This is the author's main gripe : that the license accompanying Pine "restricts modified redistribution" (emphasis mine). But doesn't the GPL also restrict modified redistribution? I can't redistribute GPL'ed software without making the source code available, can I ? So restriction-free redistribution cannot by itself be the sticking point for the author of the article. Why doesn't the author just face up to his ideologies and admit he just doesn't like how the UW license restricts modified redistribution, and say instead that he prefers the way the GPL restricts the same thing ?
The other single salient suggestion I have is do as much as you can on barter. If you need a couple boxen for your new lab and your client is a
PC shop that needs some wiring hung and a T1 installed then why bother with the cash and associated accounting.
If I am reading between the lines correctly, here, and you are suggesting that you save yourself money by not reporting these new boxes as income, isn't this tax evasion ?
the high RPM drives are more fatiguing/damaging to the ears because they emit a high-pitched whine from the
Are you serious ? The noise from your 3 drives is causing you hearing damage??? How close are you to the drive ? Given that the noise from even the loudest drives I have ever been around is certainly far less than that of normal conversation, I would think the only way they could damage your ear is if you removed the casing, honed the edge of a platter to be razor sharp, and cut your ear off. Or maybe you could do it if you cut off the leads from the cables, exposed the wires at the end, then jabbed them so far in your ear canal as to rupture the tympanic membrane.
I also wonder how long the hinges on the screens would last in the environments PDA users typically find themselves in (crowded subway stations, in the car with kids, etc.)...
Three screens sounds cool, and the authors make a reasonably good rationalization for their use, but in the absence of real photos of the 3 screen device, I think I might prefer having one larger screen with a windowing system that let me display multiple types of information, rather than 3 single small screens...it would let me see more when I needed to. For instance, a 21" monitor costs well more than 3 or 4 15" monitors, but who wouldn't prefer the one larger monitor ? I guess there would be power savings when using only one of the screens, though. I suppose figuring out the strengths/weaknesses of various approaches is the whole point of building concept devices.
Yeah...I remember almost jumping out of my skin when a guard would hear me shooting or spot me before I could steal a uniform and I would hear that tinny, scrapey "jawohl". I don't think I ever won it, but I think that was because there was no save-game function.
In those days the only way to make a sound on an Apple II (without a special sound card) was to repeatedly toggle the speaker, which you did by accessing a particular memory location (I can almost remember it ). To get a higher tone you had to toggle it faster. Yes, the game halted while the sound was being played. Yes, this explained the poor quality. No, there was nothing that could be done about it.
And I fail to see why the soldiers who partook in the Rape of Nanking or served at Unit 731 were any less evil than the Nazi's who ran the
death camps.
I agree. In fact, one could argue that the Japanese murdered and raped in Nanking (among other places) with an abandon, wantoness, glee, and sheer speed that was unsurpassed by the Nazis. Worse, while Germany has taken sizeable steps towards recognizing its complicity and making reparations, the Japanese have done very little towards the same. In a TV interview I saw once that pitted the author of the book "The Rape of Nanking" against a Japanese diplomat (I believe the ambassador to the U.S.), said diplomat steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the Japanese did anything that was unexpected during wartime, specifically in Nanking.
While I don't think the point of killing Nazis in the game is Nazi-glorifying, I have lately begun to wonder whether or not the game is in bad taste and whether they point to some hypocritical double standards.
Yes, I know, "it's just a game", but I can't think of another game anywhere where you run around and kill an identifiable group of people, no matter how evil they are deemed to be. Can you imagine a game where you're a US GI trying to escape from a Japanese POW camp with Rising Suns everywhere, killing caricatures of (probably bespectacled) Japanese soldiers and invading Japanese labs where experiments are being conducted on Filipinos and Chinese and American servicemen ? What about if a game were released where you are a Palestinian in an Israeli prison and you walk through Star-of-David-festooned hallways trying to kill Israeli stormtroopers while trying to halt their nuclear weapons research program ? How well accepted would those games be ? What kind of uproar would we expect then ?
Yes, the original Castle Wolfenstein (on the Apple II) sported awful graphics,
was hard to control, and had poorly digitized sound effects. However, at the
time that game was state of the art - it had great graphics for the
Apple, and it had great sound effects for its day, too. How many other
games of its era had digitzed speech ? I wrote some speech digitizers for the
Apple II when I was a kid and I can tell you that attaining the quality of Wolfenstein's digitzed speech requires
100% of the 6502 in a very short loop - so almost nothing more was technically possible.
Also, the plotline was very immersive for its time. It may have been a
terrible game now, but it was a groundbreaker then.
