I do a lot of Actionscript-heavy Flash stuff, and I really don't see SVG as an alternative for much of that. Flash has lots of features that are good for things OTHER than animation, and the players are pretty consistent across platforms (since they all come from Macromedia).
On the other hand, I could definitely see SVG being a big winner for animated banner ads and the like, as well as for more useful stuff like data visualization.
I think Flash has more or less become what Macromedia originally hoped Director/Shockwave would be for the web.
SVG could become a more useful version of what Flash started out as (and what a lot of people still use it for).
I can't see why the success or failure of either side in the copyright/warez battle will affect the availability of RedHat (etc).iso's via BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was obviously built with legitimate uses in mind, and it will continue to be useful in that realm regardless of which pirate sites get taken down.
I agree that most people are pirating. But I don't think even the USDOJ is stupid enough to shut down free software distro sites, as long as *those* aren't being used for pirating.
I love the idea of propagating Linux and other free software in poor areas.
But I wonder what the options are for extremely-low-cost hardware to match?
If you consider that there's a lot of gov't bureaucratic infrastructure to build up, and not much public (international) money to support it, Linux et al are the obvious answer. Linux experts volunteering to do training are the next logical component.
How cheap could decent computers be bought to round out the picture?
I don't mean as in "Dell, give us freebies." I mean, could we get together good cheap PCs for US$100 including shipping? Or US$???howmany? What if you bought in Taiwan?
I'd love to see some charity/not-too-corrupt-NGO make a website where you could buy a computer for the department of your choice in the poor country of your choice. You could opt to keep in touch with its users as well, if there's a common language between you. Dellpaqarcdbmitsu and the like would of coure be welcome to help.
I use Google news pretty regularly, and I've noticed that some of their links are to paid subscription sites. These are clearly marked as such ("subscription").
I don't generally click on those links, but I think it's a good idea, since I'm not actually going to Google for the news, rather for links to the news. The reason I personally don't click on the subscription links is that I have my favorite set of real newspaper sites (some registration, some free, some not) and that's not what I'm using Google News to find. Someone else, however, probably is using it that way.
I would guess that Google gets something back from that sort of link, since the site owner is getting more from the link than Google is from the listing. (Maybe I'm wrong, of course.)
It makes perfect sense to have something like that for the regular search engine, and to charge for it, as long as it doesn't affect the link's rank in the search results.
For example they could have a special command for robots.txt (or google.txt maybe) that would allow Google to access and cache the page, but the regular link would go to some registration page (easy to do) *and* the cache link would also go to some kind of registration page, defined in the google.txt file.
The NYT would promise that the cached page is really the cached page, and pay Google something for redirecting to NYT's cache (with registration). Or even better, there would be some kind of redirect where I actually get the cache from Google after I've registered with NYT.
They're probably thinking of something like that, because otherwise the solution would be to simply disallow caching, and that wouldn't be news, would it?;=)
If somebody not reading about this on slashdot downloaded the source, believed in good faith that it was legally GPL'd, and has been redistributing, they aren't doing anything wrong until AOL/Nullsoft actually informs them that the original release was authorized.
I think AOL has a potential problem here if they really want to stop distribution, since it would be up to AOL to prove that the distributing party knew the original release was unauthorized. And that could be, uh, pretty hard.
My guess is that AOL is perfectly happy to just cut off the main distribution channel and give general notice about their legal position, and won't bother with a mirror here or there as long as it doesn't get too popular.
Of course, if it gets Kazaa'd (etc) then all they will have done is protect themselves from Lawyerly Wrath.
The scary thing is that there probably are a lot of C*O's / PHB's out there saying "Well, if we're going to run Oracle 9 on Linux, we had better use RedHat 9 as well."
I'm sure others out there have prior art to present in this - particularly TMDA.
My own anti-spam system, which will be launched very soon (sorry no link, my dev server couldn't survive a slashdotting), also uses challenge-response. The predecessor of this also used challenge-response, and has been in use for around three years, "publicly" at least in the sense of the many thousands of people and spammers who interacted with it.
Any suggestions how I ought to present this to the patent and/or lawsuit people? Sure it would be helping a competitor, but I feel it's the right thing to do.
...than could be done with just a PO box and a cell phone.
Maybe something with a bunch of people working, working late sometimes; lots of deliveries, possibly clients or investors or business partners coming in for meetings.
I realize this wasn't specified, but if zoning really is a big issue, then it sounds to me like it's not a case of "me and my friend writing programs and selling them online."
I see a lot of posts going in that direction and rising to the top, but I'm curious whether anyone has advice for this person if the business "looks" more like a business (at the residence).
In countries with something approximating due process, it could be good.
