It might be possible to build something similar to an oil platform, or possibly even make us of a decomissioned one.
It's fifty years out though, there's no guarantees that any presently stable government will still be stable nor any presently unstable government won't be the model of stability.
Seriously, why couldn't he just certify certain countries as "Freedonia" and incorporate this into
the licence? I imagine there's some legal reason...
The freedom of a nation or a state can change with whoever happens to be in control at the time. Suppose that Ferdinand Poo was currently the reigning champion of freedom. RMS modifies the GPL to state that its written under the jurisdiction of Ferdinand Poo. Next week there is a coup, the previous head of state is now worm food. The new head of state is the antithesis of democracy and freedom.
Uh oh, the GPL is now basically null and void.
This is a bit drastic but things like the DMCA wouldn't have been passed even 15 years ago.
Quicktime player is extensible, as is I believe Windows Media Player. The barriers to actual acceptance will most likely be the quality of the codec. Trying to get anything other than a fan-boy site like slashdot to use it won't be succesful unless there are compelling advantages to using it. The 50K bounty is no more than a signing bonus for an engineer capable of doing industry leading research in the area of video compression.
There are likely intellectual property issues that will scare away any potential commercial use of an Open Source MPEG4 codec.
By and large most projects will still be done by people to fill their own personal needs, ala the linux kernel and Linus. There are some areas that are otherwise neglected where the enticement of a financial reward could really help in getting an Open Source alternative out there. I think of this a bit more like contract programming where the fruits of the labour are given to the community.
Video codecs probably are not good targets for bounty driven programming though. First of all to really develop a codec takes a very substantial amount of knowledge of signal processing theory, human perception, code optimization and numeric methods - at least if you want a USEFUL codec to be the result. In this case maybe things are a bit easier, the target, MPEG4, is already a documented algorithm. For a from-scratch codec I'd expect that Open Source proponents would call the project vapour-wear before the research phase was even close to completion.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but I've yet to see a good quality codec come out as Open Source. Calling it a good codec because it's open isn't good enough in this case.
This reminds me of 'long ago', about '92 I think it was. I was getting ready to finish my first degree, an Associates in
Electronic Engineering Technologies. All the professional industry magazines that I was reading kept proclaiming
what a shortage of technical workers there was. I was so excited to be earning a degree in field with such a demand.
I graduated with about 20 other guys. I got lucky and landed a job in a union shop where I got about $10/hr. The best
the others could find were some jobs paying $7/hr. As a point of reference, the job I had to get through school was as a
security guard. I sat at a desk and had people sign a paper when they came in. I made $6/hr.
There's got to be more to the story than what you say. I graduated in '91 with a bachelor of applied science in electrical engineering. I made over twice what you made and over three times what your friend made while working part time as an undergraduate. i.e., I was making 21 or so dollars an hour while in school. I wasn't alone, many of my friends did just as well.
On graduating I had two choices, go into industry and get payed fairly well or stick around for graduate studies. I opted for the latter and as a graduate student around 30 bucks an hour and got a free ride. Again, I wasn't alone here.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for people who complain that they can't make money as an engineer or in another technical field. I've almost always found that these same people may have a degree in the field but there is no way on earth I'd personally hire them. There are exceptions of course, maybe you're one, but having a degree doesn't entitle you to high wages. Having the degree, an interest in the job and talent entitles you to high wages.
I'm a foreigner in the U.S. on an H1-B, the problem isn't the number of available H1-B Visas, the problem is unscrupulous companies as well as people who are willing to put up with five years of slave labour to get to permanent residency. To compound the problem there is also the INS which seems to spend a huge amount of time making H1-B applicants wait but seems to accomplish little in terms of realistically determining if the wages are just for the job and location. I won't even start complaining about the slow permanent residency and citizenship process.
