That's not the point. SCO is not the point. The absurdity of a wrong claim in a special case does not translate into the absurdity of the concepts on which the claim is expressed.
I feel it does. Consider books for instance. Once a book is out, its contents becomes part of our culture quite immediately. The ideas expressed therein may be used rather freely and one may even quote portions of it somewhere else. The book as a whole is protected so nobody is allowed to simply reprint it in its entirety without permission of the copyright holders, but any other use of its contents is restricted in a rather loose way, or not at all.
So please tell me why software ought to be treated so differently. Why, for instance, I'm not even allowed to modify most of the software running on my machines. Why I may write a book built upon an arbitrary selection of those published before, but why I may not do the same in software.
You might also want to tell me why you think selling hibiscus plants with a label saying: "Propagation prohibited." is not as ridiculous as it looks, or why you believe that to be a different situation.
If Newton lived today, one probably would have to pay royalties on any application of the law of gravity. I consider this a problem, and cases like the one discussed here a symptom of this problem.
Without any such incentive, it can be abandoned. The less immediate and less personal the incentives are, the more likely the discovery is abandoned or kept private.
Next you are going to tell me that, as an employee the only thing I have an incentive to do is the least amount of work that keeps me not even my job but my monthly payment, right? Or maybe that the opportunity to wave all my code goodbye when I leave the company would be a great incentive making me produce more of it?
Open remains the question how many of todays owners of the entity named SCO actually did put any physical and/or intellectual efforts into the evolution of operating systems.
Re:SCO has Dirty Hands. Will not be able to collec
on
SCO To Show Copied Code
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If anyone argues this, we lose in a bigger way. MS can then say "see, I told you so! GPL caused SCO to lose their IP!!!!".
So what? Smart people understand that progress of mankind is not and cannot be property of individuals or small groups; it belongs to mankind as a whole. The entire notion of intellectual property is misplaced here. Mankind is discovering how to make computers a useful universal too and how to build an Internet out of all those computers. Linux is part of that ongoing discovery. What could it be that gives a small group of people the right to own progress?
I cannot imagine this increasing productivity. really cannot. People will be able to interrupt your legitimate work from the convenience of their own cube! and I doubt you can hide yourself (invisible) because that would totally be against the whole point of INSTANT messenging.
Looks like your experience is limited. Ever had coworkers more than a few cubicles away? I did, and instant messaging was quite a helpful tool. It is less intrusive and distracting than the telephone, especially if one has more than a single machine around. Doing software development, I use to have two machines on my desk, one for actual hacking and one for reading documentation, running tests, etc. -- and instant messaging.
Of particular importance to developers is the ability to easily exchange code snippets. Compare to reading them over the phone, or sending e-mail messages then waiting for a reply. IM gives instant access to coworkers' knowledge while making it easy to talk about technical matter that would be hard to express in voice.
And of course if you are serious about it you will allow people to make themselves unavailable.
The idea of embedding code in XML is a perverse distortion of what XML is really about.
XSP is really just fine. Well, it may not be embedding as we used to know it; it is specification of XML-generating Java code in XML. This way it is even able to provide some features typical for scripting languages to Java developers without the need to use the reflection API.
Should U.S. authorities make any attempt to identify potentially dangerous travellers before they enter the U.S.?
No, because there is no chance for any traveller to prove that he is not "potentially dangerous". They would end up arbitrarily rejecting people without increasing overall security as even those authorities have no means of determining whether they identify the right people. Except when one potentially dangerous traveller slips through, and turns out to be more dangerous than potential.
But it's your country, of course. Do with it whatever you like.
What it does is to let you prove to me what software you are running, and vice versa.
That's indeed a revolutionary concept. Up to today, the key idea of computer networking was open standards. What is defined and agreed upon is the interface between systems, not how anything behind that interface is implemented on either side. Palladium changes this situation by providing the ability to enforce the use of particular implementations. And you call this 'not control'?
