I would laugh my ass off if this wasn't so sad. Can you believe that justice, through litigation, has become just another corporate weapon? Oh wait, we knew that already.
Nevertheless, the irony would be enough to kill a medium-sized vulcan town.
Alright, this is going out of hand. I find that most of the charm of the Mr Torvalds is that he's close to us other geeks, and sort-of "first among equals"... Yeah, of course, not exactly, but you get my idea. Now over the last months I seem to see a crop of "Linus says..." and stuff... I don't want to see this become a personnality cult, as it's going to strongly degrade the quality of the open-source developper environment.
Still use an old hp workstation monitor. Bugger's fixed-resolution and fixed refresh rate (1280x1024@72Hz or 1024x768, don't have it next to me), and syncs on green. Makes it unusable on most modern video cards... but take a matrox card with Linux, and ta-da! I love the fact that the linux driver developpers used an undocumented feature (the output chip COULD do sync on green!) in the driver. Bugger monitor weighs a ton, but I got my 21" screen for 0$ plus shipping costs (my arms).
FINALLY, an NFS client for win! That said, I'm still looking for a network file system that I like. Samba gives me white hairs on our student network, as periodically domain browsing goes down (Does it come from the samba master? or from one of those diverse win (95/98/2k/XP) PCs on the network? What's this Coda FS I see in the kernel, any user experience out there?
Sheeat. I was hoping on buying myself some Mindstorms a little later on when I'll be self sustained, because the darn things cost way too much (students have a very limited budget)... But by then they'll be gone. They were really one of a kind, and it saddens me no end to see Lego botched this try... (where are the upgrades? A PIC or any microcontroller costs zilch!) They messed up their market aim. Movie tie-ins? eech, all those special pieces were worthless! But I pray they'll still be around when I'll be looking for stuff for my kids. In the meantime, I'll cry a tear of nostalgia with the Legomania Demo (for those of you who still have a windows lying around, a majority, don't lie to yourselves).
you know, few sentences are as annoying as "[N million people] can't be wrong.". Not in this case mind... but OF COURSE so many people can be wrong! Remember that law of mass stupididty? "The intelligence of a mob is equal to that of it's stupidest member divided by the number of people in it", you get my point. So people thought the earth was flat. And the center of the universe. that matter was made of earth, wind, and fire. Manifest Destiny, racism, ANYTHING! Now why big news sources (CNN?) really trustworthy anymore? Because they bend to those millions who "can't be wrong". Think it's time I found myself some deep cozy cave...
after some initial 'wtf' and worry, there's only one thing left for me to do...
/me lays back with a nice martini (with an olive, for without an olive, a martini isn't _really_ a martini) and awaits the fireworks as SCO prepares to enter the atmosphere and burst into flames.
"he U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that a patent held by E-Pass may have been infringed by Palm and other PDA..." What the hell? since when do courts rule "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no"!? okay sure, so what they're saying is that "ok, you can proceed to the next step". nevertheless the idea of a court ruling (ie final decision) "maybe" seems... well, preposterous.
Yes of course, but the parent's comment "If you burn the CD at slower speeds, the laser has more time to burn better pits in the media." is wrong by saying it's a problem of "time to burn a hole". As this comment and you correctly point out, it's more a question of errors relative to speed.
which is a completely ridiculous notion. Well no, let's not be so aggressive, it's not COMPLETELY ridiculous. But if that reasoning was all true, if the laser had the time to burn a pit normally at 1x, then that time would be divided by N at Nx speed (well not exactly, but that's beyond my scope), and the pit would be N times "weaker". So of course, the power of the laser is increased to palliate this effect. So in an perfect world, the laser power would be increased 32 times when you increased the speed 32 times, thus making the same pits as if you burned in 1x. Now this is only taking into account laser power when burning at higher speeds. Thing is, there can be lots of other problems when burning at higher speed, any minuscule glitch in laser power, rotation speed, laser position, anything can cause a problem. Of course most problems are corrected, and those that pass aren't fatal. But with age, the organic compound on which your data is written deteriorates, as any organic compound would, and the errors get worse.