I'm not in I.T., I'm an engineer, but I know that compared to other engineers at my location I'm being payed very favourably. If I wasn't I'd walk out in an instant. I also know that in my company they'd never replace a senior engineer with a less expensive college grad or immigrant. Most of the engineers I work with have been here for 15 or more years.
The current way the INS is run and in turn runs things gives too much leverage to unscrupulous companies. The filing processes for permanent residancy are too long, so as a result engineers from abroad can feel that they're forced to stay at their current employer for the years it takes to get permanent residency. Unscrupulous companies can exploit this to keep good engineers onboard for peanuts.
People in that situation are in a very weak bargaining position. They can't vote, they're not citizens. They can't easily change jobs, an H1-B ties you to a particular position at a particular company.
This product seems to me like something that needs the final nail in its coffin, if not I wouldn't be at all suprised to see it as the final nail in 3DFX' coffin. At a suggested retail price of 600 bucks I can't see anybody seriously pursuing it.
It's too high priced for all but the gamers with the deepest pockets (it costs more than some PC's!) and 3DFX doesn't really have any penetration into professional graphics (too many years w/o 32 bit 3D and supporting proprietary graphics libraries instead of OpenGL).
It's going to cost more money to produce than they'll make off of it (of course overall 3DFX loses money hand over fist, but they're being punished for it on the stock market).
A weak case wouldn't set precedence by being thrown out of court, there is also the matter of jurisdiction. If the court is thrown out on the grounds that prohibiting linking to copyrighted material is unconstitutional it would only be a precedent in the territory over which that court has jurisdiction. A higher court could still overturn the findings.
Re:Breeding population
on
TigerCloning
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· Score: 2
This isn't entirely true. There are endangered species that have recovered after dropping down to around a dozen (I saw this on National Geographic or some similar show, it was a US species of creature, I'm drawing a blank on the actual bird though) closely related animals.
In the same show they talked about using the genes of close evolutionary cousins to reduce the potential damage caused by inbreeding. This would be key to making a viable species recovery from only preserved genetic material.
If this reintroduction were successful (and a lot of knowledgeable people say it won't be, apparently DNA tends to fragment) the biggest problem will be, as usual, humans. Much like the reintroduction of wolves these tasmanian tigers will be mythified and vilified and hunted back to extinction by clueless farmers.
No matter what the application there are always myriad screams of "if it was released under the GPL it would be stable and have reasonable features now" due to the breadth of eyes looking at it. There's never been a test case with the following characteristics: 1) the project is languishing in the eyes of the public 2) there is an interest in the project 3) it languished under a license that wasn't the GPL.
<p>
I hope this makes mozilla or GNU-Mozilla very succesful but I wonder if it will really happen or not. Time will tell. It will be major egg on the face of the GPL zealots if it doesn't happen though.
Re:Has Anybody Used the Mindstorms Before?
on
Lego + Linux HOWTO
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· Score: 1
I bought one for myself (no kids, we'd be fighting over the toys anyway). I find it easy to work with and I did similar things (sans motors or computer interfaces) with LEGO technics when I was about 10 and with Meccano when I was around 8. I'd have loved these around that age or even a bit earlier.
I've not used the software that comes with it since I don't run Windows, but it looks like its simple to use, sort of a simplified version of ProGraph (A visual language which may or may not still exist)
Timeliness. Programs CHANGE! Open projects change QUICKLY! You must have open docs, or at least docs not
committed to paper, to revise them.
Programs change, docs don't. Other than a few projects like Apache and PostgreSQL most documentation lags so badly that the 'free' documentation is useless. It's unencumbered but the developers are too busy to update the documentation and no outside parties step up to the plate.
Writing documentation isn't sexy enough for most people yet those same people aren't competent enough to contribute code... so they (myself included) contribute nothing.
In a lot of cases I'd rather have non-free but up-to-date documentation.
I'm not going to volunteer for it. But I can think of a segment of the population that may find it useful. Business executives travelling abroad have been the target of kidnapping plots (actually, foreigners travelling abroad, but business executives are more at risk). The local geurilla fighters kidnap you, ask for ransom and release you. Maybe. An added bit of insurance could be a tracking device.