Enforcing use of a particular implementation of some software concept, as a means of enforcing any real-world goals I may have, requires that I am able to aquire such a software that entirely fulfills my needs. I also need the actual ability to make somebody use this software rather than saying: "Thanks, no." Considering consumers and the software industry, who do you think will be more successful in defining the design of software and in making others use their own software, the industry and the consumer? Right. And you call this an 'informed, mutual agreement'?
Then I guess you're not too shocked that Linux isn't being accepted by the mass market.
Who cares? Linux is not a product, and nothing and nobody forces the Linux people to get anything accepted by the mass market. The market does not matter here. Linux does exist; whether it is used as a basis for successfully marketed products by anybody is not important in any way. Linux depends on the people contributing to it, not on the people consuming it. That is the major difference between free an unfree software.
No, I would not be too shocked if these two paragraphs of text aren't accepted by you, or by the mass audience. Writing them is fun and there is nothing you could do to change that. Likewise, if writing Linux or Linux applications is fun (or education, or pastime, or social life) for its authors, there is nothing you, the market, or end users could do to change that.
A P2P filesharing network is a thing where people can make available files to other people who are able to dowload those files from wherever they are made available. What exactly constitutes a sabotage activity in such a situation? Offering a file obviously not. Using non-unique file names? Probably not, as this happens every day without people complaining. Being a certain entity? Well, then there is no point in mentioning P2P networks; just declare entity X evil regardless of context (which might compatible with the facts in this particular case). Is it sharing noise in a filesharing network? If so, why?
Re:question for all you Java experts
on
Effective Java
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· Score: 1
Do any of you Java people have some amazing tips for me? I did use all the optimization flags I could find. Or is this typical performance for Java, making a 1.2Ghz Duron run as slow as a P200 or a K6/300?
Sure. Wipe the words milliseconds, GHz, performance, benchmark, and optimization from you memory. They don't matter in about 99.99% of all programming, and caring about them where you shouldn't is likely to lower the quality of your program code. In particular they don't matter when comparing languages. Thank you for your consideration.
Regarding the pregnant gay man, Amazon has a feature where you can see what the basis was for a recommendation. If you find it was based on a book or other product that you do not want them to consider for your recommendations, you click a button and that is the end of it.
So I am supposed to improve the efficiency of their sales tools to the end of making it easier for them to influence my decisions? Great!
That's a common misconception. Actually it works for them, not for you. It is one of their sales tools, and the sole purpose of it is to make you buy more without feeling uncomfortable. Why this makes a difference, you ask? Well, because it works for them they will always be happier than you.
Did you ever wonder why every commercial aircraft of a certain size has a captain AND a co pilot? Because the co pilot might realize an error or a danger the pilot did not realize.
I don't think that's a useful comparison. Aviation is quite different from programming. In particular,
Flying is a real-time task. There is nothing on the flight deck the pilots could defer until after lunch.
An airplane, when airborne, is a closed system. You cannot bring in new staff if you are short on human resources for some reason.
Flying is a highly interactive task. The airplane is interactive, the radio is interactive, the airspace is interactive, the airports are. Programming is done in the head, then written down and tested.
Flying is pretty complex in some phases of the flight (take-off, landing). Controlling the plane, changing its configuration, navigation, radio, congested airspace, etc., and all in parallel, are just enough work to keep more than one pilot busy.
So there are more reasons for having two pilots than your simple explanation suggests. Not too long ago, an engineer in addition to the two pilots was standard in commercial jet liners. Perhaps we should introduce triple programming, with one person doing all the typing and the others the actual programming?
Also don't overestimate the gain of having more than one person involved for safety. There are countless reports of social problems within the flight crew contributing to fatal accidents. Some captains do not listen to their co-pilots, some co-pilots don't dare speaking up against their caiptain even if the captain is wrong, and even a crew of three might forget to check the altimeter while trying to investigate a problem with the landing gear. Not to mention communication problems between crew members, distraction by crew members, etc.
