Regarding jobs getting lost, I also agree. The problem is NOT as big as Gates says atm, but if OSS becomes much more popular in the future, it will be a problem for software engineers. You devalue your own profession.
Nonsense. You are falling into the trap of thinking that most software is developed to be put in a box and sold at CompUSA. That may be the only software you ever see, but the truth is, most software is developed for a company's internal use, or for a development contract. In the former case, you don't have to release your source, but if you release your improvements back to the tree, you are doing yourself a favor. In the latter case, the customer is not looking to sell the software themselves, so they don't care what license the product is under, so long as they get what they need. Are you a software engineer yourself? I am, and F/OSS is a large part of what my comapny does. We're not a big company, but we contribute to a large F/OSS project, which gives us the credibility to sell services around that project. OSS also gives us reusable components that we leverage to slash our development time, thus enabling us to write more software, sell more services, and hire more people!
I'm probably going to get modded down for expressing a dissenting opinion, but I feel that this communal Matrix sequel bashing is unwarranted.
Admit it - you loved the ghost twins and the car chase extravaganza. You watched with mouth agape as Neo held his own against waves of Agent Smiths. You feasted your eyes on the gunfight in the club at the beginning of Revolutions. You delighted in the apocalyptic, desparate battle between the defenders of Zion and the machines.
And finally, you still found the philosophy intriguing. Do humans have free will, or are we as predictable and predestined as the Oracle and the Architect believe? Had you ever really thought about how much we depend on machines before the councilman's conversation with Neo? What would the offspring of software be like, and what happens to beings without "purpose?"
So, suck it up. Sure, there are major problems with the sequels. Nevertheless, I am GLAD I paid money to see them, and so are you.
Yes. The new format is XML-like (though not legal XML).
Anybody familiar with the rationale behind this decision? The sample file is indeed very close to legal XML. If it is so close, why not go the last mile and make it legal? Well-formed XML facilitates communication and interoperability, because standardXML parsers can grok it, making it easier to write new implementations that understand the same XML format.
Using peoples' fear of child exploitation as a tool to push through draconian copyright measures to help BigCorp Inc. is despicable.
Surely this _is_ child exploitation.
It's more like parent exploitation. The extremely wealthy media conglomerates are exploiting parents (through fear) in an attempt to preserve the status quo and, they believe, by extension preserve their current revenue streams.
What they don't realize is that civil liberties, innovation, and fair use are themselves part of the status quo in the United States. They also don't realize that by stifling innovation, they are stifling their own future revenue stream.
Since they "aid" and "abet" copyright infringement, normal CD Burners would also be illegal under this law. It's as if Sony Music wants Sony Electronics to stop making devices that are obviously designed solely to pirate their copyrighted works.
The downsides that I can see are the loss in voltage over the increased wire lengths and idiots who don't know what they're doing zap the sh** out of themselves by touching the wrong thing. Does anyone think that this has potential or is it just a great way to kill off... er, teach some not-so-bright people about what 120VAC can do to your extremities?
You shouldn't be working on the insides of your computer when it's plugged in anyway. Just because its DC doesn't mean it can't still hurt... But seriously, the reason power supplies are contained in a single metal box is because they use "Capacitors", which store electric charge and help keep the power output steady even if the power input is flaky. These Capacitors bleed power over time after the unit is turned off. If you were to touch one shortly after powering down, you would short the power from the capacitor to the ground.
*ducks*
At least you would learn what a ton of amperage at 12V would do to your extremities.
I know very little about electronics. Can someone explain to me why computers and electronics can't simply run directly on AC? Why always the DC conversion?
<SIMPLIFICATION> Computers use "transistors" which are like tiny little On/Off switches. If you apply current to the "Gate", the transistor turns on. In the ON state, current goes through, in the OFF state, it doesn't. AC, or Alternating Current, is like a sine wave. The voltage swings from a positive peak to a negative trough, and the current switches direction when the voltage changes polarity. If you apply current to the gate of a transistor the wrong way, it stops working and will probably break. Therefore, everything that uses transistors uses DC, or Direct Current, where the electricity flows one way, and at a consistent voltage.</SIMPLIFICATION>
Every electronic doodad I can think of has an AC/DC adapter. It's not just an issue with computers.
