Re:Instead, envision a live-action Heavy Metal com
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
And I thought Christin and Mezieres were involved. These guys author/draw one of the very best science fiction comic series ever: Valerian et Laureline
My proof for this was the bluish femal singer, she looks like right out of Valerian et Laureline.
By the way, the french fashion maker Jean-Paul Gauthier was involved in the costume designs, that makes too for the extraordinaire looks.
Don't forget to read the mangas!
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
I've seen so many...Akira's usually the big one people name, but I can't say I loved it.
From a technical point, Akira is brilliant. But the storyline pales compared to 20 or more volumes (guess about 1500 pages) of the comic book. And that one is available in a colored version (YUCK!) and the original black and white art, which is superb in style and atmosphere.
So don't forget to read the mangas!
Another example is Appleseed by Masamune Shirow. Best Manga I ever read. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. But the anime is a joke.
Ghost in the Shell by Shirow is another one, where you must read da book. However that had a quite nice anime (again the story sucks, but the atmosphere/music is very good).
Also read Orion by Shirow, which is really interesting mix between Buddism and Fantasy/SF.
My personal anime favourite is Bubblegum Crisis, which not only has great story but also a very fitting soundtrack.
From the newer stuff, Neon Genesis Evangelion is on the top.
I also saw Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) in Paris some months ago. Definitely worth seeing, but this is more a mystery/ecological adventure.
From the same folks you get Wings of Honneamise, kind of "The Right Stuff" in anime. Grab it.
From Leiji Matsumoto (Star Blazers) is my second favourite that was broadcasted years ago on German TV as Queen of the thousand years. Too bad I can't get it on a dozen tapes.
That one brings me on a topic I really hate. There are some tapes available, like Odin, Lensmen or Venus Wars where some morons cut down 30 or 50 half hour episodes into a two hour tape. That stuff is hardly bearable.
Last tip: In a sense you can count in the Final Fantasy computer games as a kind of interactive anime. FF7 is very good. Possibly Play station folks will have a lot more of that stuff.
First you should talk with your customers, the scientists that use your software.
Usually there are folks around who know the open software in that area pretty good. Sometimes there are even people around who might be able to write it themselves, if they had the time/funding to do it.
Aside from that, I found some gems in the FreeBSD ports collection:
Of course you won't find applications for all problems, some stuff (I used to work for LabControl and their partner Chemical Concepts) is not only complicated and needs experience, but often is pretty boring, which nobody would do for free.
One of the truly remarkable things about Einsteins theory of general relativity is that is not ivory tower stuff, pleasing some physicists, but actually this is put to use in ordinary every day devices:
The GPS system (basically a bunch of high precision atomic clocks that send down their time) uses general relativistic corrections to achieve its high position resolution!
On the other hand I know no application of the theory of strong interaction (Quantumn chromodynamics - think quarks) of any kind.
Einstein couldn't do simple math. He had to get someone to help him with geometry for his own theories...
Nope. Replace 'simple' by 'esoteric non-trivial' and you come closer to real thing.
Einstein was pondering about how to extend his theory of special relativity, which is suited for uniform motion to be extended to the case where acceleration happens.
He was a genius in the art of thought experiments, and realized that if you are closed into an elevator without the means to look outside, you can't distinguish if you experience acceleration to the bottom of the elevator by a source of gravity or by someone accelerating/pulling the elvevator.
More abstract, he concluded an eminent physical priciple:
Dynamical and gravitational mass are the same!
That the 'm' for mass that shows up in Newton's equation of motion is the same as the 'm' that shows up in the law of gravitation, the gravitational charge of materia so to say.
He went one and found that this narrows the set of all possible physical laws down considerably. (Physical laws must be covariant).
So he talked to his friend Marcel Grossman, that he should go to the library and look for a mathematical framwork that had this and that features.
Like other people order pizza, Einstein orderd non-Eucledean geometry this way.
Grossman could report to him that Bernhard Riemann, based on work of Carl Friedrich Gauss, had already developed a suitable theory a hundered years before. Differential Geometry on Manifolds in a modern speaking, Tensor calculus in more old fashioned formulation.