I've seen reports on this a few times in ABC news and other main stream media. I don't know how prevalent this really is. Typically the news is more than willing to overemphasize risks to give people reason to read the news. I'm not sure it matters how true or not true it is. The same executives who enroll themselves in survival courses and hire security details would also be more inclined to get one of these embedded in them.
Get this months IEEE Spectrum issue. It's an electrical engineering magazine but its written for a more general audience. A quick search turned out that the article I was thinking of is online at IEEE Spectrum Online
Briefly, in one study of 250000 cell phone subscribers they found no mortality difference between hand held cell phone use and automobile mounted cell phones (hand helds have the transmitter close to your head, car mounted have them further away). They went a bit further and looked for a correlation between duration of cell phone use and mortality and did find one: use of a cell phone while driving did result in more accidents.
Animal studies where they were subjected to radiation of the frequency and modulation of cell phone also yielded no correlation between cell phone usage and cancer.
Read the article though, its pretty good (as Spectrum usually is)
The 100K limitation can be bypassed if you use an automated system on top of a Publius client. Consider some large package of data, say the source code to MozillaR16.
You create a gzipped tar file of MozillaR16, MozillaR16.tar.gz. You use a simple utility to seperate it out into 100K pieces:
piece00000 through piece99999 (10 gigs of data there, in 100K pieces!)
If you abandoned these on Publius they'd be useless, there's no information on reassembling them into a whole and unless you're very careful there can be ambiguity in what fragment of the archive goes with what other fragment of the archive.
You calculate the MD128 hash of each piece and rename it with the hash as part of the information:
MozillaR16-0x01234567012345670123456701234567 and so on.
You append all these filenames into a file
MozillaR16.build
Now if you want the files in MozillaR16 you get the MozillaR16.build file. Your client sends out queries for the various 100K packages that build up MozillaR16.tar.gz.
This could be truely distributed in that there isn't the necessity that any one site contains the whole list of fragments needed to build an archive. You could add in a translation layer so that any individual file is a cross section of the overall archive itself such that by itself it contains little or no information. Think of grabbing 100K bytes of the archive at random and inserting them into files with offset information. Any single file would not contain any distinguishable information. It might be a safety feature against being accused of carrying certain types of information.
No such luck here, I'm Canadian. 11 bucks for the last pitcher of beer I had while in university. On the other hand I actually drank good beer as opposed to Milwaukee's Best or whatever else is on sale for 6 bucks per case of 24.
The point is that no matter how cheap you remember everything else being there were other non-essential expenses. College students choose where they spend the money (and most College students I knew had extensive if estoric CD collections). If they're spending less on CD's now and there is a correlation between this and mp3 then it's pretty fair to say that mp3 hurts profits in that market segment.
For a realistic survey they should've picked a suitable sized random population of music listeners who uses Napster and an equal sized random population of music listners who don't use Napster. I'm not too sure the results would've been any more favourable for the "But it encourages us to buy your CD's" argument, but thats just my personal statistics looking at highly payed engineer and computer scientist friends.
Considering the quantity of beer consumed by college students, pleading poverty doesn't hold a whole lot of water though. It also doesn't excuse copywrite violation, music isn't a necessity and the radio is free as are most local bands if you bother to go to the bars where they play.
The article said that "They've even open sourced the kernel." I would actually be quite surprised if they didn't- after all, the
Linux kernel is released under the GPL, which requires all derived works to also be open source. I don't see why Logik
stated this fact as if it's nice of them to do that - it's not like they had any other option.
I'd be suprised if they didn't, but if they didn't state that they did so prominently I'd be totally unsuprised if the drooling hoardes didn't assume they didn't release under the GPL and go on a witch hunt w/o checking facts first. As far as reporting on it ZDnet the idea of the GPL is still new to the media, even though its been around for ages. (I'm assuming ZDnet went out of their way to state this, don't watch the show and can't find it on the GeoCities page...)