That's because frequently those electronic doodads are computers, just not computers with a hard drive and a monitor. They have CPUs and RAM inside. Even if said electronic thingamajig is not a computer, it probably has transistors in it, hence the DC power.
And it would be nice to get rid of those bulky AC/DC power bricks too...
We use AC power instead of DC power because we use a centralized power grid.If the world moves to distributed power generation, we'll likely abandon AC entirely. Of course, we'll never be completely free of power bricks, because our devices need different voltages. However, DC to DC conversion is much simpler than AC to DC conversion.
For true 64 bitness, launch every Linux!
on
Renderfarm Setup Tips?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apple has not yet released a true 64-bit version of OS X, while Gentoo released a PPC64 version a few weeks ago. If you're going to buy 64 bits of CPU, you might as well get 64 bits of OS too.
Advertisements should NOT be counted in the Billboard Charts. There is something seriously wrong with the system. At least the television networks cannot buy Nielson ratings by bribing viewers. We do not tolerate steroids in athletics, we do not condone special interests buying legislation, and we should also cry foul over the destruction of popular culture and mass-market art.
What's the best way to shame Billboard into excluding ads from the rankings? Web, email, or phone campaign? Media watchdog group?
Imagine that you are a researcher who is the first person anywhere to discover a vulnerability in a widely used piece of software. You have the option of keeping quiet or disclosing the vulnerability to the vendor. If you notify the vendor the WHD scenario (ed - where an exploit is written after public disclosure) of Section 3.1 will follow. If you do not notify the vendor, a Black Hat may independently discover the vulnerability, thus initiating the BHD scenario (ed - where an exploit appears in the wild before public disclosure). However, there is also some chance that the vulnerability will never be rediscovered at all or that it will be rediscovered by another White Hat. In the first case, the cost of disclosure will never be incurred. In the second, it will be incurred later. Either outcome is superior to immediate disclosure.
This line of thinking ignores the fact that for most software, the installed base increases over time. If the vulnerability is ever "rediscovered," reported, and exploited, then many more systems are affected than if the original White Hat had reported the flaw right away.
The myth that the 3 Gs and PPLQ make a game a commercial success is perpetuated by the mistaken notion that all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys.
A handful each year would be both novel, and actually contribute to the progress of the useful arts, and have potential financial value. Given this disparity between that handful and the many, many patents actually awarded (and litigated over), it is actually somewhat better to reject the patentability of all software in an effor to protect society from the damage being done by totally unwarrented patents.
This sounds like a good idea until you have your own invention to patent.
Of course, it would be better still to reform patent law.
Not exactly. Many (some would say most) of the software patents issued recently should never have been issued given their obvious nature and the existence of prior art. It is not patent law that needs reform, but rather the Patent Office.
I agree that writing software is a creative process, but I disagree that it is an artistic discipline. Writing software is an engineering discipline. Software can be elegant, or entertaining, or masterful, but the purpose of software is to solve problems. I return to my original question - why is it that you believe that a microprocessor advancement or the pot that cooks and drains pasta can be patented, while software should not be? If I create, nay, invent, a new program which solves a problem which before had no obvious solution, do I not deserve a patent for it?
If you actually wrote software, then you would know that that creating software and the process of invention are (often) one and the same. Perhaps you are implying that because programmers make use of tools and shared libraries written by other programmers, that their creations are somehow merely cobbled together components that happen to work well. Programmers are NOT assembly line workers, nor does software write itself. Where a problem appeared unsolvable, a software "developer" has invented the solution.
Here's another angle. Chip design these days is usually done completely in a description language like VHDL or Verilog. The engineer does not lay out the transistors by hand. Hence, the engineer's creation is literally software cum hardware. You would have us believe that just because the electrical engineer has produced something he can touch that he is an "inventor" while the software engineer is merely a "developer".
Or perhaps you mean that the pot that cooks AND drains pasta is an invention, and Bayesian spam filtering is just a bunch of 1s and 0s.
K's QT isn't truely OSS since you have to pay out the ass to use it on Windows, so I avoid it on principle.
Comments like this really bother me. What, were you planning on running KDE on Windows? Here's the truth: QT on X11 has been licensed under the GPL for almost 4 years. This means that KDE is 100% GPL and 100% Free, and has been for a very long time. No matter what Trolltech decides to do to stay in business, my KDE desktop will ALWAYS be Free.
