There's 12 million developers worldwide, are you gonna let their work be free? - McB
If they want it to be free, then fine.
If they don't then fine.
However, if you take someone else's work, which they have chosen to make free, claim it's yours, and then threaten people with lawsuits in the hope of shaking them down for money, then that's not fine.
Which, of course, is why Groklaw and its associated community are shining a 10,000 lux light on SCO's every flaw and blemish.
...and yet I get "first post" on the article feedback link over at e-Week? For shame, Slashdotters, I was expecting a serious amount of easily visible criticism for non-geek readers of the article.
Unless, of course, all anti-TC comments are being removed from the feedback area by ZDnet;-)
Stephenson is a great writer, but this so-so review does not surprise me.
I liked Zodiac, I found Snow Crash interesting and funny, Interface was workmanlike but engaging, and The Diamond Age is one of the books I have re-read most often.
But I just didn't "get" Cryptonomicon. Yes, lots of running around, intrigue and so on. But in the end I didn;t find it satisfying. I'm afraid that, for the Baroque trilogy, I haven't even made it past the cover blurb.
I'm sure many others will disagree (and I apologize to Mr Stephenson for any hurt feelings should he happen across this post), but for me at least I'm waiting for a return to form.
Spyware on my Windows box at home was the final straw - I don't know what the hell it was, but it managed to get through ZoneAlarm, past Spybot, past two antivirus packages and was taking pot shots at PestPatrol.
So, last week, I said "enough is enough" and migrated to Mandrake 10.0.
So far, I've been pretty impressed. I had some teething problems setting up, but nothing too drastic - I just had to configure my video card manually during install.
I can browse the web, get email, play my.ogg files, write letters to Grandma, and burn backup CDs straight out of the box.
I have a win2k boot option too, in case there's something I *really* need to do under Windows, but I doubt I'll use it much at home. When I get around to it, I will be disabling its networking capability completely (so far, I just yank the cable before booting into Windows).
So count me in on the desktop revolution, boys'n'girls.
Do you really "ldr r3,[r0, r1 ROR r2]" all that often?
All the time.
Well, not all the time, but you have no idea just how often you can combine a logical operation and a shift into a single instruction.
I write code for a range of architectures including the ARM and this feature is probably the most useful single tool for optimising the inner loops of certain types of code. (Sorry for lack of detail; I can hear the Cubicle Police outside, and what's really worrying me is that I'm posting from home...)
From a business relationship point of view, I have always found my dealings with ARM very friendly and helpful. But, to be honest, I haven't worked with an embedded processor manufacturer who isn't friendly and helpful.
Of course, all this is personal opinion, so attach the usual IMHO, IANAL, IDNR, disclaimers here.
I thought it was just me. My friends use the GIMP and sing its praises. I used it, and I was horrified by the user interface. So much so, it survived approximately an hour on my machine.
Of course, I didn't feed this back, because I assumed it was just me being corrupted by the Evil UI Conventions from Redmond.
Cars, too, are being designed with more and more impressive technology, many are capable of noticing that you are tailgating, some may even begin to slow the car automatically soon
I've always been in favor of Annoyatrons for this kind of enforcement, rather than outright control. You just never know what's going to happen that means your life suddenly depends on defeating the automatics.
If you're trying to get away from car-jackers (or whatever other unlikely scenario; it will doubtless happen to someone within a week of the thing being introduced), then I can ignore an annoying beeping tone for a couple of minutes. I can't ignore it every day if I persist in being an "unintelligent road stud".
There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.
As anyone who has tried to open an Office 2000 document in Office 97, this is blatantly untrue.
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.
Indeed. For MS products, the cost of constant forced upgrades, security problems, antivirus tools, e-mail scanners, etc. represent a serious additional cost.
OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining"
Indeed, this is true. But at least they had the decency to put "retraining" in quotes. The vast majority of commonly used functions will be at a user's fingertips within minutes of loading OpenOffice. The rest are no more different than from one version of Office to the next. My wife is not at all technical, was trained on MS Office, and hardly noticed the difference when switching to Open Office.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
Note the "if" in that sentence. Note also the number of defects open in MS Office. Note also the excellent reputation of MS support.
businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a
small business needs.
Businesses indeed do not operate in a vacuum. I presume that this is why the document is in PDF format - so everyone can read it. Compare and contrast the ease of creating PDF documents in MS Word and in Open Office.
I could go on, but my righteous indignation circuits are all burned out. EUR500M? Should have been the full EUR5G.
I was dismayed to hear that Verisign has launched a lawsuit against ICANN over the termination of the Sitefinder service.
I realise that I am only one person, but hopefully you will receive sufficient numbers of messages in similar vein that you will reconsider this action. It can have only one outcome, and this will not be good for Verisign or its shareholders.
ICANN is a regulatory body specifically tasked with ensuring that the cooperative standards which embody the Internet are administered for the common good.
Verisign, being in a unique position of trust, introduced a service that rendered the entire domain name mechanism broken.
Although the service provided may possibly have been useful for web users, the Internet is most emphatically not just the web. By ensuring that nonexistent domain name lookups succeeded, Verisign circumvented the error handling provisions of a large number of IP-based software products.
You will have noticed at the time that the immediate response from many ISPs was to immediately place local detection and blocking of Sitefinder, in order to restore correct functionality to these applications in accordance with accepted practice. This caused a considerable amount of effort and cost to the businesses concerned, and is therefore a legitimate target for regulation, and the regulatory body in question was the ICANN.
To attempt to sue a regulatory body for doing its job correctly and effectively is, I am afraid, unlikely to show Verisign in a good light.
Even the freeloaders get something from Open Source, because taking stuff does not diminish the pot. It takes only relatively few contributors, or a few more people willing to give a little, to keep the pot growing.
I've contributed a little to the OSS movement (a bug fix to Audacity, some freely available code for AVR microcontrollers), and I am sure I will contribute some more in the future. But there's no way that, as an individual, I could have written a whole office suite, photo editor, web browser, HTML editor, C++ compiler, etc. etc.
But because what I take doesn't diminish the pot for everyone else, I can still see myself as a contributor rather than a leech.
This isn't a new viewpoint, but it's really the first time I've actually sat and thought about it in personal terms.
That's a big "me too". I'm not an open source zealot, and I use Win2k as my base OS, because some of my apps are Windows only (Atmel AVR Studio, for example), but I use numerous free (as in beer) or free (as in speech) apps because they are better for me than the closed-source alternatives.
Two examples:
Mozilla Firebird - leaner, nicer and more configurable than IE, and actually supports HTML and transparent PNGs properly.
OpenOffice - because I don't want to pay $400 to edit my letters to Grandma and to balance my checkbook. (Actually, even $40 would be stretching it.)
Good SF is difficult to write, and when done really well it should make your brain want to crawl out of your ears as it fizzes with ideas and implications. Greg Egan, Iain M Banks, Bruce Sterling, Ken Macleod, Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter - all of these authors are continuing to push the genre forwards. Egan in particular is joyously brain-stretching.
Good Fantasy, in my book, is comic fantasy. Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Tom Holt succeed in parodying a genre that became a self-parody without anyone noticing (apparently).
Science fiction and fantasy have been embraced by the mainstream media. Most of the top ten grossing films for 2002 could be called F&SF. Perhaps because they conveniently allow a stage where there is no editorial control, no bothersome minority complaining about misrepresentation, and where hack authors can spout rubbish at an uncritical audience. (Anyone who nods knowingly and says "1950's pulp magazines" to himself gains a bonus point.)
On TV, what works best? Thoughtful plotlines about the societal effect of pervasive DNA technology ("Gattaca"), or things blowing each other up at the slightest provocation (virtually everything else)?
And are you tired of continually having to justify your tetrion field emissions, or you quantum flux inverters, or whatever? No bother - just transliterate the whole story into fantasy-land.