I dumped the Linksys DSL router for a Netgear RT-314. While both do port-forwarding (I could not determine from the online documentation nor from various searches whether the SMC barricade or any other number of routers did this), there appeared to be a bug in the Linksys code which caused various applications (read: online games) to abort with generic 'out of sync' errors. The Netgear runs these apps flawlessly... to think I wasted many hours playing games that would die because of my router !!! It also looks nice and feels solid. I should note, however, it does not have an uplink port (the Linksys does), and it does not have either a serial or printer port (which the barricade does).
I don't think any of the portable Palm keyboards I have seen make a really loud "clack" sound when you type. If you are a gentle typist, you
shouldn't make too much noise.
To the contrary, I was at a conference last week, and some guy two rows back was using a Palm with a keyboard. Sure enough, whenever the speaker would say anything interesting, there would go the clackety-clack of his keyboard. In fact I am not sure whether or not the noise comes from the keyboard action, or from his fingers hitting the keys, and I am not sure if he was an especially heavy typist, but it proved constantly distracting at all the wrong moments.
The point of the comment about stats.zone.com is just that - if the GPL is
really cancer-like or pac-man-like, they would have no choice but to GPL their proprietary code. The fact that obviously they haven't done
so, and the FSF hasn't gone after them to do so, shows that the Mundie/Gates story is pure FUD.
Umm, but just because a given application of a GPL'ed piece of work that does not result in cancer-like repercussions to other pieces of work, doesn't really diminish one narrower interpretation of the Microsoft argument, which is that using GPL'ed software in software intended for subsequent redistribution DOES result in "cancerous" repercussions. I don't think any reasonable person could deny that the viral nature of the GPL is the very essence of the GPL. Obviously if some GPL'ed code found its way into, say, Word, then Microsoft would have to give up its code, so a Microsoft argument that the GPL is cancer-like for commercial software is not without its merits.. indeed, it is true by design.
So Microsoft uses some GPL'ed stuff in some small part of their universe. This doesn't make them hypocritical in this regard, especially as they are almost certainly going to move that material to Windows as soon as they can if only to fix their PR (and it should be infinitely easier than the Hotmail stuff).
Perhaps he should issue a company memo to the folks running Microsoft's stats.zone.com, who
seem to be using GNU/Linux and Apache happily without donating MS Office to the FSF.
Let me get this straight. Microsoft bought a company and uses but does not sell or otherwise redistribute its Linux-based product for a small part of one of their websites. So why exactly should Microsoft donate a completely unrelated product that predates the Linux-based product and almost certainly owes none of its code to said Linux-based product ??? Come on, Microsoft's business conduct is certainly not beyond reproach, but if this is the best you can do in the way of attacking their stand on the GPL....
I can't stand people who sit in classes/meetings/conferences taking notes while typing away noisily on a keyboard. They might as well be listening to headphones that are turned up enough that neighbours can hear. Even worse is when you get more than one of those people nearby you at the same meeting...the cacophony can be damn distracting. At least using Graffiti on the palm doesn't disturb and distract people within earshot. Decorum at the expense of technology, I suppose.
Since you yourself admit the possibility of a security risk, the employers aren't being clueless or dictatorial, and they are not without justification. And as others point out, there are other reasons why they should not allow the software to run. Installation of unsanctioned software increases all sorts of costs: administrators have to tend to machines with non-standard configurations, hard-drives may be used a bit more, network bandwidth is being consumed by transmission, employees spend time installing, playing with and otherwise dicking with the program.
Incorrect. Depreciation is the opposite. It is the remaining value of the asset, excluding the amount of the asset that has been used in the
present and previous accounting periods.
Huh ? I am not an expert in accounting, but have had some financial accounting in the CFA program, and depreciation shows up on the income statement, so it couldn't be "the remaining value of the asset" (else it would be on the balance sheet). To use your terminology, depreciation is "the amount of value that has been used on an asset" in a given reporting period. The amount of value that has been used (total) on an asset is the accumulated depreciation.
Damn, do GPL zealots here really think that 'basing' something on an essentially obvious but GPL'ed hello.c should force something to fall under the GPL? That makes me sick. I cannot imagine the hue and cry that would arise here if Microsoft tried to enforce or even tried to suggestsuch specious claims to their intellectual property.