That stuff is not easy. It is not standard curriculum in Physics and except for mathematicians, only some mechanical engineers in fluid and solid dynamics use that framework.
I hope I will be able to pick it up in a shop soon and am curious what format it uses, with its approx. 800 pages it will be a solid book.
The price is also interesting. Frustrated with the slow progress of the German translation project, I am looking into the possibility to hire some students for help, financing this by the sales, since I became aware of book on demand publishing, a method that seems suited for low volume printings. This makes calculation a bit easier and gives people a better idea of what to expect.
When I showed this URL to my family, the reaction was "wait a sec! Bottomfeeders? Isn't that a bit derogative?". It took quite some explaining to make it clear that it was the culmination of what I've done over the years: I've joined the hordes of folks who, by submitting small patches, fixes, bits of functionality, have made the difference between making Open Source a hobby of a select few, and making it a (possibly) useful tool.
Yep. The author credited is usually the person who wrote the first version of a particular file. This neglects the maintainer and the many people who might advance the state with their patches. All of them, plus web masters, documenters, release and source code repository engineers (maybe I forget a couple of important folks too) deserve credit!
If done properly, patch submitters should be noted in the CVS logs. Some projects (like FreeBSD) route that comments in commit logs too.
Ergo: scan the cvs trees and not the release packages.
Problem is that if you don't use the language (or rather: written language in this case) regulary, you forget. And one is usually very seldom opposed to that language in Germany.
It is interesting to see Japanese folks who live here to use a kanji dictionary when they write a post card. So they suffer the same.
I noticed on the PostgreSQL Hackers list that Thomas Lane said this was very bogus because it appears to re-include his libjpeg as many times as it is used by something else.
Yep. I came to the same conclusion. The authors of the survey do a brute force analysis and count whatever name shows up.
So if you manage to show up on some file that gets included in a lot of projects, like the C/C++ libraries, you will score very high. That is what put Ulrich Drepper on number 8.
On the contrary I was not able to spot a lot of hard working folks from the BSD crowd. So the authors of the survey did not scan through a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD tree. Even giants, like Donald E. Knuth (DEK) did not show up. So TeX was not included either.
What to think of it? The basic idea is nice, the equivalent of a Open Source top ten. It could appeal to the same people who try to score high on distributed.net or Seti. (But especially these projects had people show up who increased their scores bei illegal methods)
I however like the idea to, in a few years on from now, to be able to look up on what stuff I worked. But guess this will need a much improved system.
My conclusion is these guys had the right idea, that the existing body of free code screams to be analyzed. So let's forget that they did it poor, and let's try to improve things.
At first they should extend their input, an easy way is to scan the contents of the former Walnut Creek ftp server, as it cover a lot of free software. However one would need to add a lot of different servers too. Adding the major free systems, commercial stuff like mozilla, projects from science (there is a lot of free Fortran out too!
If anyone is interested in setting up a better attempt, please contact me.
My dream would be "Kanji Glasses", a device in the shape of glasses, where a built-in camera takes pictures of the object I view at, does pattern recognition to identify the Japanese/Chinese Kanji characters and projects the dictionary entries via the glasses to my eyes while telling me the meaning in japanese via a built in ear speaker if I look at a certain request point... Maybe in 10 years.
For now I would be happy with a Sharp Zauraus, thus a kind of super Palm Pilot, where I can use a stylus to draw a Kanji character I see on its screen and it applies pattern recognition and gives a lookup from a built in dictionary. It exists in Japan, but I have no clue where to buy it in Germany.
While the article was ok, the huge discussion is what got really ridiculous. The kernel module in question comes with source, nvidia's error was not to honor Ralph's code in their accompaigning license. Expect them to either honor Ralph's copyright, or to provide their own memory code.
Here is the original answer from nvidia's Tony Bennett:
This was an oversight. We have no intention of changing the rights to your code. This should be obvious based on the attribution.
Its a bug and we'll fix it. --tony
And the code in question is (compared to the matter) rather easy - it is absurd to believe it was stolen.
Bill Joy recently started quite a lot of discussion with his "Terminator 2" like scenario of mankind beeing in real potential danger by sophisticated technology.