No geeks complaining that your gravity whip couldn't be used to create a closed spacelike trajectory - just use a magic book and save yourself (and your consumers) the bother of having to think. Problem? Just whack it on the head. Supernatural forces capable of dissociating the whole of reality from the atomic level up? Use a bit of 2nd-rate karate and you'll have them banished back to Unconvincia before your makeup gets smudged.
Theodore Sturgeon once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." I'd add another "9" these days to take in all the media tie-ins, the Power Rangers, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spell-Book Diaries, the unimaginitive by-catch in the trawl net of popular culture.
So, to sum up this off-the-cuff rant, what's the reason that most SF is fantastic rather than speculative these days? Because speculative can't be dumbed down. And that's what the unwashed masses appear to want.
When you can bandy about cool names like "the Carnot cycle", why let actual facts get in the way?
Absolutely. Here's a nice fact: Compton scattering is a transfer of momentum from a photon to a massy particle (an electron) in a perfectly elastic collision. It is well-studied and is exactly analogous to a perfect mirror.
Re:Look at it scientifically
on
Venus and Life
·
· Score: 1
Anything can exist anywhere
This is a bit sweeping. Let's try: "Liquid helium. Center of the sun." No.
Life can exist in a wide variety of environments, possibly even including the upper atmosphere of Venus. But I would give very long odds on a bet that the surface is anything but sterile.
Slashdot Mirror
Aagh. You beat me to it.
There's 12 million developers worldwide, are you gonna let their work be free? - McB
If they want it to be free, then fine.
If they don't then fine.
However, if you take someone else's work, which they have chosen to make free, claim it's yours, and then threaten people with lawsuits in the hope of shaking them down for money, then that's not fine.
Which, of course, is why Groklaw and its associated community are shining a 10,000 lux light on SCO's every flaw and blemish.
Start and stop codons?
...and yet I get "first post" on the article feedback link over at e-Week? For shame, Slashdotters, I was expecting a serious amount of easily visible criticism for non-geek readers of the article.
;-)
Unless, of course, all anti-TC comments are being removed from the feedback area by ZDnet
"We apologise for the delay to the 11:20 Virgin Suborbital. This is due to... err... the wrong kind of space."
Branson had been in talks with the now-defunct Rotary Rocket company (also based in Mojave) as long ago as 1999.
t ml
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0705/6401140a.h
Stephenson is a great writer, but this so-so review does not surprise me.
I liked Zodiac, I found Snow Crash interesting and funny, Interface was workmanlike but engaging, and The Diamond Age is one of the books I have re-read most often.
But I just didn't "get" Cryptonomicon. Yes, lots of running around, intrigue and so on. But in the end I didn;t find it satisfying. I'm afraid that, for the Baroque trilogy, I haven't even made it past the cover blurb.
I'm sure many others will disagree (and I apologize to Mr Stephenson for any hurt feelings should he happen across this post), but for me at least I'm waiting for a return to form.
Spyware on my Windows box at home was the final straw - I don't know what the hell it was, but it managed to get through ZoneAlarm, past Spybot, past two antivirus packages and was taking pot shots at PestPatrol.
.ogg files, write letters to Grandma, and burn backup CDs straight out of the box.
So, last week, I said "enough is enough" and migrated to Mandrake 10.0.
So far, I've been pretty impressed. I had some teething problems setting up, but nothing too drastic - I just had to configure my video card manually during install.
I can browse the web, get email, play my
I have a win2k boot option too, in case there's something I *really* need to do under Windows, but I doubt I'll use it much at home. When I get around to it, I will be disabling its networking capability completely (so far, I just yank the cable before booting into Windows).
So count me in on the desktop revolution, boys'n'girls.
Do you really "ldr r3,[r0, r1 ROR r2]" all that often?
All the time.
Well, not all the time, but you have no idea just how often you can combine a logical operation and a shift into a single instruction.
