Bruce had to work really hard to try to describe Open Source in a way that included both the GPL and the BSDL. The spirit of collaboration that surrounds projects like GNU, Linux, X, and the BSDs owes as much to history as to the license, so it is clear why he had so much trouble trying to include it in the Open Source Definition and why the OSI has even more problems using a subset of the OSD to define an Open Source License.
Read it again. The keystone of the GPL is making source available. There is no guarantee of source availability with the MS-PL. It may be ordinary and simple, but it is not reomotely "GPL-ish."
"They are often pure epidemiological number crunching that ignores major differences between study conditions"
Sturgeon's Law, I guess.
Did I misuse the term meta-study? I am not in the biological sciences. My understanding was that it is something like a review article, but with actual numerical analysis and assessment of the error/validity of the original studies.
It doesn't seem that a single study is ever definitive. Perhaps this is due to error, perhaps it is because human beings have too many variables that cannot be controlled for. I don't understand your comment about differences in study conditions - either they are different approaches meant to be studying the same effect, in which case comparing them makes sense, or they are understood to be measuring different things, in which case no one would think that they could be combined.
Should I have said review article instead of meta-study? If poorly designed studies show one thing, but several well designed studies show the opposite, what is the publication in which this situation is described and analyzed?
Athena involved setting up a network of workstations so that you could log onto any one of them and have access to your home directory, mail, etc. as if they were local to that machine.
This doesn't sound like a big deal until you find out that it started in 1983. Kerberos and X are children of Project Athena.
The sample sizes are often small in medical/health studies and human beings have a lot of extra variables that are hard to control. The best thing to do is to wait for the meta-study, where someone analyzes all the studies that relate to an effect. After many studies have been done, do they agree? Do they appear to have been well done? Adding the studies together creates a larger sample size and hopefully averages out some of the variation due to flaws in the method.
"That one watt of output is in the gigahertz range, and is easily filtered"
It is not as easily filtered as you might think. Semiconductors have a tendency to rectify very high frequency signals, converting them into low frequency signals. Even discrete components can have problems, because you only need a tiny stray capacitance to get significant coupling at those frequencies. (Look at some numbers - a low stray capacitance is in the pF range, so what is 1/(2pi f C) for f of a few GHz?) It is easy to be stung by resonances unless you have a careful cascade of filters optimized for different frequency ranges.
How often does a business need only a single copy of a piece of software? Copying inside the business is still copying and requires a license.
Heck, even copying from the hd to ram to run the code counts as copying (note that this copying is allowed by US law if the copy on the drive is legal, but not otherwise).
"I mean really, you expect just everyone to know how to use the technology completely?"
The point is not expectations. The point is legal culpability. Should the law protect those who can't be bothered to learn how the equipment works?
If you don't put up No Trespassing signs and monitor your land, you can actually lose it under US law under very specific circumstances. You must exercise vigilance to protect what is yours. Why do we need government nannies to protect wireless access?
It would be nice if I could set my house up on a "power budget", and let my appliances vie for electrical power and load-balance themselves to stay within that budget.
I wonder if you are mixing up two things - power and energy.
Power is important. Enough power plants and transmission capacity have to be built to handle the peak power load. Leveling out power usage can save money in construction costs and reduce the footprint of the electrical infrastructure.
As individuals, most of us pay for electrical power by the kilowatt-hour regardless of when we use it (this is not true for everyone). Personally, I would like to reduce my energy usage, because it would save me money.
There are lots of tricks to level out the electrical load. Many people do this anyway by running things like the dishwasher at night. Hot water heaters could be smarter - if everyone in the house takes showers in the morning, we could let the water cool down a little during the day and heat it back up again at 3 am. But none of this reduces the total energy use significantly.
Other than adding insulation, buying more energy-efficient appliances, or staying dirty, it is a lot less clear what can be done to reduce energy use in a normal house. (There are lots of ways people waste small amounts of energy, leaving lights on and wall warts plugged in, but anyone can fix that if they care. CF bulbs may save a lot if everybody switches, but the effect on my bottom line is minimal.)
Well, calling it a "programming language" certainly qualifies as "fantasy"...;-)
Har har har.