Strange that I've had exactly the opposite experience. I was going nuts with the configuration of printers with 'good old' lpd, and so decided to try out CUPS. After installing some related packages (cupsomatic), it just... worked! Hell, installation was as easy as in windows! (note: this on a debian distribution)
okay, sure, it's not technically linux, rather it's X. Nevertheless, I've been bitched by fonts. After a great many late hours of fighting and tuning and googling, fonts remain one huge bloody mess on linux. It's pretty awefully documented. Like: Is xfs still necessary on a non-network box (server and display on same machine)? How/where do I install fonts!? And why the hell does *%$ konsole not see any of the available fonts?!
it's extraordinary to see today's business practices. Just Check out sco's stock value anywhere (Nasdaq: SCOX if you missed it from all related press releases*). It's gone from around 1.2 in january when they starting hinting about pressing IP claims, to the current 12! They've increased their value by an order of magnitude! At the same time they put themselves in a situation where it would be convenient for IBM to just buy them to make'em shut up. And in the whole affair, Linux gets bad publicity for the guys who hold the Big Money strings. These guys don't care about effectiveness, they don't want to be hit by a lawsuite, which would be MUCH costlier than reducing purchase/licensing costs. So while Linux keeps making steps forward in our geeky view (yay! just about as easy as winxp! yay! it got an excellent common cirteria certification), SCO is batting it back to the prehistoric age. Remember, winning such a lawsuite isn't all about "being right". Lawyers know everything of loopholes around "being right", and given enough money will explain by 1+1=2 that Bad is Good. This is going to be long and bloody because it's SCO's last-ditch policy, and we're talking cornered-rat tactics by people with money and getting media attention. The only thing we can do about it is, if ever your Boss mentions the name SCO, calmly explain how they have absolutely no chance of winning, and any money given to them is straight to the trash, and money refused to Red Hat and other OSS-based companies in light of the fight will seriously hamper lots of excellent quality projects.
*btw aren't there criteria which would quickly kick SCO out of Nasdaq? that would be fun:)
that way, we are forced to have a look at the article, thus preventing uninformed rants. Yes, it requires a tad more effort, but I think Slashdotters need that =)
you forgot to capitalize it, it's supposed to be "The Obviously Superior Linux Distribution Against Which There Can Be No Other Contenders", and as it is a phrase to be used often, TOSLDAWTCBNOC, for short. Yes, the "TCBN" part is tough.
1) Well, on their site Digital Innovations say they intend to open up the device for the community. This way we should be able to quickly get some good hacks for the player (i'm not expecting D.I. to *support* these hacks), thus enhancing the player for free! 2) Ogg vorbis support: we're not talking about whether Ogg sounds better on the player. Remember that most people have secondary players for their audio files (like... their PC?) which can take full advantage of the higher quality (?) of the OggV* files. If the player supports OggV, then all those guys who are turning to OggV will be able to listen to their precious OggV collection with this player 3) I'm not sure about this, but look at the HD Upgrade version of the Neuros player. It seems that with it you can quickly switch from a solid-state device, which you take out for your jogging session. to the HD version for that long car trip, with one device!
*OggV = Ogg Vorbis As a side note, remember that Ogg != audio. The ogg format, if you checked out the RFC that was posted some time ago, is a *container* for media streams. Vorbis is the actual audio format, contained in the.ogg file. From what I skimmed, Ogg can contain mp3 or mpeg4 even!
From the Neuros Forum thread pertaining to ogg Vorbis, from the head of the Neuros product development:
(...)we do wish to open up our system so that third parties can contribute to the product's development amd leverage our own efforts. Good! another smart company who wants to help the user community rather that stop them!
On their site, Digital Innovations say the NeuRosetta (ogg vorbis for neuros) should soon (sometime in June?) be available for the Neuros HD... I was really hyped up by the Neuros 128MB / 20GB Upgrade Bundle (tho does the upgrade bundle include the Neuros 128? If not, the price tag is beyond my limited student resources...) But will NeuRosetta work on other versions of the Neuros than the Neuros HD? Coz an HD mp3 player is maybe a bit big for all my uses...
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Actually no, they didn't really care, then.
I would laugh my ass off if this wasn't so sad. Can you believe that justice, through litigation, has become just another corporate weapon? Oh wait, we knew that already.
Nevertheless, the irony would be enough to kill a medium-sized vulcan town.
One word: Aerogel.