Suppose some old QuickC manuals contained Microsoft copyrighted code that got borrowed and incorportated into Linux by some coder...would people here assert that Linux thusly fell under Microsoft's licenses ? (Yeah, I know the code in the QuickC manual probably isn't copyrighted but I'm too tired to search for those things in my basement)
While some people may have well looked at some other code bases, I would be surprised if the all of the coders in the Windows divisions were not under orders to NEVER look at GPL'ed code. Microsoft has too much at stake to risk the possibility that some code under a restrictive license like the GPL would get incorporated either intentionally or unintentionally. You can also bet that any code that does get pulled in from open-source projects like FreeBSD get combed over by an army of lawyers and coders charged with documenting and verifying licensing. Call Microsoft what you want, but you can't call them stupid.
This isn't the first time they've posted things critical of Microsoft; in fact, I could've sworn that I found a "Windows Bug of the Day" section,
although I can't find it now...
While I have never seen "Windows Bug" pages on MSN (which is not to say they don't exist, I wish I had seen them them), I *certainly* have seen unflattering coverage of Microsoft's and Bill Gates' conduct on Microsoft properties, such as msnbc.com. In this regards, I view properties like msnbc.com to have at least a small measure of integrity more than such chauvinistic p.r. mouthpieces like Slashdot which:
- seems to view the GPL as holy and unquestionable,
-focuses on Linux to the essential exclusion (read: paying token coverage) of other operating systems which 'geeks' may well be interested in,
- is unanimously anti-Microsoft (to the point of not being able to discuss a single Microsoft product or feature without viciously criticizing their larger conduct or philosophy,even when such is irrelevant to the article at hand, and despite the fact that it certainly appears as if at least some of the cabal uses MS products to play games, at least), and
- which rarely has the guts to point out the many bugs and shortcomings of open-source software in general, and Linux in particular.
Part of the logic of the majority opinion was that the thermal emissions issued from inside the house in question should be private : "Americans inside their homes expect their heat signatures and other incidental emissions to be private" (quoting from the opinion reported in Wired).
But how does these emissions differ materially from, say light bouncing off people in the midst of committing some heinous crime, while in the privacy of their own backyard, or while inside their home in front of an open window ? Should that not be sufficient for law enforcement to take action ? How about sound waves emanating from the sounds of a crime in progress ? Should those sound waves be private, too ?
Re:PS2 Computer would never work -- Here's why
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 1
Adding more features means selling more PS2s, selling more PS2s means more
developers willing to commit to the platform, which means
more games available and more money for Sony
Maybe. But the premise of PS2-as-computing-platform seems largely built on the fact that the PS2 itself is pretty cheap. But its cost is evidently subsidized by Sony, who sells them at a loss and recoups its money later on royalties. So this creates a bit of a dilemna for Sony in terms of making it a viable non-gaming platform:
If Linux on PS2 is available, and if there are enough applications to make it as useable (i.e. Word/Excel compatible) as a commodity PC, and if the overall cost of the system (including keyboard, hard-drive, ethernet, and probably a floppy or Zip disk) doesn't go much over $500 USD (for which, in Canada, you can buy a pretty half-decent PC NOW (sometimes even with monitor), then what might happen is people start buying the PS2 for purposes other than playing games (for which they reap big royalties).
One could imagine PS2s bought exclusively for non-game related applications. These new applications would mostly not accrue royalties to Sony, which would mean Sony would be subsidizing the cost of the PS2 for these users, with no way to recoup those losses from these users. Depending on how wide-spread the acceptance of PS2s for non-gaming related purposes, and on how much a loss Sony takes on these boxes, this could potentially harm the bottom line. So Sony might be faced with the possibility of upping the price of the box, which would decrease its attractiveness as a platform.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the author's main gripe : that the license accompanying Pine "restricts modified redistribution" (emphasis mine). But doesn't the GPL also restrict modified redistribution? I can't redistribute GPL'ed software without making the source code available, can I ? So restriction-free redistribution cannot by itself be the sticking point for the author of the article. Why doesn't the author just face up to his ideologies and admit he just doesn't like how the UW license restricts modified redistribution, and say instead that he prefers the way the GPL restricts the same thing ?
If I am reading between the lines correctly, here, and you are suggesting that you save yourself money by not reporting these new boxes as income, isn't this tax evasion ?
I think I skipped the class where we learned about exaclty how quiet 2 bel hard drives are.
Are you serious ? The noise from your 3 drives is causing you hearing damage??? How close are you to the drive ? Given that the noise from even the loudest drives I have ever been around is certainly far less than that of normal conversation, I would think the only way they could damage your ear is if you removed the casing, honed the edge of a platter to be razor sharp, and cut your ear off. Or maybe you could do it if you cut off the leads from the cables, exposed the wires at the end, then jabbed them so far in your ear canal as to rupture the tympanic membrane.
I also wonder how long the hinges on the screens would last in the environments PDA users typically find themselves in (crowded subway stations, in the car with kids, etc.)...