Of course there are places where sending that encrypted mail would be worse than voicing dissent, since by sending the encrypted mail you have shown both a desire and an *ability* to circumvent the government.
In many totalitarian states, appearing to be subversive is more dangerous than speaking openly (though that can be mighty dangerous too).
That's interesting. Assuming it's true, it means I'm not gonna really get love from Netflix over 5 movies a month.
That means they want to charge me 4 bucks a movie (at least).
The average price of a DVD seems to be about $25.
I wonder how practical it would be to make a private (or public, for that matter) DVD library that would work something like this:
Join for $20/month. Your money is used to cover admin costs and to buy movies - the movies YOU would like to have in the library. Your membership dues would be adding between 1/2 and 2 movies *per month* to the pool.
Imagine this organized with a nice database, online access, etc, but NO POSTAGE. It's a real library, just a bit pricey. You check stuff out, you bring it back, there's a limit to how many you can have out, there are fees for extreme lateness and for damage. You can still have allocation priorities, but based on things like how fast you bring your movies back.
Let's say you have a thousand members (20K/mo in dues) and low admin costs (say 5K/mo total) - then you have over 7000 movies in a year. Already a really good start. Plus you're giving a couple local high-school movie buffs a job.
I'm brainstorming a bit, sorry.
Anyone know if this is being done seriously anywhere? Seems like it could work on a nonprofit basis in any metropolitan area.
Is it based on how near the top of your list the movies are, or just how many you get?
Most Netflixers I know have very long lists, and keep them long, so they're getting a constant flow of movies whether or not they're getting their first picks.
Would we not then be constantly flipping from high to low allocation priority and back again?
Of course, you could just shorten your list and not get anything for a while, so you could be high-priority again, but that seems a bit much.
Anyway as I see it the challenge for Netflix is to keep enough available *good* movies so that heavy users, cinephiles, etc, can always have a long waiting list of interesting stuff. If your waiting list is sufficiently interesting, anything you get is good (and surprises can be very nice). These people turn their friends with more "normal" viewing habits on to Netflix,
I agree with your analysis, and I imagine that's why Netflix doesn't charge for lost movies.
There's probably something in the contract saying that if you "lose" too many movies they cancel you or something. But the normal loss rate, as far as I can tell from anecdotes, seems quite normal for the amount of logistics involved (compared to the price).
My mum's been doing about 3 a week for a year, and only one has been lost.
In keeping with the fire and lizard themes, how about "Salamander" for the browser?
That's brilliant! And really much better than Firebird. Putting out fires, being immune to fire (to flames?), etc. - things you actually want in a browser! Plus the obvious flexibility of an amphibian...
Here's a little quote about the etymology: Newts and Salamanders Newts and salamander have also been associated with evil and mischief. Salamanders have been linked to fire as far back as the times of Aristotle (384-322 BCE.); the word salamander is of Greek origin, and translates roughly to "Fire-Lizard". It was believed that salamanders were immune to fire, and could extinguish fire with skin secretions. In 1607, Edward Topsel published the book The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, which, along with illustrations of newts and salamanders resembling serpents and dragons, hypothesizes about the ability of salamanders to extinguish fire, receive nourishment from fire, and pass through fire unscathed. This leads to the origin of the of the vernacular name, Fire Salamander, given to the species Salamandra salamandra. - Amphibian Folklore
While I agree that it's wishful thinking to try to match up the beliefs of any religion too directly with contemporary science, I must point out here that there are different kinds of Buddhism. Radically different kinds.
Your parent poster probably had something like Theravada in mind.
Honestly, as much as I admire the work these folks do, I have to wonder how one medium-to-high-profile open-source project can decide to use the name of another.
It's not like there aren't other good poetic variations on the Phoenix theme.
Slashdot Mirror
Also...
Finally....
it's all in Latin.
Unfortunately, I think the Latin part is a show-stopper here for amateurs interested in learning about the Bible's history and various versions.
I welcome the digitization and fully agree with the parent post, but I think the Latin bit is, alas, asking too much of today's readers.
Maybe there's a dual-text, original-plus-translation, annotated version available online. Now THAT would be supercool!
I do a lot of Actionscript-heavy Flash stuff, and I really don't see SVG as an alternative for much of that. Flash has lots of features that are good for things OTHER than animation, and the players are pretty consistent across platforms (since they all come from Macromedia).
On the other hand, I could definitely see SVG being a big winner for animated banner ads and the like, as well as for more useful stuff like data visualization.
I think Flash has more or less become what Macromedia originally hoped Director/Shockwave would be for the web.
SVG could become a more useful version of what Flash started out as (and what a lot of people still use it for).
Folks, this was posted days ago on Fark!
Maybe not stuff that matters, but certainly news for nerds. Come on people! Fight back!