The guts of FORTRAN is the conversion of formulas written in typical mathematical notation, like x=(y+23)*z, into computer code. Almost every programming language in use today is a descendant of FORTRAN (except, like, shell scripts and original LISP, but I think most LISPs now include evaluation of mathematical formulas).
Choosing a computer language today in most cases is answering the question, "What form of program flow control do you want with your FORTRAN?"
(What would slashdot be without over-generalizations and intentionally inflammatory statements?)
There is a link to NASA posting the new numbers. Need more corroboration?
No, the numbers speak for themselves.
It took ten seconds to create a plot in gnuplot with the corrected data.
I was surprised at the results. They show a random scattering of occasional really warm years, and a massive, unmistakable, consistent warming trend since 1980.
This was not at all what I expected to see after reading TFA. Maybe that's why they don't plot the corrected data.
Unlike mathematicians, physicists almost never distinguish between "f(x0) equals y" and "the limit of f(x) as x approaches x0 is y." (I am not saying that there are no cases where the distinction is made, e.g. degeneracies in QM.)
You'd be amazed at the hideous things physicists do with the Dirac delta function.
So what if they compile to the same code? Source code is for humans to read, and machine code is for machines to read. Comments don't show up in the compiled code at all. Does this mean that they serve no purpose?
Break's and goto's are very different, and I am surprised to see so many people say that they are essentially the same. When I am reading code and I see a break statement, I know where the flow goes. When I see a goto statement, I have no idea where the flow goes unless the label is withing a few lines. That is the difference.
"but do not remember when the file was first created,"
Nice idea, but pretty clearly problematic in reality.
Example: Open something.txt in emacs, make a change, and save it. The old file something.txt is renamed something.txt~ and the modified version is saved as something.txt. So, when was something.txt first created? Just now. Not very useful.
If you rename a file, does the "first created" time change? How about if you truncate it to zero length and write completely new information? What if you do both? The whole concept of "first created" is kind of murky unless files are only appended to.
When I really, really need to remember when a file was first created, I put the date in the filename.
Thanks. The wikipedia article actually says that a Class B is a/16, so it could have gone either way. I usually use 255.255.255.0 rather than/24 so I got it backwards. Plus, I am an idiot.
"It's actually quite easy to switch from a/24 to a/22 if you actually need to"
I am not sure what you mean by easy. I am sure that the provider could give them a larger contiguous set of addresses, but no one would be willing to do the work necessary to change the addresses on the machines - too many servers running too many (necessary) services set up by people who don't work there anymore. It would take years to sort it all out. I guess going to IPv6 would be just as hard, but at least it would be done (plus management would be forced to allocate resources to do the job, rather than using a short-term solution which is worse in the long run).
"Something actually interesting that's IPV6 only so that end users will actually want."
That exists for some people. I suspect that there are a lot of businesses that (1) want their computers to have real IP addresses and (2) are too large for a set of/8 addresses (I was going to say Class C but Wikipedia says they don't exist anymore). It is not an easy thing to switch in a/8 for a/10 and so on whenever you want. These just aren't available.
And it really sucks to have to machines on the same hub that can only talk to each other through an overburdened router in another building.
"If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows"
That may often be true, but not always.
I have a couple really nice digitizers that run Linux in the firmware that live in a rack with a controller running Linux and store the data (closing in on 1 TB) on a Linux server. The code controlling the digitizers and archiving the data is free to download (but not officially open source). All the data analysis is done in a commercial data analysis programming language which runs on Linux. (The same hardware and software could run under Windows, too.)
"But if enough people used that aspect, it might become a theft deterrent.
Not unless 99+% of people use it. If 50% of people opt in, then thieves will just steal twice as many ipods. You also create a "prisoner's dilemma." Enabling this on my own ipod can only hurt me, because it makes charging and portability less easy, and it will never help me because whoever steals it won't know that this feature is enabled. So why would I ever enable it?
I would like to remind people that what the court has done is make the rule the same for minimum prices as it is for maximum prices.