Three screens sounds cool, and the authors make a reasonably good rationalization for their use, but in the absence of real photos of the 3 screen device, I think I might prefer having one larger screen with a windowing system that let me display multiple types of information, rather than 3 single small screens...it would let me see more when I needed to. For instance, a 21" monitor costs well more than 3 or 4 15" monitors, but who wouldn't prefer the one larger monitor ? I guess there would be power savings when using only one of the screens, though. I suppose figuring out the strengths/weaknesses of various approaches is the whole point of building concept devices.
What, no laments/rejoices about how this machine does or does not run Linux ? Just exactly who is running this show ?
Yeah...I remember almost jumping out of my skin when a guard would hear me shooting or spot me before I could steal a uniform and I would hear that tinny, scrapey "jawohl". I don't think I ever won it, but I think that was because there was no save-game function.
In those days the only way to make a sound on an Apple II (without a special sound card) was to repeatedly toggle the speaker, which you did by accessing a particular memory location (I can almost remember it ). To get a higher tone you had to toggle it faster. Yes, the game halted while the sound was being played. Yes, this explained the poor quality. No, there was nothing that could be done about it.
I agree. In fact, one could argue that the Japanese murdered and raped in Nanking (among other places) with an abandon, wantoness, glee, and sheer speed that was unsurpassed by the Nazis. Worse, while Germany has taken sizeable steps towards recognizing its complicity and making reparations, the Japanese have done very little towards the same. In a TV interview I saw once that pitted the author of the book "The Rape of Nanking" against a Japanese diplomat (I believe the ambassador to the U.S.), said diplomat steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the Japanese did anything that was unexpected during wartime, specifically in Nanking.
Yes, I know, "it's just a game", but I can't think of another game anywhere where you run around and kill an identifiable group of people, no matter how evil they are deemed to be. Can you imagine a game where you're a US GI trying to escape from a Japanese POW camp with Rising Suns everywhere, killing caricatures of (probably bespectacled) Japanese soldiers and invading Japanese labs where experiments are being conducted on Filipinos and Chinese and American servicemen ? What about if a game were released where you are a Palestinian in an Israeli prison and you walk through Star-of-David-festooned hallways trying to kill Israeli stormtroopers while trying to halt their nuclear weapons research program ? How well accepted would those games be ? What kind of uproar would we expect then ?
Also, the plotline was very immersive for its time. It may have been a terrible game now, but it was a groundbreaker then.
I dumped the Linksys DSL router for a Netgear RT-314. While both do port-forwarding (I could not determine from the online documentation nor from various searches whether the SMC barricade or any other number of routers did this), there appeared to be a bug in the Linksys code which caused various applications (read: online games) to abort with generic 'out of sync' errors. The Netgear runs these apps flawlessly... to think I wasted many hours playing games that would die because of my router !!! It also looks nice and feels solid. I should note, however, it does not have an uplink port (the Linksys does), and it does not have either a serial or printer port (which the barricade does).
To the contrary, I was at a conference last week, and some guy two rows back was using a Palm with a keyboard. Sure enough, whenever the speaker would say anything interesting, there would go the clackety-clack of his keyboard. In fact I am not sure whether or not the noise comes from the keyboard action, or from his fingers hitting the keys, and I am not sure if he was an especially heavy typist, but it proved constantly distracting at all the wrong moments.
Umm, but just because a given application of a GPL'ed piece of work that does not result in cancer-like repercussions to other pieces of work, doesn't really diminish one narrower interpretation of the Microsoft argument, which is that using GPL'ed software in software intended for subsequent redistribution DOES result in "cancerous" repercussions. I don't think any reasonable person could deny that the viral nature of the GPL is the very essence of the GPL. Obviously if some GPL'ed code found its way into, say, Word, then Microsoft would have to give up its code, so a Microsoft argument that the GPL is cancer-like for commercial software is not without its merits.. indeed, it is true by design.
So Microsoft uses some GPL'ed stuff in some small part of their universe. This doesn't make them hypocritical in this regard, especially as they are almost certainly going to move that material to Windows as soon as they can if only to fix their PR (and it should be infinitely easier than the Hotmail stuff).
>whois slashdotsucks.com
Registrant:
...
Record last updated on 19-Jun-2001.
Anthony DiPierro
34 Putnam Ave
suite: A7
Brewster, NY 10509
US
Domain Name: SLASHDOTSUCKS.COM
Record expires on 31-Oct-2001.
