OSI is relatively simpler and more clear cut Wha? Did you ever actually try to implement/use OSI? I did. And the words "simple" or "clear" never crossed my mind. It was a classic case of "design by committee", rivaled only by Ada in my experience.
Other than the 100-ish year lifespan, copyright law is the one (of three) branches of "Intellectual Property" that actually gets it right!
In theory, yes. But in practice it is a nightmare. In addition to the "limited in theory but perpetual in practice" Micky Mouse Preservation Law you note, there are major issues with the DMCA (a copyright law), erosion of fair use, and applying copyright to inappropriate works (such as user interface look-and-feel).
Unions exist to get the best package for employees. All the employees. The employees know that if they don't stand together they will be fucked.
Unions are a bureaucracy. The nature of the beast is that they will (eventually) serve the leadership rather than the members. The members exist only to give the leadership the authority/power/money they need to maintain their position.
As a Pittsburgher who watched the 70's (and 80's) happen here before my eyes, this is not idle speculation. It is observed fact.
The only place I truly support unions is in areas where safety requires it, such as coal mining. Those guys need all the help they can get.
I know the Wii is nice and all, but if you are looking for an HD experience look no further than PS3.
The problem with this argument is that most people are looking for a game experience.
You should no more buy the PS3 because it's HD than you should buy the Wii because of it's unique controller. You should buy the system which has the best games in the genres that interest you (tempered by price). That being said, the quality of the games will indeed be influenced by how well the game companies take advantage of what each respective system has to offer, be it graphics resolution, CPU speed, memory, or controller capabilities.
Not strictly what the poster is asking for, as it's not a single, long biography, but I can't recommend highly enough Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It's a thick, massively cross referenced volume with mini biographies of over 1500 scientists arranged chonologically from Imhotep to Stephen Hawking. Lengths range from a short paragraph to several pages (Galileo gets 4+ pages, for example).
As a teen, this book was a constant pleasure. I'd look up a single scientist and find myself following the cross references from one to another, coming up for air hours later. Never boring, although the heavy cross referencing really screams out for an online version.
Obviously not enough for those needing complete biographies, but an excellent starting point.
IBM has more or less bet the company on the viability of Linux
While it is indeed true that IBM has made a major commitment to Linux, if you truly think they've "bet the company" you have no clue as to the scope of IBM and how many markets they are in.
Although I'm sure many only know the character of Conan from John Milius' big screen romp with steroid-giant Ahnold (or possibly from the even more wretched TV series or the comic books), no one has yet had the guts to film a real movie based on the original Robert E. Howard stories from the 1930's.
The real REH Conan wasn't the dumb as a board Ahnold, he was a multilingual leader of men, an accomplished horseman, a stealthy and dextrous thief, and many other things that neither Milius nor Ahnold understood (and still don't to this day). He was a product of the pulp era and the Great Depression. He was the toughest guy not because he was chained (for no apparent reason) to a wheel for his entire life, but because he had survived as only the fittest did in his environment.
Hollywood very rarely avoids the trap of going for the "easy story". Why create a complex character that is truly interesting when a one-dimensional revenge-fest is so much easier to explain to a suit? Why respect the original stories when just grabbing the trademark name to use for promotion takes less time? Why cast an actor who can actually act when a steroid-giant looks so cool on screen?
I've given up on any story or book adaptation ever coming close to the original and hence am no longer disappointed. And that way I enjoy the very rare occasions when they do actually get it right. But for every Maltese Falcon there are hundreds of I, Robots.
I coworker (who was much more familiar with Windows than Linux) was doing some dev work on a Solaris machine and spent more time as root than was healthy.
This came to an end when he neglected to set an environment variable then executed "make clean" with the following Makefile:
"Look at my knees. They ran on top of me. I just starting kicking the people," she said.
A man who had been standing in line since 2 a.m. came to Jemerson's rescue. Bair Hossai was almost guaranteed to get one of the coveted computers.
"I'm not going to leave somebody who's hurt. It's not worth it. I could have been in the line, but I'm not going to do it, because it's not worth it," Hossai said.