I want Gimp contests on Slashdot and I want 'em NOW!
I can't see why the success or failure of either side in the copyright/warez battle will affect the availability of RedHat (etc) .iso's via BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was obviously built with legitimate uses in mind, and it will continue to be useful in that realm regardless of which pirate sites get taken down.
I agree that most people are pirating. But I don't think even the USDOJ is stupid enough to shut down free software distro sites, as long as *those* aren't being used for pirating.
I love the idea of propagating Linux and other free software in poor areas.
But I wonder what the options are for extremely-low-cost hardware to match?
If you consider that there's a lot of gov't bureaucratic infrastructure to build up, and not much public (international) money to support it, Linux et al are the obvious answer. Linux experts volunteering to do training are the next logical component.
How cheap could decent computers be bought to round out the picture?
I don't mean as in "Dell, give us freebies." I mean, could we get together good cheap PCs for US$100 including shipping? Or US$???howmany? What if you bought in Taiwan?
I'd love to see some charity/not-too-corrupt-NGO make a website where you could buy a computer for the department of your choice in the poor country of your choice. You could opt to keep in touch with its users as well, if there's a common language between you. Dellpaqarcdbmitsu and the like would of coure be welcome to help.
Anybody seen such a thing yet?
I use Google news pretty regularly, and I've noticed that some of their links are to paid subscription sites. These are clearly marked as such ("subscription").
;=)
I don't generally click on those links, but I think it's a good idea, since I'm not actually going to Google for the news, rather for links to the news. The reason I personally don't click on the subscription links is that I have my favorite set of real newspaper sites (some registration, some free, some not) and that's not what I'm using Google News to find. Someone else, however, probably is using it that way.
I would guess that Google gets something back from that sort of link, since the site owner is getting more from the link than Google is from the listing. (Maybe I'm wrong, of course.)
It makes perfect sense to have something like that for the regular search engine, and to charge for it, as long as it doesn't affect the link's rank in the search results.
For example they could have a special command for robots.txt (or google.txt maybe) that would allow Google to access and cache the page, but the regular link would go to some registration page (easy to do) *and* the cache link would also go to some kind of registration page, defined in the google.txt file.
The NYT would promise that the cached page is really the cached page, and pay Google something for redirecting to NYT's cache (with registration). Or even better, there would be some kind of redirect where I actually get the cache from Google after I've registered with NYT.
They're probably thinking of something like that, because otherwise the solution would be to simply disallow caching, and that wouldn't be news, would it?
Hilarious!
...which is, in fact, a hosting provider!
I clicked on the localhost link just for the heck of it, since I had forgotten which project was running on my laptop's Apache server...
And MozillaFirebird helpfully took me to:
http://www.localhost.net.au/
Ghosts in the machine, I swear.
Main product page: http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/
and here there are bunch of PDFs to download: http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/datasheets.html
for example:
SGI Altix 3000 Family of Servers and Superclusters (172K)
Linux Software for the SGI Altix 3000 Family (50K)
SGI Technology Solutions for Linux (48K)
If somebody not reading about this on slashdot downloaded the source, believed in good faith that it was legally GPL'd, and has been redistributing, they aren't doing anything wrong until AOL/Nullsoft actually informs them that the original release was authorized.
I think AOL has a potential problem here if they really want to stop distribution, since it would be up to AOL to prove that the distributing party knew the original release was unauthorized. And that could be, uh, pretty hard.
My guess is that AOL is perfectly happy to just cut off the main distribution channel and give general notice about their legal position, and won't bother with a mirror here or there as long as it doesn't get too popular.
Of course, if it gets Kazaa'd (etc) then all they will have done is protect themselves from Lawyerly Wrath.
The scary thing is that there probably are a lot of C*O's / PHB's out there saying "Well, if we're going to run Oracle 9 on Linux, we had better use RedHat 9 as well."
I'm sure others out there have prior art to present in this - particularly TMDA.
My own anti-spam system, which will be launched very soon (sorry no link, my dev server couldn't survive a slashdotting), also uses challenge-response. The predecessor of this also used challenge-response, and has been in use for around three years, "publicly" at least in the sense of the many thousands of people and spammers who interacted with it.
Any suggestions how I ought to present this to the patent and/or lawsuit people? Sure it would be helping a competitor, but I feel it's the right thing to do.
whether "nekked" or "nekkid" was more commonly used...
;-P
neked is
Here is a link to a recent book about the Turk. It got pretty good reviews.
...than could be done with just a PO box and a cell phone.
Maybe something with a bunch of people working, working late sometimes; lots of deliveries, possibly clients or investors or business partners coming in for meetings.
I realize this wasn't specified, but if zoning really is a big issue, then it sounds to me like it's not a case of "me and my friend writing programs and selling them online."