Lady 3Jane!
I'll drink to that!
Alright, this is going out of hand. I find that most of the charm of the Mr Torvalds is that he's close to us other geeks, and sort-of "first among equals"... Yeah, of course, not exactly, but you get my idea.
Now over the last months I seem to see a crop of "Linus says..." and stuff... I don't want to see this become a personnality cult, as it's going to strongly degrade the quality of the open-source developper environment.
Still use an old hp workstation monitor. Bugger's fixed-resolution and fixed refresh rate (1280x1024@72Hz or 1024x768, don't have it next to me), and syncs on green. Makes it unusable on most modern video cards... but take a matrox card with Linux, and ta-da!
I love the fact that the linux driver developpers used an undocumented feature (the output chip COULD do sync on green!) in the driver. Bugger monitor weighs a ton, but I got my 21" screen for 0$ plus shipping costs (my arms).
FINALLY, an NFS client for win!
That said, I'm still looking for a network file system that I like. Samba gives me white hairs on our student network, as periodically domain browsing goes down (Does it come from the samba master? or from one of those diverse win (95/98/2k/XP) PCs on the network?
What's this Coda FS I see in the kernel, any user experience out there?
Sheeat. I was hoping on buying myself some Mindstorms a little later on when I'll be self sustained, because the darn things cost way too much (students have a very limited budget)... But by then they'll be gone. They were really one of a kind, and it saddens me no end to see Lego botched this try... (where are the upgrades? A PIC or any microcontroller costs zilch!) They messed up their market aim.
Movie tie-ins? eech, all those special pieces were worthless!
But I pray they'll still be around when I'll be looking for stuff for my kids.
In the meantime, I'll cry a tear of nostalgia with the Legomania Demo (for those of you who still have a windows lying around, a majority, don't lie to yourselves).
...on the amessage.* servers. They patched the transport a while ago. Never had to change clients.
you know, few sentences are as annoying as "[N million people] can't be wrong.". Not in this case mind... but OF COURSE so many people can be wrong! Remember that law of mass stupididty? "The intelligence of a mob is equal to that of it's stupidest member divided by the number of people in it", you get my point.
So people thought the earth was flat. And the center of the universe. that matter was made of earth, wind, and fire. Manifest Destiny, racism, ANYTHING! Now why big news sources (CNN?) really trustworthy anymore? Because they bend to those millions who "can't be wrong". Think it's time I found myself some deep cozy cave...
after some initial 'wtf' and worry, there's only one thing left for me to do...
/me lays back with a nice martini (with an olive, for without an olive, a martini isn't _really_ a martini) and awaits the fireworks as SCO prepares to enter the atmosphere and burst into flames.
"he U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that a patent held by E-Pass may have been infringed by Palm and other PDA ..."
What the hell? since when do courts rule "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no"!?
okay sure, so what they're saying is that "ok, you can proceed to the next step". nevertheless the idea of a court ruling (ie final decision) "maybe" seems... well, preposterous.
Yes of course, but the parent's comment "If you burn the CD at slower speeds, the laser has more time to burn better pits in the media." is wrong by saying it's a problem of "time to burn a hole". As this comment and you correctly point out, it's more a question of errors relative to speed.
which is a completely ridiculous notion. Well no, let's not be so aggressive, it's not COMPLETELY ridiculous. But if that reasoning was all true, if the laser had the time to burn a pit normally at 1x, then that time would be divided by N at Nx speed (well not exactly, but that's beyond my scope), and the pit would be N times "weaker".
So of course, the power of the laser is increased to palliate this effect.
So in an perfect world, the laser power would be increased 32 times when you increased the speed 32 times, thus making the same pits as if you burned in 1x.
Now this is only taking into account laser power when burning at higher speeds. Thing is, there can be lots of other problems when burning at higher speed, any minuscule glitch in laser power, rotation speed, laser position, anything can cause a problem. Of course most problems are corrected, and those that pass aren't fatal. But with age, the organic compound on which your data is written deteriorates, as any organic compound would, and the errors get worse.
me not too.