Although it sounds the same, the recording through Line-In is being degraded from Digital to Analog. At this point, you are not really "ripping" or creating an exact copy of the CD. This is pretty much the same as recording a song off the radio. RIAA does not really care when you do this. However, they do care when you create a digital copy. As a digital copy will never degrade because it is an exact bit-for-bit duplication.
So what? You may not get an exact digital copy of the original CD, but you thanks to digital technology your copy is still not subject to the same kind of quality degradation as it were in the analog ages even if you record through Line-In. The difference is not where you record from, the difference is really whether you have available digital technology or not.
Making an analog copy of some music degrades quality a little. Nobody is going to notice that little degradation for a first generation copy if resonably good equipment is used to make it. Now in the analog ages, making a copy of the copy again degraded quality a little. So if one wanted a high quality copy, one had to draw it right from the original as each generation added some loss of quality. This is no longer true in the digital ages, regardless of how you make your initial copy. When recording through Line-In one can record to digital media, then copy digitally again. That way all copies suffer from a little degradation in quality from the first copying step, but they still expose the same characteristics as other digital media for all further copying steps.
People learn patents no good. Make people unhappy. People overthrow oppressors. Now people happy.
Re:Invasion Of Privacy?
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Google is providing you the free service of looking up words that you have intentionally provided.
With the intention to get a search result for the words provided. It becomes a privacy issue as soon as the user's intention is not met by the system without making the user aware of that. Which may happen after the fact if a long-term cookie is stored on the user's harddisk.
Refusing the cookie is the right thing in principle but to the average user, all cookies lok the same -- they are invisible. To the more advanced user, they still look the same -- an annoying dialog box with gibberish inside. How does the user know whether it's a good or a bad cookie?
If you are forced to distribute the secret in an insecure way, the game's over.
You are right, technically. But legally, mentioning or employing this obvious fact turns you into an evil cyber terrorist, as they nowadays use to call us.
Why, exactly, is any website _required_ to permit another page to link to it?
A site isn't required to permit linking, and that's the whole point here. Linking just happens, as does bookmarking, sending a URL to a friend, a colleague, or a mailing list, or URL guessing. If you put something on the Web, it will be used by people unknown to you in ways you can't anticipate. That's reality; Jakob Nielsen even considers the URL as UI.
Linking just means to tell each other about things one can do or find on the Web. Simple, isn't it? There really is no further meaning of a link. There could be, if we had a common system of link types, but we don't have that. So a link just says: It might be worthwhile to let your Web client software retrieve whatever it finds under address XYZ. (What will those lawyers say if somebody links to a non-existing page on a site that tries to forbid linking?)
Moreover, standard Web technology is built upon the idea of a worldwide hypertext system co-operatively created by independent entities. This is clearly expressed in the RFC, though not in typical disclaimer-style legalese. If one doesn't like that technology, one is free to choose something else.
Trying to forbid linking on the Web means trying to change reality without really changing it, somehow. Sure, lawyers could claim and courts could rule that Pi equals four, pigs can fly, and the moon is made of green cheese. They just have to accept that average people call them crazy, and ignore them. I think that's all this is about.
The only drawback is that a 2D barcode requires a more precise scanner and technique.
This is true, but on the other hand, technology has evolved. As an alternative to linear scanning as employed by traditional scanners, and still supported by some 2D symbologies like PDF417, a little CCD camera can be used. Many symbologies have been developed especially for this scanning technique. Matrix codes like Aztec may even be more robust than barcodes in the literal sense. It is rather easy to hand-draw a readable matrix code symbol (if it does not have to be too small:)) -- try that with PDF417.
But this is a general advantage of 2D codes with their considerably higher capacity: the ability to embed enough information to correct errors rather than just checksums for mere error detection. Any modern 2D symbol will remain readable after part of it has been destroyed. You may rip off a corner, it won't matter.