His, and others reasoning goes roughly like this:
Given Moores law for hardware (doubling every so and so months), we can estimate that we will have super powerful hardware in 2050 or so.
While this might be reasonable, then they go further and claim:
With such a powerful hardware somehow these machines will be finally powerful enough to develop some kind of intelligence.
In terms of physics I would translate this into that the system "computer" with the parameter "computing power" (more MHz, more megs of RAM) will go through a phase transition in complexity from
stupid computer -> AI
if the control parameter is larger than some magic critical value of "enough power".
I really wonder why these people argue that way. Is there any serious hint that would justify this hope for such a phase change in quality?
Personally, I see no such indicator at all. Machines are still stupid. Pattern recognition is still stupid (done brute force).
Oh, and people, never do "make depend all install" like the article suggests. Make doesn't rescan the dependency file after the "depend" step, so the kernel is built with possibly incorrect dependency information.
I see.. one would need to force make into rescanning the dependencies after it processed a 'depend' target.
Not sure if this can be done without modifying make. In either case it would be very nice to have some warning about this case somewhere.
Might I add that if you've ever audited code, it isn't easy. Many, many things slip through. Hell, go to www.openbsd.org and read the errata for 2.6, 2.5, etc. There are tons of security fixes.
I wonder if they use any tools for program validation. Stuff like the boundschecking gcc, or stuff similiar to Purify. Is it really only experienced devlopers staring at the code? Guess the NASA does er.. did slightly better in the past.
I'm not convinced that OpenBSD's "increased security" is significant enough to justify using it over FreeBSD or NetBSD. Except I'm going to be likely to start off a religious war with THIS one.
A system like FreeBSD is evolving quickly. Every day lots of lines of code get changed. Not every change has implications that are easy to grasp. To me, not experienced in security auditing, only exposed to theory of program testing, this looks like I either have a secure but slow evolving system or a quickly evolving system with potentially new security holes opening up.
Let's take the change to IPv6 for instance. You can't tell me that this will not go hand in hand with a lot of holes.
Back to automated testing: I know that this is very hard to be done with complex programs, one reason being that it is not easy to come up with a formal specification to test against. I also don't expect that someone is able to give pre- and post conditions for every statement. But it should be able to perform a lot of the static and dynamic tests that are known to computer science.
Is this methodology not used in the domain of operating systems security or do they not talk about it? Or is it simply not possible or useful?
I couldn't even get the Linux programs to work under it, even though it specified after the bootup that Linux was already loaded!!!
You should have no trouble at all with already ported Linux apps. For example try this
marc@oranje$ cd/usr/ports/www/linux-netscape47-navigator marc@oranje$ make install clean marc@oranje$ netscape
and you can fire up Linux Netscape after a while.
For non ported applications the only trick to know is that a Linux binary perceives the file/directory hierarchy a bit different - it sees all stuff beneath/usr/compat/linux/usr as beneath/usr. Example:
marc@oranje$ pwd /usr/compat/linux marc@oranje$ uname FreeBSD marc@oranje$../bin/bash # Linux bash marc@oranje$ uname Linux marc@oranje$ cd/usr marc@oranje$ pwd # a pwd within Linux system /usr marc@oranje$/bin/pwd # a pwd within FreeBSD /usr/compat/linux/usr # you see the mapping? marc@oranje$
Hi, I'm using FreeBSD 3.4 -stable and have never quite understood whether or not XF 4.0 supports 3d acelleration on non linux systems. I've got a Voodoo 3 and was just curious as to the matter. M
Doug Rabson has the drm ready for XFree86 4.0 under FreeBSD. This gives you DRI with Voodoo3 under FreeBSD. I would suggest the freebsd-multimedia mailing list for more information. Ports will be available during the next days.
This was bound to happen, Kirk Mc. has been involved with both FreeBSD and BSDi, and it was just a matter of time before something like this happened.
Over the years I recognize a lot of people working on FreeBSD, but I know nearly nothing about the folks at BSDi. Anyone has informations about their staff and the company history?
Probably they would kill you (with by passengers applauding) in France, Italy, Japan or every other place that knows about good food.