The current sterilizing procedures for spacecraft are very stringent. They really want to knock down everything. The reason being that this experiment was already accidently done.
First link, now a quick summary: The early unmanned space probes contained cameras. This was the mid 1960's, the only way to retrieve the images was to pick up the cameras, which our intrepid astronauts did. They returned to earth with a colony of the bacteria, these bacteria survived launch, radiation, 3 years on the moon, launch from the moon, more radiation and re-entry.
High compression ratios are easy. High compression ratios that don't look like utter crap is difficult. This algorithm isn't even for movie data though, its for 3D scans points, more along the lines of a model.
As one poster jokingly stated the Matrix could be stored in a single bit, '1', for instance albeit with some loss in signal quality. An algorithm won't become popular based only on its ability to reduce data, nor will it become popular only based on its fidelity (otherwise we'd be sharing 30 frame per second raw digital data)
slashdot is part of a corporation now, they should pay for damages, say 75% of the clickthroughs from slashdot. That'd nullify the thoughtlessness of puting the direct link down.
I'm assuming you're not poor, since you have a computer and internet access. So just go to the local cineplex and spend $8, or even better, go to the mattine and save lots of money.
I'm a lot more concerned with wasting the time than wasting the money. Between work and other things I need to do I budget my spare time on the things that bring me the most enjoyment. It's summer now and its been a pretty damned nice summer. To talk me out of hiking or biking as opposed to sitting on my butt for a couple of hours (ok, biking is sitting on my butt a couple of hours but you know what I mean) I need a pretty compelling argument. I'll see Titan A.E. when it comes out on video, probably in the not so nice months (I'm in Wisconsin, so thats pretty much anything after September till May)
When I first saw the teasers for Titan A.E. on television it looked like it was going to be awesome. It looked like it was going to be closer to anime than the typical american movie: an actual plot, character development, deep story and characters as opposed to the typical saturday morning cartoon action hero with the a somewhat typical plot and two dimensional characters.
When they showed the trailers I felt robbed. It looked more akin to Lion King than what I was expecting. I was half expecting the characters to break out in song. To my eye they geared this thing at the same people who religiously watch Disney cartoons (not that there's anything wrong with that, but its not what I'm interested in) who may not really be into science fiction.
I didn't see it, but I had every intention of seeing it prior to seeing the trailer. Good marketing that, changing somebodies mind 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
I don't know where the fault lies, but it just didn't seem like a very compelling movie to win 8 bucks and a couple hours of my time. Maybe the studio forced there hand in the animation and story department. I don't think animation is dead, nor do I think two dimensional animation is dead. It just looked like a single episode of Gundam Wing could involve me more than a full movie of Titan A.E. would.
I don't even know if what cartoon network shows is supposed to be good anime, but I do know I like it more than what I've seen coming out of the U.S.
To me it looks like www.anybirthday.com got their information from amazon.com. If you look at the suggested gift fields you'll notice (at least on the few I looked up) that the gifts come from amazon.com and include that umpteen digit identifier that you see when you've got an account at amazon.com.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fifty years out though, there's no guarantees that any presently stable government will still be stable nor any presently unstable government won't be the model of stability.
Uh oh, the GPL is now basically null and void.
This is a bit drastic but things like the DMCA wouldn't have been passed even 15 years ago.
There are likely intellectual property issues that will scare away any potential commercial use of an Open Source MPEG4 codec.
Video codecs probably are not good targets for bounty driven programming though. First of all to really develop a codec takes a very substantial amount of knowledge of signal processing theory, human perception, code optimization and numeric methods - at least if you want a USEFUL codec to be the result. In this case maybe things are a bit easier, the target, MPEG4, is already a documented algorithm. For a from-scratch codec I'd expect that Open Source proponents would call the project vapour-wear before the research phase was even close to completion.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but I've yet to see a good quality codec come out as Open Source. Calling it a good codec because it's open isn't good enough in this case.
