You wrote: As I understand it, part of some the licensing deal is that you can reveal any aspects of the spec (especially, if there's a competing spec). Hence, you can't distribute the source for your creation under the GPL. Or am I wong?
Unfortunately you are quite right. I would not work in a lot of cases, but in some instances, like this one, it might. Things like these need to gain momentum, linux has come a long way, in time the big boys will probably see the benefit of having their technologies available on this platform.
From the FAQ: OpenGL® is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., who quite reasonably only licence the name to be used by products which have been tested to comply with the specification. Since testing costs money, there are no free licenced versions of OpenGL.
Licencing is, especially for companies wanting to use Linux, a big issue. There are quite a few projects that could get seriously underway if there was a fund or what ever that could pay some of these fees. It would greatly enhance the acceptability for larger institutions. Maybe in this case it might get some game-writers to get into Linux games. I don't care much for games, put there seem to be an awful lot of people who do.
An interesting way to make moderation work so everybody likes it might be moderator clustering.
There are a lot of moderators moderating SlashDot, maybe even more than the 400 there are now. As moderators tend to be human, they tend to show group behaviour. One moderator cluster(1) may rate a certain style of writing up (Universe A: Linus is God), and another one down (B: Everything that MS does is rotten and should be forgotten). Cluster 2 is different: They don't care much about MS or Linus, they just like to read the social interactions between technology and humans (rate++), but dont particularly like heated, but significant arguments between MS and Linus. And there is a third cluster, etc.
I think it would be briliant to set my prefences so that I can get the down regulation of Cluster 1 (but not their up), and the upregulation of cluster 2 (but not their down).
This would involve giving a patial identity of the moderator to the world, which is not in it self a bad thing. I strongly agree with moderator anomity as a person.
This system might solve one of the worst problems, IMHO, of moderation: Moderator bias.
The only downside is that, as other people stated, up to 95% of all user have their preferences set to the defaults. (This is where a piece of Novell technology might come in handy: personal profiles that are standardised and get transmitted (if you want to) to web sites.)
Moderator bias is what makes some Scientific Journals a nightmare to get an article submitted to.
On the practical side, clusters could be defined by using a questionaire that moderators have to fill out, so they can be clustered. A harder way could be using statistical analysis of the moderators.
I don't tend to side with big companies, but Intel had a point when they said all kinds of IDs and serials are available in any PC.
The most reliable source seems to be the harddrive manufacturer and drive serial number. All available within the IDE and SCSI APIs if I recall correctly.
Why the sudden fuss? The Bad Guys Out There have known this for a long time...
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You wrote:
As I understand it, part of some the licensing deal is that you can reveal any aspects of the spec (especially, if there's a competing spec). Hence, you can't distribute the source for your creation under the GPL. Or am I wong?
Unfortunately you are quite right.
I would not work in a lot of cases, but in some instances, like this one, it might. Things like these need to gain momentum, linux has come a long way, in time the big boys will probably see the benefit of having their technologies available on this platform.
From the FAQ:
OpenGL® is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., who quite reasonably only licence the name to be used by
products which have been tested to comply with the specification. Since testing costs money, there are no free licenced versions
of OpenGL.
Licencing is, especially for companies wanting to use Linux, a big issue. There are quite a few projects that could get seriously underway if there was a fund or what ever that could pay some of these fees.
It would greatly enhance the acceptability for larger institutions.
Maybe in this case it might get some game-writers to get into Linux games. I don't care much for games, put there seem to be an awful lot of people who do.
An interesting way to make moderation work so everybody likes it might be moderator clustering.
There are a lot of moderators moderating SlashDot, maybe even more than the 400 there are now. As moderators tend to be human, they tend to show group behaviour. One moderator cluster(1) may rate a certain style of writing up (Universe A: Linus is God), and another one down (B: Everything that MS does is rotten and should be forgotten).
Cluster 2 is different: They don't care much about MS or Linus, they just like to read the social interactions between technology and humans (rate++), but dont particularly like heated, but significant arguments between MS and Linus.
And there is a third cluster, etc.
I think it would be briliant to set my prefences so that I can get the down regulation of Cluster 1 (but not their up), and the upregulation of cluster 2 (but not their down).
This would involve giving a patial identity of the moderator to the world, which is not in it self a bad thing. I strongly agree with moderator anomity as a person.
This system might solve one of the worst problems, IMHO, of moderation: Moderator bias.
The only downside is that, as other people stated, up to 95% of all user have their preferences set to the defaults. (This is where a piece of Novell technology might come in handy: personal profiles that are standardised and get transmitted (if you want to) to web sites.)
Moderator bias is what makes some Scientific Journals a nightmare to get an article submitted to.
On the practical side, clusters could be defined by using a questionaire that moderators have to fill out, so they can be clustered. A harder way could be using statistical analysis of the moderators.
I don't tend to side with big companies, but Intel had a point when they said all kinds of IDs and serials are available in any PC.
The most reliable source seems to be the harddrive manufacturer and drive serial number. All available within the IDE and SCSI APIs if I recall correctly.
Why the sudden fuss? The Bad Guys Out There have known this for a long time...