When reading specifications, I also got the impression that PDF417 is rather hard to implement, compared to e.g. Aztec.
If the advertising integrates nicely with the shell, why not? Right after one issued a find, make, or latex command might be a good time to place an ad on stderr.
Anybody who uses their credit card on the net can cancel their charge, after they receive their merchandise, and the merchant cannot contest this "chargeback".
Most people are honest, and there are rather strong incentives to remain honest for the holder of a credit card shopping online. Though in theory it would be possible to dispute a transaction one actually did make, not many will try that with their own name on card, and their own delivery address (for non-digitized merchandise).
I will get behind anything that allows me to contest, with the cardholder's bank, a fraudlant refund(chargeback) requested by somebody who received their merchandise.
I will refuse to use any payment scheme online that is not provably secure (under real-world conditions, including insider attacks, implementation blunders, worms and viruses on my PC, etc., not just in theory) but does not give me the opportunity to dispute a transaction. Generally I prefer payment schemes that accept the fact that there will be some fraud, and provide for a fair and comprehensible distribution of the overall risk.
So, bottom line is, Passport is the authentication piece.
Will the user authenticate the particular transaction (i.e., who gets how much money)? How does the system authenticate to the user? Will the user understand this authentication and its necessity? Will the user be sufficiently warned if everything looks fine but system authentication towards the user is omitted? Will any liability shift occur when such a verification scheme is used?
Slashdot Mirror
I feel it does. Consider books for instance. Once a book is out, its contents becomes part of our culture quite immediately. The ideas expressed therein may be used rather freely and one may even quote portions of it somewhere else. The book as a whole is protected so nobody is allowed to simply reprint it in its entirety without permission of the copyright holders, but any other use of its contents is restricted in a rather loose way, or not at all.
So please tell me why software ought to be treated so differently. Why, for instance, I'm not even allowed to modify most of the software running on my machines. Why I may write a book built upon an arbitrary selection of those published before, but why I may not do the same in software.
You might also want to tell me why you think selling hibiscus plants with a label saying: "Propagation prohibited." is not as ridiculous as it looks, or why you believe that to be a different situation.
If Newton lived today, one probably would have to pay royalties on any application of the law of gravity. I consider this a problem, and cases like the one discussed here a symptom of this problem.
Next you are going to tell me that, as an employee the only thing I have an incentive to do is the least amount of work that keeps me not even my job but my monthly payment, right? Or maybe that the opportunity to wave all my code goodbye when I leave the company would be a great incentive making me produce more of it?
Open remains the question how many of todays owners of the entity named SCO actually did put any physical and/or intellectual efforts into the evolution of operating systems.
So what? Smart people understand that progress of mankind is not and cannot be property of individuals or small groups; it belongs to mankind as a whole. The entire notion of intellectual property is misplaced here. Mankind is discovering how to make computers a useful universal too and how to build an Internet out of all those computers. Linux is part of that ongoing discovery. What could it be that gives a small group of people the right to own progress?
Looks like your experience is limited. Ever had coworkers more than a few cubicles away? I did, and instant messaging was quite a helpful tool. It is less intrusive and distracting than the telephone, especially if one has more than a single machine around. Doing software development, I use to have two machines on my desk, one for actual hacking and one for reading documentation, running tests, etc. -- and instant messaging.
Of particular importance to developers is the ability to easily exchange code snippets. Compare to reading them over the phone, or sending e-mail messages then waiting for a reply. IM gives instant access to coworkers' knowledge while making it easy to talk about technical matter that would be hard to express in voice.
And of course if you are serious about it you will allow people to make themselves unavailable.
I am now free to decide who gets to know what about myself.
XSP is really just fine. Well, it may not be embedding as we used to know it; it is specification of XML-generating Java code in XML. This way it is even able to provide some features typical for scripting languages to Java developers without the need to use the reflection API.