Turbolinux is really stretching the truth when they claim to be the first to support WMV and RM on Linux. I run Gentoo, and I've been able to play these formats for over a year. I did the following:
Running a Free operating system for free: priceless.
Why not Mozilla Thunderbird or Mail and News?
on
THG On Migrating To Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'll second the recommendation for Pan - it's a terrific newsreader and supports all the latest technologies. Otherwise, if you're already using Firefox, why don't you try Mozilla Thunderbird? It's a great email client and newsreader, and it's definitely far more featureful and secure than Outlook Express.
Computer Associates International Inc. said on Monday it has licensed the freely available Linux operating system software from SCO -- a move that could become key legal ammunition for the SCO Group Inc. in a battle over who owns the software.
The editor who let this lede get published should be taken out and, er, fired. It does not make a shred of difference in court if somebody actually caved to SCO's extortion; just because CA believed SCO's lie does not make the lie true.
Besides, people just hate the idea of paying for their e-mail.
Indeed! As the author points out, we already pay for the privilege in connection fees, bandwidth fees, storage costs, and time. Why would we want to pay more money for something that doesn't actually cost anything? The answer: the sender pays an email tax to the recipient instead of the gov't or the ISP. This means that the cost of receiving the email is offset by being paid to receive it. If you don't want to charge Grandma or your favorite mailing list to send you e-mail, then add them to your Whitelist, and they don't pay anything. This way, if you get spam, at least you're getting paid for it! Implementation could be handled at the e-mail server level - the sending ISP pays the receiving ISP. The sending ISP adds the charge to the sender's bill, and the receiving ISP subtracts it from the receiver's bill, after taking the cut for their storage and bandwidth costs. Therefore, if spammers steal an account with which to spam, they are now also stealing money from the account holder, which is covered under strong, existing laws .
I had a very similar Gateway 2000 system (p 200, 64 MB RAM, STB Virge/VX video... blech) and I remember installing RH7 on it, and watching the computer constantly thrash the hard disk, trying to swap pages in and out. One simple thing fixed it: I started using IceWM. Suddenly, Linux stopped thrashing the disk. Bliss.
Lest you think I'm an IceWM fanboy, I don't run it anymore; nowadays I'm a KDE 3 guy with lots of eyecandy, on a much more powerful system.
A 3D engine is doing a lot of math. C code that just does math is already portable across platforms, and usually across compilers too. You're never going to see cutting edge 3d engines written in Java, or any other interpreted, scripted, or bytecode language, because those languages lose their typical advantages in this case. The rest of the game, however, can greatly benefit from high-level languages, because it simplifies game object creation and handling. Do you really want to be managing memory when you could be writing the interface?
the "wheel" group is not intended for su, it is intended for sudo.
Although it's hard to see where this quote was going without some context, here's a guess: privelege separation. If su used the wheel group, it might be possible for a network admin (who controls group membership) to keep local users from making changes to a local machine they should be allowed to control.
and I noticed something strange. For those of you who can't or won't try Rasterman's benchmark yourself, the program runs six different tests, each of which uses a different scaling technique. Each of the six tests is run on the three different test platforms: XRender onscreen, XRender offscreen, and Imlib2. Imlib2 is also written by Rasterman, and is part of Enlightenment.
Here are the test scores from one of the rounds -
*** ROUND 3 ***
Test: Test Xrender doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 196.868 sec.
Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 196.347 sec.
Test: Test Imlib2 doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 6.434 sec.
Now for the strange thing. For the first platform, I watched as the program drew the enlightenment logo thousands of times in the test window, as you would expect. For the second test, it took about the same amount of time, but drew offscreen, again, as the test's name would indicate. However, for the imlib2 test, it also didn't draw anything in the test window. I got the impression (perhaps wrongly?) that Imlib2 would actually draw to the screen as well. Since it doesn't change the screen, I have no way of telling if imlib2 is doing any drawing at all.
So, I'm digging into the benchmark's code... I'll let you guys know what I find.
Slashdot Mirror
What has two thumbs and loves simultaneous touch points?
This guy...
Are you a software engineer yourself? I am, and F/OSS is a large part of what my comapny does. We're not a big company, but we contribute to a large F/OSS project, which gives us the credibility to sell services around that project. OSS also gives us reusable components that we leverage to slash our development time, thus enabling us to write more software, sell more services, and hire more people!