Intel did patent the 8088 design. They were required by IBM to license it to a second source. AMD were founded, basically, to be this second source.
As they were founded in 1969, that was quite a trick of prescience.
While AMD might not have appeared on most people's radar until they put out their x86 clones, they were an established and significant semiconductor manufacturer. I remember studying their bit-slice processor chips in college.
From memory, but the header comment in the display engine for the old Gosling (aka Unix aka Unipress) Emacs code (display.c):
"Abandon all hope ye who enter here."
If you think you understand this code, you don't.
Go back and read it again.
This was accompanied by an ASCII-art Skull & Crossbones.
Of course Gosling later pissed off many people by taking the free community contributions and selling the whole thing off to Unipress (who then sued the FSF claiming they stole their display code). Ah, the salad days before the GPL!
Tor was initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from ONR and DARPA.
Gotta love this. Paid for by my tax dollars, then I also get to pay for the NSA to develop improved snooping technology to crack it.
Still, good to know at least some of my tax dollars was well spent for a change.
Gosling is a "big fan" of open source? Maybe now he is, but don't forget the fun we all had with him concerning UnixEmacs (aka Gosmacs). He wrote a free Emacs clone, actively distributed source and solicited improvements, then sold it to a commercial company which immediately started throwing lawyers around.
True, Gosling never promised to keep the source freely available, but it was a tacit assumption by the contributors which he deliberately chose not to correct.
Here's one very terse account of the story.
Ever wanted to know what Idle is really like? Or why his fellow ex-Pythons rarely work with him? The original page is gone, but The Wayback Machine comes to the rescue.
A choice quote:
The other Pythons have become accustomed to this attitude over the last 30 years - and because they have continuing business interests in common - have to tolerate it. Living 6,000 miles away from him and seeing him only very occasionally helps.
But they are unsparing about him behind his back. "Eric Idle gives selfishness a bad name" is John Cleese's openly-expressed and widely-repeated description of his former colleague.
From the article: Gryphon's innovative propulsion system uses liquid oxygen, drawn and compressed from the air, as fuel.
Oxygen as fuel? Eek!
A real pleasure to work (remotely) with LNZ
on
RIP: Leonard Zubkoff
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Many years ago, I wrote the original Buslogic driver for Linux. After maintaining it for a while, Leonard appeared with significant improvements. I knew the name sounded vaguely familiar but it took me a while to place.
As an undergrad at CMU, the CS terminal room was rather evenly split between DEC VT52 and Concept C100 terminals. And then there were the "special" terminals: the Concept-LNZ. These amazing little creatures were a result of Leonard's graduate work. They contained custom firmware that the locally hacked version of Unix Emacs contained special support for. It cached frequently displayed tokens in local (off screen) video memory and exchanged an encoded/compressed token stream with the editor. Working over a 2400 bps serial line was an absolute dream on these. It sped up the editing sessions to an amazing degree.
When I asked Leonard in an e-mail if he was "the" LNZ of Concept-LNZ fame, he was rather flabergasted that someone would remember this over 10 years later. He gradually took over support for the Buslogic driver as he was both a better driver writer and had local access to the Buslogic lab to do testing.
When I read this headline, my gut tied in a very tight knot that will not soon be untangled.
Slashdot Mirror
They seemed to think that the moon has zero gravity. Inside the dome, you floated. Once you went outside, you could walk.
It just made me stare at the screen and go "Wha?"
Nice writeup here.
In other words, it's a mess and getting worse.
Unions are a bureaucracy. The nature of the beast is that they will (eventually) serve the leadership rather than the members. The members exist only to give the leadership the authority/power/money they need to maintain their position.
As a Pittsburgher who watched the 70's (and 80's) happen here before my eyes, this is not idle speculation. It is observed fact.
The only place I truly support unions is in areas where safety requires it, such as coal mining. Those guys need all the help they can get.
You should no more buy the PS3 because it's HD than you should buy the Wii because of it's unique controller. You should buy the system which has the best games in the genres that interest you (tempered by price). That being said, the quality of the games will indeed be influenced by how well the game companies take advantage of what each respective system has to offer, be it graphics resolution, CPU speed, memory, or controller capabilities.