It was already true that a producer could fix a maximum price at which his goods can be sold by the eventual vendor. Rather than being automatically (per se) considered anticompetitive, each situation has to be examined on its own merits to see whether consumers are harmed. The/. crowd should be fervent admirers of allowing maximum prices to be fixed, because that is what allows the GPL to operate.
Whatsisface (Wallace?) claimed that the GPL was per se illegal price fixing. Part of the reason he lost is because fixing a maximum price (in the case of the GPL, zero*) was not per se illegal as he claimed.
So if we all think fixing a maximum price can be good for consumers, is fixing a minimum price always bad?
*The price of the license is zero. You can charge for physical distribution, support, etc.
Your analysis might seem correct at first glance. But if it is correct, why do companies buy Macs for their employees? If the don't need iLife at work, why don't they "buy whatever [computers] they can get cheap that work as a basic [computer]"?
Macs are not cheap, unless you add usability and quality of manufacture to your equation. I don't use them, but I see an awful lot of people using them who did not pay for them themselves.
"Isn't the whole point of innovation to come up with some new idea."
Lots of people come up with new ideas. Can you take your new idea and create a profitable business with a marketable product? Being a smart and creative person doesn't mean that you can build a business. You probably can't learn to be smart and creative, but you can learn the techniques of starting a business.
"Does that 40,000,000 figure count the license that was bundled with my Dell laptop?"
Oops. Apologies for the error.
Editors, please change the headline to "Vista's 39,999,999 License Sales In Context."
Seriously, Microsoft is probably not concerned about the tiny percentage of people who know enough to convert their machines to dual boot with Linux. They really don't care about people who pay for a Vista license and then use XP (you're still paying to feed the monopoly and still using monopoly software).
These things take time, especially when even "hot" fusion hasn't reached the break-even point.
If you are referring to the point where fusion power created equals input power (ignoring the change in internal plasma energy), the reason is that no one is trying to do this. Most facilities cannot handle enough radiation to even run DT plasmas. The few places that can currently run DT plasmas can only do so in a very limited fashion, no where near enough to optimize the parameters. Reaching Q=1 is a easy as building the right facility. On the other hand, reaching Q of 10 or 50 or infinity will require physics advances.
Of course; that is why it is so important to understand what is meant by "efficiency" in the context in which it is used. If someone says they are converting one form of mechanical energy to another form of mechanical energy with greater than 100% efficiency, then he is lying. On the other hand, the efficiency of a heat pump is calculated as heat output divided by energy input and is always greater than 100% (for the abstract heat engine cycle, not a physical unit - since these often double as ACs, the waste heat is outside instead of inside and practical efficiency can be low).
The numbers might not work out (does the hot air get hot enough to aid the hot water heater? can the various streams of cold and hot air be moved around effectively?) but if we define efficiency as the electrical output plus the electricity to provide the same amount of hot water and cold air (resistive heating and conventional AC respectively) divided by the electrical input, then we might get a number greater than 1.
If you then use the hot water and cold air to generate electricity, you will of course end up with less electrical power output than you started with. You can never get above 100% efficiency by that definition.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce had to work really hard to try to describe Open Source in a way that included both the GPL and the BSDL. The spirit of collaboration that surrounds projects like GNU, Linux, X, and the BSDs owes as much to history as to the license, so it is clear why he had so much trouble trying to include it in the Open Source Definition and why the OSI has even more problems using a subset of the OSD to define an Open Source License.
Read it again. The keystone of the GPL is making source available. There is no guarantee of source availability with the MS-PL. It may be ordinary and simple, but it is not reomotely "GPL-ish."
Sturgeon's Law, I guess.
Did I misuse the term meta-study? I am not in the biological sciences. My understanding was that it is something like a review article, but with actual numerical analysis and assessment of the error/validity of the original studies.
It doesn't seem that a single study is ever definitive. Perhaps this is due to error, perhaps it is because human beings have too many variables that cannot be controlled for. I don't understand your comment about differences in study conditions - either they are different approaches meant to be studying the same effect, in which case comparing them makes sense, or they are understood to be measuring different things, in which case no one would think that they could be combined.
Should I have said review article instead of meta-study? If poorly designed studies show one thing, but several well designed studies show the opposite, what is the publication in which this situation is described and analyzed?