On graduating I had two choices, go into industry and get payed fairly well or stick around for graduate studies. I opted for the latter and as a graduate student around 30 bucks an hour and got a free ride. Again, I wasn't alone here.
Sorry, I have no sympathy for people who complain that they can't make money as an engineer or in another technical field. I've almost always found that these same people may have a degree in the field but there is no way on earth I'd personally hire them. There are exceptions of course, maybe you're one, but having a degree doesn't entitle you to high wages. Having the degree, an interest in the job and talent entitles you to high wages.
I'm not in I.T., I'm an engineer, but I know that compared to other engineers at my location I'm being payed very favourably. If I wasn't I'd walk out in an instant. I also know that in my company they'd never replace a senior engineer with a less expensive college grad or immigrant. Most of the engineers I work with have been here for 15 or more years.
The current way the INS is run and in turn runs things gives too much leverage to unscrupulous companies. The filing processes for permanent residancy are too long, so as a result engineers from abroad can feel that they're forced to stay at their current employer for the years it takes to get permanent residency. Unscrupulous companies can exploit this to keep good engineers onboard for peanuts.
People in that situation are in a very weak bargaining position. They can't vote, they're not citizens. They can't easily change jobs, an H1-B ties you to a particular position at a particular company.
It's too high priced for all but the gamers with the deepest pockets (it costs more than some PC's!) and 3DFX doesn't really have any penetration into professional graphics (too many years w/o 32 bit 3D and supporting proprietary graphics libraries instead of OpenGL).
It's going to cost more money to produce than they'll make off of it (of course overall 3DFX loses money hand over fist, but they're being punished for it on the stock market).
A weak case wouldn't set precedence by being thrown out of court, there is also the matter of jurisdiction. If the court is thrown out on the grounds that prohibiting linking to copyrighted material is unconstitutional it would only be a precedent in the territory over which that court has jurisdiction. A higher court could still overturn the findings.
In the same show they talked about using the genes of close evolutionary cousins to reduce the potential damage caused by inbreeding. This would be key to making a viable species recovery from only preserved genetic material.
If this reintroduction were successful (and a lot of knowledgeable people say it won't be, apparently DNA tends to fragment) the biggest problem will be, as usual, humans. Much like the reintroduction of wolves these tasmanian tigers will be mythified and vilified and hunted back to extinction by clueless farmers.
No matter what the application there are always myriad screams of "if it was released under the GPL it would be stable and have reasonable features now" due to the breadth of eyes looking at it. There's never been a test case with the following characteristics: 1) the project is languishing in the eyes of the public 2) there is an interest in the project 3) it languished under a license that wasn't the GPL.
<p>
I hope this makes mozilla or GNU-Mozilla very succesful but I wonder if it will really happen or not. Time will tell. It will be major egg on the face of the GPL zealots if it doesn't happen though.
I've not used the software that comes with it since I don't run Windows, but it looks like its simple to use, sort of a simplified version of ProGraph (A visual language which may or may not still exist)
Writing documentation isn't sexy enough for most people yet those same people aren't competent enough to contribute code... so they (myself included) contribute nothing.
In a lot of cases I'd rather have non-free but up-to-date documentation.
I've seen reports on this a few times in ABC news and other main stream media. I don't know how prevalent this really is. Typically the news is more than willing to overemphasize risks to give people reason to read the news. I'm not sure it matters how true or not true it is. The same executives who enroll themselves in survival courses and hire security details would also be more inclined to get one of these embedded in them.
Briefly, in one study of 250000 cell phone subscribers they found no mortality difference between hand held cell phone use and automobile mounted cell phones (hand helds have the transmitter close to your head, car mounted have them further away). They went a bit further and looked for a correlation between duration of cell phone use and mortality and did find one: use of a cell phone while driving did result in more accidents.