Record Created on 31-Oct-2000.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.MCFLY.COM 216.97.123.61
Let me get this straight. Microsoft bought a company and uses but does not sell or otherwise redistribute its Linux-based product for a small part of one of their websites. So why exactly should Microsoft donate a completely unrelated product that predates the Linux-based product and almost certainly owes none of its code to said Linux-based product ??? Come on, Microsoft's business conduct is certainly not beyond reproach, but if this is the best you can do in the way of attacking their stand on the GPL....
I can't stand people who sit in classes/meetings/conferences taking notes while typing away noisily on a keyboard. They might as well be listening to headphones that are turned up enough that neighbours can hear. Even worse is when you get more than one of those people nearby you at the same meeting...the cacophony can be damn distracting. At least using Graffiti on the palm doesn't disturb and distract people within earshot. Decorum at the expense of technology, I suppose.
Since you yourself admit the possibility of a security risk, the employers aren't being clueless or dictatorial, and they are not without justification. And as others point out, there are other reasons why they should not allow the software to run. Installation of unsanctioned software increases all sorts of costs: administrators have to tend to machines with non-standard configurations, hard-drives may be used a bit more, network bandwidth is being consumed by transmission, employees spend time installing, playing with and otherwise dicking with the program.
Huh ? I am not an expert in accounting, but have had some financial accounting in the CFA program, and depreciation shows up on the income statement, so it couldn't be "the remaining value of the asset" (else it would be on the balance sheet). To use your terminology, depreciation is "the amount of value that has been used on an asset" in a given reporting period. The amount of value that has been used (total) on an asset is the accumulated depreciation.
Suppose some old QuickC manuals contained Microsoft copyrighted code that got borrowed and incorportated into Linux by some coder...would people here assert that Linux thusly fell under Microsoft's licenses ? (Yeah, I know the code in the QuickC manual probably isn't copyrighted but I'm too tired to search for those things in my basement)
While some people may have well looked at some other code bases, I would be surprised if the all of the coders in the Windows divisions were not under orders to NEVER look at GPL'ed code. Microsoft has too much at stake to risk the possibility that some code under a restrictive license like the GPL would get incorporated either intentionally or unintentionally. You can also bet that any code that does get pulled in from open-source projects like FreeBSD get combed over by an army of lawyers and coders charged with documenting and verifying licensing. Call Microsoft what you want, but you can't call them stupid.
While I have never seen "Windows Bug" pages on MSN (which is not to say they don't exist, I wish I had seen them them), I *certainly* have seen unflattering coverage of Microsoft's and Bill Gates' conduct on Microsoft properties, such as msnbc.com. In this regards, I view properties like msnbc.com to have at least a small measure of integrity more than such chauvinistic p.r. mouthpieces like Slashdot which:
- seems to view the GPL as holy and unquestionable,
-focuses on Linux to the essential exclusion (read: paying token coverage) of other operating systems which 'geeks' may well be interested in,
- is unanimously anti-Microsoft (to the point of not being able to discuss a single Microsoft product or feature without viciously criticizing their larger conduct or philosophy,even when such is irrelevant to the article at hand, and despite the fact that it certainly appears as if at least some of the cabal uses MS products to play games, at least), and
- which rarely has the guts to point out the many bugs and shortcomings of open-source software in general, and Linux in particular.
But how does these emissions differ materially from, say light bouncing off people in the midst of committing some heinous crime, while in the privacy of their own backyard, or while inside their home in front of an open window ? Should that not be sufficient for law enforcement to take action ? How about sound waves emanating from the sounds of a crime in progress ? Should those sound waves be private, too ?
Maybe. But the premise of PS2-as-computing-platform seems largely built on the fact that the PS2 itself is pretty cheap. But its cost is evidently subsidized by Sony, who sells them at a loss and recoups its money later on royalties. So this creates a bit of a dilemna for Sony in terms of making it a viable non-gaming platform:
If Linux on PS2 is available, and if there are enough applications to make it as useable (i.e. Word/Excel compatible) as a commodity PC, and if the overall cost of the system (including keyboard, hard-drive, ethernet, and probably a floppy or Zip disk) doesn't go much over $500 USD (for which, in Canada, you can buy a pretty half-decent PC NOW (sometimes even with monitor), then what might happen is people start buying the PS2 for purposes other than playing games (for which they reap big royalties).
One could imagine PS2s bought exclusively for non-game related applications. These new applications would mostly not accrue royalties to Sony, which would mean Sony would be subsidizing the cost of the PS2 for these users, with no way to recoup those losses from these users. Depending on how wide-spread the acceptance of PS2s for non-gaming related purposes, and on how much a loss Sony takes on these boxes, this could potentially harm the bottom line. So Sony might be faced with the possibility of upping the price of the box, which would decrease its attractiveness as a platform.