Athena involved setting up a network of workstations so that you could log onto any one of them and have access to your home directory, mail, etc. as if they were local to that machine.
This doesn't sound like a big deal until you find out that it started in 1983. Kerberos and X are children of Project Athena.
Wikipedia is your friend: Project Athena
The sample sizes are often small in medical/health studies and human beings have a lot of extra variables that are hard to control. The best thing to do is to wait for the meta-study, where someone analyzes all the studies that relate to an effect. After many studies have been done, do they agree? Do they appear to have been well done? Adding the studies together creates a larger sample size and hopefully averages out some of the variation due to flaws in the method.
It is not as easily filtered as you might think. Semiconductors have a tendency to rectify very high frequency signals, converting them into low frequency signals. Even discrete components can have problems, because you only need a tiny stray capacitance to get significant coupling at those frequencies. (Look at some numbers - a low stray capacitance is in the pF range, so what is 1/(2pi f C) for f of a few GHz?) It is easy to be stung by resonances unless you have a careful cascade of filters optimized for different frequency ranges.
No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
It sounds like a good idea. I always wonder how many of these good sounding ideas will actually work when I do have kids.
Heck, even copying from the hd to ram to run the code counts as copying (note that this copying is allowed by US law if the copy on the drive is legal, but not otherwise).
The point is not expectations. The point is legal culpability. Should the law protect those who can't be bothered to learn how the equipment works?
If you don't put up No Trespassing signs and monitor your land, you can actually lose it under US law under very specific circumstances. You must exercise vigilance to protect what is yours. Why do we need government nannies to protect wireless access?
I wonder if you are mixing up two things - power and energy.
Power is important. Enough power plants and transmission capacity have to be built to handle the peak power load. Leveling out power usage can save money in construction costs and reduce the footprint of the electrical infrastructure.
As individuals, most of us pay for electrical power by the kilowatt-hour regardless of when we use it (this is not true for everyone). Personally, I would like to reduce my energy usage, because it would save me money.
There are lots of tricks to level out the electrical load. Many people do this anyway by running things like the dishwasher at night. Hot water heaters could be smarter - if everyone in the house takes showers in the morning, we could let the water cool down a little during the day and heat it back up again at 3 am. But none of this reduces the total energy use significantly.
Other than adding insulation, buying more energy-efficient appliances, or staying dirty, it is a lot less clear what can be done to reduce energy use in a normal house. (There are lots of ways people waste small amounts of energy, leaving lights on and wall warts plugged in, but anyone can fix that if they care. CF bulbs may save a lot if everybody switches, but the effect on my bottom line is minimal.)
Har har har.
The guts of FORTRAN is the conversion of formulas written in typical mathematical notation, like x=(y+23)*z, into computer code. Almost every programming language in use today is a descendant of FORTRAN (except, like, shell scripts and original LISP, but I think most LISPs now include evaluation of mathematical formulas).
Choosing a computer language today in most cases is answering the question, "What form of program flow control do you want with your FORTRAN?"
(What would slashdot be without over-generalizations and intentionally inflammatory statements?)
No, the numbers speak for themselves.
It took ten seconds to create a plot in gnuplot with the corrected data.
I was surprised at the results. They show a random scattering of occasional really warm years, and a massive, unmistakable, consistent warming trend since 1980.
This was not at all what I expected to see after reading TFA. Maybe that's why they don't plot the corrected data.
Unlike mathematicians, physicists almost never distinguish between "f(x0) equals y" and "the limit of f(x) as x approaches x0 is y." (I am not saying that there are no cases where the distinction is made, e.g. degeneracies in QM.)
You'd be amazed at the hideous things physicists do with the Dirac delta function.
Break's and goto's are very different, and I am surprised to see so many people say that they are essentially the same. When I am reading code and I see a break statement, I know where the flow goes. When I see a goto statement, I have no idea where the flow goes unless the label is withing a few lines. That is the difference.
Nice idea, but pretty clearly problematic in reality.