And then this quote from the Dilberito site: Adams and Parker plan to redefine what people expect from food, raising the bar for the rest of the food industry, and contributing to the health of the world. They plan to make money, too.
This is sooo american.. yuck! (Apologies to the few americans who know better)
Obviously (look here:) Keanu Reeves is easy to emulate with some FSM of this kind:
switch(state) { case 1: return "Dude.."; case 2: return "Dude."; case 3: return "Dude?"; case 4: return "Whoa."; case 5: return "No way."; case 6: return "Excellent!"; case 7: return "Uh.. rock on, dude."; default: return "What?"; }
You sound much like the Eliza program (take a statement, mirror it into a question). But nonetheless I try to answer:
(1) without seeing a claim, how can you possibly know what is the subject matter of the patent?
Why do I have to consider the patent at all in the first place? That is my point.
I rather want to keep the freedom to use whatever method I am capable of using and sharing that, than have those economic benefits that the patent advocates promise.
This is a cultural choice, I don't try to argue for the best economic way.
(2) How do you define the "realms of mathematics?"
As that canon of theorems and techniques that is commonly associated with it. Of course this can be only characterized and not be defined with rigour.
Precisely what are your particular subject matter objections to patents concerning compression technologies on this "pure mathematics" ground?
Like I wrote, I have a problem with the idea of patenting itself. It seems not possible to me to seperate ideas from a field into patent worthy ones and those who aren't. Add to that the fact that the state of the art procedure from today is in the standard texts tomorrow. And all this should be handled by the patent lawyers? Have a look at the Usenet FAQ on compression. It is full of cases where they goofed. Like patents on simple algorithms and cases where several patents were granted for the same idea. Very hard to accept that a simple scheme still has implications, like with the Unisys patent on GIF format.
Exactly how does it stop you from the "freedom of doing mathematics without having to be a lawyer."
I can't use and implement the tool what I want and share it as I want. And don't tell me mathematicians don't need this. (I might point you to a lot of software packages from PDEs to algebra in that case)
With all due respect, to this lawyer/mathematician, your argument sounds more like attempting to "lawyer" away the patent law than to argue for the virtues of pure science.
I don't intend to argue or "proof" that my way is better than yours, as I deem it a matter of belief in the principles of free exchange. I think it is a choice (software patents or not) and I don't want them. Luckily the EU so far seems to agree with me.
With all due respect, none of us, myself included, can comment on the validity or propriety of an application for a patent until we have seen what in fact is claimed.
I disagree. The fundamental question is:
Do we want patent law in the realms of mathematics?
I don't have to be able to judge the claims of that transform author, it is simply that I want to keep the freedom of doing mathematics without having to be a lawyer at the same time.
The situation with compression (LZH, mp3,..) is ridiculous enough.
All those claim on the ground that their algorithm could be implemented in hardware and then apply patent laws, that originally came from the domain of engineering. Heck, since we have those all purpose computers available, this reasoning would gather any mathematical procedure. Only no one has been barefaced enough to claim very fundamental algorithms yet (maybe except that patent on run length encoding).
As the free software community is about freedom to code and share, no wonder that these issues make us angry.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys author/draw one of the very best science fiction comic series ever: Valerian et Laureline
My proof for this was the bluish femal singer, she looks like right out of Valerian et Laureline.
By the way, the french fashion maker Jean-Paul Gauthier was involved in the costume designs, that makes too for the extraordinaire looks.
From a technical point, Akira is brilliant. But the storyline pales compared to 20 or more volumes (guess about 1500 pages) of the comic book. And that one is available in a colored version (YUCK!) and the original black and white art, which is superb in style and atmosphere.
So don't forget to read the mangas!
Another example is Appleseed by Masamune Shirow. Best Manga I ever read. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. But the anime is a joke.
Ghost in the Shell by Shirow is another one, where you must read da book. However that had a quite nice anime (again the story sucks, but the atmosphere/music is very good).
Also read Orion by Shirow, which is really interesting mix between Buddism and Fantasy/SF.
My personal anime favourite is Bubblegum Crisis, which not only has great story but also a very fitting soundtrack.