Not strictly what the poster is asking for, as it's not a single, long biography, but I can't recommend highly enough Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It's a thick, massively cross referenced volume with mini biographies of over 1500 scientists arranged chonologically from Imhotep to Stephen Hawking. Lengths range from a short paragraph to several pages (Galileo gets 4+ pages, for example).
As a teen, this book was a constant pleasure. I'd look up a single scientist and find myself following the cross references from one to another, coming up for air hours later. Never boring, although the heavy cross referencing really screams out for an online version.
Obviously not enough for those needing complete biographies, but an excellent starting point.
Oh? So I've played (and have on my shelf) a nonexistant game?
Freaky... Cue the Twilight Zone theme.
Odd. When I plug May 4, 2102 into the orbital calculator it shows the asteroid well outside the orbit of Mars at that point...
Although I'm sure many only know the character of Conan from John Milius' big screen romp with steroid-giant Ahnold (or possibly from the even more wretched TV series or the comic books), no one has yet had the guts to film a real movie based on the original Robert E. Howard stories from the 1930's.
The real REH Conan wasn't the dumb as a board Ahnold, he was a multilingual leader of men, an accomplished horseman, a stealthy and dextrous thief, and many other things that neither Milius nor Ahnold understood (and still don't to this day). He was a product of the pulp era and the Great Depression. He was the toughest guy not because he was chained (for no apparent reason) to a wheel for his entire life, but because he had survived as only the fittest did in his environment.
Hollywood very rarely avoids the trap of going for the "easy story". Why create a complex character that is truly interesting when a one-dimensional revenge-fest is so much easier to explain to a suit? Why respect the original stories when just grabbing the trademark name to use for promotion takes less time? Why cast an actor who can actually act when a steroid-giant looks so cool on screen?
I've given up on any story or book adaptation ever coming close to the original and hence am no longer disappointed. And that way I enjoy the very rare occasions when they do actually get it right. But for every Maltese Falcon there are hundreds of I, Robots.
This came to an end when he neglected to set an environment variable then executed "make clean" with the following Makefile:
clean:
Took days to restore that baby.
While AMD might not have appeared on most people's radar until they put out their x86 clones, they were an established and significant semiconductor manufacturer. I remember studying their bit-slice processor chips in college.
Of course Gosling later pissed off many people by taking the free community contributions and selling the whole thing off to Unipress (who then sued the FSF claiming they stole their display code). Ah, the salad days before the GPL!
No worries. We'll just let the real Tor handle the dispute.
Gosling is a "big fan" of open source? Maybe now he is, but don't forget the fun we all had with him concerning UnixEmacs (aka Gosmacs). He wrote a free Emacs clone, actively distributed source and solicited improvements, then sold it to a commercial company which immediately started throwing lawyers around. True, Gosling never promised to keep the source freely available, but it was a tacit assumption by the contributors which he deliberately chose not to correct. Here's one very terse account of the story.
Gryphon's innovative propulsion system uses liquid oxygen, drawn and compressed from the air, as fuel.
Oxygen as fuel? Eek!
As an undergrad at CMU, the CS terminal room was rather evenly split between DEC VT52 and Concept C100 terminals. And then there were the "special" terminals: the Concept-LNZ. These amazing little creatures were a result of Leonard's graduate work. They contained custom firmware that the locally hacked version of Unix Emacs contained special support for. It cached frequently displayed tokens in local (off screen) video memory and exchanged an encoded/compressed token stream with the editor. Working over a 2400 bps serial line was an absolute dream on these. It sped up the editing sessions to an amazing degree.
When I asked Leonard in an e-mail if he was "the" LNZ of Concept-LNZ fame, he was rather flabergasted that someone would remember this over 10 years later. He gradually took over support for the Buslogic driver as he was both a better driver writer and had local access to the Buslogic lab to do testing.
When I read this headline, my gut tied in a very tight knot that will not soon be untangled.
We'll miss you, Leonard.
As I used to say in the post-interview meetings at my job: We don't want "average" programmers. Average programmers suck.