Strange that I've had exactly the opposite experience. I was going nuts with the configuration of printers with 'good old' lpd, and so decided to try out CUPS. After installing some related packages (cupsomatic), it just... worked! Hell, installation was as easy as in windows! (note: this on a debian distribution)
okay, sure, it's not technically linux, rather it's X. Nevertheless, I've been bitched by fonts. After a great many late hours of fighting and tuning and googling, fonts remain one huge bloody mess on linux. It's pretty awefully documented. Like: Is xfs still necessary on a non-network box (server and display on same machine)? How/where do I install fonts!? And why the hell does *%$ konsole not see any of the available fonts?!
well; looks like these researchers know how to get attention. I got the news here in the Economist's excellent vulgarized science section
Don't you get it? It's their goal! The evil moderators want to destroy this little item of computer diversity! It's computer racism I say!
Wait, we already have loads of that, here at slashdot...
it's extraordinary to see today's business practices. Just Check out sco's stock value anywhere (Nasdaq: SCOX if you missed it from all related press releases*). It's gone from around 1.2 in january when they starting hinting about pressing IP claims, to the current 12! They've increased their value by an order of magnitude! At the same time they put themselves in a situation where it would be convenient for IBM to just buy them to make'em shut up.
:)
And in the whole affair, Linux gets bad publicity for the guys who hold the Big Money strings. These guys don't care about effectiveness, they don't want to be hit by a lawsuite, which would be MUCH costlier than reducing purchase/licensing costs.
So while Linux keeps making steps forward in our geeky view (yay! just about as easy as winxp! yay! it got an excellent common cirteria certification), SCO is batting it back to the prehistoric age.
Remember, winning such a lawsuite isn't all about "being right". Lawyers know everything of loopholes around "being right", and given enough money will explain by 1+1=2 that Bad is Good. This is going to be long and bloody because it's SCO's last-ditch policy, and we're talking cornered-rat tactics by people with money and getting media attention.
The only thing we can do about it is, if ever your Boss mentions the name SCO, calmly explain how they have absolutely no chance of winning, and any money given to them is straight to the trash, and money refused to Red Hat and other OSS-based companies in light of the fight will seriously hamper lots of excellent quality projects.
*btw aren't there criteria which would quickly kick SCO out of Nasdaq? that would be fun
what about Harvey the Wonder Hamster, and HIS master?
that way, we are forced to have a look at the article, thus preventing uninformed rants. Yes, it requires a tad more effort, but I think Slashdotters need that =)
you forgot to capitalize it, it's supposed to be "The Obviously Superior Linux Distribution Against Which There Can Be No Other Contenders", and as it is a phrase to be used often, TOSLDAWTCBNOC, for short. Yes, the "TCBN" part is tough.
1) Well, on their site Digital Innovations say they intend to open up the device for the community. This way we should be able to quickly get some good hacks for the player (i'm not expecting D.I. to *support* these hacks), thus enhancing the player for free!
.ogg file. From what I skimmed, Ogg can contain mp3 or mpeg4 even!
2) Ogg vorbis support: we're not talking about whether Ogg sounds better on the player. Remember that most people have secondary players for their audio files (like... their PC?) which can take full advantage of the higher quality (?) of the OggV* files. If the player supports OggV, then all those guys who are turning to OggV will be able to listen to their precious OggV collection with this player
3) I'm not sure about this, but look at the HD Upgrade version of the Neuros player. It seems that with it you can quickly switch from a solid-state device, which you take out for your jogging session. to the HD version for that long car trip, with one device!
*OggV = Ogg Vorbis
As a side note, remember that Ogg != audio. The ogg format, if you checked out the RFC that was posted some time ago, is a *container* for media streams. Vorbis is the actual audio format, contained in the
From the Neuros Forum thread pertaining to ogg Vorbis, from the head of the Neuros product development:
(...)we do wish to open up our system so that third parties can contribute to the product's development amd leverage our own efforts.
Good! another smart company who wants to help the user community rather that stop them!
On their site, Digital Innovations say the NeuRosetta (ogg vorbis for neuros) should soon (sometime in June?) be available for the Neuros HD... I was really hyped up by the Neuros 128MB / 20GB Upgrade Bundle (tho does the upgrade bundle include the Neuros 128? If not, the price tag is beyond my limited student resources...) But will NeuRosetta work on other versions of the Neuros than the Neuros HD? Coz an HD mp3 player is maybe a bit big for all my uses...