From the newer stuff, Neon Genesis Evangelion is on the top.
I also saw Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) in Paris some months ago. Definitely worth seeing, but this is more a mystery/ecological adventure.
From the same folks you get Wings of Honneamise, kind of "The Right Stuff" in anime. Grab it.
From Leiji Matsumoto (Star Blazers) is my second favourite that was broadcasted years ago on German TV as Queen of the thousand years. Too bad I can't get it on a dozen tapes.
That one brings me on a topic I really hate. There are some tapes available, like Odin, Lensmen or Venus Wars where some morons cut down 30 or 50 half hour episodes into a two hour tape. That stuff is hardly bearable.
Last tip: In a sense you can count in the Final Fantasy computer games as a kind of interactive anime. FF7 is very good. Possibly Play station folks will have a lot more of that stuff.
So it might be interesting to have a look at their developers mailing lists.
And that docking station is awesome.
And these are just lab versions, working with standard notebook PCMIA dimensions.
Usually there are folks around who know the open software in that area pretty good. Sometimes there are even people around who might be able to write it themselves, if they had the time/funding to do it.
Aside from that, I found some gems in the FreeBSD ports collection:
Look here
Browse the math, biology etc categories.
Of course you won't find applications for all problems, some stuff (I used to work for LabControl and their partner Chemical Concepts) is not only complicated and needs experience, but often is pretty boring, which nobody would do for free.
The GPS system (basically a bunch of high precision atomic clocks that send down their time) uses general relativistic corrections to achieve its high position resolution!
On the other hand I know no application of the theory of strong interaction (Quantumn chromodynamics - think quarks) of any kind.
Nope. Replace 'simple' by 'esoteric non-trivial' and you come closer to real thing.
Einstein was pondering about how to extend his theory of special relativity, which is suited for uniform motion to be extended to the case where acceleration happens.
He was a genius in the art of thought experiments, and realized that if you are closed into an elevator without the means to look outside, you can't distinguish if you experience acceleration to the bottom of the elevator by a source of gravity or by someone accelerating/pulling the elvevator.
More abstract, he concluded an eminent physical priciple:
Dynamical and gravitational mass are the same!
That the 'm' for mass that shows up in Newton's equation of motion is the same as the 'm' that shows up in the law of gravitation, the gravitational charge of materia so to say.
He went one and found that this narrows the set of all possible physical laws down considerably. (Physical laws must be covariant).
So he talked to his friend Marcel Grossman, that he should go to the library and look for a mathematical framwork that had this and that features.
Like other people order pizza, Einstein orderd non-Eucledean geometry this way.
Grossman could report to him that Bernhard Riemann, based on work of Carl Friedrich Gauss, had already developed a suitable theory a hundered years before. Differential Geometry on Manifolds in a modern speaking, Tensor calculus in more old fashioned formulation.
That stuff is not easy. It is not standard curriculum in Physics and except for mathematicians, only some mechanical engineers in fluid and solid dynamics use that framework.
I hope I will be able to pick it up in a shop soon and am curious what format it uses, with its approx. 800 pages it will be a solid book.
The price is also interesting. Frustrated with the slow progress of the German translation project, I am looking into the possibility to hire some students for help, financing this by the sales, since I became aware of book on demand publishing, a method that seems suited for low volume printings. This makes calculation a bit easier and gives people a better idea of what to expect.
This way it would not be possible to use the Motif source here.
Yep. The author credited is usually the person who wrote the first version of a particular file. This neglects the maintainer and the many people who might advance the state with their patches. All of them, plus web masters, documenters, release and source code repository engineers (maybe I forget a couple of important folks too) deserve credit!
If done properly, patch submitters should be noted in the CVS logs. Some projects (like FreeBSD) route that comments in commit logs too.
Ergo: scan the cvs trees and not the release packages.
Problem is that if you don't use the language (or rather: written language in this case) regulary, you forget. And one is usually very seldom opposed to that language in Germany.
It is interesting to see Japanese folks who live here to use a kanji dictionary when they write a post card. So they suffer the same.
Yep. I came to the same conclusion. The authors of the survey do a brute force analysis and count whatever name shows up.