I'm probably going to get modded down for expressing a dissenting opinion, but I feel that this communal Matrix sequel bashing is unwarranted.
Admit it - you loved the ghost twins and the car chase extravaganza. You watched with mouth agape as Neo held his own against waves of Agent Smiths. You feasted your eyes on the gunfight in the club at the beginning of Revolutions. You delighted in the apocalyptic, desparate battle between the defenders of Zion and the machines.
And finally, you still found the philosophy intriguing. Do humans have free will, or are we as predictable and predestined as the Oracle and the Architect believe? Had you ever really thought about how much we depend on machines before the councilman's conversation with Neo? What would the offspring of software be like, and what happens to beings without "purpose?"
So, suck it up. Sure, there are major problems with the sequels. Nevertheless, I am GLAD I paid money to see them, and so are you.
Well-formed XML facilitates communication and interoperability, because standard XML parsers can grok it, making it easier to write new implementations that understand the same XML format.
It's more like parent exploitation. The extremely wealthy media conglomerates are exploiting parents (through fear) in an attempt to preserve the status quo and, they believe, by extension preserve their current revenue streams.
What they don't realize is that civil liberties, innovation, and fair use are themselves part of the status quo in the United States. They also don't realize that by stifling innovation, they are stifling their own future revenue stream.
Since they "aid" and "abet" copyright infringement, normal CD Burners would also be illegal under this law. It's as if Sony Music wants Sony Electronics to stop making devices that are obviously designed solely to pirate their copyrighted works.
But seriously, the reason power supplies are contained in a single metal box is because they use "Capacitors", which store electric charge and help keep the power output steady even if the power input is flaky. These Capacitors bleed power over time after the unit is turned off. If you were to touch one shortly after powering down, you would short the power from the capacitor to the ground.
*ducks*
At least you would learn what a ton of amperage at 12V would do to your extremities.
AC, or Alternating Current, is like a sine wave. The voltage swings from a positive peak to a negative trough, and the current switches direction when the voltage changes polarity. If you apply current to the gate of a transistor the wrong way, it stops working and will probably break. Therefore, everything that uses transistors uses DC, or Direct Current, where the electricity flows one way, and at a consistent voltage.</SIMPLIFICATION>
That's because frequently those electronic doodads are computers, just not computers with a hard drive and a monitor. They have CPUs and RAM inside. Even if said electronic thingamajig is not a computer, it probably has transistors in it, hence the DC power.We use AC power instead of DC power because we use a centralized power grid.If the world moves to distributed power generation, we'll likely abandon AC entirely. Of course, we'll never be completely free of power bricks, because our devices need different voltages. However, DC to DC conversion is much simpler than AC to DC conversion.
Apple has not yet released a true 64-bit version of OS X, while Gentoo released a PPC64 version a few weeks ago. If you're going to buy 64 bits of CPU, you might as well get 64 bits of OS too.
The parent post beat me to the point.
Advertisements should NOT be counted in the Billboard Charts. There is something seriously wrong with the system. At least the television networks cannot buy Nielson ratings by bribing viewers. We do not tolerate steroids in athletics, we do not condone special interests buying legislation, and we should also cry foul over the destruction of popular culture and mass-market art.
What's the best way to shame Billboard into excluding ads from the rankings? Web, email, or phone campaign? Media watchdog group?
The myth that the 3 Gs and PPLQ make a game a commercial success is perpetuated by the mistaken notion that all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys.
Instead, according to TechTV, the 5 most commercially successful PC games ever are:
5. Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
4. Flight Simulator
3. The Sims
2. MP Roller Coaster Tycoon
1. Myst
Absolutely none of the three Gs anywhere on this list, unless you count rollercoasters breaking or blurry simulated nudity.
By contrast, BMX XXX only succeeded at being controversial.
I agree that writing software is a creative process, but I disagree that it is an artistic discipline. Writing software is an engineering discipline. Software can be elegant, or entertaining, or masterful, but the purpose of software is to solve problems.
I return to my original question - why is it that you believe that a microprocessor advancement or the pot that cooks and drains pasta can be patented, while software should not be? If I create, nay, invent, a new program which solves a problem which before had no obvious solution, do I not deserve a patent for it?