I write code for a range of architectures including the ARM and this feature is probably the most useful single tool for optimising the inner loops of certain types of code. (Sorry for lack of detail; I can hear the Cubicle Police outside, and what's really worrying me is that I'm posting from home...)
From a business relationship point of view, I have always found my dealings with ARM very friendly and helpful. But, to be honest, I haven't worked with an embedded processor manufacturer who isn't friendly and helpful.
Of course, all this is personal opinion, so attach the usual IMHO, IANAL, IDNR, disclaimers here.
I thought it was just me. My friends use the GIMP and sing its praises. I used it, and I was horrified by the user interface. So much so, it survived approximately an hour on my machine.
Of course, I didn't feed this back, because I assumed it was just me being corrupted by the Evil UI Conventions from Redmond.
Cars, too, are being designed with more and more impressive technology, many are capable of noticing that you are tailgating, some may even begin to slow the car automatically soon
I've always been in favor of Annoyatrons for this kind of enforcement, rather than outright control. You just never know what's going to happen that means your life suddenly depends on defeating the automatics.
If you're trying to get away from car-jackers (or whatever other unlikely scenario; it will doubtless happen to someone within a week of the thing being introduced), then I can ignore an annoying beeping tone for a couple of minutes. I can't ignore it every day if I persist in being an "unintelligent road stud".
You are a bad, bad man. You have, even if only fleetingly, made me imagine Steve Ballmer naked.
Now I have to go outside and scourge myself in the rain.
I noticed that too, but declined to correct it in the interests of verisimilitude.
So, what was used to produce that document?
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
So, once again it looks like MS don't like their own dogfood.
There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.
As anyone who has tried to open an Office 2000 document in Office 97, this is blatantly untrue.
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.
Indeed. For MS products, the cost of constant forced upgrades, security problems, antivirus tools, e-mail scanners, etc. represent a serious additional cost.
OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining"
Indeed, this is true. But at least they had the decency to put "retraining" in quotes. The vast majority of commonly used functions will be at a user's fingertips within minutes of loading OpenOffice. The rest are no more different than from one version of Office to the next. My wife is not at all technical, was trained on MS Office, and hardly noticed the difference when switching to Open Office.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
Note the "if" in that sentence. Note also the number of defects open in MS Office. Note also the excellent reputation of MS support.
businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
Businesses indeed do not operate in a vacuum. I presume that this is why the document is in PDF format - so everyone can read it. Compare and contrast the ease of creating PDF documents in MS Word and in Open Office.
I could go on, but my righteous indignation circuits are all burned out. EUR500M? Should have been the full EUR5G.
next time run spell check beofre you look like a complete moron
I think that just crossed the line from ironic coincidence to evil omen, don't you?
Mr. Sclavos,
I was dismayed to hear that Verisign has launched a lawsuit against ICANN over the termination of the Sitefinder service.
I realise that I am only one person, but hopefully you will receive sufficient numbers of messages in similar vein that you will reconsider this action. It can have only one outcome, and this will not be good for Verisign or its shareholders.
ICANN is a regulatory body specifically tasked with ensuring that the cooperative standards which embody the Internet are administered for the common good.
Verisign, being in a unique position of trust, introduced a service that rendered the entire domain name mechanism broken.
Although the service provided may possibly have been useful for web users, the Internet is most emphatically not just the web. By ensuring that nonexistent domain name lookups succeeded, Verisign circumvented the error handling provisions of a large number of IP-based software products.
You will have noticed at the time that the immediate response from many ISPs was to immediately place local detection and blocking of Sitefinder, in order to restore correct functionality to these applications in accordance with accepted practice. This caused a considerable amount of effort and cost to the businesses concerned, and is therefore a legitimate target for regulation, and the regulatory body in question was the ICANN.
To attempt to sue a regulatory body for doing its job correctly and effectively is, I am afraid, unlikely to show Verisign in a good light.
Again, I urge you to reconsider this action.
Yours,
Sean Ellis
Software Developer
--------
I'm writing my MEP as soon as possible.