So if you manage to show up on some file that gets included in a lot of projects, like the C/C++ libraries, you will score very high. That is what put Ulrich Drepper on number 8.
On the contrary I was not able to spot a lot of hard working folks from the BSD crowd. So the authors of the survey did not scan through a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD tree. Even giants, like Donald E. Knuth (DEK) did not show up. So TeX was not included either.
What to think of it?
The basic idea is nice, the equivalent of a Open Source top ten. It could appeal to the same people who try to score high on distributed.net or Seti. (But especially these projects had people show up who increased their scores bei illegal methods)
I however like the idea to, in a few years on from now, to be able to look up on what stuff I worked. But guess this will need a much improved system.
My conclusion is these guys had the right idea, that the existing body of free code screams to be analyzed. So let's forget that they did it poor, and let's try to improve things.
At first they should extend their input, an easy way is to scan the contents of the former Walnut Creek ftp server, as it cover a lot of free software. However one would need to add a lot of different servers too. Adding the major free systems, commercial stuff like mozilla, projects from science (there is a lot of free Fortran out too!
If anyone is interested in setting up a better attempt, please contact me.
Maybe in 10 years.
For now I would be happy with a Sharp Zauraus, thus a kind of super Palm Pilot, where I can use a stylus to draw a Kanji character I see on its screen and it applies pattern recognition and gives a lookup from a built in dictionary. It exists in Japan, but I have no clue where to buy it in Germany.
While the article was ok, the huge discussion is what got really ridiculous. The kernel module in question comes with source, nvidia's error was not to honor Ralph's code in their accompaigning license. Expect them to either honor Ralph's copyright, or to provide their own memory code.
Here is the original answer from nvidia's Tony Bennett:
This was an oversight. We have no intention of
changing the rights to
your code. This should be obvious based on the
attribution.
Its a bug and we'll fix it.
--tony
And the code in question is (compared to the matter) rather easy - it is absurd to believe it was stolen.
His, and others reasoning goes roughly like this:
Given Moores law for hardware (doubling every so and so months), we can estimate that we will have super powerful hardware in 2050 or so.
While this might be reasonable, then they go further and claim:
With such a powerful hardware somehow these machines will be finally powerful enough to develop some kind of intelligence.
In terms of physics I would translate this into that the system "computer" with the parameter "computing power" (more MHz, more megs of RAM) will go through a phase transition in complexity from
stupid computer -> AI
if the control parameter is larger than some magic critical value of "enough power".
I really wonder why these people argue that way.
Is there any serious hint that would justify this hope for such a phase change in quality?
Personally, I see no such indicator at all. Machines are still stupid. Pattern recognition is still stupid (done brute force).
So, where is the qualitative change?
I see .. one would need to force make into rescanning the dependencies after it processed a 'depend' target.
Not sure if this can be done without modifying make. In either case it would be very nice to have some warning about this case somewhere.
I wonder if they use any tools for program validation. Stuff like the boundschecking gcc, or stuff similiar to Purify. Is it really only experienced devlopers staring at the code? Guess the NASA does er.. did slightly better in the past.
I'm not convinced that OpenBSD's "increased security" is significant enough to justify using it over FreeBSD or NetBSD. Except I'm going to be likely to start off a religious war with THIS one.
A system like FreeBSD is evolving quickly. Every day lots of lines of code get changed. Not every change has implications that are easy to grasp. To me, not experienced in security auditing, only exposed to theory of program testing, this looks like I either have a secure but slow evolving system or a quickly evolving system with potentially new security holes opening up.
Let's take the change to IPv6 for instance. You can't tell me that this will not go hand in hand with a lot of holes.
Back to automated testing:
I know that this is very hard to be done with complex programs, one reason being that it is not easy to come up with a formal specification to test against. I also don't expect that someone is able to give pre- and post conditions for every statement. But it should be able to perform a lot of the static and dynamic tests that are known to computer science.
Is this methodology not used in the domain of operating systems security or do they not talk about it? Or is it simply not possible or useful?
You should have no trouble at all with already ported Linux apps. For example try this
marc@oranje$ cd /usr/ports/www/linux-netscape47-navigator
marc@oranje$ make install clean
marc@oranje$ netscape
and you can fire up Linux Netscape after a while.