Example: Open something.txt in emacs, make a change, and save it. The old file something.txt is renamed something.txt~ and the modified version is saved as something.txt. So, when was something.txt first created? Just now. Not very useful.
If you rename a file, does the "first created" time change? How about if you truncate it to zero length and write completely new information? What if you do both? The whole concept of "first created" is kind of murky unless files are only appended to.
When I really, really need to remember when a file was first created, I put the date in the filename.
"It's actually quite easy to switch from a /24 to a /22 if you actually need to"
I am not sure what you mean by easy. I am sure that the provider could give them a larger contiguous set of addresses, but no one would be willing to do the work necessary to change the addresses on the machines - too many servers running too many (necessary) services set up by people who don't work there anymore. It would take years to sort it all out. I guess going to IPv6 would be just as hard, but at least it would be done (plus management would be forced to allocate resources to do the job, rather than using a short-term solution which is worse in the long run).
That exists for some people. I suspect that there are a lot of businesses that (1) want their computers to have real IP addresses and (2) are too large for a set of /8 addresses (I was going to say Class C but Wikipedia says they don't exist anymore). It is not an easy thing to switch in a /8 for a /10 and so on whenever you want. These just aren't available.
And it really sucks to have to machines on the same hub that can only talk to each other through an overburdened router in another building.
That may often be true, but not always.
I have a couple really nice digitizers that run Linux in the firmware that live in a rack with a controller running Linux and store the data (closing in on 1 TB) on a Linux server. The code controlling the digitizers and archiving the data is free to download (but not officially open source). All the data analysis is done in a commercial data analysis programming language which runs on Linux. (The same hardware and software could run under Windows, too.)
Not unless 99+% of people use it. If 50% of people opt in, then thieves will just steal twice as many ipods. You also create a "prisoner's dilemma." Enabling this on my own ipod can only hurt me, because it makes charging and portability less easy, and it will never help me because whoever steals it won't know that this feature is enabled. So why would I ever enable it?
It was already true that a producer could fix a maximum price at which his goods can be sold by the eventual vendor. Rather than being automatically (per se) considered anticompetitive, each situation has to be examined on its own merits to see whether consumers are harmed. The /. crowd should be fervent admirers of allowing maximum prices to be fixed, because that is what allows the GPL to operate.
Whatsisface (Wallace?) claimed that the GPL was per se illegal price fixing. Part of the reason he lost is because fixing a maximum price (in the case of the GPL, zero*) was not per se illegal as he claimed.
So if we all think fixing a maximum price can be good for consumers, is fixing a minimum price always bad?
*The price of the license is zero. You can charge for physical distribution, support, etc.
Macs are not cheap, unless you add usability and quality of manufacture to your equation. I don't use them, but I see an awful lot of people using them who did not pay for them themselves.
Lots of people come up with new ideas. Can you take your new idea and create a profitable business with a marketable product? Being a smart and creative person doesn't mean that you can build a business. You probably can't learn to be smart and creative, but you can learn the techniques of starting a business.
Oops. Apologies for the error.
Editors, please change the headline to "Vista's 39,999,999 License Sales In Context."
Seriously, Microsoft is probably not concerned about the tiny percentage of people who know enough to convert their machines to dual boot with Linux. They really don't care about people who pay for a Vista license and then use XP (you're still paying to feed the monopoly and still using monopoly software).
If you are referring to the point where fusion power created equals input power (ignoring the change in internal plasma energy), the reason is that no one is trying to do this. Most facilities cannot handle enough radiation to even run DT plasmas. The few places that can currently run DT plasmas can only do so in a very limited fashion, no where near enough to optimize the parameters. Reaching Q=1 is a easy as building the right facility. On the other hand, reaching Q of 10 or 50 or infinity will require physics advances.
The numbers might not work out (does the hot air get hot enough to aid the hot water heater? can the various streams of cold and hot air be moved around effectively?) but if we define efficiency as the electrical output plus the electricity to provide the same amount of hot water and cold air (resistive heating and conventional AC respectively) divided by the electrical input, then we might get a number greater than 1.
If you then use the hot water and cold air to generate electricity, you will of course end up with less electrical power output than you started with. You can never get above 100% efficiency by that definition.