Me too - I just sent an e-mail to the Lib Dem MEP overseeing this legislation. Let's see whether we get a reply.
It was funny, but it raises a serious point.
Even the freeloaders get something from Open Source, because taking stuff does not diminish the pot. It takes only relatively few contributors, or a few more people willing to give a little, to keep the pot growing.
I've contributed a little to the OSS movement (a bug fix to Audacity, some freely available code for AVR microcontrollers), and I am sure I will contribute some more in the future. But there's no way that, as an individual, I could have written a whole office suite, photo editor, web browser, HTML editor, C++ compiler, etc. etc.
But because what I take doesn't diminish the pot for everyone else, I can still see myself as a contributor rather than a leech.
This isn't a new viewpoint, but it's really the first time I've actually sat and thought about it in personal terms.
That's a big "me too". I'm not an open source zealot, and I use Win2k as my base OS, because some of my apps are Windows only (Atmel AVR Studio, for example), but I use numerous free (as in beer) or free (as in speech) apps because they are better for me than the closed-source alternatives.
Two examples:
Mozilla Firebird - leaner, nicer and more configurable than IE, and actually supports HTML and transparent PNGs properly.
OpenOffice - because I don't want to pay $400 to edit my letters to Grandma and to balance my checkbook. (Actually, even $40 would be stretching it.)
So, I guess Bill didn't ask me either.
Good SF is difficult to write, and when done really well it should make your brain want to crawl out of your ears as it fizzes with ideas and implications. Greg Egan, Iain M Banks, Bruce Sterling, Ken Macleod, Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter - all of these authors are continuing to push the genre forwards. Egan in particular is joyously brain-stretching.
Good Fantasy, in my book, is comic fantasy. Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Tom Holt succeed in parodying a genre that became a self-parody without anyone noticing (apparently).
Science fiction and fantasy have been embraced by the mainstream media. Most of the top ten grossing films for 2002 could be called F&SF. Perhaps because they conveniently allow a stage where there is no editorial control, no bothersome minority complaining about misrepresentation, and where hack authors can spout rubbish at an uncritical audience. (Anyone who nods knowingly and says "1950's pulp magazines" to himself gains a bonus point.)
On TV, what works best? Thoughtful plotlines about the societal effect of pervasive DNA technology ("Gattaca"), or things blowing each other up at the slightest provocation (virtually everything else)?
And are you tired of continually having to justify your tetrion field emissions, or you quantum flux inverters, or whatever? No bother - just transliterate the whole story into fantasy-land.
No geeks complaining that your gravity whip couldn't be used to create a closed spacelike trajectory - just use a magic book and save yourself (and your consumers) the bother of having to think. Problem? Just whack it on the head. Supernatural forces capable of dissociating the whole of reality from the atomic level up? Use a bit of 2nd-rate karate and you'll have them banished back to Unconvincia before your makeup gets smudged.
Theodore Sturgeon once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." I'd add another "9" these days to take in all the media tie-ins, the Power Rangers, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spell-Book Diaries, the unimaginitive by-catch in the trawl net of popular culture.
So, to sum up this off-the-cuff rant, what's the reason that most SF is fantastic rather than speculative these days? Because speculative can't be dumbed down. And that's what the unwashed masses appear to want.
Initial testing was done by Olver Wendell Jones with legos (sic), but in the end they just sewed the bills together into a kind of giant net.
When you can bandy about cool names like "the Carnot cycle", why let actual facts get in the way?
Absolutely. Here's a nice fact: Compton scattering is a transfer of momentum from a photon to a massy particle (an electron) in a perfectly elastic collision. It is well-studied and is exactly analogous to a perfect mirror.
This is a bit sweeping. Let's try: "Liquid helium. Center of the sun." No.
Life can exist in a wide variety of environments, possibly even including the upper atmosphere of Venus. But I would give very long odds on a bet that the surface is anything but sterile.
http://www.homoexcelsior.com/omega.db/datum/refere nce/star_lifting/177