No, because there is no chance for any traveller to prove that he is not "potentially dangerous". They would end up arbitrarily rejecting people without increasing overall security as even those authorities have no means of determining whether they identify the right people. Except when one potentially dangerous traveller slips through, and turns out to be more dangerous than potential.
But it's your country, of course. Do with it whatever you like.
That's indeed a revolutionary concept. Up to today, the key idea of computer networking was open standards. What is defined and agreed upon is the interface between systems, not how anything behind that interface is implemented on either side. Palladium changes this situation by providing the ability to enforce the use of particular implementations. And you call this 'not control'?
Enforcing use of a particular implementation of some software concept, as a means of enforcing any real-world goals I may have, requires that I am able to aquire such a software that entirely fulfills my needs. I also need the actual ability to make somebody use this software rather than saying: "Thanks, no." Considering consumers and the software industry, who do you think will be more successful in defining the design of software and in making others use their own software, the industry and the consumer? Right. And you call this an 'informed, mutual agreement'?
Who cares? Linux is not a product, and nothing and nobody forces the Linux people to get anything accepted by the mass market. The market does not matter here. Linux does exist; whether it is used as a basis for successfully marketed products by anybody is not important in any way. Linux depends on the people contributing to it, not on the people consuming it. That is the major difference between free an unfree software.
No, I would not be too shocked if these two paragraphs of text aren't accepted by you, or by the mass audience. Writing them is fun and there is nothing you could do to change that. Likewise, if writing Linux or Linux applications is fun (or education, or pastime, or social life) for its authors, there is nothing you, the market, or end users could do to change that.
The most interesting are.
A P2P filesharing network is a thing where people can make available files to other people who are able to dowload those files from wherever they are made available. What exactly constitutes a sabotage activity in such a situation? Offering a file obviously not. Using non-unique file names? Probably not, as this happens every day without people complaining. Being a certain entity? Well, then there is no point in mentioning P2P networks; just declare entity X evil regardless of context (which might compatible with the facts in this particular case). Is it sharing noise in a filesharing network? If so, why?
Sure. Wipe the words milliseconds, GHz, performance, benchmark, and optimization from you memory. They don't matter in about 99.99% of all programming, and caring about them where you shouldn't is likely to lower the quality of your program code. In particular they don't matter when comparing languages. Thank you for your consideration.
So I am supposed to improve the efficiency of their sales tools to the end of making it easier for them to influence my decisions? Great!
That's a common misconception. Actually it works for them, not for you. It is one of their sales tools, and the sole purpose of it is to make you buy more without feeling uncomfortable. Why this makes a difference, you ask? Well, because it works for them they will always be happier than you.
I don't think that's a useful comparison. Aviation is quite different from programming. In particular,
So there are more reasons for having two pilots than your simple explanation suggests. Not too long ago, an engineer in addition to the two pilots was standard in commercial jet liners. Perhaps we should introduce triple programming, with one person doing all the typing and the others the actual programming?
Also don't overestimate the gain of having more than one person involved for safety. There are countless reports of social problems within the flight crew contributing to fatal accidents. Some captains do not listen to their co-pilots, some co-pilots don't dare speaking up against their caiptain even if the captain is wrong, and even a crew of three might forget to check the altimeter while trying to investigate a problem with the landing gear. Not to mention communication problems between crew members, distraction by crew members, etc.
So what? You may not get an exact digital copy of the original CD, but you thanks to digital technology your copy is still not subject to the same kind of quality degradation as it were in the analog ages even if you record through Line-In. The difference is not where you record from, the difference is really whether you have available digital technology or not.
Making an analog copy of some music degrades quality a little. Nobody is going to notice that little degradation for a first generation copy if resonably good equipment is used to make it. Now in the analog ages, making a copy of the copy again degraded quality a little. So if one wanted a high quality copy, one had to draw it right from the original as each generation added some loss of quality. This is no longer true in the digital ages, regardless of how you make your initial copy. When recording through Line-In one can record to digital media, then copy digitally again. That way all copies suffer from a little degradation in quality from the first copying step, but they still expose the same characteristics as other digital media for all further copying steps.