I see a lot of posts going in that direction and rising to the top, but I'm curious whether anyone has advice for this person if the business "looks" more like a business (at the residence).
In countries with something approximating due process, it could be good.
Of course there are places where sending that encrypted mail would be worse than voicing dissent, since by sending the encrypted mail you have shown both a desire and an *ability* to circumvent the government.
In many totalitarian states, appearing to be subversive is more dangerous than speaking openly (though that can be mighty dangerous too).
That's interesting. Assuming it's true, it means I'm not gonna really get love from Netflix over 5 movies a month.
That means they want to charge me 4 bucks a movie (at least).
The average price of a DVD seems to be about $25.
I wonder how practical it would be to make a private (or public, for that matter) DVD library that would work something like this:
Join for $20/month. Your money is used to cover admin costs and to buy movies - the movies YOU would like to have in the library. Your membership dues would be adding between 1/2 and 2 movies *per month* to the pool.
Imagine this organized with a nice database, online access, etc, but NO POSTAGE. It's a real library, just a bit pricey. You check stuff out, you bring it back, there's a limit to how many you can have out, there are fees for extreme lateness and for damage. You can still have allocation priorities, but based on things like how fast you bring your movies back.
Let's say you have a thousand members (20K/mo in dues) and low admin costs (say 5K/mo total) - then you have over 7000 movies in a year. Already a really good start. Plus you're giving a couple local high-school movie buffs a job.
I'm brainstorming a bit, sorry.
Anyone know if this is being done seriously anywhere? Seems like it could work on a nonprofit basis in any metropolitan area.
Is it based on how near the top of your list the movies are, or just how many you get?
Most Netflixers I know have very long lists, and keep them long, so they're getting a constant flow of movies whether or not they're getting their first picks.
Would we not then be constantly flipping from high to low allocation priority and back again?
Of course, you could just shorten your list and not get anything for a while, so you could be high-priority again, but that seems a bit much.
Anyway as I see it the challenge for Netflix is to keep enough available *good* movies so that heavy users, cinephiles, etc, can always have a long waiting list of interesting stuff. If your waiting list is sufficiently interesting, anything you get is good (and surprises can be very nice). These people turn their friends with more "normal" viewing habits on to Netflix,
3. Profit!
Or something like that.
I agree with your analysis, and I imagine that's why Netflix doesn't charge for lost movies.
There's probably something in the contract saying that if you "lose" too many movies they cancel you or something. But the normal loss rate, as far as I can tell from anecdotes, seems quite normal for the amount of logistics involved (compared to the price).
My mum's been doing about 3 a week for a year, and only one has been lost.
In keeping with the fire and lizard themes, how about "Salamander" for the browser?
That's brilliant! And really much better than Firebird. Putting out fires, being immune to fire (to flames?), etc. - things you actually want in a browser! Plus the obvious flexibility of an amphibian...
Here's a little quote about the etymology:
Newts and Salamanders
Newts and salamander have also been associated with evil and mischief. Salamanders have been linked to fire as far back as the times of Aristotle (384-322 BCE.); the word salamander is of Greek origin, and translates roughly to "Fire-Lizard". It was believed that salamanders were immune to fire, and could extinguish fire with skin secretions. In 1607, Edward Topsel published the book The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, which, along with illustrations of newts and salamanders resembling serpents and dragons, hypothesizes about the ability of salamanders to extinguish fire, receive nourishment from fire, and pass through fire unscathed. This leads to the origin of the of the vernacular name, Fire Salamander, given to the species Salamandra salamandra.
- Amphibian Folklore
Now the government is going to know why you are so mean to the guy with the big white face and grey body!
I figure they owe you a new cake.
I am trying to picture steaming legions of Indian and Chinese programmers.
Somehow it doesn't come into focus.
When you talk about "legions" of programmers, I think you miss the point that programmers are fairly high up the professional scale there too.
And as for "steaming" I have no idea what you mean, since I'm sure you don't mean to sound racist here.
Now we need some feral NanoDogs!
Of course, the waste may be hazardous... or at least nanosmelly. I definitely want a pack of NanoDobermans protecting me from the other nanobots.
hmmm, I feel a rock band coming on...
While I agree that it's wishful thinking to try to match up the beliefs of any religion too directly with contemporary science, I must point out here that there are different kinds of Buddhism. Radically different kinds.
Your parent poster probably had something like Theravada in mind.
Disclaimer: IANABE (I Am Not A Buddhist Either)
NO! Don't click!! You'll kill us all!!
...the Database?
Honestly, as much as I admire the work these folks do, I have to wonder how one medium-to-high-profile open-source project can decide to use the name of another.
It's not like there aren't other good poetic variations on the Phoenix theme.