Animal studies where they were subjected to radiation of the frequency and modulation of cell phone also yielded no correlation between cell phone usage and cancer.
Read the article though, its pretty good (as Spectrum usually is)
You create a gzipped tar file of MozillaR16, MozillaR16.tar.gz. You use a simple utility to seperate it out into 100K pieces:
piece00000 through piece99999 (10 gigs of data there, in 100K pieces!)
If you abandoned these on Publius they'd be useless, there's no information on reassembling them into a whole and unless you're very careful there can be ambiguity in what fragment of the archive goes with what other fragment of the archive.
You calculate the MD128 hash of each piece and rename it with the hash as part of the information:
MozillaR16-0x01234567012345670123456701234567 and so on.
You append all these filenames into a file
MozillaR16.build
Now if you want the files in MozillaR16 you get the MozillaR16.build file. Your client sends out queries for the various 100K packages that build up MozillaR16.tar.gz.
This could be truely distributed in that there isn't the necessity that any one site contains the whole list of fragments needed to build an archive. You could add in a translation layer so that any individual file is a cross section of the overall archive itself such that by itself it contains little or no information. Think of grabbing 100K bytes of the archive at random and inserting them into files with offset information. Any single file would not contain any distinguishable information. It might be a safety feature against being accused of carrying certain types of information.
The point is that no matter how cheap you remember everything else being there were other non-essential expenses. College students choose where they spend the money (and most College students I knew had extensive if estoric CD collections). If they're spending less on CD's now and there is a correlation between this and mp3 then it's pretty fair to say that mp3 hurts profits in that market segment.
Considering the quantity of beer consumed by college students, pleading poverty doesn't hold a whole lot of water though. It also doesn't excuse copywrite violation, music isn't a necessity and the radio is free as are most local bands if you bother to go to the bars where they play.
Thanks for the correction, my understanding from another article was that the reason for retrieval was for the images.
First link, now a quick summary: The early unmanned space probes contained cameras. This was the mid 1960's, the only way to retrieve the images was to pick up the cameras, which our intrepid astronauts did. They returned to earth with a colony of the bacteria, these bacteria survived launch, radiation, 3 years on the moon, launch from the moon, more radiation and re-entry.
High compression ratios are easy. High compression ratios that don't look like utter crap is difficult. This algorithm isn't even for movie data though, its for 3D scans points, more along the lines of a model.
As one poster jokingly stated the Matrix could be stored in a single bit, '1', for instance albeit with some loss in signal quality. An algorithm won't become popular based only on its ability to reduce data, nor will it become popular only based on its fidelity (otherwise we'd be sharing 30 frame per second raw digital data)
slashdot is part of a corporation now, they should pay for damages, say 75% of the clickthroughs from slashdot. That'd nullify the thoughtlessness of puting the direct link down.
When they showed the trailers I felt robbed. It looked more akin to Lion King than what I was expecting. I was half expecting the characters to break out in song. To my eye they geared this thing at the same people who religiously watch Disney cartoons (not that there's anything wrong with that, but its not what I'm interested in) who may not really be into science fiction.
I didn't see it, but I had every intention of seeing it prior to seeing the trailer. Good marketing that, changing somebodies mind 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
I don't know where the fault lies, but it just didn't seem like a very compelling movie to win 8 bucks and a couple hours of my time. Maybe the studio forced there hand in the animation and story department. I don't think animation is dead, nor do I think two dimensional animation is dead. It just looked like a single episode of Gundam Wing could involve me more than a full movie of Titan A.E. would.
I don't even know if what cartoon network shows is supposed to be good anime, but I do know I like it more than what I've seen coming out of the U.S.
To me it looks like www.anybirthday.com got their information from amazon.com. If you look at the suggested gift fields you'll notice (at least on the few I looked up) that the gifts come from amazon.com and include that umpteen digit identifier that you see when you've got an account at amazon.com.