For non ported applications the only trick to know is that a Linux binary perceives the file/directory hierarchy a bit different - it sees all stuff beneath /usr/compat/linux/usr as beneath /usr. Example:
marc@oranje$ pwd
/usr/compat/linux ../bin/bash # Linux bash /usr
/usr /bin/pwd # a pwd within FreeBSD
/usr/compat/linux/usr # you see the mapping?
marc@oranje$ uname
FreeBSD
marc@oranje$
marc@oranje$ uname
Linux
marc@oranje$ cd
marc@oranje$ pwd # a pwd within Linux system
marc@oranje$
marc@oranje$
Hope that helps - if not seed me an e-mail!
Doug Rabson has the drm ready for XFree86 4.0 under FreeBSD. This gives you DRI with Voodoo3 under FreeBSD. I would suggest the freebsd-multimedia mailing list for more information. Ports will be available during the next days.
Over the years I recognize a lot of people working on FreeBSD, but I know nearly nothing about the folks at BSDi. Anyone has informations about their staff and the company history?
And then this quote from the Dilberito site: Adams and Parker plan to redefine what people expect from food, raising the bar for the rest of the food industry, and contributing to the health of the world. They plan to make money, too.
This is sooo american.. yuck! (Apologies to the few americans who know better)
switch(state) {
case 1: return "Dude..";
case 2: return "Dude.";
case 3: return "Dude?";
case 4: return "Whoa.";
case 5: return "No way.";
case 6: return "Excellent!";
case 7: return "Uh.. rock on, dude.";
default: return "What?";
}
Now try this one:
M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead
Hours of fun.
Not PC, but fun, is this one:
M-x doctor-strangelove
But nonetheless I try to answer:
(1) without seeing a claim, how can you possibly know what is the subject matter of the patent?
Why do I have to consider the patent at all in the first place? That is my point.
I rather want to keep the freedom to use whatever method I am capable of using and sharing that, than have those economic benefits that the patent advocates promise.
This is a cultural choice, I don't try to argue for the best economic way.
(2) How do you define the "realms of mathematics?"
As that canon of theorems and techniques that is commonly associated with it. Of course this can be only characterized and not be defined with rigour.
Precisely what are your particular subject matter objections to patents concerning compression technologies on this "pure mathematics" ground?
Like I wrote, I have a problem with the idea of patenting itself. It seems not possible to me to seperate ideas from a field into patent worthy ones and those who aren't. Add to that the fact that the state of the art procedure from today is in the standard texts tomorrow. And all this should be handled by the patent lawyers? Have a look at the Usenet FAQ on compression. It is full of cases where they goofed. Like patents on simple algorithms and cases where several patents were granted for the same idea. Very hard to accept that a simple scheme still has implications, like with the Unisys patent on GIF format.
Exactly how does it stop you from the "freedom of doing mathematics without having to be a lawyer."
I can't use and implement the tool what I want and share it as I want. And don't tell me mathematicians don't need this. (I might point you to a lot of software packages from PDEs to algebra in that case)
With all due respect, to this lawyer/mathematician, your argument sounds more like attempting to "lawyer" away the patent law than to argue for the virtues of pure science.
I don't intend to argue or "proof" that my way is better than yours, as I deem it a matter of belief in the principles of free exchange. I think it is a choice (software patents or not) and I don't want them. Luckily the EU so far seems to agree with me.
I disagree. The fundamental question is:
Do we want patent law in the realms of mathematics?
I don't have to be able to judge the claims of that transform author, it is simply that I want to keep the freedom of doing mathematics without having to be a lawyer at the same time.
The situation with compression (LZH, mp3, ..) is ridiculous enough.
All those claim on the ground that their algorithm could be implemented in hardware and then apply patent laws, that originally came from the domain of engineering. Heck, since we have those all purpose computers available, this reasoning would gather any mathematical procedure. Only no one has been barefaced enough to claim very fundamental algorithms yet (maybe except that patent on run length encoding).
As the free software community is about freedom to code and share, no wonder that these issues make us angry.