If you actually wrote software, then you would know that that creating software and the process of invention are (often) one and the same. Perhaps you are implying that because programmers make use of tools and shared libraries written by other programmers, that their creations are somehow merely cobbled together components that happen to work well. Programmers are NOT assembly line workers, nor does software write itself. Where a problem appeared unsolvable, a software "developer" has invented the solution.
Here's another angle. Chip design these days is usually done completely in a description language like VHDL or Verilog. The engineer does not lay out the transistors by hand. Hence, the engineer's creation is literally software cum hardware. You would have us believe that just because the electrical engineer has produced something he can touch that he is an "inventor" while the software engineer is merely a "developer".
Or perhaps you mean that the pot that cooks AND drains pasta is an invention, and Bayesian spam filtering is just a bunch of 1s and 0s.
Here's the truth: QT on X11 has been licensed under the GPL for almost 4 years. This means that KDE is 100% GPL and 100% Free, and has been for a very long time. No matter what Trolltech decides to do to stay in business, my KDE desktop will ALWAYS be Free.
Spread your FUD somewhere else.
Running a Free operating system for free: priceless.
I'll second the recommendation for Pan - it's a terrific newsreader and supports all the latest technologies.
Otherwise, if you're already using Firefox, why don't you try Mozilla Thunderbird? It's a great email client and newsreader, and it's definitely far more featureful and secure than Outlook Express.
The answer: the sender pays an email tax to the recipient instead of the gov't or the ISP. This means that the cost of receiving the email is offset by being paid to receive it. If you don't want to charge Grandma or your favorite mailing list to send you e-mail, then add them to your Whitelist, and they don't pay anything.
This way, if you get spam, at least you're getting paid for it!
Implementation could be handled at the e-mail server level - the sending ISP pays the receiving ISP. The sending ISP adds the charge to the sender's bill, and the receiving ISP subtracts it from the receiver's bill, after taking the cut for their storage and bandwidth costs.
Therefore, if spammers steal an account with which to spam, they are now also stealing money from the account holder, which is covered under strong, existing laws .
I had a very similar Gateway 2000 system (p 200, 64 MB RAM, STB Virge/VX video... blech) and I remember installing RH7 on it, and watching the computer constantly thrash the hard disk, trying to swap pages in and out.
One simple thing fixed it: I started using IceWM. Suddenly, Linux stopped thrashing the disk. Bliss.
Lest you think I'm an IceWM fanboy, I don't run it anymore; nowadays I'm a KDE 3 guy with lots of eyecandy, on a much more powerful system.
A 3D engine is doing a lot of math. C code that just does math is already portable across platforms, and usually across compilers too.
You're never going to see cutting edge 3d engines written in Java, or any other interpreted, scripted, or bytecode language, because those languages lose their typical advantages in this case.
The rest of the game, however, can greatly benefit from high-level languages, because it simplifies game object creation and handling. Do you really want to be managing memory when you could be writing the interface?
the "wheel" group is not intended for su, it is intended for sudo .
Although it's hard to see where this quote was going without some context, here's a guess: privelege separation. If su used the wheel group, it might be possible for a network admin (who controls group membership) to keep local users from making changes to a local machine they should be allowed to control.
and I noticed something strange. For those of you who can't or won't try Rasterman's benchmark yourself, the program runs six different tests, each of which uses a different scaling technique. Each of the six tests is run on the three different test platforms: XRender onscreen, XRender offscreen, and Imlib2. Imlib2 is also written by Rasterman, and is part of Enlightenment.
Here are the test scores from one of the rounds -
*** ROUND 3 ***
Test: Test Xrender doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends
Time: 196.868 sec.
Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends
Time: 196.347 sec.
Test: Test Imlib2 doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends
Time: 6.434 sec.
Now for the strange thing. For the first platform, I watched as the program drew the enlightenment logo thousands of times in the test window, as you would expect. For the second test, it took about the same amount of time, but drew offscreen, again, as the test's name would indicate. However, for the imlib2 test, it also didn't draw anything in the test window.
I got the impression (perhaps wrongly?) that Imlib2 would actually draw to the screen as well. Since it doesn't change the screen, I have no way of telling if imlib2 is doing any drawing at all.
So, I'm digging into the benchmark's code... I'll let you guys know what I find.