They don't have to. It shouldn't be too hard to write some XSLT code that translates XHTML 2.0 into XHTML 1.x, or even HTML 3.2.
People learn patents no good. Make people unhappy. People overthrow oppressors. Now people happy.
With the intention to get a search result for the words provided. It becomes a privacy issue as soon as the user's intention is not met by the system without making the user aware of that. Which may happen after the fact if a long-term cookie is stored on the user's harddisk.
Refusing the cookie is the right thing in principle but to the average user, all cookies lok the same -- they are invisible. To the more advanced user, they still look the same -- an annoying dialog box with gibberish inside. How does the user know whether it's a good or a bad cookie?
You are right, technically. But legally, mentioning or employing this obvious fact turns you into an evil cyber terrorist, as they nowadays use to call us.
A site isn't required to permit linking, and that's the whole point here. Linking just happens, as does bookmarking, sending a URL to a friend, a colleague, or a mailing list, or URL guessing. If you put something on the Web, it will be used by people unknown to you in ways you can't anticipate. That's reality; Jakob Nielsen even considers the URL as UI.
Linking just means to tell each other about things one can do or find on the Web. Simple, isn't it? There really is no further meaning of a link. There could be, if we had a common system of link types, but we don't have that. So a link just says: It might be worthwhile to let your Web client software retrieve whatever it finds under address XYZ. (What will those lawyers say if somebody links to a non-existing page on a site that tries to forbid linking?)
Moreover, standard Web technology is built upon the idea of a worldwide hypertext system co-operatively created by independent entities. This is clearly expressed in the RFC, though not in typical disclaimer-style legalese. If one doesn't like that technology, one is free to choose something else.
Trying to forbid linking on the Web means trying to change reality without really changing it, somehow. Sure, lawyers could claim and courts could rule that Pi equals four, pigs can fly, and the moon is made of green cheese. They just have to accept that average people call them crazy, and ignore them. I think that's all this is about.
This is true, but on the other hand, technology has evolved. As an alternative to linear scanning as employed by traditional scanners, and still supported by some 2D symbologies like PDF417, a little CCD camera can be used. Many symbologies have been developed especially for this scanning technique. Matrix codes like Aztec may even be more robust than barcodes in the literal sense. It is rather easy to hand-draw a readable matrix code symbol (if it does not have to be too small :)) -- try that with PDF417.
But this is a general advantage of 2D codes with their considerably higher capacity: the ability to embed enough information to correct errors rather than just checksums for mere error detection. Any modern 2D symbol will remain readable after part of it has been destroyed. You may rip off a corner, it won't matter.
When reading specifications, I also got the impression that PDF417 is rather hard to implement, compared to e.g. Aztec.
If the advertising integrates nicely with the shell, why not? Right after one issued a find, make, or latex command might be a good time to place an ad on stderr.
Most people are honest, and there are rather strong incentives to remain honest for the holder of a credit card shopping online. Though in theory it would be possible to dispute a transaction one actually did make, not many will try that with their own name on card, and their own delivery address (for non-digitized merchandise).
I will refuse to use any payment scheme online that is not provably secure (under real-world conditions, including insider attacks, implementation blunders, worms and viruses on my PC, etc., not just in theory) but does not give me the opportunity to dispute a transaction. Generally I prefer payment schemes that accept the fact that there will be some fraud, and provide for a fair and comprehensible distribution of the overall risk.
Will the user authenticate the particular transaction (i.e., who gets how much money)? How does the system authenticate to the user? Will the user understand this authentication and its necessity? Will the user be sufficiently warned if everything looks fine but system authentication towards the user is omitted? Will any liability shift occur when such a verification scheme is used?