free OS vendors know they aren't allowed to call themselves UNIX(R) unless they use a licensed and approved XOpen implementation of Motif. Perhaps Open Motif are covering their asses?
It just so happens that BT's initial attempt at the web / email / phone combo was too expensive for most people. So right now, all BT's netphones are FREE for internet, email and text messaging. Which, predictably, makes them very popular. Presumably, BT wants to encourage use before re-applying the charge.
How can somebody make a profit selling below cost at all times?
Well, you know the idea of the loss leader. Amazon.com used to have this loss leader, called 'inventory'. They used it to promote the purchase of something else in the store, called 'shares in Amazon'. These were sold with huge profit margins.
Or was it just the byproduct of the "our stock price will go up no matter our business plan" sort of thing that just blew up these last months?
This article is titled 'Amazon tries to turn a profit' for a reason, y'know....
>The extension of this, is that if Microsoft needs a compression algorithm found in a popular piece of GPL code, they will have to prove that they did not look at the popular code and hence have to open-source all their stuff, which they are not eager to do.
This is not necessarily so. Only if they take the code from the GPL'd source, and maybe adapt that a little, then they have to GPL their own stuff. I doubt seeing a GPL'd algorithm, and afterwards reimplementing what that algorithm does would force them to open up their source. But ofcourse, it's as good as impossible to see in the compiled binaries what code they took, so who knows, maybe their software is already filled with GPL'd code. If you were a developer on a dead-line, and you knew what you needed was in a GPL'd app, and you also knew that nobody would ever get to see your code, wouldn't you be extremely tempted to just take the GPL'd source?
Well, firstly, it's quite easy to see particular compression algorithims in binary code, for someone skilled in the art.
Secondly, most compression code, GPL'd or otherwise, is based on freely available compression research. If M$ wants a new compression algorithim, they go to the real source; compression researchers.
See my website for more details.
FACT: There are make-believe religions. (Scientology, Moonies, Islam, etc.)
FACT: There is true religion. (Christianity)
If you think that there's a difference between 'make-believe' religion and 'true' religion, I have a bridge in London you might want to buy.
By the way, I've informed the Taliban regime about your feelings on Islam. They're coming over to kick your ass right now. Run while you still have legs.
What exactly have they patented?
US Patent 6,061,680.
As I understand it (IANAPL), they've patented not only the server-end approximate matching algorithm (which I think is fair enough to patent), but they've patented the way a 'CD ID' is generated by the CD client and sent to the server in order for it to do the search.
This could be replaced with the client simply sending the CD track lengths to the server, rather than combining them at the client end using a patented ID generation algorithm.
They can't claim that the database freedb uses is theirs, it was GPLed, and freedb's database is built only with GPLed entries.
They're damn right about their patents, though. I think freedb should offer a client query method that isn't patented, in addition to the patented method. Therefore, those client authors who don't want Gracenote on their backs can be relieved. Eventually, I'd like to see freedb drop all patented-cddb-request support from their server. We don't actually need it, and it only serves to give gracenote a stick to beat us with.
Magnequench have a handy guide to their own patents. Bonus points awarded to those who post hyperlinks to US Patents 4496395, 4851058, 4802931, 5411608, 4902361, etc.
Magnequench! Leading innovation in Nd-Fe-B magnets, because only we own the license to innovate!
From what I remember of the Akira game for the Amiga, it was complete rubbish. I'm sure they can improve on that, even if it does end up as a mix of NeoTokyo Road Rash and Nursery DOOM.
However, I also remember seeing Akira for the first time on BBC2, subtitled with a decent, rich translation of the story. The subsequent Manga Video release did a hatchet job on the subtitles, very much in the "We get signal! What!" style. So: please oh please oh please let the Akira rerelease have a decent translation. As good as, if not better, than the BBC version.
yes, one of those monolithic Linux ISP's, oh wait, there are none.
yes, of course
If you think SUV's run inefficient, you should see the waste figures for a fleet of busses running near empty to and from the suburbs to the central cities.
And if you think *that's* inefficent, you should see how much waste 50 SUVs make compared to the 50 occupants being on one full bus. Or how much 400 SUVs idling in traffic make compared to the 400 occupants sitting on a train. The train doesn't get stuck in traffic, either.
Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women, the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.
Don't worry Jamie, your government didn't go to war to defend the Kuwait government, it went to defend its oil interests.
Human rights atrocities are fine by us (and the UK will even supply the torture equipment!) but mess with the fuel chain and we'll blitz you. We didn't walk out on the Kyoto agreement for nothing, you know! We demand our right to cheap fuel for our SUVs to run inefficiently on while sitting idle in traffic jams!
of course it would take a hell of a lot more skill to build a fully autonomous robot then it does to build a fancy rc car
Apples and oranges. In Robot Wars, you have a lot of engineering work to do. Consider material stresses and tolerances, operating parameters for your industrial-strength batteries, motors and cylinders, Newtonian physics (A spike punch is useless! What part of "equal and opposite reaction" don't they get?), interior design, redundancy (so your robot can't be disabled with a tap in one little place), safety, and, of course, how to be strong against a large variety of opponents without vastly changing the design of the robot.
In short, if you're building an RC car for Robot Wars, you've got the wrong idea. If you're writing any software for your robot, you've severely got the wrong idea; it's an engineering contest, not a computing one.
Am I the only one that is a little sick of the remote controlled battle bots, admit it, it would be interesting to see a couple fully autonomous bots going at it, completely independent of any external control.
I agree that such a thing would be interesting. However, I also think computing Bayesian belief networks is fun. I don't believe either would make good TV.
I think that kids fighting each other with robots they built themselves is good TV. It's a battle. It's gladitorial combat. It's war. It's real. It's the clashing of metallic bone and sinew. You're not watching two AI computer programs at work, completely ignorant to the skill and ingenuity of thought processes that went on to build them.
Heck 99% of the fun would be trying to build one of these.
Indeed. Only 1% of the fun could be shared with the viewers.
If you want a program which was carefully constructed to share the joy of constructing machines to do some task, Junkyard Wars / Scrapheap Challenge is what you want to watch.
this shall be the "furst poast"!
(except it's not. oh well)
Next week: NYT mistakes Linux + GNOME for MS Windows!
Vanessa: Maintaining multiple versions of source code in a distributed project, that's you in a nutshell.
CVS: No, this is me in a nutshell; "Help! I'm in a nutshell! What kind of nut has such a big nutshell? How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell?"